Being a Conservative Christian Without Losing Your Faith

Throughout my 35 year teaching career in colleges, a university, and a seminary, there has been one issue in particular that I and most of my students have had to deal with constantly: the issue of how conservative or liberal people in our churches expect us to be. In dealing with this issue more often than I would have liked, I have learned two things about most of the people for whom it is an issue. The first is that our being liberal or conservative is their test of our faith, credibility, and acceptability in the sight of God. The second is that neither I nor any of my colleagues in ministry are ever going to be conservative or liberal enough for them.

Is there any way to get beyond this kind of stereotyped, spiritually enervating thinking about who is and who is not of the elect among us? I believe so. This column focuses on the conservative side of being Christian. Next time, I will deal with the positives and the negatives of liberal Christianity.

As I experience and treasure it, conservative Christianity powerfully integrates four strong and compelling emphases. The first is a passion for holding up the whole of the Bible --- and not just the parts of it with which we are more comfortable --- as conveying the final and authoritative revelation of God. The second is an abiding concern for identifying the distinctiveness of the Christian faith over against social, cultural, and religious ideas and practices that can deflect attention from furthering the mission of Christ in the world. The third is an insistence that our churches teach clear beliefs, conduct worship according to biblically grounded guidelines, and promote concrete and decisive actions on behalf of people in need everywhere. Finally, conservative Christians actively seek a personal, deeply inward, transforming experience of, and continuing relationship with, Jesus Christ.

Could any earnest follower of our Lord not want to be a Christian in these senses of the word? Hardly. The problem comes when the center does not hold --- when conservative Christians begin to de-form a living, dynamic process of constant re-centering of faith into a steadily hardening ideology that, instead of embracing people in ever widening circles of love, drives them into warring camps endlessly disputing with each other over who is and who is not really Christian.

As ideology rather than faith, conservative Christianity is not a very attractive proposition. It no longer rejoices in the overall reliability of the Scriptures. Instead, it imposes a rigid doctrine of biblical literalism, inerrancy, and infallibility as something the assent to which is deemed necessary for our salvation. It no longer looks eagerly for signs of God's presence in every human society. Instead, it devalues other religions and peoples in a spirit of exclusivism and superiority. It no longer strives for a deeper understanding of the Christian tradition as a whole. Instead, it reduces faith to an intellectual assent to its own preferred and largely unexamined doctrinal emphases. It no longer encourages believers to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit for themselves in deciding how God wants them to live. Instead, it imposes its own rules for action and demands unquestioning obedience to them. Finally, conservative Christian ideology no longer celebrates the many ways God chooses to bring women and men to faith. Instead, it judges the genuineness of others' faith by the presence or absence of a single kind of religious experience, e.g., a personal encounter with Jesus, conversion at an identifiable moment in time, baptism by immersion, speaking in tongues, or whatever.

There is a better way to be a conservative Christian than to substitute ideology of this sort for genuine faith. It begins with distinguishing the message of the Bible in the Bible, and then goes on to assess all the other parts of the scriptures in the light of this message. It includes learning to discern God's activity in other societies, cultures, ideas, and practices through the light that Jesus Christ sheds on them. (Is Jesus Christ not, after all, the light of the world, and not just the church?) It accepts beliefs, guidelines for worship, and rules for action as responses to God which are always open to fresh disclosures from him. And finally, it invites people to hope for a deep and personal relationship with Jesus Christ that is unique to their own circumstances and longings.

What's new about this way of being a conservative Christian? Not much. It's what conservative Christianity at its best has always been.