If you didn’t mean that, I’m sure you can see how it could come across that way.
You’re right on that-I better clear up the wording.
So why did you include something that has no relation to any “general school of opinion” as your first point?
I do know a very few people who hold some belief that vaguely resembles your first point, but they are hardly considered to be among the “Liberals” of Christianity. (One might make the claim that their position is closer to that of Liberals than to Fundamentalists, but that says nothing about the “Liberal” position in Christianity. Read Tillich or Schillebeeckx, (or Barth or Brown)–Liberal Christian theologians–and show us where any of them deny the Divinity of Jesus or where any of them “disregard” the bible.
You are displaying a significant amount of ignorance on a topic on which you feel free to pontificate–and you are undermining any argument you make with such erroneous claims.
I am in awe. There is a God.
I meant that some among them do not believe in Jesus’ divinity and while they may claim to follow the Bible they often ignore large portions of it (ie Paul’s various pronouncements). As to Karl Barth he seems inclined to the third viewpoint not the first.
You need to put Barth in the third category to keep your claim alive, but Barth was certainly more Liberal in his theology and treatment of the bible than he was Evangelical.
The reality is that there is a wide spectrum of belief within Christianity and aside from setting up artificial boundaries for very narrow topics, it is pretty much always wrong to claim that there are only two or three general positions. Just within the Fundamentalist tradition–a movement founded to address Scripture–there are (a century later) widely varying approaches to Scripture.
Your “three general schools of opinion” is not accurate and your use of the label “Liberal” for one of those positions is applied wrongly.
Tell me what Bishop Spong’s views are, as you understand them. (Note: he is a personal though not close acquaintance; Skulldigger and I have mutual friends with him and his wife. I’ve met and talked with him, disagree with some of his stances, think he’s misunderstood (and doesn’t care) on others, and right on target on still others.
I will tell you this: he does recite the Nicene Creed, evidently meaning what he says, and he’s not the sort of person to say something he doesn’t mean out of social niceties. I’ve been ten feet from him when he did it.
Ball’s in your court, Curtis.
I need to jump in on this. Sorry, Poly & Curtis.
I’ve read Bishop Spong’s BORN OF A WOMAN and RESURRECTION, various articles by him, including the 12 issues he believes need to be revisited in Christianity-
With all I’ve read by him, that he & I can both sincerely recite the Creed shows that we use the English language totally differently when it comes to faith issues. What we think the words mean are probably about 180 degrees from each other. We do not belong to the same religion, the same faith or the same spiritual orientation. Can the historic Biblical Christian faith can truly encompass us both? I don’t think so. YMMV.
Request to mods- unless the post between mine & Poly’s last posts contains a NSFW link or a virus, PLEASE let it stay! It probably makes as much sense in this conversation as anything else! L
To Curtis’s whole point: There are Liberal Christians who truly affirm a saving faith in Christ & respect for Divine Revelation in the Bible, and those who so redefine the words so that while they confess Christ & honor the Bible, they do not do so in a way consistent with the historic Christian Tradition.
Also, one may be liberal or conservative in theology & not necessarily be so in politics. For most of his adult life, Robert Welch- founder of the John Birch Society- was a Unitarian (he’d been a fundamentalist Baptist as a child & near the end of his life reportedly converted to Traditionalist Catholicism.) On the other hand, William Jennings Bryan was by 1910-20’s standards almost radically liberal/progressive (his opposition to evolutionism was intensified by his opposition to Social Darwinism & militarism.)
Hold Fast you live up to your name. I hope that God is merciful and forgives you for ignoring the majesty of his work over billions of years and substituting a narrative altered by man’s own wickedness.
However, there are other Liberal Christians who do not redefine the words in any way, turning this into a semantic No True Liberal game of name calling. Would Harvey Cox meet the definition of Liberal Christian that you and Curtis are employing? Absolutely. Would Raymond Brown? Not a chance. Bonhoeffer, beloved among Evangelicals, was much more a Liberal Christian than they like to think of him. His theology was very dependent on the theology of Barth, whom they scorn, (incorrectly), as a “follower” of Bultmann.
If you guys want to make a point about some group of Christians redefining the approach to Scripture, then you need to come up with a new term, (counter-Fundamentalists? Bultmanniacs? 
), rather than employing a term that has a current meaning that can be applied to real people, but then limiting its use to a small subset of that group.
I do recognize that the phrase “liberal theology,” as it was employed in the 19th century, very much set the stage for the beliefs that Curtis now calls “Liberal Christian,” but that phrase has seen numerous expressions for widely differing movements over the past 150 years and its use in the manner that Curtis has posted it simply reflects the views of one narrow tradition opposing a different narrow tradition, employing 100+ year old terminology in a way that is misleading today.
Uh, excuse me. Maybe I wasn’t clear or maybe you’re not getting it…
What I meant to say is that there are at least two types of Liberal Christians- those who hold to the historic tradition Christian faith and those who redefine the terms as to claim Christian faith while totally parting with the historical meaning.
My quote- clarified, I hope-
There are Liberal Christians who truly affirm a saving faith in Christ & respect for Divine Revelation in the Bible,
(the first group)
and those who so redefine the words so that while they confess Christ & honor the Bible, they do not do so in a way consistent with the historic Christian Tradition.
(the second group)
Sorry for not making that clearer.
On the contrary, that is excellent advice, and something I did 35 years ago - read the Bible from cover to cover. It is something that all atheists should do. I even took notes about it and posted them. 35 years ago I was on PLATO which had message boards quite like this one. I said that I considered the Bible a fantasy book, and I read all the fantasy and sf books I owned (true back then) and if someone would send me a Bible I would read it and post my comments. Someone did, and I did. I had never realized how self contradictory and absurd the thing was before then. Being Jewish, I had no more interest in Jesus than you do in Krishna, but I certainly used to believe, and went to five years of Hebrew school willingly.
