Transforming Liberalism: The Theology of James Luther Adams

By George Kimmich Beach

"James Luther Adams, one of the most beloved teachers, racontours, scholars and editors of the 20th century, wrote in small rather than full-length books. No one has mastered this vast body of material or grasped his inner coherence better than Beach, who not only edited several earlier volumes of Adam's works but has now compiled the main them

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReadersMagnet LLC
• Release date: Nov 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781953616555

George Kimmich Beach

George Kimmich Beach is the editor of the three volumes of essays by James Luther Adams: The Prophethood of All Believers (Beacon Press, 1986), An Examined Faith: Social Context and Religious Commitment (Beacon Press, 1991), and The Essential James Luther Adams: Selected Essays and Addresses (Skinner House Books, 1998), Beach has published essays on Adams in The American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Faith and Freedom (Great Britain) and The Unitarian Universalist Christian. His video, "JLA at Home," features Adams discussing his life and work with laypersons from Arlington, Virginia in 1988.

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Transforming Liberalism: The Theology of James Luther Adams

Copyright © 2021 by George Kimmich Beach

Published in the United States of America

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-953616-54-8

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We gratefully acknowledge permission for the following materials:

Excerpt from Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1935 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1963 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from East Coker in Four Quartets, copyright 1940 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

For the Time Being, copyright 1944 and renewed 1972 by W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939, copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

This consciousness which is aware reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

To James Luther Adams,

masterful teacher, wise mentor, constant friend,

who spoke to us not without a parable,

that the community-forming and transforming power

be not hidden from the rising generation;

and to my dear grandchildren,

Alec, Elizabeth, Erick, Elise, Aiden, and Hadley

Give ear, O my people, to my law: incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old: Which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, showing to the generation the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done.

—Psalm 78:1-4

And he said unto them, Is a candle brought to be put under a bushel, or under a bed? And not to be set on a candlestick? For there is nothing hid which shall not be manifested; neither was there any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad. If any man has ears to hear, let him hear. And he said unto them, Take heed what ye hear: with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you, and unto you that hear shall more be given. For he that hath, to him shall be given, and from him that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath....And with many such parables spake he the word unto them, as they were able to hear it. But without a parable spake he not unto them....

—Mark 4:21-25, 33

Contents

Introduction

The Impact of Adams’s Thought

Theology in a Prophetic Key

Biographical Sketch

Liberalism Is Dead. Long Live Liberalism!

An Adams Synthesis

Being Religious: The Intimate and the Ultimate

Religious Consciousness

All Are Theologians

The Loss of the Sacred

Being Born Anew

Crystallizing Religious Understanding

Being Human: Primacy of the Will

The Mystery of Human Freedom

Against Angelism

Tragic History

Metanoia

Identity Formation

Confronting the Demonic: Blessed are the Powerful

Power, the Mark of the Real

The Demonic

Contemporary Idolatry

Worldliness and Otherworldliness

The Courage to Confront Evil

Confronting Injustice: By Their Groups Shall You Know Them

The Moral Imperative

The Prophetic Tradition

The Institutionalization of Prophetic Faith

Voluntary Associations

The Human Vocation

Renewing Community: The Covenant of Being

The Meaning and the Use of Covenants

Covenants Constitute History

Toward an Inclusive Covenant

Covenant as Creation in Time

Covenant, Grace, and Peace

Renewing Faith: Taking Time Seriously

The Inescapability of Faith

Paradoxical Faith

Meaning in History

The Personalization of Faith

Redeeming Time

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

Introduction

JLA wears his vast learning gracefully....As a theologian he is sui generis: his work is liberal in spirit while it respects and draws upon many traditions; it is catholic in its range of knowledge and insight; his canon includes much more than that drawn upon by traditionalist and parochial colleagues; it has the aroma of moral and intellectual passion.

—James M. Gustafson

Professor Gustafson’s Words on the uniqueness and power of James Luther Adams as thinker and teacher testify to Adams’s importance to the communities in which he worked. I would offer a more personal testimony. Jim Adams was a man of immense appreciations, a quality he would signal in his lectures by saying, Now here is something remarkable! An interpretive commentary would follow on such disparate matters as the emergence of contemporary sensibility in the serial music compositions of Anton Webern, or the ethical ethos reflected in television soaps (he had his own lunchtime favorite), or the imagery of spiritual transformation projected by the sixteenth-century revolutionary Thomas Münzer. Being vastly curious and enthusiastic, Adams sparked curiosity and enthusiasm in his auditors. In this way his moral and intellectual passion became a source of astonishment and delight.

