ABSTRACT
Tillich and Rahner are the two theologians who open a way for theology as liberation in the emergent tradition. This is not to deny that liberation theologies arise primarily from the protest of the household, the option for the poor, and the history of the black church. It is to suggest, however, that the formal identification of liberation as an ontological determinant of a graced human nature arises from those theologians who explicitly produced a theological apologia for modernity. Because God is now known through an identity with emancipatory negation and practice, specific Christian theology and practice are rendered secondary to this primary negation. This results in a diminished role for ecclesiology in favor of a theology grounded in a transcendental reality: a reality that becomes so certain that it can too easily dispense with the categorical, i.e. the historical language produced and embodied in the church’s tradition, and ongoing historical existence. The result is the subordination of theological virtues to natural ones, but also theological language becomes viewed in terms of a scarcity that makes the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy difficult to maintain. All theological language becomes inadequate because it is grounded in a lack. This scarcity of theological language does not provide a form of theology that can emerge out of and against modernity. It can be only its ally.
