The Difficulty of Explanations
This is the first of a three part post. It is in three parts because it just got too long as one piece to impose on innocent browsers. And it got too long because explaining the meaning of liberal turned out not to be as easy as I thought it would be. So why is it a difficult explanation?
In the late 15th century all of Europe was intensely curious what this strange fruit Columbus had discovered in the Caribbean, the pineapple, might taste like. In fact, the difficulty in describing the taste of the exotic pineapple came to exemplify the difficulty we have in discussing the nature of knowledge itself. The philosopher John Locke asserted that true knowledge can only come from actual experience. “If you doubt this,” he wrote, “see if you can give by words, anyone who has never tasted pineapple, an idea of the taste of that fruit.” Trying to describe what it means to say someone is a liberal Christian is about as challenging as trying to explain the taste of pineapple to someone who has never tasted one. It is not, of course, that it is any easier to say what constitutes a conservative Christian. The problem is that the words “liberal” and “conservative” are both too imprecise to say anything definitive. As Marcus Borg pointed out in his book the Heart of Christianity:

The familiar labels of “conservative” and “liberal” do not work very well, because both are imprecise. Conservative covers a spectrum ranging from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to C. S. Lewis to (perhaps) Karl Barth. The latter two would find the first two to be strange bedfellows. “Liberal” can be applied to a range of Christians from those with a strong sense of the reality of God and a deep commitment to the Christians tradition to advocates of a nontheistic Christianity for whom “tradition” is a negative term. Thus “conservative” and “liberal” don’t tell us much.

Borg’s use of C. S. Lewis as an example is especially helpful in that many American conservatives would not consider Lewis to be an evangelical since he did not embrace a number of doctrines they consider essential, such as biblical inerrancy. On the other hand, most liberals do categorize Lewis as conservative. So, neither the word “conservative” nor the word “liberal” tell us much; yet, they are among a handful of words we have to use as instruments to get at something we may really want to know for our own personal spiritual progress.

A Working Definition
Unfortunately, while there are plenty of lengthy academic essay like answers to the question, “What is liberal Christian theology?” there are not many concise and simple (workable) definitions. Consequently, I have attempted to come up with one of my own. Here it is:

Liberal Christian thought, or theology, is a movement emerging out of the Age of Enlightenment which, with relatively few exceptions, attaches prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters, believes in the primacy of reason rather than Scripture; and places a high value on scientific method, individual human experience, freedom, and social justice.

I use the qualifying term “generally” here in this definition because there are liberal Christians who most certainly believe in God, who embrace the Christian tradition, and who affirm, in some form, the resurrection of Christ. In fact, it is liberal in this second sense with which I would identify myself. But this, it seems to me, although I have no statistical data on the subject, is not the most prevalent sort of liberal. More common is the Episcopal priest I knew who led his congregation in reciting the Nicene Creed each Sunday, but acknowledged in the Adult Sunday Study that outside that formal recitation of the liturgy he could not bring himself to affirm God as “creator of heaven and earth.” As for Christ, he said he supposed: “His spirit is alive and exists out there somewhere.” When I asked him why, then, was he a Christian and an Episcopal priest? he said, “Because it’s a good way to live. And I love the beauty of the liturgy.” It is liberal in this sense with which the three parts of this essay (“What Is Modern Liberal Theology”) is primarily concerned. It is my intention to write another blog dealing with a liberal perspective that is identifiably Christian and thoroughly orthodox. So, with this acknowledgement of my definition’s limitations I will try to elaborate in a way that may bring some further clarification to that form of liberal theology, or what scholars sometimes refer to as modernity, that is problematic for many thinking men and women of faith.

Primacy of Reason
Liberal theologians in this sense of modernity believe that the ultimate authority for all ethical, moral, political, religious, and for matters of what is factual, is reason and common human experience. Marcus Borg, who is perhaps the best known and widely read of contemporary liberals, therefore wrote of what he called “the limits of the spectacular.”

I think Jesus really did perform paranormal healings and that they cannot be explained simply as faith healings. I am even willing to consider that spectacular phenomena like levitation happen. But do virgin births, walking on water, multiplying loaves and fish, changing water into wine, bringing genuinely and definitely dead people back to life, ever happen anywhere?

For Borg, and many other liberals, some miracles, such as those named here, just do not, in light of reason and common experience, seem believable. For those Christians who would consider themselves both liberal and orthodox this represents no great problem. For such Christians what constitutes their faith is not believing the literal factuality of every miracle, but entrusting their life into the hands of Christ. But the further one looks to either the right or the left of the theological continuum the doubting of any biblical miracle story is seen as a diminishment of the Christian faith. This, of course, is simply one area in which reason is given primacy.