Adams said that he had learned early on—from his college speech professor—that a good public speaker is one who elicits involuntary attention—a lesson he took to heart and learned well. With but little exaggeration we can say that he was interested in everything, tried to read everything, and spoke or wrote almost as broadly. Perhaps this is why he never did what many of his friends and students wished upon him, to present his theological thought in a comprehensive and unified way. In the end, the wish for his magnum opus reflected not his need but our own, for he never expressed the slightest regret or sense of unfulfilled promise in his lifework, which includes hundreds of published essays and addresses.

This book brings together Adams’s numerous memorable and insightful words—including the stories for which he is justly famous—on the entire range of his religious, historical, cultural, and ethical interests. In fact, his thought does not fit into traditional categories. For anyone who would write about his thought as a unified whole, the challenge is to find a central, organizational principle that is inherent within his thought, not imposed from without.

Why undertake the effort to understand Adams? One of his students, Karen Smith, suggests an answer: Adams belongs in the company of such artist-teachers as Andreas Segovia and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who performed as masterfully as they taught. I have found that sitting at the feet of Jim Adams was an educational experience unavailable elsewhere, and I am entirely certain that others will also.

The Impact of Adams’s Thought

The influence of James Luther Adams can be gauged by the statements of his students and professional colleagues in the fields of theology and religious social ethics. James Gustafson and other academic colleagues—many of them his students at the University of Chicago and at Harvard—have spoken of the distinctive character and broad range of his thought. Often they speak not only of his intellectual creativity but also his generosity and personal interest. Paul Tillich, probably the most influential liberal theologian of the twentieth century, remarks on the blend of intellectual and personal qualities that he found in Adams, in a tribute published in the Festscrift presented to Adams when he retired from Harvard:

Without my dear friend, Jim Adams, I would not be what I am, biographically as well as theologically. He received me graciously when I came to Chicago as a German refugee; he has studied my thought so thoroughly that I have sent to him all those who wanted to know about it, because he knows more about my writings than I do myself....There is a humility in his attitude which I deeply admire. It is ultimately an expression of agape, which cares for the smallest, without itself becoming small. But there is another side of him that is equally astonishing: the largeness of interests and involvements in all sides of [humanity’s] cultural creativity: in the arts as well as in the sciences. Again it is love, the eros toward the true and the beautiful, which makes it possible for him to unite intensive participation in these functions of the human spirit with his continuous concern for the practical problems of individuals as well as of the society. In theological terminology I could say that James Luther Adams is a living proof of the ultimate unity of eros and agape and for the possibility that this unity becomes manifest, however fragmentarily, in a human being.

Adams was associated with Paul Tillich as a translator of his early writings from the German and as an interpreter of his thought. During the latter part of his career, he and Tillich were colleagues at Harvard, where Adams was Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Professor of Divinity and Tillich was University Professor.

In addition to his writings on Tillich, Adams’s largest and most distinctive contribution to contemporary thought concerns voluntary associations as agencies of democracy and reform. The social and political significance of this work is noted by Professor Walter George Muelder, of Boston University School of Theology:

No contemporary theologian has contributed more or stimulated as much thinking and research about voluntary associations as Prof. Adams has. Their origins, types, conflicts, pathologies, and promise have all engaged his attention.... For Adams the church ought to be a voluntary society and so conceived both theologically and socially. It has been a genuine historical paradigm for other voluntary associations since the days of the early church....The struggle for religious liberty and the resultant separation of church and state, still incompletely realized, stand at the center of the human struggle for a humane and open society....Voluntary associations profoundly affect the ethos and action-style of society. Adams’s thesis that they are indispensable for genuine freedom is persuasive.

Another tribute to Adams’s influence, showing how closely the intellectual and personal sides of his lifework were related, was recently given by David Little, formerly senior scholar of the United States Institute of Peace, now a professor at Harvard Divinity School. He comments on the effect Adams had on both his ideas and his sense of moral priorities.

