Bryan, 

For a little under a year now I've been in a weekly discussion group with a few guys going over some different material by thinkers identified as “postliberal.”  The group has been led by a pastor and his associate, who have some affiliation with Anabaptist and Mennonite traditions.  I came in just after the group finished John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus.  I have gone through Douglas Harink’s Paul Among the Postliberals:  Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity with them, as well as Rodney Clapp’s A Peculiar People:  The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society. 

Harink, himself postliberal, pulls from Karl Barth, John Howard Yoder, Krister Stendahl, Stanley Hauerwas, J. Louis Martyn, and Richard Hays, among others.  I’ve found the camp absolutely fascinating.  They’re certainly neither Catholic nor Orthodox, but sometimes I wonder if I should even call them Protestant. They differ from the traditional expressions of each of these three camps in some pretty significant ways.  I almost want to put them in their own arena entirely.  But between the books we’ve plowed through and this pastor and his associate's immense collective erudition in other postliberal literature (and their firm adherence to the camp), I think I’ve gotten a fairly decent feel for the school of thought, at least in an introductory sense. 

I've seen a couple of salient features in PL thought thus far:  (1) their almost wholesale rejection of philosophies they might consider “products of modernity” on the one hand, and (2) their desire to explicate and remedy some alleged follies of “Constantinian Christianity” on the other.

(1)    Regarding the former, they appreciate quite a bit of postmodern philosophy, with its “deconstructionism” and notions of “cognitive constructivism” emphasizing the historically, culturally, socially, and linguistically influenced nature of any person’s understanding of reality.  They seem to reject anything hinting of epistemological “foundationalism,” i.e., the idea that there are universally accessible and independently defensible truths, truths upon which one might build or by which might try to justify some kind of “worldview.”  They’re slow to accept any notion of “common ground” from which to reason to Christian truths, especially if one is trying to reason with someone who has not yet been recreated by the Holy Spirit. 

So they punt any sort of evidential or classical apologetics, natural law, natural theology, etc.  Their understanding of the relationship (if any) between faith and reason doesn’t leave much room for these things.  I know the proponents in my discussion group even describe the first principles of logic as “conventional” (i.e. merely Western conventions).  Given all this, I can see why they prefer to talk about things in terms of “narratives,” “conversations,” and “stories.”  

(2)   Regarding the latter, many of these PL’s see the 4^th century shift in the life of the Church, due to the Roman Empire’s sanctioning and subsequent endorsement of Christianity (under Constantine and Theodosius), as a primarily negative thing.  As Church and Empire were becoming more and more fused, the people of God were losing their distinctiveness, i.e., their “alien-ness” in this world.  The kingdom(s) of the world, with their “politics” and “powers’ standing in opposition to those of Christ’s Kingdom, were requiring and winning the allegiance of those who professed faith in another Lord and King.  And failing to recognize the distinction between the kingdoms, Christians had no idea they were being led astray. 

The PL’s see the resultant recontextualization of the Christian life as a monumental tragedy in Christian history and one not reformed by the Reformation.  They would say the problem continues today, as evidenced in popular notions that America is a “Christian nation” and in the tendency of believers to frame and live their Christian thought and experience within the parameters of the “American Dream.” 

Harink argues a number of other things:

(1)    The common Protestant notion of justification by faith alone in Christ, and the resultant faith/works dichotomy, are misguided.  He argues from linguistic and contextual considerations in Paul’s letters that Luther mistranslated key passages on justification in Romans, translating by faith in Christ when he should have translated by the faith of Christ. 

(2)    The common Protestant understanding of precisely what took place in the cross of Christ is also misguided.  He chides Protestant tendencies to internalize, personalize, and privatize the salvific effects of Christ’s “apocalyptic act of redemption,” which accomplished so much more in its triumph over the "powers” and principalities." 

(3)    The Christian community should be a “political” reality in that it has its own political order for peace rooted in things like humility, servanthood, submission, and self-sacrifice.  The religion/politics dichotomy then, he argues, is a poor dichotomy.  But the Church shouldn’t be striving to see to it that the national government is propped up by Christian tenets or ethics either. 

(4)    The common Protestant understandings of the Church as the “new Israel” and of what is happening in God’s “election” of his “chosen people” are also way off.  Corporeal Israel has always been and will always be God’s chosen people.  What we see in Paul is God’s grafting of the Gentiles into this elect through the cross of Christ.  So the closing of the Jew/Gentile divide is more paramount than Protestantism typically renders it.  He spends a lot of time here critiquing N. T. Wright’s formulation of the common “super-cessionist” (the Church succeeding Israel as God's chosen people) view on the relationship between the Church and Israel.

(5)     Just as the way of Christ offers its own “politic,” it is also offers its own “culture.”  We should treat and preach Christianity as a “political” and “cultural” way of life rather than as a “religion.”  The Christianity as a way of life as opposed to Christianity as a set of ideas language is pretty popular among these PL's that I've been in contact with.

I can’t say how many PL’s across the boards agree with Harink on these points, but I imagine a large portion of them do.  But anyway, hopefully I didn’t regurgitate too much of what was already in the link you gave us above.   What I read in the article sounds a lot like what I’ve come across in my experience with this circle.  I appreciate a lot of what the PL’s have to say, although they also seem to me to be a bit extreme in much of what they have to say, if not quite reductionistic (particularly in the discussion of epistemology).  I really enjoyed reading Harink and found him challenging.  Despite still disagreeing with him on some key theological points, I would definitely say his book is well worth the read.  He really got me thinking about some new things, as well as some old things from different angles.

Regarding the Constantinian factor (which Rodney Clapp focuses a little more on),  these PL’s have quite a bit in common with Greg (Boyd) actually.  I would encourage you to check out Greg’s 4/18/04 sermon entitled “Taking America Back for God?” on the www.whchurch.org website.  It’s the first sermon in a series he entitled “The Cross and the Sword.”  I was really encouraged to hear Greg addressing this issue.  And I think he's right on here.  This is where I believe my time in this PL discussion group has benefited me the most as a Christian.  They really opened my eyes up to some profound truths here, I believe.  I think we have conflated the Kingdom of God with the kingdom(s) of the world in more ways than we realize.    

But enough of the tome.  Hopefully you’ve found some of this helpful.   

Have a good week!

Shane