Scholarly Objectivity
For liberal Protestants of the Enlightenment to subject all truth claims to reason and common human experience meant Christian doctrine, tradition, and the Bible itself were to be studied with complete objectivity and according to scientific methodology. However, Paul Ricoeur, Michael Polanyi, William Poteat, and Abraham Maslow have all, among others, convincingly demonstrated that the sort of Enlightenment objectivity once thought possible is a delusion. But perhaps even more significantly they have shown that there are other ways of thinking and knowing than those of school book science or formal logic.
There is a wonderful film based on the real life story of the brilliant Indian mathematician Ramanujan. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, Ramanujan made substantial contributions to the field, including solutions to problems considered to be unsolvable. His work opened entirely new areas of research. He was a profoundly religious Hindu who credited his mathematical insights to something akin to divine revelation.
In the film, Ramanujan explains his fascination and devotion to mathematics: “Mathematics,” he says is a beautiful painting of images you cannot see.” And to H. G. Hardy, his mentor and collaborator who was known for his work in number theory, mathematical analysis, the ascetics of mathematics, and genetics, Ramanujan says: “You want to know,” how I get my ideas. My God speaks to me. Puts formulas on my tongue when I sleep, sometimes when I pray. An equation,” he says, “has no meaning to me unless it expresses a thought of God.” The lack of academic rigor in Ramanujan’s work –– his frequent inability to demonstrate how he reached a conclusion while asserting he “just saw” it –– is unbearably frustrating to Hardy and the other British mathematical scholars at Cambridge. My point, without going into an academic discussion of scientists and philosophers like Polanyi or Ricoeur is that there are other ways of knowing reality other than mathematical logic or empirical observation––a way that is less linear and more intuitive, and that frequently has to do with the ability to apprehend beauty. The Copernican revolution came about when Copernicus saw the universe not from a more scientifically logical perspective, but from what was for him a more wondrously beautiful perspective. Albert Einstein insisted that, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” And he thought that it was important for mathematical equations to be beautiful since, like the Greeks, he believed that the true, the good and the beautiful are one and that what is beautiful is likely to also be true. Here, again, is a sign post pointing to knowledge as something that transcends scientific understanding.
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason or Science, with its emphasis on objective reasoning has obviously led to many scientific and technological advances for which gratitude is the appropriate response. But it has also given us poisonous air, fouled oceans, polluted waters, and the contaminated soil of a dying planet; the proliferation of intercontinental ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads capable of obliterating the planet; endless genocidal wars, new opportunities for violence, oppression and greed; murder and terror in our streets, schools and homes, rising suicide, depression, and anxiety rates; a world in which the loss of moral reasoning, the capacity for genuine commitment, delayed gratification and self-sacrifice is sucking humanity into a dystopian vortex of insanity. Particularly in the social sciences, including theology, or what is now usually called religious studies, liberal thought has become a kind of psychic scalpel for removing the conscience so that no disturbing questions emerge from the depths of the soul. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden they took their new knowledge with them –– but not wisdom.

Open-mindedness
At least one more thing needs to be said about the liberal ideal of scientific objectivity, and it is this. Liberal Christians and scholars frequently pride themselves on being open minded, accepting, and objective. The reality is they can be as biased, closed, angry, and rejecting as any fundamentalist. When I was doing my graduate work in Counseling Psychology a woman came up to me during a class break and asked, “Aren’t you a pastor?” When I confirmed that I was indeed a pastor she went on to ask: “Doesn’t that mean you believe some things are wrong and some things right? How can you become a professional counselor? You can’t show unconditional positive regard for everyone.” I told her I didn’t know how to respond, that I had never run into that problem. After the break the professor set up a role play, and this woman volunteered to play the role of therapist while two other members of the class played a married couple coming to see her for marriage counseling. The problematic issue the couple presented in this role play was that the wife was wanting to go to work and the husband thought women should stay at home. They were into the role play less than three minutes when the woman who had told me I could not be a therapist because I believed in right and wrong, was yelling at this student playing the role of a chauvinistic husband. It was so bad the professor had to stop the role play.