When I came to Harvard Divinity School some forty years ago, I was a resolute and committed Barthian, heavily influenced by neo-orthodox theology...which had taught me to be dismissive in my encounters with alien views. Naturally, I was deeply suspicious of liberal Protestantism, particularly that sort identified as Unitarianism, of which JLA [Adams] was a leading representative. May I say that, in this respect, my experiences with JLA turned out to be life-transforming. It was a profoundly liberating experience to encounter a genuinely liberal spirit, a man who was tolerant in the very best sense of the word. He welcomed views he didn’t accept or altogether share, and almost seemed happiest in the presence of people who disagreed with him. JLA...greatly influenced my subsequent professional concern with human and natural rights, and in particular with the task of implementing religious freedom and equality around the world.

Little’s words were spoken in an address—the 2003 James Luther Adams Lecture, in Cambridge, Massachusetts—on the importance of natural law theory in dealing with intercultural conflict in the contemporary world. While this book comments on natural law and on many other intellectual contributions of Adams, its focus is on our sense of Adams as a mahatma, a great soul who affects our understanding of what it means to be a moral and spiritual member of the human community.

Theology in a Prophetic Key

The core of Adams’s thought is rooted in the idea of a prophetic theology. Paul Tillich, a one-time leader in the German religious socialist movement, says of Adams,

He represents the prophetic element in Christianity that much [of the] teaching in the churches badly neglects. I even may confess that I feel him as a thorn in my flesh, when the flesh tries to ignore the social implications of the Christian message! He represents in his whole being a warning against a theology that sacrifices the prophetic for the mystical element, though both of them, as he and I agree, are essential to religion.

Adams defines mysticism as a sense and taste for the infinite, the ground of all meaningful existence. He gives mysticism a place within the context of a prophetic religion, but there is no doubt that his heart lies not with the private, inward, and infinite realms of life, but with the public realm, the realm of ethical commitments and socially formed identity. At the time that Tillich wrote those words, almost thirty years had passed since Adams published his remarkable mid-life autobiographical essay—in 1939, at age thirty-eight—titled Taking Time Seriously. In this essay, he describes the intellectual, moral, and spiritual place to which his pilgrimage had brought him:

In Tillich’s view of the dialectical nature of reality, of revelation, of God, of the Kingdom, of human nature and history, I find an interpretation and an application of Christian doctrine which are far more relevant to the social and divine forces that determine the destiny of humanity than in any other theologian I happen to know about. Here, if ever, is a theologian who takes time seriously.

The dialectic that Adams finds central and illuminating in Tillich—a concept frequently referred to in his own writings—is not forbiddingly abstract. Unlike formal, deductive logic, dialectical logic is a way of thinking that describes oppositions and seeks unities. I learned at my artist-mother’s knee that there are no pure blacks and whites in nature. So too there are no pure opposites in moral and spiritual life; oppositions are always found in shades of gray that, in time, give way to new realities. We can say that dialectic constantly moves from either/or to both/and. For instance, Adams tells the story of two theological students, one keen on God and the other keen on ethical commitment. The first accuses the second of having mere morality, and the second retorts that the first has mere God. The argument is familiar and significant, of course, but for Adams it is finally a matter of both/and. Theology and ethics are inextricably interrelated in his thought; each criticizes, enriches, and thus—in time—each decisively modifies the other. In short, they are dialectically related.

Further introductory comment will help the reader understand Adams’s use of dialectic, including many places where it is implicit but not specifically named. Dialectic does not always have a precise meaning, as in the familiar notion of a movement of thought from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. The concept seems to have originated with the idea of dialogue. Plato proposed that thought progresses to reasoned conclusions through a conversational inquiry between two or more minds (see Theatetus 253); thus most of his writings took the form of dialogues, especially between Socrates and others. Thinking itself, then, may be seen as the dialogue of the mind with itself—thought moving from question to answer, to further question and further answer. More generally stated, dialectic is a form reasoning through oppositions, toward unities. Adams does this constantly.

Adams’s thought most clearly shows its dialectical bent when he counterposes two thinkers (for instance, Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx) or two ideas (for instance, natural law and creative novelty) and suggests that truth must synthesize elements of both. He often cites Pascal’s advice, Practice opposite virtues and occupy the distance between them, a dictum that shows the kinship between dialectic and paradox. But is dialectic rooted in the dynamics of historical change as well as in human thinking? Adams implies that it is, as when he speaks of theories of the periodization of history (usually in triads, from Joachim of Fiore to Karl Marx) and of Tillich’s sense of the dialectical nature of reality. He enjoys noting that the dispensational theology that he learned as a child—the idea that the Old and New Testaments, or Covenants, are linked historical epochs—prepared him to understand that the question of meaning and direction in history is a central theological issue.

