What is the point of Liberal Christianity?

[mswas]

@Fear Itself

But of course you do. And you cannot comprehend how any Christian could interpret it otherwise. Such certainty must be a comfort.

What the hell are you talking about? I swear, you have to spend more time on this forum cutting through people’s stereotyping than anything else.

[Alan_Smithee]

@miss elizabeth

I was raised as a liberal Christian. Throughout my childhood, and beginning of adolescence I was very involved in my church. The people were kind, and there was a strong emphasis on love for everyone, and respect and tolerance of other’s beliefs. This resonated with me, and I was happy, to the point that I considered the ministry as my calling. So, as I got older I read the Bible, of course, but the older I got the more questions I had. I began to see things in a very different way. Noah’s Ark had always been a cute little children’s story, the kind of thing the wallpaper in the nursery had. But now I thought about all the people that would have perished horribly if such a story was true. But of course, I saw that it wasn’t true, and this bothered me also. All of the Old Testament was this way to me, and I found myself rejecting the entire thing as anything more than tribal stories from the foundations of my own faith. They did not represent the God of love that I worshipped, but I had never been a Bible literalist, so I chucked them.

Then I started to have problems with the New Testament. First of all, Jesus talked about Hell, and how He was the only way to Heaven. I didn’t believe that either. How could God send anyone to Hell? It was just cruel, and wrong. So, I ignored that part too. No Hell, ok. And a lot of what Paul wrote bothered me too. Of course women could speak in church; my minister was a woman, and she was wonderful. Revelations was creepy, too. But, Jesus didn’t say any of that stuff, so I felt perfectly fine about dis-believing it.

So, skipping ahead a bit, I found myself at a point where I had sort of glossed over everything Jesus didn’t say, and even a few things he did. But I still considered myself a Christian (and, it should be noted, I was still very much welcome in my church at this point). But, one day I had a sort of revelation. If Jesus was the Son of God, and all these wonderful things, He pretty much had to be infallible. I couldn’t just discount it. And if he WAS all those things, why didn’t he speak out more on the things that were important to me, in more forceful terms? Why didn’t he say, “Women who love other women, and men who love other men are ok. And women are as capable as men in every spiritual capacity, they are equal. And blacks and whites are equal, and slavery is wrong,” and so on and so on. I mean, he was God! He had to have known this stuff! You can’t say, “Oh, it was the time He lived in,” because he was timeless! Jesus’s message was revolutionary, in it’s time, but a message from God should be pretty much eternal, I thought.

So, I reached a point where I realized I respected Jesus, and found him to be a good person, and a spiritual teacher. But in my studies of other religions, I saw that Jesus was hardly the only one. There are lots of wonderful teachers, some of whom had more complete philosophies than Jesus did! I felt like Jesus could have reached that point in his ministry, but he was killed, which is very sad. And I think we can benefit from reading his teachings; they aren’t the be all end all, but what they say has merit. But I no longer considered myself a Christian, because I did not exclusively follow the teachings of Jesus. So, finally, my question:

For liberal Christians, what is different for you? What philosophy makes Christianity the thing for you? I feel like most liberal Christians have feelings similar to these (at least the ones I’ve known) but stop short of dropping their faith. Can you explain why that is?

Going back to the OP for a moment, I can say that as a former liberal Christian myself, I think I can speak to these questions. When I was a Christian, the thing that made me a Christian was that I took the claims of the faith seriously. The story of Noah’s Ark didn’t seem like it described the actions of a loving God, but that didn’t mean I just chucked it. Instead, I asked what lesson it taught, what was valuable enough in that story that for thousands years people who worshiped a God of Love and Justice would continue telling and listening to that story despite all its shortcomings.

Even after I decided that Jesus was not divine, and that in fact God does not exist, I had trouble giving up the name “Christian” as long I felt both compelled and able to ferret out deep and meaningful truths from those stories and claims. Once I stopped living in the tradition, however, I suddenly felt comfortable calling myself a non-Christian.

[Malacandra]

@Fear Itself

You gotta love the Bible in that respect. It is so fair and balanced, it demands behavior in one verse, then lets you off the hook in the next. That’s how so many of the faithful talk themselves into believing they don’t really have to give away all they own, or love their enemies, or turn the other cheek; because just a few verses further along, they can seize on some words that justify the complete opposite. No wonder there are a thousand different churches, all based on the same book, but lacking any agreement on just which verses trump the others.

Yeah, it’s a shame, isn’t it? Just like I’d no sooner got my head around Newton’s theory of gravity than someone comes along and tells me I need to read Einstein too, 'cos sometimes gravity does what Newton says it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. Must mean physics is a crock, if you ask me.

I guess, when it comes down to it, if you want to follow Christ you have to do more than just pick one favourite verse and stick to it. Fortunately, if all you want to do is snark on Christians, it’s easy: without too much ado, you can find some verse somewhere that you find the Christians you know of, even by reputation, don’t stick to, and you’re good to go.