Zygmunt Bauman diagnoses our cultural climate as one of liquid modernity – a state of permanent instability in which norms vanish as quickly as they attempt shape. Modernity’s obsessive melting of the solids (faith, tradition, religion, commitment) has resulted in a world in which individuals are disembedded from createdness, relationships are commodified, and the construction of any telos is fully deregulated and privatized. While theological method has largely been a response to modernity’s strong separation between faith and public reason, methodological conversations have yet to sufficiently account for the unique challenges posed by a liquid world. This paper will address this deficit by positioning postconservative evangelical theological method – with its commitment to a flexible solidity rooted biblically formed wisdom – as uniquely capable of confronting liquid modernity and inviting fragmented individuals to reweave themselves into creation and community through the death and resurrection of Christ.
This paper will evaluate theological methods that have attempted to account for postsecularism and postmodernity, namely apophatic comparative theology (represented by Rubén Rosario Rodríguez) and postliberal communitarianism (represented by George Lindbeck and Stanley Hauerwas), and demonstrate their deficits regarding the specific challenges of liquid modernity. Drawing from postconservatives (e.g., Roger Olson, Stanley Grenz) and the growing sapiential theology movement (e.g., Kevin Vanhoozer, Daniel Treier), I will demonstrate that an evangelical commitment to flexible solidity expressed through wisdom is most prepared to account for and resist the disembedding, commodifying, and deregulating forces of liquid modernity. I will argue that this theological method begins with a recognition of createdness and limitation that produces humility before God, Scripture, and the world, but nonetheless faithfully pursues understanding through revelation that can never fully capture the fullness of God.