What's the point of "liberal" Christianity?

[Cisco]

I’m getting weary of The Great Atheist War of 2006 and all the ad hominem attacks therein, but I believe there are still many questions it has left unanswered and I’d like to do discuss these in a - hopefully - calmer environment.

Now, “liberal” Christianity is not something I’ve ever encountered outside of the SDMB. I’m not saying it may not be wildly popular, but it was certainly non-existent or at least not spoken about where I grew up. The bible was the inerrant Word handed down from GOD through divine inspiration and that was the end of that discussion.

Liberal Christians, it seems, do not believe this to be the case. However, it was relentlessly preached in the schools and churches I went to growing up that if one word of the bible was wrong - if there was one inconsistency - then it was all wrong. I’ve got to admit that this makes a lot of sense to me. The bible either describes an omniscient God or it doesn’t. If he were flawless, it seems he’d make damn sure his user’s manual was too.

Liberal Christians seem to interpret the bible however they want. Maybe they agree that Jesus was a virgin birth, but there’s no way he turned water into wine. Maybe they agree that there was a flood, but it didn’t actually cover the entire Earth, etc. Some take this to one end of the spectrum, believing all but a handful of minor details, and some take it to the opposite end and say the whole book is just allegory.

My question is: Why?

If you truly believe in your heart that the Word of GOD was divinely revealed to you through the Holy Bible and live your life accordingly - especially if you’re one of the extremely precious few who do it without harming or discriminating against others - then I find a certain nobility in that. My grandfather was a conservative Christian and there is not a human being who has ever walked this Earth whom I respect more than I respected him or love more than I loved him. I try to model my life after his and I say that as a comfirmed atheist.

If, however, you want to make up your own religion, why base it on Christianity? With so much stigma attached to it, so many disagreeable stablemates, and so much unsavory history, wouldn’t you want to drop it if you didn’t need it? In other words, when so many conservative Christians believe that it’s their way or the highway, why shuffle around behind them? Why not take the highway?

[John_DiFool]

The Bible (at best-that’s another debate) could be considered as the inspired Word of an
Infallible God handed down thru fallible men, who must, somewhere along the line, have
garbled things up somewhat (“Blessed are the cheesemakers?”). If man is an intermediary
there MUST by definition be errors small and large. If the Bible had instead been directly
delivered by one of God’s messengers (an angel perhaps) signed and sealed and dropped off
at the nearest temple, then you could make an argument for infallibility (as was apparently
the case with the first set of Commandments).

Really don’t get the “one thing wrong = entire thing wrong” concept at all-certainly there
can still be significant value derived from the Bible even if it contains various errors?
As for me the Bible at best is an arrow pointing the way and not the way itself
(map =/ territory), even though I am not a Christian per se.

[Septima]

And on top of that, there is the fact that the bible has been translated any number of times, so that what most people have (depending on language) is a copy of a copy of a copy…

A common hobby a teo.studies at my university is the ever popular “look what they made Jesus say in Farsi/Am.english/mandarin etc.”

What I refer to as “the good kind of christian” put personal belief in God over the literal word of the bible.

[Canadjun]

Not only is the Bible considered to have been recorded by man (as opposed to being directly handed down by divine intervention), it has been re-recorded and re-recorded from one language to another over the centuries. That means that not only are there questions of whether man originally recorded the divine messages and events correctly, it also causes questions of whether word X in ancient Aramaic (or Greek, or Hebrew, or whatever) is really best represented by word Y in Latin and whether word Y in Latin is best represented by word Z in English. Hence the question of whether Mary was actually a virgin, or was she just a young maiden as some translations suggest? Books were also chosen by men long after the fact for inclusion or non-inclusion in the Bible, so who’s to say that the correct books were chosen?

I’m actually atheist, so all of that is moot to me anyway, but that is, to my understanding, why many devout Christians do not believe that the Bible should be taken literally word-for-word.

[Anne_Neville]

@Cisco

The bible either describes an omniscient God or it doesn’t. If he were flawless, it seems he’d make damn sure his user’s manual was too.

That assumes that God wrote the Bible. Liberal Christians (and liberal Jews) believe that people who may have been inspired by God wrote the Bible. Nothing about how being inspired by God renders you unable to make mistakes or gives you a perfect understanding of God. A lot of us have, at some point in our lives, had a feeling that we would describe as “inspired by God” or “an experience of God”, but that doesn’t mean that we never made a mistake or misunderstood something after that.

Also, it assumes that everything the Bible says is meant to be taken literally by its author (whoever or whatever that may be)- there’s no use of metaphor, poetic license, or of telling a story to make a point, even if that story might not be literally true. Even science textbooks use metaphors and analogies to explain concepts, and it’s a mistake to take those too literally (the atom isn’t like a miniature solar system, but science textbooks teach that model because it’s useful for certain purposes). If something in the physical world like quantum mechanics can be beyond most people’s ability to understand it, there’s no reason why that couldn’t be true of God as well.

