Wednesday, August 28, 2002

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.

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

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.