A small point towards a defense of so called modern and other theological developments: It continues to be a seemingly popular belief among evangelical theologians to maintain the idea that the modern (i.e. post-Enlightenment) theological turn needs to be corrected to the point of abandonment. That modern theology took a turn for the worse when the Divine was collapsed into the creature; 
when the absolute power of God in eternity was disjoined from the ordained power of God in history; when the subject became Lord rather than the Lord being Lord. These are some of the major premises many believe thrust Christian theology into a ruinous trajectory of doing anthropology as theology, and that our only hope is to turn back to the pure being theology of the scholastic schoolmen (i.e. via antiqua). Note John Webster as he speaks to this issue in the context of theology of retrieval:
‘Retrieval’, then, is a mode of theology, an attitude of mind and a way of approaching theological tasks which is present with greater or lesser prominence in a range of different thinkers, not all of them self-consciously ‘conservative’ or ‘orthodox’. Although here we concentrate upon strong versions of this approach, it can be found in less stringent forms and in combination with other styles of theological work. A rough set of resemblances between different examples of this kind of theology would include the following: these theologies are ‘objectivist’ or ‘realist’ insofar as they consider Christian faith and theology to be a response to a self-bestowing divine reality which precedes and overcomes the limited reach of rational intention; their material accounts of this divine reality are heavily indebted to the trinitarian, incarnational, and soteriological teaching of the classical Christianity of the ecumenical councils; they consider that the governing norms of theological inquiry are established by the object by which theology is brought into being (the source of theology is thus its norm); accordingly, they do not accord final weight to external criteria or to the methods and procedures which enjoy prestige outside theology; their accounts of the location, audience, and ends of Christian doctrine are generally governed by the relation of theology to the community of faith as its primary sphere; and in their judgements about the historical setting of systematic theology they tend to deploy a theological (rather than socio-cultural) understanding of tradition which outbids the view that modernity has imposed a new and inescapable set of conditions on theological work. For such theologies, immersion in the texts and habits of thought of earlier (especially pre-modern) theology opens up a wide view of the object of Christian theological reflection, setting before its contemporary practitioners descriptions of the faith unharnessed by current anxieties, and enabling a certain liberty in relation to the present. With this in mind, we begin by considering the study of history as a diagnostic to identify what are taken to be misdirections in modern theology, and then the deployment of history as a resource to overcome them.[1]
As much as I like Webster, I don’t agree with him here; particularly the emboldened aspect. Do I think there are serious problems with the premises that fund “much” of modern theology? Yes. But I also don’t think they are any more sinister than premises that have percolated throughout the history of ideas and theological development for centuries. In other words, every period of theological ideational development will have pros and cons. To suggest that the whole of a period is simply a dung-heap that needs to be abandoned and corrected to the point that we simply start-over is really only a bad case of chronological snobbery. Unfortunately, Webster’s sentiment has been internalized by a whole generation of up and coming and have come theologians.
I seek to work from different grounds as a theologian; grounds that constructively look for God in Christ in whatever sector and period of the Church that can be fruitfully gleaned. David Steinmetz, as he segues into a sketch of Nikolaus von Amsdorf’s person and theology writes this:
The role of a religious conservative is rarely a popular one, especially when this conservatism is combined with an intolerance of all theological innovation. There is something pinched and one-sided about the mentality that holds that a decisive theological breakthrough has taken place in the past but denies (or is at least distrustful of) the possibility of new and original insights in the present. That the church has been led into truth in the past does not exclude the possibility of the discovery of new truth in the present, even if the new insight is only a deepened participation in the meaning of the old.[2]
Steinmetz’s point is well taken, or it should be! And yet so many ‘conservatives’ of our day, which is where Webster ended up going in his latter theological ministry, take the notion that he finally did to heart. Some, like Webster, spend so much time in the modern ambit that they grow weary of it. But maybe this weariness, rather than resulting in an abandonment project, ought to simply be the source for a time of reprieve and perspective building. Instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water and essentially saying that the modern needs to be fully abandoned or, at best, corrected; maybe the theologian, as Steinmetz notes, ought to be open to the idea that new and even innovative insights can be gained by modern thinkers in and for the Church just as much as the premodern thinkers were able to gain.
Travel in the theological circles that I do, and all of modern theology is essentially junked; except for careful and incidental quotes here and there of Barth or some other like figure. This is to the Church’s and theologian’s loss. When we cut ourselves off from the modern we cut the ground right out from under us and fail to recognize that this is an impossible task to begin with. Surely we can constructively retrieve and listen to the past for the present, but this need not entail a full on abandonment of what we can’t abandon to begin with: i.e. our own modern locatedness and epistemic formation. Why not admit that all theology the 21st century thinker engages in is by necessity, Modern? Why not, if this is the case, attempt to critically engage with the categories we have been given and understand that those can be cross-pollinated by the past; thus allowing new vistas and innovations to open up for the Christian imagination and doctrinal development, that outwith will and cannot happen? Why not abandon the “fear” of the present, and recognize that we are part of an ideational lineage that does not ultimately allow for it to be cast off? When we admit this, we are more free to hear the voice of the living God whether that be spoken anew and afresh for us in the 21st century, or from the 16th century. But this pervasive bias, by evangelicals, against anything ‘modern’ is a fools-errand of thought that needs to be repented of and abandoned itself.
[1] John Webster, “Theologies of Retrieval,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology,edited by John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford/NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 584-85.
[2] David C. Steinmetz, Reformers In The Wings: From Geiler von Kayserberg to Theodore Beza, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 70.