Postliberal theology, or postliberalism is a movement in contemporary theology that "rejects both the Enlightenment appeal to a 'universal rationality' and the liberal assumption of an immediate religious experience common to all humanity."

The movement initially began in the 1980's with its associated to Yale Divinity School. Theologians such as Hans Frei, Paul Holmer, David Kelsey, and George Lindbeck were influential and were significantly influenced by theologians such as Karl Barth, Clifford Geertz, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Postliberalism uses a narrative approach to theology, such as developed by Hans Frei, and argues that "all thought and experience is historically and socially mediated... Postliberalism is thus anti-foundational (in that it rejects the notion of a universal foundation of knowledge), communitarian (in that it appeals to the values, experiences, and language of a community, rather than prioritizing the individual), and historicist (in that it insists upon the importance of tradition and their associated historical communities in the shaping of experience and thought."

http://www.theopedia.com/Postliberal_theology

Narrative theology began as a late 20th-century theological development. It supported the idea that the Church's use of the Bible should focus on a narrative presentation of the faith as regulative for the development of a systematic theology. Also frequently referred to as postliberal theology, narrative theology was inspired by a group of theologians at Yale Divinity School, many influenced theologically by Karl Barth, Thomas Aquinas and to some extent, the nouvelle théologie of French Catholics such as Henri de Lubac. The clear philosophical influence, however, was Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, and the sociological insights of Clifford Geertz and Peter Berger on the nature of communities.

Partly a reaction to the modern, individualist, rationalist and romantic trends of theological liberalism, important postliberal thinkers included George Lindbeck, Hans Wilhelm Frei, and Stanley Hauerwas; theologians in this camp dominate the faculties of seminaries such as Yale and Duke Divinity School (where Hauerwas teaches). This movement has provided much of the foundation for other movements, such as Radical orthodoxy, Scriptural Reasoning, paleo-orthodoxy, the emerging church movement, and postliberal versions of evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism. In contrast to liberal individualism, postliberalism tends toward more tradition-constituted and communitarian accounts of human rationality and personhood. Theological rationality is not to be rooted in the authority of the individual (cogito ergo sum) but in the language and culture of a living tradition of communal life. The postliberals argue that the Christian faith be equated with neither the religious feelings of Romanticism nor the propositions of a Rationalist or fundamentalist approach to religion. Rather, the Christian faith is understood as a culture and a language, in which doctrines are likened to a second-order "grammar" upon the first-order social practices, narratives, skills, and habits of the worshipping community. Thus, in addition to a critique of theological liberalism, and an emphasis upon the narratives of scripture, there is also a stress upon tradition, and upon the language, culture and intelligibility intrinsic to the Christian community. As a result, postliberal theologies are often oriented around the scriptural narrative, liturgical action and descriptions of Christian practice as resources for critical inquiry (e.g. culture critique).

Critiques of postliberalism often have been concerned with its "post-foundational" aspects; debates have been centered around issues of incommensurability, sectarianism, fideism, relativism, truth and ontological reference. A number of works have sought to resolve these questions to various degrees of satisfaction, and the debates continue across the theological disciplines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postliberal_theology