Adams articulates theology in a prophetic key because he believes that social relevance and ethical commitment are the touchstones of authentic faith. Authentic faith is reliance upon that which, when we are faithful, will not betray us; he calls spurious faith our ever-recurrent reliance upon the unreliable. His theological writings are an ongoing essay on the difference between authentic and spurious faith, and between reliable and unreliable faith. The dialectical relationship between faith and ethical commitment that Adams proposes leads to a conclusion that may seem surprising, given his thoroughly Biblical language. Ethical commitment is a clearer sign of authentic faith than is any particular language of religion, including God-language itself. He writes,

An authentic prophet is one who prophesies in a fashion that does not comfort the people, but actually calls them to make some new sacrifices. That’s an authentic prophet, whether one speaks in the name of God or whatever. A great deal of authentic prophetism in the modern world is to be found in non-religious terms and in non-church configurations, often even hostile to the church. The churches themselves have broadly failed the prophetic function. Therefore a good deal of atheism, from my point of view, is theologically significant.

Prophetic faith yields a theology of hope. It means proclaiming in the face of present injustice, a justice to come, and in the face of present hatred and fear, a peace to come—both as moral commitments and as articles of faith. It means knowing that the sin of religion is cheap grace, offering spiritual comfort without the call to make some new sacrifices.

With his liberal and in some respects radical perspective, Adams is able to communicate with the secular-minded and the frankly untheological. Nevertheless, he works within an explicitly Christian theological framework. When he speaks of prophetic theology, he is pointing to the creative edge within the religious currents of his time and our own. So doing, he seeks to take liberal religion out of an increasingly isolated and culturally marginal status and transform it. Liberalism has accented divine immanence and benevolence, to the point of identifying human ideas and ideals with God, and then noticing that our ideas and ideals are assumed to be self-authenticating, rendering God dispensable. The new liberalism that Adams seeks accents God’s transcendence and power. Liberalism has tended to attenuate religion to the point where its own children have opted for straightforward secularism. The transformed liberalism that Adams seeks knows that we are incurably religious. In sum, his prophetic theology does not soften theological concepts but radicalizes them:

Prophetic theology...rejects the notion that Christian faith can provide sanction for a culture-religion. It holds that history and culture point beyond themselves to a commanding, judging, sustaining, and transforming reality. Confidence in and response to this reality is the nerve of prophetic faith.

Political ideologies such as fascism and communism provided demonstrations of what Adams and his generation see as culture-religion raised to its highest pitch. To the critical thrust of the prophetic theology, Adams adds a creative thrust—again, it is both/and:

The Lord of history calls men and women into a community of faith. In response to the Lord of history this community of faith takes time and culture seriously, so seriously as to hold that political and social institutions, the arts and the sciences, as well as the individual believer, have a vocation from on high. Indeed, prophetic faith in its critical and formative power serves as the basis for a true and viable autonomy of these spheres. Redemption is for them as well as for individual persons. Accordingly, prophetic theology recognizes the obligation to interpret the signs of the times in the light of the End, that is, of the Reign of God. It aims to speak to the concrete situations in which men and women find themselves.

This is vintage Adams, packing multiple themes into a single paragraph— community of faith, political and social institutions, the arts and the sciences, vocation, redemption, the interpretation of history, eschatology, the concrete situation—leaving our minds spinning. This book unpacks these same themes.

Biographical Sketch

Adams transcends denominational categories. It is not an exaggeration to say that he speaks to, and deeply affects, people of every faith tradition and of no definable faith. At the same time he has deep roots in Protestant Christianity and was actively engaged in Unitarian Universalist churches and associations throughout his adulthood. While intellectuals commonly disguise their religious roots and eschew organized religion, Adams holds that historically formed and institutionally embodied commitments are essential to character formation and ethical responsibility. His byword, taking time seriously, means at least this: Know your historical roots and participate fully in your present religious, professional, and civic communities. A significant instance of Adams’s church involvement is his proposal, late in his career, of revised language for the Principles and Purposes statement of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Among several sources of the living tradition we share, the statement, adopted in 1985, names the following: Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love. The words are redolent with Biblical language and Adams’s own prophetic theology.

