I have never forgotten a phrase I heard when a seminarian in Recife of the late Presbyterian pastor Joo Campos (there is one still alive with the same name and living in Sao Paulo): I think unknowingly summed up in a nutty the secret of being progressive without being liberal and why neoliberal theologians lack imagination.
Anyone who thinks that conservative Christian theology (from Augustine to Calvin, and from there, to puritans, to modern Calvinists) has already said all that could be said of the Trinity, for example, and that all that remained was to preserve the dogma of the Trinity and fight for the faith that was once and for all given to the Saints , should read John Frame and Vern Poythress to see how conservative theologians can move forward without leaving Jesus behind. Both are apologists of Westminster and have creatively applied the doctrine of the Trinity to hermeneutics and apologetics, pursuing the fundamental vision of Cornelius Van Til. Without breaking with historical and biblical assumptions about the trygon nature of the one God, they have opened new horizons regarding the implications of this triunity in related disciplines.
- The problem with neoliberals.
- Like old liberal theologians of the past.
- Is that they think they can only move forward if they radically break with what’s left.
- They believe that knowledge advances only with a change in the foundation upon which the building of all theology was built before them.
- If you read Nancy Pearcey and other historians of evangelical science.
- You will see that the advances of modern science have occurred.
- Not with the discovery of new facts that have invalidated the ancients.
- But with a change of attitude towards the same facts as before.
It takes more imagination and creativity to be progressive in theology without abandoning christian historical assumptions than simply throwing away the past and starting over. What will come from there will not be something new, let alone Christian, since the guidelines have been abandoned.
What Brazilian theology needs is not a crisis of radical rupture with all of the above, we do not want to reinvent the wheel. But it takes imagination and creativity to build a new building on the solid foundations already laid by the ancients. Be theologians without leaving Jesus behind.