The Limits of Liberalism

Extract

Rosemary Haughton’s latest book is an interesting and original attempt to connect literary, psychological, personal and Christian insight in a way which illuminates the meaning of being human for a Christian and at the same time creates common ground between Christian and non-believer. As such it is a significant achievement: the explorations of love, freedom, maturity, community are done with a sensitivity and intelligence which comes from a blending of common experience, in the psychology of personal relationship, with a sense of Christianity as a depth within this common knowledge. There are excellent individual accounts of the relation of childhood attitudes to the gospel, of the experience of passion and community and communication, and these add up to a book which represents the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition – the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships.

To say this is also to indicate, negatively, the book’s weakness. For the liberal tradition is not the only one in modern Christianity and when it stands alone, as it does here, it demonstrates at once its strengths and failures, as an account of ‘the human’. It is dangerous to quarrel with a writer’s self-imposed limitations, and yet in a book which treats of the ‘human’ these can be indicative: the focus, very firmly, is on the personal, psychological, the immediately known and experienced, not on history, politics, institution, society, structure.