Sin –– Does it Exist?
Liberal Christianity believes that all people are good at heart; and, therefore, need only encouragement and nurture to allow their natural goodness to express itself. God’s character, again if one wants to speak in terms of God as a reality, is one of pure benevolence so that sin does not separate anyone from God, results in no negative judgement, and is not something for which one may be held ultimately accountable. This means, as Marcus Borg argued, that Christ did not die for our sins; and, that “Christianity is not about reward and punishment in some future life”  but solely about our “transformation” in this life. Even if Borg was talking about what is known as the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement (a doctrine that only goes as far back as Anselm in the eleventh century, and is far from universally accepted) he had to have known that the sort of blanket statements he made rejecting the Christian understanding of sin as a part of the human condition would be worthy of an “F” grade for any student making it in a first year theology class. It’s one thing to argue that the Biblical concept of sin is a bad bit of theology or philosophy, or that it is offensive to people of the twenty-first century, but to argue that it has nothing to do with biblical or historic Christian spirituality is simply egregiously incorrect. If you would like to pursue the subject further I would suggest you read: The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion by O. Hobart Mowrer; Whatever Became of Sin? by Karl Menninger; and The Atonement: The Origins of the Doctrine in the New Testament by Martin Hengel. Meanwhile you might reflect on something Kathleen Norris said in her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography:

Comprehensible , sensible sin is one of the unexpected gifts I’ve found in the monastic tradition. The fourth-century monks began to answer a question for me that the human potential movement of the late twentieth-century never seemed to address: if I’m O. K. and you’re O. K., and our friends (nice people and like us, markedly middle class, if a bit bohemian) are O. K., why is the world definitely not O. K.? Blaming others wouldn’t do. Only when I began to see the world’s ills mirrored in myself did I begin to find an answer; only as I began to address that uncomfortable word, “sin”, did I see that I was not being handed a load of needless guilt so much as a useful tool for confronting the negative side of human behavior.

Whether regarding sin, or the nature of reality, it is frequently difficult to say what liberal Christians believe. This is because a basic characteristic of liberal theologians has been to define themselves over against historic Christianity. Their statements of belief are, therefore, primarily negations –– statements of what they do not believe.

Five Final Observations on the Liberal Ethos
To understand the ethos or culture of liberal theology as modernity there are four characteristics with which it is helpful to be familiar:
• Casuistry
Where misapplied biblical quotations form the basis for most fundamentalist arguments liberals much prefer casuistry –– the use of clever and intellectually sophisticated but unsound reasoning to prove a point. Recently students at Union Theological Seminary in New York met in chapel sitting in a circle around an arrangement of green houseplants to “hold their grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings (the plants) who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor.” The statement put out by Union asked, “What, do you confess to the plants in your life?” The ceremony was conducted by the students in Professor Claudio Carvalhaes’s course in Extractivism: A Ritual/Liturgical Response. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds smart. What I do recognize is that it is casuistry. And I know that Union’s response to the many mocking responses it received is casuistry:

This is a beautiful ritual. . . . We are in the throes of a climate emergency, a crisis, created by humanity’s ignorance, our disregard for Creation. . . We must build new bridges to the natural world. And that means creating new spiritual and intellectual frameworks by which we understand and relate to the plants and animals with whom we share the planet. . . . We must birth new theology, new liturgy to heal and sow, replacing ones that reap and destroy. . . . Because plants aren’t capable of verbal response, does that mean we shouldn’t engage with them?

