Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 180:719 (Jul 2023)
Article: The Pastor After 2020
Author: Joel D. Lawrence

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The Pastor After 2020

Joel D. Lawrence

Joel D. Lawrence is President of the Center for Pastor Theologians in Oak Park, Illinois.

* This is the third article in the three-part series “The Pastor Theologian and the Pattern of the Age,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 1, 3, and 4, 2022.

The Crisis Of Western Liberalism

We are living in a moment of crisis for Western liberalism. The year 2020 and its aftermath were not the beginning of the crisis but rather an accelerant of an already present weakness. On both the left and the right, people are questioning the premises of Western liberalism. On the right, we have calls for “illiberal democracy,” a philosophy pursued by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and approved by numerous pundits on the American right.1 This notion claims that because liberalism promotes the selfish interests of individuals, it is not sufficient to serve the interest of and secure the tradition of the nation.2 Therefore, we need more authoritarian leadership to protect the national interest. On the left, we have claims that Western liberalism is fundamentally racist because it was created by and aims to serve a powerful elite, leading to a rise in Americans who argue that the United States should embrace socialism.

Patrick Deneen argues that liberalism failed because liberalism succeeded. He writes, “Liberalism has failed—not because it

BSac 180:719 (July-September 2023) p. 260

fell short, but because it was true to itself.”3 What he means is that liberalism, founded on the self-interest of humans, will inevitably lead to a factionalized, disintegrating, self-protective society in which overarching goals of society that transcend individuals are lost as each person is trained by the liberal anthropology to be an autonomous individual—not connected in any essential way to a larger community. Liberalism, positing the self-actualization and self-definition of individuals, is a tradition-dissolving philosophy that views tradition as a barrier to the achievement of the self and so leads to ever-deepening factions of self-interested autonomy. Such a traditionless society cannot long endure. Barbara Walter, in her recent book How Civil Wars Start, having studied civil wars around the world since World War II, shows that the primary predictor of a civil war is when a political society turns from a shared ideology to an identity that is focused on the self or the in-group the self belongs to. Tho...