In The Theological Project of Modernism, Kevin Hector of the
University of Chicago Divinity School offers a nuanced and timely defense of
what he sees as an unjustifiably maligned tradition in modern Christian
theology. He focuses on what is commonly labeled the liberal or revisionist
tradition, centered in its early stages on figures such as Immanuel Kant,
Friedrich Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel, Albrecht Ritschl, Ernst Troeltsch,
and, more recently, Paul Tillich. By carefully reconstructing key arguments from
these thinkers, Hector shows not only how this trajectory hangs together as a
tradition, but also how its animating impulse differs from what many critics
have assumed. Hector's central claim is that this tradition is
fundamentally concerned with a distinctive problem, namely, how to relate
religious faith to a sense of one's life as one's own—or,
put differently, how one's faith can be self-expressive. Hector labels
this the problem of “mineness,” or the problem of “how
persons could identify with their lives or experience them as
‘mine,’ especially given their vulnerability to tragedy,
injustice, luck, guilt, and other ‘oppositions’” (viii).
Hector argues that for his chosen thinkers in this tradition, faith—more
specifically, faith in a God who is able to reconcile such
oppositions—plays a crucial role in resolving this problem.