Should old Aquinas be forgot, and never brought to Mind?
Should old Aquinas be forgot,in days of Wittgenstein?
Can quiddity and haecceity, analogies divine,
Resolve the paradoxes of Willard Van Orman Quine?

Should symbols bleak replace the speech we learned at Mother's knee?
Or should we now reverse ourselves, and write the backwards E?
Can form and matter be preserved, and analyticity,
If we but put particulars for variables free?

Now Henry Veatch and Peter Geach we really must berate:
The subject and the predicate they leave to copulate.
Intensions pure we can't secure with Frege, Russell, Boole,
By treating good old Barbara with a novel kind of tool.

And Hesperus and Vesperus are entities distinct--
Or should we say, not this, but that they're analytically linked?
Shall we aver they're one indeed, with Smullyan, Church and Fitch?
Or should we moan "Ah, Quine alone can tell us which is which"?

Unconvinced

            Followers of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin may remember last year’s autumn issue, which was no different from all the others – insightful commentaries on current events and journeys of faith. I would like to say I subscribe to the Harvard Divinity Bulletin with moderate interest. Yes, the publication maintains a high level of professionalism and their articles are always published with the standards we have come to expect from Harvard, but I have always disliked the school’s appeal to liberal theology.

            When I use the term “liberal” theology, I do not mean left political agenda. What I am referring to is the recent batch of weak theology; non-dogmatic religion with generous portions of textual criticism and peppered with the latest in German Protestantism. So it was with great interest that I discovered a book review inside the magazine that grapples with the very problems I have with liberal theology: that it concedes far too much in an effort to come off as unabrasive, and thus finds itself without a foundation to stand upon.

            The article was written by a certain Todd Shy, which a quick Google search reveals him as a well-published (and well-educated) 7^th grade teacher from North Carolina. His article is titled “Liberal Ambivalence is Necessary”, and is a reaction to Christopher Hitchen’s latest effort of controversy, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. As a work of literature, Shy’s piece stands well above the others in the Bulletin as thoroughly readable and thought-provoking. It is even interspersed with the occasional aloof witticism (“religion poisons everything?!” an astonished Shy japes), yet does not stoop to the gross hyperboles or rhetorical sleights Hitchens has found so easy effective.  

            But halfway in, Shy poses a question he himself cannot successfully answer. The question was quietly inserted towards the end of a lengthy paragraph spanning seven or eight inches, just after he correctly observed that Hitchens has missed the point of Biblical criticism (“authority inheres to the vision itself…, and as Hitchens isn’t concerned with Hamlet in Shakespeare’s name, liberal Christians have learned not to worry whether Ephesians was written by Paul.”)

            It is asked, “Religious liberals have to wonder, then, if they are not perceived as unobjectionable because there is nothing particularly religious to object to.” I think that is entirely the case, and I believe the reason he does not hit upon a satisfactory response is because the answer is too uncomfortable. I am afraid religious liberals have the same problem universalists have had for a while – how do you fill the pews if it does not really matter what you believe? Perhaps this is a fallacious appeal to consequences, but I did not do terribly well in Formal Logic class anyways.

            However, let me go on record that I am no fundamentalist. I have no qualms about saying I descended from primordial soup, nor do I ignore the latest challenges to Biblical authority. But I refuse to accept non-dogmatic theology on the same grounds Hitchens has rejected it. Without doctrines God has become a name without being, possessing a bit of significance in the cosmological sense but lacking any compelling reason to believe. When a religious liberal forfeits all the beauty and poetry to the secular world, Hitchens gains the footing he needs to say religion really does poison everything it touches.

            For an example of how far astray some liberals have managed to wander, I need only flip back a few pages to the beginning of the Bulletin where a former Cambridge math professor, David Williams, wrote that because we constantly evolve, humans four billion years from now will look back on us with the same respectful superiority we look at bacteria. Williams illogically assumes that for in order for Christianity to survive we must “abandon traditional concepts of Incarnation and the Trinity.”

            I am afraid he has entirely missed the point of Christianity. Instead of looking at Christianity as a religion, that is, a relationship with our Creator, Williams has seen it as a theological baseball team to bat for, or a pretty philosophy with attractive historical roots. No real weight of importance, just a chance to contribute to something that will obviously outlast him.

            If Williams wants to badly to contribute to something beyond him I suggest he reevaluate his belief system. While Shy and Williams think the world too much for dogma, I reply that life is too short to believe without borders.