If, however, you want to make up your own religion, why base it on Christianity? With so much stigma attached to it, so many disagreeable stablemates, and so much unsavory history, wouldn’t you want to drop it if you didn’t need it? In other words, when so many conservative Christians believe that it’s their way or the highway, why shuffle around behind them? Why not take the highway?

If your belief is inspired by the same text used by other Christians, and you share some beliefs with them, and you celebrate the same holidays and rites of passage as Christians do, why not call it Christianity?

Just about any religious tradition or philosophy is going to have something undesirable associated with it, either currently or historically.

[badchad]

It’s not so much that if one word in the bible is wrong then it’s all wrong, but rather that if one thing is wrong it’s not inerrant. An errant text, especially one as errant as the bible does not come even close to giving reasonable justification to the claims made within it. If it were demonstrably inerrant on all things verifiable that would be some reason to believe it when it talks of miracles, gods, and an afterlife. Since it is chocked full of errors one can and should most rationally assume that the miracles, gods, and afterlife described therein are as shaky as everything else, which is pretty damn shaky.

[Beware_of_Doug]

@John DiFool

Really don’t get the “one thing wrong = entire thing wrong” concept at all-certainly there can still be significant value derived from the Bible even if it contains various errors?

BUT. There you deprive the earthly pulpit, the man of God, preacher and interpreter, of his authority over the faithful. Because if the Bible is inerrant, then obviously it needs a devout servant of God to interpret it with authority. Authority. It’s all about authority. The fundamentalist mindset craves authority, for without it people will just go out and do any old thing. If God is not authoritarian – he IS nothing.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Cisco

If you truly believe in your heart that the Word of GOD was divinely revealed to you through the Holy Bible…

If, however, you want to make up your own religion, why base it on Christianity?..

Because there is a middle ground between believing that the Bible was handed down word for word by God, and believing that the Bible was just invented out of thin air.

It is possible to hold beliefs consistent with traditional Christianity (e.g. about what Jesus said, did, and was), and to try to follow him, without believing the Bible to be inerrant.

If you really want to understand liberal Christianity and, in particular, its approach to the Bible, one good book is Marcus Borg’s Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally.

One of the points Borg makes is that the understanding of the Bible that you (the OP) grew up with is actually relatively recent, compared to Christianity in general.

@Marcus Borg

Christian fundamentalism as an identifiable religious movement originated early in the twentieth century in the United States, with its immediate roots in the nineteenth century. It stressed the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible in every respect,

…it was in the second or third generation of the Reformation that claims for the infallible truth of the Bible were made.

…The explicit description of the Bible as inerrant and infallible by fundamentalists and conservative-evangelicals cannot claim to be the ancient and traditional voice of the church.

Borg’s understanding of the Bible is

The Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) is the product of ancient Israel. The New Testament is the product of the early Christian movement. What the Bible says is the words of those communities, not God’s words.

To see the Bible as a human product does not in any way deny the reality of God. Indeed, one of the central premises of this book is that God is real and can be experienced.

…calling the Bible the Word of God refers not to its origin but to its status and function.

[Quiddity_Glomfuster]

@Cisco

Liberal Christians, it seems, do not believe this to be the case. However, it was relentlessly preached in the schools and churches I went to growing up that if one word of the bible was wrong - if there was one inconsistency - then it was all wrong. I’ve got to admit that this makes a lot of sense to me. The bible either describes an omniscient God or it doesn’t. If he were flawless, it seems he’d make damn sure his user’s manual was too.

1. Think of God as having the mind of human. Think of humans as having the brains of ants or worms or something that you acknowledge is vastly inferior to the mind of the human. Now, how is the human going to get a message across to the ants? In ant-speak of course. In the days the Bible was received by its interpreters, there were different social paradigms. Story-telling and allegories were common means of conveying information. You absolutely cannot read something written that long ago in today’s context. Everybody understands that about Shakespeare or Chaucer but has trouble getting it when it comes to the Bible.

2. The Bible contains many inconsistencies. That in and of itself shows that it’s not internally logical. Nobody said it should be, anyway.

3. If you ask these fundies who claim to ‘live by Every Word In The Bible’, then grill them about Leviticus. If they’re not stoning their disobedient children to death, then they are lying about their faith. Fact is that, as usual, hypocritical humans twist the Bible to their own purposes (usually this means using it against others).
   To my mind, it’s a bastardization of the Bible to take little bits and pieces out to wield as weapons against others and still claim to live by every word. It’s hateful.

4. Kindly do not think that just because a person calls himself a ‘christian’ he is. I could sit in a barn, whinny, and call myself a horse but that wouldn’t make me one.

Christ preached love and forgiveness. He didn’t say ‘stick to every word in the Bible’. In fact, he said things very different, for instance that the Two Great Commandments were all that was needed because they contain all the Law and Prophets. Which they happen to do - and both are based on love, not condemnation, rule-making, and nitpicking over the Bible.