So, head off to the library and get some science books.
You see, if you had read some science books you wouldn’t be making the elementary mistake of putting evolution and the Big Bang in the same sentence. They have absolutely nothing to do with one another. I don’t know if your reference to the Second Law has something to do with entropy and the Big Bang (which is at least interesting) or the Second Law and evolution, which would display a laughable misunderstanding of both.
Look, if I told you that the Garden of Eden was in Seattle, you’d tell me that I should get a clue as to what the Bible actually says. Your understanding of science seems to be at about this level, so I say you should educate yourself in the same way.
Well, it wasn’t quite as long as the four operas. And there was no singing. 
But I’m very good at parody. Two piece of my column giving parts of a Windows manual as written by famous writers (Searching through a Disk on a Snowy Evening and All the World’s a Screen) won a poetry contest.
BTW, when I heard Anna Russell I was ready!
I find it funny your calling men such as multiple fouding fathers “non-scholars.”
You have to twist the words and ideas in the bible quite a bit to get them to come out as myths and legends. The people writing them in every way took what they were writing as truth, and explicity claimed that they were doing so. Any time that they were not they would tell you. Like a parable for example.
Oh, I completely agree; but I think I got enough knowledge of it after four years of public education. Enough to the point where I don’t need to spend time reading books on a theory that is forced to change its beliefs on a regular basis. You really should take some of your own advice though; if your continuing to argue that the bible and its writers didn’t mean for it to be taken literally, you must not have spent all that much time reading it.
Oh I’m sure he no doubt could have–but he didn’t. He told us quite plainly what he did, and so thats why I believe it. The bible is supposed to be, as God intended it to be, more of a moral guide and general explanation for existence–not a scientific journal.
First off, you misunderstand the use of the word myth. In popular expression, myth indicates a made up tale in the manner of a “Just So” story. In various disciplines such as anthropology, myth indicates a story that expresses a truth to a society. The story is the framework for conveying the message while the truth is the message conveyed.
So we are agreed that the authors were attempting to express truth. The only question is whether they were attempting to use a narrative of facts or whether they were employing the literary expressions of their time.
I realize that I will not persuade you to change your beliefs, but you need to at least understand what is being said so that you do not attack other arguments from a position of ignorance.
I would be curious as to what “beliefs” you think have been “forced to be changed.” Science looks at evidence, proposes explanations for that evidence, then seeks to prove that the explanation is wrong. To the extent that an explanation holds up over long periods, it is treated as a reliable explanation. This is not a matter of belief.
I do not believe that the authors of the bible meant for it to be taken literally because I have studied it. They employed a number of different literary forms as they wrote various different books and those forms rarely depended on strict adherence to facts. The truth of the story was always more important than the details employed to tell the story.
Again, I do not expect you to accept my word on that topic, but making the claim that anyone who disagrees with you must not have spent enough time studying the book is just silly and demonstrates a rather naive world view.
Except that he doesn’t, really. Let’s assume that the Christian Bible is the one true literal word of God. Okay, fine. But he’s dropped it down into a sea of other religious texts, each one claiming that it is the one true literal word of God, none of them independently verifiable, and then threatens dire punishment if we do not guess which book is the real deal. It’s a cosmic shell game, being played with a gun against the temple of mankind, and your best chance of getting it right is to be fortunate enough to be born into a culture where the majority of people happen to have already made the right guess.
Really, Biblical literalism is a really, really bad argument for both a benevolent deity, and for an objective system of morality.
Alright, let’s go with that. The Big Bang doesn’t make any sense, because you don’t have an answer to the question of where the matter that exploded in the Big Bang came from. But how is your explanation any better? If we say that the universe exists because of God, doesn’t that leave us with exactly the same question? Where did God come from?
Lots of animals have feelings and functions that are unique to their species. The platypus is pretty unusual in that it has fur and lays eggs. Is there any particular reason we shouldn’t assume that the world was created specifically for the platypus, and the rest of us are just along for the ride?
Then why do you insist of treating it as one?
First, how do you know what their intentions were? Fiction writers and fabulists throughout history wrote that their stories are true. Plus, people back then had a very different sense of historical truth than we do. For the glory of God, they might well write how something should have happened.
You should read not just the Bible but books about the Bible - and not just by true believers. Remember, that in Prophets the Ark is mentioned and is very important, but the Bible itself is never mentioned. No one ever reads from it, no one acts like it exists until after the Babylonian exile. If it were written by Moses, why is this?
Reread the story of Samson. Not a myth in the usual sense? Do you believe in the historical accuracy of Hercules also?
So, if evidence arrives to put your beliefs into question, is it better to ignore the evidence or change your beliefs? Science is evidence based, and never claims perfection - in that way it explains the world better as time goes on, which shows it gets closer to the real truth. If you had gotten a good education, you’d know that learning doesn’t stop after four years of whatever, but goes on throughout your lifetime.
If God had truly inspired the Bible, he could have caused an accurate story to be written. No equations required - just that the universe started a long time ago, the sun came into existence before the earth, and the order of the population of the earth by living things was correct instead of totally wrong. But nothing is there that a smart priest living almost 3,000 years ago couldn’t have put in. Why do you want to limit your understanding of the universe to that of a 3,000 year old priest anyway?
You probably know this, but Hold Fast doesn’t - no matter exploded in the Big Bang. In fact, there was no matter at all until the universe cooled and the energy in the universe froze into matter. That question is easy. Why there is a shortage of anti-matter - now that question is hard.