The statement is casuistry not because it advocates the urgency of addressing the ecological crisis or reflecting on the responsibility of human beings to respect and care for God’s living creation –– awake to the realization that in its beauty we see the face of God. Nor is it casuistry because it ignorantly assumes that Christian thinkers have not been reflecting theologically on the ecological crisis for quite some time now (See for example: Francis Schaffer’s Pollution and the Death of Man written in 1970 for a healthy evangelical perspective on the needed Christian response; or, Richard Bauckham’s The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation, 2010). No it is casuistry because it uses sophisticated sounding language and liberal intellectual clichés to convince people of something dumb.
• Freedom
Liberal Christianity, modernity, envisions and promotes a freedom detached from all authority other than the reason and experience of the individual. The greater the detachment from religious, biblical, social, governmental or community responsibility the greater, so it is thought, the freedom of the person. So, altruistic behavior has been detached from Jesus’s teaching which sees selfless acts of kindness as a “secret” spiritual practice of love and compassion, and has instead become a part of the public relations strategy of local stores and national corporations –– just another part of merchandizing. Freedom to pursue the “American Dream” is ultimately little more than the hope that if one works hard, or catches a lucky break, or is smart enough he or she too can join the elite oppressor class. Freedom for contemporary Americans is frequently just another word for self-absorption. Our search is for self-actualization, self-realization, self-fulfillment. For modernity freedom means individual freedom from outside constraints. I get a kick out of that commercial Ronnie Reagan does–– the one in which he seems to be afraid someone will take away his right to go to hell. If Ron is bent on going to hell far be it from me to interfere with his freedom. Thomas Oden, the pastoral theologian who turned from modern liberalism to classical Christianity, thought that in the modern world a consuming interest in self-expression has overwhelmed our sense of community responsibility –– our human accountability to one another. “The social result,” he said, “is precisely the inordinate, hedonistic self-assertiveness that classic Jewish and Christian ethics have always eschewed as the center of the human predicament. Its horrifying consequences are often not recognized until one discovers a polluted beach, the results of acid rain, upraised barricades for an incipient revolution, a raging epidemic, or an impending genocide.”
• Values
Theoretically all liberals value tolerance and respect. They have supported and continue to support the civil rights movement, affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the rights of gays and lesbians. Liberals contrary to the old Puritan principle which says, “Ever one should help himself,” believe that government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are without adequate food, shelter, health care, or educational opportunities. If you are a literalist and strict Biblicist you should know, whether it is hard for you to accept or not, the furthest liberal to the left you can imagine may possess more real moral integrity and good will than any member of your church. Being a good person is not dependent on what someone believes about any religion. Having said that, the reality is that liberals and humanists, in general, practice these values with about as much hypocrisy as any other group practices its values. One would think that liberal Christianity would be devoted to the spiritual principle of nonviolence, but they are more likely to be proponents of “just war theory” than the peace of Christ, or the ahimsa of Gandhi. But then few Christian denominations seem to know that the teaching of Christ was that of peace and love; and, few Hindus recognize nonviolence as a central characteristic of their faith. Not many secular liberals recognize or have any real appreciation for the fact that their values are derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Ironically, even when they are denouncing the fundamentalist for their abhorrent rhetoric and policies, they are doing so on the ethical foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Quaker philosopher D. Elton Trueblood once described this as a “cut-flower” faith or spirituality. The stem of a flower is cut from its root and the flower placed in a vase, for a while the flower continues to look beautiful, and its fragrance may fill the room, but it quickly wilts and dies without having given new life. Christian values cut off from the wisdom of Scripture and the living Spirit of Christ are simply not the same thing as those values rooted in Christ and nourished by the Spirit. Ultimately, liberal Christianity to the far left, liberal Christianity as modernity, has no real “why” for the good it advocates other than it seems reasonable in the moment; but, as the moment is ever changing so may what one believes reasonable appears and disappear like warm breath on a frosty morning.
• Reconfiguration
Liberal Christianity, or modernity, received much of its original energy from an infatuation with new concepts and ideas –– rather like the philosophers on Mars Hill Paul encountered who “loved to hear and discuss anything new.” Ironically many modernists were originally motivated by a desire to defend the Christian faith. However, unlike conservative fundamentalism, rather than launching a frontal assault liberalism devised a defense strategy of accommodation. Consequently, in time, much of liberalism came to be preoccupied with the business of reconfiguring Christianity so as to make it more acceptable to modern thought and consciousness. Unfortunately, that is a labor more than a little like rolling the proverbial boulder up the hill every day –– the work of reconfiguring Christianity is never done.
• Clichés
Fundamentalist and evangelicals tend to trivialize Christian thought and practice by talking in empty clichés. Liberals tend to do the same thing, tend to make what is large small and to ignore the subtleties and nuances of life and reality, through obsessive political correctness.

It’s a Matter of What You Want?
Allen, my friend since grade school, and I took our first college philosophy class together. From the first day the professor insisted that it was not possible to be both a Christian believer and a philosopher. At the time we were far too naive to know how wrong he was. So, late in the second semester Allen went to the professor’s office and asked: “How can I be both a Christian and a philosopher?” It was important to Allen that he be seen as intellectually sophisticated. His question was essentially the question of early liberalism. Thomas à Kempis, the fifteenth century monk, said in his The Imitation of Christ, “The learned are always anxious to appear learned.” If that is your goal there is probably no reason you can not attain it. If your goal is to know God, is to live in conscious contact, in mystical intimacy with the God of the Burning Bush, The One Who Is, and the Christ God sent, then you will need to take a long arduous journey along the rugged path of the classical spiritual disciplines of the Christian faith. And, you will have to let go of all self-enhancing images. As E. Stanley Jones noted, “We are all free to choose, but we are not free to choose the results of our choosing.