Conservative Blog

Why a liberal interpretation of Christianity is not Christianity at all

It is quite the confusing religious world that we live in these days. Christianity seems to be changing by the minute, and the factions that line up against each other are stranger and stranger. I'm not going to get into a full theological discussion at this point, but what is the benefit to liberal Christianity? A Christianity that denies that Christ is the way to God is not even a religion any more.

It has been argued for some time that everyone is responsible for their faith to the level that they have had the Gospel revealed to them. This is a part of Revelation and many use it to neatly dance around the problem of having people in China who have never heard of Christ going to Hell. That doesn't quite seem fair, after all. Being a staple passage in the Bible, this doesn't really qualify as a wholly liberal theology. I've heard many conservative apologists (the ones who think the world is 6000 years old) use it as proof of God's love and mercy. Fine, I'm untrained in theology, so I'm not going to argue with them.

Yet it is another thing altogether to claim that people who specifically reject Christ are rewarded with eternal life, as Barack Obama recently suggested. It seems to me that this leaves Christianity with nothing at all.

And this is only one of the strange stories with liberal interpretations of the Bible that I've read lately. Yesterday, for example, I read an op-ed on Real Clear Politics that began with these lines:

In her 2001 memoir of seminary life, Episcopal priest Chloe Breyer expressed befuddlement that the Rikers Island inmates to whom she was ministering mocked her liberal approach to religion.

"They want answers, not questions," Ms. Breyer wrote in frustration. "The more contradictions I point out in the Bible, the more the inmates decide there is no point in wasting their time with a religion that lacks answers."

Pardon me, but what the hell? Who decided the proper way to minister to people, much less convicts at Rikers Island, was to point out contradictions in the Bible? After Pentecost when the Apostles and disciples of Jesus went out into the world to spread the Gospel, they anticipated that people would need proof in order to convert--thus the need for "witnesses", people who had seen the risen Christ. The last thing these men would have done was to spend a great deal of time casting doubt upon their own story.

A liberal approach to religion renders the religion impotent and meaningless, much as a liberal approach to the constitution renders law impotent and meaningless. Either it is or it is not. For Obama and those on the left wing of Christianity, it is not, and neither is our constitution and neither is our liberty. The principle difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals bring chaos while conservatives bring order. Think that is going too far? Ask Christ who has been thrown out of his own religion.

2 comments | Posted in » Christianity, Paul Zannucci