James Luther Adams was born in 1901 in the small farming community of Ritzville, Washington, the son of an itinerant fundamentalist minister and an equally devout mother. Soon his father shifted from the Baptist fold to the Plymouth Brethren, a sect that held to St. Paul’s example of a tent-making rule of ministry: To accept pay for preaching the Gospel corrupts the faith, for a true preacher is beholden only to God. As a result his father worked at farming until physical disability threw responsibility for supporting the family onto young James and his two sisters. An astonishing array of enterprises followed, from his childhood to his youth, when Adams became the secretarial assistant to a regional superintendent on the Northern Pacific railroad. He chose the University of Minnesota because it was on the railroad line and he could continue to work full-time and study. He seldom slept—a persisting life pattern. While in college Adams rejected the otherworldly and rigidly fundamentalist Christianity of his youth, to his parents’ chagrin, initially rebelling against all religion. Before graduation, however, he yielded to the calling that underlay all his protests against it: He enrolled in Harvard Divinity School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study for the ministry.

From this time his mind was formed and reformed by his theological studies and, in his restless quest to deprovincialize himself, by reading and studying English and comparative literature. His liberal theological convictions led to pastorates in Boston-area Unitarian churches, first in Salem and later in Wellesley Hills, where he vividly remembers tangling with conservative patriarchs in his own congregations over social issues—in particular, unionization of cotton mills and flag-waving patriotism. He married Margaret Ann Young of Salem, a student at the New England Conservatory. He and Margaret had three daughters, raised largely during their years in Chicago, and were devoted to each other through fifty years of marriage.

A sense of disillusionment with the church led Adams to question his commitment to ministry. During his pastorates he taught English composition at Boston University part-time and could have become an English professor, just as earlier in his life, he could easily have become a railroad executive. What held him, he reflected, was his commitment to the Church as a community of faith, something the university could not embody for him. In the end, however, by preparing himself for teaching in a theological seminary, he was able to choose both worlds. Commitment to meaning-providing social institutions became the hallmark of his religious and moral vocation.

Besides the usual voracious diet of readings in history, sociology, the arts, and theology, he undertook two extended study trips to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s—visiting England, France, and especially Germany. This was the heyday of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Otto, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and many less famous figures in German theology and philosophy. He met or studied with all of them. This was also the time when Nazism overwhelmed Germany and infected virtually all its institutions. Resistance, Adams learned from several palpitating experiences, became increasingly risky and costly. Many of his most vivid stories come out of these encounters. The wider significance that he drew from these European experiences was the recognition that, in the face of fascist fanaticism, liberal institutions—church, state, university—generally meet crises of integrity and courage.

He returned home to teach theology and social ethics at Meadville Theological School, the Unitarian seminary in Chicago, and subsequently, the Federated Theological Faculty of the University of Chicago. In Chicago, liberal social and political organizations engaged his energies (he founded, with others, the reformist Independent Voters of Illinois). In consequence, his doctoral studies and dissertation (on the political and cultural theology of Paul Tillich) were completed only several years afterward. In 1956 Adams was appointed to the faculty of Harvard Divinity School, where he taught Christian social ethics to ministerial and doctoral-degree students from the whole range of faith traditions. The homes of Jim and Margaret Adams, first in Chicago and later in Cambridge, became centers for discussion among students, academic colleagues, and community activists. Their weekly late-evening open house became an important part of my own theological education at Harvard. During this time Adams was publishing dozens of essays, book introductions, and addresses in the areas of historical and contemporary theology and religious social ethics. Late in his career, former students assembled and, with his collaboration, published several collections of his essays and addresses.

Following his Harvard retirement, Adams accepted teaching appointments, first in Boston and then in Chicago. After his third retirement, he and Margaret returned to their home in Cambridge, and shortly afterward, in 1977, Margaret succumbed to cancer. They were devoted to each other; he had dedicated a book to her as the beloved and writes with deep feeling about the spiritual significance of marriage. The James Luther Adams Foundation was formed at this time to provide secretarial and publications support, helping him to continue lifelong passions—writing and speaking, religion and politics, conversation and ministry. In 1994, after years of intense discomfort due to disintegrating vertebra, still lucid and engaged with others until his last six months, James Luther Adams died at the home he and Margaret had built on the historic Shady Hill estate in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Liberalism Is Dead. Long Live Liberalism!

During the midyears of his long and active life, Adams became a man with a mission, namely, to transform religious and political liberalism into a realistic, resilient, and indeed transforming cultural force. In this period (roughly 1935 to 1945) Adams undertook several life-changing initiatives, in addition to shifting from the parish to a teaching ministry. Seeing his adopted Unitarian denomination fall into incipient decline, he founded with several allies the Commission of Appraisal, which renewed institutional confidence and purposefulness within the Unitarian denomination in the ensuing years.

