Ch. 5 The Quest (continued)
Liberal Christianity
“True religion is the life we live, not the creed we profess.” (J. F. Wright) Remember when I mentioned that I had skipped exploring a local Baptist church because I wrongly believed that all Baptist churches in the South were Southern Baptist? Now I am jumping significantly ahead in my personal time-line but I did eventually attend an American Baptist church in the South and it was lovely. The quote that opened this paragraph is from their web page as is the following description: "where truth is a becoming more than a having." After each Bible reading, the pastor would say: “You have heard the ancient Story. Let us listen now for the word of the Lord.” They followed the Way of Jesus by being kind and welcoming and reaching out to the poor and outcast through the promotion of social justice and equality. Imagine that. They even would have welcomed me and I wonder what would have happened if I had crossed their threshold all those years ago.
The Liberal Christian in me embraces their emphasis on living as Jesus lived rather than professing a unified set of propositional beliefs. I appreciate their viewing the Bible as an anthology documenting the human authors' beliefs and feelings about God within a historical and cultural context. I value their acceptance of diversity and ambiguity as they search for Truth as an ongoing task. I join them in their desire to build the Kingdom through actively pursuing social justice and the transformation of society to one centered on love.
I am not a Liberal Christian because, frankly, I am burned out on the Bible. I appreciate that Liberal Christians do not ascribe inerrancy to the Bible or interpret it literally. I understand that they read the Bible through a historical and cultural lens to try to understand what the words might have meant to the writer at that time but I just don't believe that God operates by providing special truth in a holy book that could not be equally available to us all. I think men seek God and write stuff down but I think that occurs in all kinds of books which are just as likely to hit the nail on the head as the Bible, Qur'an, Vedas, etc. On a personal level, I had a deeply satisfying relationship with God for fourteen years without the Bible playing a meaningful role. When the Bible did become a big issue in my life, it was under the unpleasant circumstance of being proselytized to by Evangelical Christians. So I read the Bible to see what it said and then I read a bunch of books by Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, and the like to see if there were some way that I could love the Bible. I came to the conclusion that those authors on the left were very similar to the apologists on the right in their sometimes acrobatic efforts to make the Bible agree with their beliefs. As I have stated, I do not believe that God operates by providing special truth in a holy book; but, if God did, then I believe God would speak clearly and plainly in the desire to be easily understood by all of God's beloved children. I do not believe that God would provide a holy book that required advanced degrees or years of study to be properly understood. There would be no need for apologists to apologize because God could dictate or inspire intelligibly. Objectively, I do think there could be some merit in spending all kinds of time and energy understanding the culture and languages of the biblical authors' days but I just don't have the motivation for it and I did not feel comfortable attending a church that was so Bible dependent.
