Being a Liberal Christian Without Losing Your Faith

Throughout the Christian community, wide disagreements persist over what theological framework best serves proclaiming the Christian message in today's church and world. The most popular terms for the conflicting positions --- "conservative" and "liberal" --- do not help us much. They quickly contaminate responsible discussion and debate, and drive people into warring camps of true believers shouting at each other across an unbridgeable divide. But these are the terms we are living with. So, last time I tried to make the best of a bad situation and write about the positives and negatives of "conservative" Christianity in as balanced a way as I could. Today, it is the "liberals" who will be under respectful scrutiny.

As I have come to understand it, the heart of liberal Christianity is a passion for identifying the historical center of the Church's faith and separating it off from the accretions of tradition which distort it. Beliefs, guidelines for worship, and rules for action are constantly tested by reference to the best understanding of genuinely apostolic faith that modern scholarship can reconstruct. Practically speaking, what this means is that liberal Christians strive to be Jesus-focused more than tradition-focused.

Liberal Christians also emphasize translating Jesus' original teaching and preaching into terms that can be understood outside the environment of Palestine in the first half of the first century. The rationale for doing so is the perception that just this was what the first apostles did so effectively. A corollary of this emphasis is an openness to and interaction with current-day social, cultural, and religious ideas and practices. Such openness, it is believed, is essential for developing a credible presentation of the Christian faith to diverse constituencies. Finally, liberal Christians seek to build and celebrate congregations that are especially committed to being inclusive and service-oriented.

Alas, just as conservative Christians all too often de-form healthy theology into malignant ideology, so do liberal Christians. For the latter, what begins as responsible skepticism about the validity of church traditions sometimes devolves into a rejection of the possibility of reconstructing any historically reliable, normative picture of apostolic Christianity at all. Then, along with Christianity, all other religions become repositories of relative values only. Cut off from participation in a community of faith with a lively commitment to truth, spirituality reduces to highly subjective personal experiences and striving that are impervious to others' assessment, and often to their understanding as well.

At its worst, Liberal Christianity mandates what can only be called a hands-off policy toward anyone else's faith. Theirs is theirs, ours is ours, and neither must ever create any problems for the other. The only way we have of deciding whether we are Christian enough, or at all, is simply by weighing how open we are to people who are different from us, and how committed we are to the struggle for justice and equality everywhere. Once, I sat in a faculty meeting in which several colleagues proposed, with straight faces, that training people for ministry must consist in nothing but a training in multiculturalism. When I asked, "What about training in understanding the gospel instead?," they laughed. I was not trying to be funny.

If we are to get beyond what divides conservative and liberal Christians today, loyal members of both groups will need to do some serious rethinking of their doctrinaire stand-offishness toward one another. Last time, I imposed some suggestions on conservatives. Now, it's the liberals' turn. My first suggestion for liberal Christians is that they learn to cherish the historical kernel of apostolic faith as the beginning more than the final expression of God's good news. Tradition, as the on-going process of reframing the Christian message for the here and now, has more to say to us than liberal Christians often give it credit for.

Second, along with learning from people who represent social, historical, and religious traditions different from ours, there are times to share openly and confidently with them what we believe with our whole hearts about Jesus Christ. Social action is great; social action with evangelism is greater. A qualifier: particularly in the light of the Middle East situation today, liberal Christians --- and conservative Christians also --- need to give particular attention to presenting God's message in a way that is respectful of Jews and Muslims alike. Finally, liberal Christians need to end their flirtation with "New Age" religion, with its atomizing of our spirituality, and rejoice once again over the power of individual, personal transformation for building lasting Christian community.

Have you heard the one about the liberal and the conservative in the same pew at church? I would surely like to.