This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping

them. I'm Albert Moller, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Theo Hobson is a British theologian and journalist currently serving as a lecturer in systematic theology at general

theological seminary in New York City. He's written a number of books but most

importantly his new book is entitled reinventing liberal Christianity. He was

educated at the universities of York and

Cambridge and he did his doctorate at Cambridge writing a thesis on Protestant theology

and rhetoric. He's speaking to us today from New York City. Dr Theo Hobson, welcome to thinking in public.

Sure, thanks for having me.

Dr. Hobson, your new book, Reinventing Liberal Christianity, begins by suggesting

that there are really two different liberal

Christianity's can you expand on that? Yes I can. I think that there's not just

two but there's a nice polarity there's a good and a bad tradition and I would say

that the good tradition is very much tied up with political liberalism and that means the liberal state and possibly secular

liberalism although that's a much contested term and so the good tradition simply

affirms freedom freedom

and i think that uh... Christianity should be

deeply involved with those things that should be in dialogue with them. Now the other tradition, what I call

the bad tradition, is more like the Enlightenment rationalist kind of tradition which says that we can modernize Christianity

in a in a rationalist direction. We can get away from faith, we can get away from ritual, we can get away from

from ritual we can get away from the church and we can create a new thing a kind of

...