Seeing liberal religion caught in a cultural lag, compared with the intellectual and social currents that he had experienced in Europe, Adams cofounded and edited a new quarterly, The Journal of Liberal Religion. At the same time, he threw himself into numerous social causes—civil liberties, urban community organization, fighting American isolationism, fighting racism, and other expressions of his ethics of engagement in voluntary associations. He also completed his doctoral dissertation for the University of Chicago, published as Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science, and Religion. As the creator of a language of faith that was both innovative and historically rooted, Tillich provided the intellectual basis of the theological renewal that Adams sought.

Adams announced his intention to seek a transformed liberalism in an editorial titled Why Liberal?, which was published in the second issue of The Journal of Liberal Religion, and continued in the third issue with the provocative title The Liberalism That Is Dead. In the first of these, he identifies four essential elements of liberalism. First, liberalism holds that nothing is complete, and thus nothing is exempt from criticism—including liberalism itself. Second, liberalism holds that all relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual free consent and not on coercion—but note the caveat, ideally. Third, being an ethical procedure...liberalism involves the moral obligation to direct one’s effort toward the establishment of democratic community. Thus liberalism is a philosophy with intrinsic social and political dimensions. It also has intrinsic spiritual consequences: Fourth, liberalism holds that the resources (human and divine) which are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism—a principle of hope that he combines with a proximate pessimism. Adams continues,

Now we may return to the previous question: Why liberal? And we answer: Because confidence in the principles of liberalism is the only effective resistant to the ultimate skepticism and despair on the one side and to blasphemous claims to authority and suppressions of criticism on the other. These are the enemies of the human spirit whose dangers are threatening today.

In The Liberalism That Is Dead he returns to these same four elements and describes the way they have been distorted or trivialized. In consequence, liberalism is widely seen as ineffectual in the face of contemporary ideological and spiritual conflicts, and therefore passé. First, liberalism’s dynamic sense of truth and its consequent insistence that nothing is exempt from criticism is turned into a relativism that thinks all beliefs equally true. Then no historically rooted faith is possible and spiritual fads rush in to fill the void. Second, liberalism’s devotion to voluntary consent and rejection of coercion are distorted as an anti-institutional bias and a fissiparous individualism. Announcing individual freedom of belief, liberalism frustrates efforts to achieve consensus and shared commitment. Third, Adams finds liberalism infected with the biased belief of the middle class that democratic community is already achieved, cutting the nerve of prophetic criticism, especially of economic and racial inequality. Believing that one’s own culture and values are the most advanced and not conditioned by a social or psychological standpoint, Adams calls belief in the immaculate conception of ideas. Finally, liberalism is distorted into a faith in progressive enlightenment, especially through education. Ignoring the tragic element in history and the the evil that good men do, we ignore our own deepest spiritual and moral needs. He asserts,

The liberalism that is dead is the liberalism that does not call for decision, that does not see that the divine spark in a person rises into flame only through the recognition of the need for a change of heart, a change which produces a skepticism concerning one’s own self-sufficiency and innate divinity... Only where there is sincere recognition of incompleteness and failure, only there are the spirit of liberalism and true religion to be found. Hence the liberal expects to hear over and over again: Liberalism is dead. Long live liberalism!

We may say that transforming liberalism signifies both the task of liberalism willing to confront and change itself from within and the object of these efforts, namely to be a liberalism that is genuinely transforming.

Adams’s call for a transformed liberalism is as relevant today as it was when he first wrote these words more than sixty years ago. The historical situation and the intellectual climate of today are, of course, significantly different. Nevertheless, it is striking to see how our sense that we are living in a time of political and cultural crisis and our uncertainty about the ability of liberalism to respond effectively to the needs of the age have not abated but deepened. This is true in political, religious, and intellectual culture. The L-word is commonly shunned by politicians for a host of complex reasons, while reform is co-opted by conservatives in, for instance, systems of public welfare, the military, and education. The identity of liberal religion is contested between advocates of religious or secular Humanism, pagan or New Age spiritualities, and liberal Christian and other traditions, especially Buddhism. In consequence liberal religion labors under a disabling tentativeness and identity confusion.