The Limits of Reason and Debunking
One Christmas season an Episcopal priest was telling the story of the visit of the Magi. In Matthew 2:11 it says that they came to the house were Jesus was and paid him homage. The priest who delighted in finding what he thought were incorrect details in biblical stories pointed out that in Luke Jesus is born in a stable: “But, here in Matthew,” he said, “Jesus and his parents are in a house. How,” he asked with a smirk, “did they suddenly get from the stable into a house?” Had that been a genuine question leading him to consult a basic commentary, he would have learned that there is a difference of about eighteen months between the two events. He might have also learned that it is not really all that clear exactly what the word “stable” means in Luke, or that the lower floor in many homes served as a place for animals. Of course, even without that much time between the two events it would be possible to name all sorts of logical ways in which Jesus might have been born in a stable, but moved into a house soon afterwards.
What this Episcopal priest was doing is an entirely common practice by liberal teachers. “scholars,” and the media. It’s just that it’s usually done with more sophistication and intelligence. I think it was last Easter that a story appeared with the headline: Jesus May Not Have Been Nailed to a Cross! The article noted that in some places the evidence seemed to indicate that crucifixion victims may have been tied rather than nailed to crosses. The story was meant to make Christian believers gasp as if this somehow changed everything modern day followers of Christ believe about the crucifixion and resurrection. The reality is it changes nothing. If I were to learn today that Jesus was tied rather than nailed to the cross, and that this was an indisputable fact, it would change absolutely nothing. Debunkers as Edwin Friedman, the rabbi and psychologist who was a pioneer in systems therapy noted, are operating out of their own inner anxieties.
Karen King, Professor of Divinity, and Harvard University were scammed by Walter Fritz (a man with a long history of producing fake antiquities and a sometimes pornographer), who sold them what appeared to be a papyrus fragment the size of a business card with what was purported to be a quote from Jesus containing the words “my wife.” King had two imminent scholars (AnneMarie Luijendijk at Princeton and Roger Bagnall at the New York Institute for the Study of the Ancient World) look at the supposed fragment and tell her it looked genuine. She quickly dubbed the “fragment” the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” A tiny scrap of paper, with too many missing and indecipherable words to make real sense, and of unknown origins, but in the mind of King and Harvard an important discovery revealing what early Christians believed about Jesus’ marital status. It was all sensationalized in the popular as well as academic media. There were numerous headlines declaring it to be authentic. Even National Geographic rushed in to do a television documentary. However, it wasn’t long before other scholars, and investigative journalists proved the so-called Gospel of Jesus’s Wife fragment, along with other New Testament texts provided by Walter Fritz, to be fraudulent. So much for scholarly objectivity applied to textual studies. Not even “The Tick” would have been so easily fooled. Neither Dr. King nor Harvard University, nor National Geographic, ever had the integrity to acknowledge they had simply been duped. Let me also add that if it were ever determined beyond doubt that Jesus was married with two children, a dog and a cat it would change nothing essential. Well, I guess the Roman church would be under greater pressure to allow its priests to marry, but that’s about it.
Here is one more. The Jesus Seminar, composed of fifty lower tier Bible scholars and 100 lay people (people with no real expertise) promoted itself as a scientific investigation of the historical Jesus––what did Jesus actually say and do? Using criteria for authenticity which defied formal logic The Jesus Seminar eventually reached its predetermined conclusion –– Jesus did not say 82% or do 84% of the things attributed to him in the Bible. But no one with even a rudimentary knowledge of its work would ever mistake the Jesus Seminar for representing the kind of scholarly rigor advocated by the enlightenment. The participants had all taken intractable negative positions of what Jesus was “really” like long before the seminar began its work. Their method of voting with colored beads among themselves, for or against the sayings and deeds of Jesus as authentic or inauthentic, caught the imagination of the media but was pure theater. That is, it was weighted in such a way that positive votes were not of equal value to more negative votes. The well-known scholar William Herzog noted of the Jesus Seminar: “They portrayed themselves as doing inductive science because they courted the aura of authority associated with the scientific method. However, they were in fact doing deductive and at times intuitive historical work all along.” Much of what passes for liberal scholarship today, far from having anything to do with reason and common human experience, is based on clever marketing, hyperbole, good writing skills, and imaginative conjecture.
Liberal Christians, then, quite often assert the doctrine of the primacy of reason with the same force that fundamentalist assert the primacy of Scripture. But human reason as an infallible guide is inadequate precisely because in, of, and by itself it is inherently inadequate. As the ancient Hebrew sage observed: “There is a way that seems reasonable, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12). The most perplexing and difficult questions of life and reality are not entirely amenable to reason as if they could be reduced to logical syllogisms, but rather are questions involving attitudes, values, feelings, commitments, and spiritual discernment.
Transition
In Part II I will continue with the modern liberal conception of God and of Christ, but I thought it important to begin, as I have done here, by reflecting on the place of reason and its often unrecognized limitations in liberal thought. If you have not read my early post on the Evangelical Movement you might want to do so before reading Part II of “What Is Modern Liberal Theology?” Finally, I want to stress my strong and passionate conviction that what matters more than anything else is not whether you are a conservative or liberal Christian, but what kind of person the faith you have professed makes you