Post-Liberal Theology and the Promise of Torat Edom
In the wake of modern theology’s collapse into abstraction and historicism, post-liberal theology emerged as a corrective. Thinkers like Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and later Richard Lints and others in the Reformed tradition, attempted to re-anchor theology in the biblical narrative itself.[1] They recognized that Enlightenment rationalism and modern Protestant theology had severed Christian faith from the story that gave it coherence. The response was to return to Scripture—not merely as a source of doctrine, but as a storied world that shapes Christian identity.
In the wake of modern theology’s collapse into abstraction and historicism, post-liberal theology emerged as a corrective. Thinkers like Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and later Richard Lints and others in the Reformed tradition, attempted to re-anchor theology in the biblical narrative itself.[1] They recognized that Enlightenment rationalism and modern Protestant theology had severed Christian faith from the story that gave it coherence. The response was to return to Scripture—not merely as a source of doctrine, but as a storied world that shapes Christian identity.
This “narrative turn” was undeniably helpful. It made space again for figural reading, for the centrality of Israel, for seeing Scripture as a coherent unity. Yet, as with all theology in exile, post-liberalism is still a reaction. Its energy is not generative; it is defensive. Like all exilic responses, it bears the marks of the imperial frameworks it seeks to escape. It doesn’t know the land, nor the God who speaks in fire and covenant. It returns to the Bible as a textual grammar, not as oracular reality. And in so doing, it preserves a double bind.
The double bind is this: on one hand, the post-liberal wants to resist the deconstruction of Scripture by the historical-critical method. On the other, it cannot fully escape the academy’s rules. Thus, narrative theology becomes literary theology—an act of storytelling within the frame of a decentered, pluralist modernity. Jesus becomes the climax of a narrative arc, but never the voice of Sinai, never the Sar HaPanim. The Bible becomes a sacred drama, but not a covenantal court proceeding. The Gospel becomes meaningful, but not true in the sense that Israel’s God is true.
Even among those who were sympathetic to Scripture—figures like Walter Brueggemann, whose poetic-prophetic lens opened many to the social, emotional, and exilic dimensions of the Hebrew Bible—we still see the failure to cross the threshold into covenantal theology.[2] Brueggemann’s prophetic imagination restored lament and divine pathos, but never fully grasped the internal coherence of Torah as halakhic reality, as a binding form of life. The prophets remained critics of power but not keepers of the oracles. The double bind remains: narrative without covenant, history without revelation.
This is where Torat Edom enters—not as another theological trend, but as a theological unveiling. It is not a reaction but a recovery. It does not seek to re-narrate or re-systematize the Christian faith, but to reframe it altogether through the covenantal structures revealed to Israel, mediated through the Sar HaPanim, and extended to the nations. Torat Edom sees Christianity not as a gentile religion about Jesus, but as the grafted-in extension of Israel through the resurrected Davidic heir. This framework sees the Bible not as a “canon” or even a “narrative” per se, but as a library of witnesses—some priestly, some prophetic, some apocalyptic—bearing a singular covenantal testimony.[3]
Within this framework, Jesus does not simply fulfill the story—He corrects its misreadings, enters it as its Author, and unseals it through the blood of the covenant. The post-liberal theologians wanted to avoid the static metaphysics of scholasticism, but they still remained entrapped by the textual lens. Torat Edom moves beyond this, because it does not treat the Bible as a document, but as a living archive of divine testimony—an Eda. The distinction between Qahal (assembly) and Eda (witnessing body) becomes central. Theology is no longer an academic discipline, but a testimony in the heavenly court.[4]
This is what post-liberalism, despite its insights, could not grasp. It attempted to recover the story, but could not recover the covenant. It gave us a re-narrated Christ, but not the real Messiah of Israel. It helped us re-read Scripture, but could not restore the orality of Sinai, nor the fire of Elijah. It made us feel again, but did not make us tremble.
In this sense, Torat Edom is not merely a better theology—it is a call to return. A call to leave behind both the abstraction of systematics and the sentimentality of narrative theology, and to return to the God who speaks, who judges, who covenants. It is the end of the double bind. It is, in truth, the end of exile.
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Shults, Pannenberg, and the Need for Torat Edom
A striking illustration of the theological double-bind created by postfoundational theology is the intellectual journey of F. LeRon Shults. Once a prolific evangelical theologian and a key disciple of Wolfhart Pannenberg, Shults authored major works reforming classical doctrines: Reforming Theological Anthropology (1999), Reforming the Doctrine of God (2005), and collaborative texts on Christology and ethics.[5]
A striking illustration of the theological double-bind created by postfoundational theology is the intellectual journey of F. LeRon Shults. Once a prolific evangelical theologian and a key disciple of Wolfhart Pannenberg, Shults authored major works reforming classical doctrines: Reforming Theological Anthropology (1999), Reforming the Doctrine of God (2005), and collaborative texts on Christology and ethics.[5]
Trained in the line of Karl Löwith, who had already exposed the secularization of Christian eschatology,[6] Shults took Pannenberg’s emphasis on history as the medium of God’s self-revelation and eventually concluded that belief in God was too contentious to be viable. He is now openly atheist, working in fields of comparative religion and human psychology.
This tragic trajectory—from systematic theology to the repudiation of God—reveals the inner collapse of theological projects that attempt to reform Christian doctrine without returning to the covenantal grounding from which the doctrines were born. Pannenberg’s historicist framework sought to rescue theology by rooting it in the public events of history (especially the resurrection), but it lacked the ontological depth and the covenantal structure to sustain belief beyond critical doubt. Shults’ apostasy is thus not merely personal; it is symptomatic of an entire school of thought that severed Christian theology from the revealed covenant and substituted it with a narrative historicism devoid of binding halakhic force.
This is the very double bind that Torat Edom resolves. It does not begin with abstract propositions nor collapse into mere narrative psychology. Instead, it recovers the covenantal architecture of Scripture as a library—a layered testimony bound by divine instruction, communal memory, and real-world judgment. Where Shults deconstructs theology because of the moral failures of contentious belief, Torat Edomreframes belief as a response to divine justice, not a human assertion of metaphysical control.
In this light, even post-liberal contributions like those of Hans Frei, Richard Lints, and Walter Brueggemann—helpful though they may be in emphasizing textual nuance—remain ultimately insufficient.
They narrativize Scripture without integrating the halakhic and eschatological vision intrinsic to Judaism. As a result, they continue to orbit the same unresolved tension: how to proclaim a meaningful theology in a world suspicious of absolutes. Torat Edom answers this tension not by systemizing or sentimentalizing, but by returning to the covenantal difference between Eda and Qahal, between Noahide inclusion and sacrificial inheritance, between the distorted genealogies of flesh and the faithful line of obedience.
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Endnotes
[1]: Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984); Richard Lints, The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).
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Endnotes
[1]: Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984); Richard Lints, The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).
[2]: Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1978); Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997).
[3]: This notion of the Bible as a “library of witnesses” is rooted in Jewish conceptions of the Tanakh as composed of distinct but harmonious voices. See James Kugel, How to Read the Bible (New York: Free Press, 2007).
[4]: See the rabbinic distinction in Mishnah Sanhedrin 1:6 between the Eda (witnessing body) and the Qahal (congregation). This distinction is also developed in modern Jewish theology by thinkers such as Yeshayahu Leibowitz.
[5]: F. LeRon Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Reforming the Doctrine of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); and Christology and Ethics, co-edited with Brent Walters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).
[6]: Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