In philosophical and cultural studies, including theology, the idea of postmodernism has arisen in response to the much-discussed and probably much-exaggerated failure of the Enlightenment project—the attempt to rationalize all realms of human life and to free people from all forms of arbitrary authority. Since liberalism has been closely identified with the modern era, the emergence of a postmodern era suggests either an end to liberalism or, as Adams would have it, a radically transformed liberalism.

In his seminal essay, The Ages of Liberalism, Adams argues that liberalism should be understood as originating not in the Enlightenment (or modern) era of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the Radical Reformation and Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the idea of a free church separated from state control and the idea of returning to the cultural and religious sources of Western civilization took root. The present-day consequences of such an altered awareness of the origins of liberalism would be significant. The pathway to its renewal in our own postmodern era is not easy to chart, and Adams offers no prescriptions. But his twin claims, by their groups you shall know them and by their roots you shall know them, reflect the associational and historical drives he finds in the Reformation and Renaissance eras and point the way forward. His conception of theology as a system of symbols or root metaphors that shape our beliefs about reality and our consequent value commitments is entirely contemporary. It recalls Wittgenstein’s idea of religious belief as a passionate commitment to a system of reference.

Since the idea of postmodernism is more clearly marked by what it is not than what it is, these comments are broad-brush and inherently indefinite. They indicate, however, the contemporary relevance of Adams’s thought.

An Adams Synthesis

This is not so much a book about Adams’s thought as it is a book of his thought. That is, it is not an academic study that seeks to analyze and evaluate Adams’s writings. Rather, it is a synthesis of his thought, taking his own words and linking them within an interpretive structure. Understanding this may affect the way you read the book. Those who want to understand Adams’s theological and ethical thought as an articulated whole will read it in the traditional way, from beginning to end.

Others may choose to open the book and read at any point or to turn to a particular chapter; a randomly selected citation or a story is likely to suggest meanings or associations in contexts beyond those provided here. This is in keeping with Adams’s imaginative form of thought, one that opens outward to various meanings. In addition, there are innumerable interconnections between ideas and narratives found in disparate parts of the book, inviting you to reassemble it according to your own lights.

Adams does not characteristically use the abstract language of theory. For instance, although he was a professor of social ethics, he never discussed the classical theories of ethics. It is as if he took hold of the telescope from the other end and set out to describe social phenomena and our moral or immoral responses to them. In this process rules, ends, or qualities of character may be reflected, but theories such as deontology or teleology are not central to his ethics. What Adams does use, as others have also noted, is the concrete language of things and events, individuals and institutions. He does this to emphasize a point, making it vivid and memorable. Often, in addition, his words take on a symbolic or, in the case of his many stories, a parabolic meaning. Again, his method is in keeping with his content: He understands theology as the reinterpretation of central symbols of a religious tradition in the light of present history. Thus the Incarnation—speaking now in shorthand—is not about an event in the distant historical past but about a present embodiment of self-giving love to which we may give personal witness.

In the interest of presenting Adams’s theological thought with the language of concrete things intact, the text includes hundreds of direct quotations from his writings, both the previously published and the unpublished. It also contains numerous citations that Adams drew from the works of others, making them his own in a secondary sense. Some citations are brief or aphoristic; others— especially the stories—are considerably longer. Still others are rhetorical expressions that display Adams’s creative use of language, his own way of eliciting involuntary attention.

Placing many quotations within new and sometimes enlarged contexts has the effect of making Adams an unwitting collaborator in a book he did not himself write. While I have called the book a synthesis of his theology, it could also be called a reading of his many-faceted moral and spiritual vision. (Adams liked Alexander Pope’s words on the art of writing; it is the art of blotting, choosing this and omitting that.) The final result may sometimes blur the line between Adams’s thought and my own—or more precisely, between what I have drawn from and what I have made of Adams’s thought, forever blotting! The reader may wish for a more immaculate conception of the truth but is unlikely to find it.

How would Adams feel about this appropriation of his words to create this book? We cannot know for sure, but we do know what he said at his eighty-fifth birthday celebration in response to a series of speeches feting his lifetime achievements:

I remember that Christopher Morley years ago said that after he had published a book he was anxious to read the reviews because he would then find out what he had been doing. And so today, I have been the recipient of many surprises.

With some such words drawing on his erudition and his uncanny wit, he would smile enigmatically. A few days later a letter might come noting omissions.

Adams gave broad latitude to the several editors who tracked down many of his fugitive essays and published