I suggest you read the entire Bible yourself if you want to see for yourself all the parts that these so-called ‘christians’ ignore, leave out, never mention, conveniently forget about. I also urge you to find a Bible with extensive notes that explain and interpret it in context.

[Cisco]

@Quiddity Glomfuster

I suggest you read the entire Bible yourself if you want to see for yourself all the parts that these so-called ‘christians’ ignore, leave out, never mention, conveniently forget about. I also urge you to find a Bible with extensive notes that explain and interpret it in context.

I wonder why you assume I haven’t read the entire bible? (I have)

I also own one of the bibles you mention, with notes (NIV study bible), and it’s sitting about 5 feet from me right now because I read it often.

I’ve also “grilled” fundies about Leviticus, and they simply respond that Jesus changed all that.

[Beware_of_Doug]

@Marcus Borg

e Bible were made.

…The explicit description of the Bible as inerrant and infallible by fundamentalists and conservative-evangelicals cannot claim to be the ancient and traditional voice of the church.

He’s obviously mistaken them for someone who gives a shit.

They are in the ascendency right now, and that’s an intoxicating thing. You think you’re God’s special little buddy, and that whatever YOU believe is the Word, or close enough it don’t make no nevermind.

[David_Simmons]

Cisco has a point though. If you adopt the position that people can decide that any part of the Bible is not the word of God that is a judgement of falible man, based on man’s incomplet knowledge.

I would think that once you open that door then all parts of the Bible are subject to man’s critical review as to whether or not they are the true word of God.

Why should that very first part be questionable and none of the rest be likewise?

[Caridwen]

@David Simmons

Cisco has a point though. If you adopt the position that people can decide that any part of the Bible is not the word of God that is a judgement of falible man, based on man’s incomplete knowledge…

Don’t people do that with every religion?

Isn’t this why there are so many Christian religions, because everyone interprets the bible differently?

[Lamar_Mundane]

@Cisco

Now, “liberal” Christianity is not something I’ve ever encountered outside of the SDMB. I’m not saying it may not be wildly popular, but it was certainly non-existent or at least not spoken about where I grew up. The bible was the inerrant Word handed down from GOD through divine inspiration and that was the end of that discussion.

…

If, however, you want to make up your own religion, why base it on Christianity? With so much stigma attached to it, so many disagreeable stablemates, and so much unsavory history, wouldn’t you want to drop it if you didn’t need it? In other words, when so many conservative Christians believe that it’s their way or the highway, why shuffle around behind them? Why not take the highway?

Others have answered the question as I would have, but I wanted to point out that your experiences, while they may have been near universal where you grew up, are in fact held by a small minority of Christians, mostly (but not completely) confined to the southern United States. Catholics, the largest Christian denomination, don’t believe in biblical inerrancy, nor do a large percentage of Protestants.

[raindog]

@Septima

And on top of that, there is the fact that the bible has been translated any number of times, so that what most people have (depending on language) is a copy of a copy of a copy…

Cite?

[sunacres]

@Cisco

Liberal Christians seem to interpret the bible however they want.

@Cisco

I’ve also “grilled” fundies about Leviticus, and they simply respond that Jesus changed all that.

I wonder if your OP is just a tiny bit disingenuous. You say you read the Bible often, you say you’ve never run into “liberal Christians” outside of the dope, you say you try to model your life after a man who took the Bible literally (that’s not what you said in fact, you veered off onto a tangent that had nothing to do with literalism and more to do with inspiration), yet you say you’re a confirmed atheist.

Then you ask why most of the Christians in the world don’t jump ship because the extreme literalists in your tiny corner of the world are giving the whole enterprise a bad name?

Did any of the responses posted so far resonate for you at all?

[Sapo]

Former Catholic seminarian for four years [turned something else] clocking in.

Catholicism is basically the Liberal Christianity the OP is referring to. It is official doctrine (as per the Catechism) that the Bible is inspired by God (only Revelations claims angelic dictation). Some books are historical (although that doesn’t mean they are perfect recounts of the events), others are allegorical and others are prophetic.

All in all, details notwithstanding, there is a unifying message that carries through the Bible (which you could basically summarize with the Nicene Creed).

Different books were written in different times to carry that same message to different audiences. A study of the Gospels offers a fascinating glimpse of how the story was presented differently to suit the different perspectives of Romans, Jews and Greeks. Similarly for all the Epistles.

Our modern times are different but we know enough of those times to figure out what the basic message was and translate it into our modern worldview (it is not that difficult of a message, really). Several gaps remain as new issues have emerged since then, but the gist is clear.

Different people will do the updating differently but that doesn’t mean a cafeteria religion where anyone just chooses what they want. The Catechism should be taken as the baseline doctrine and if someone chooses to believe differently, he should have some good excuse to give himself.

The Catechism is the product of a thinktank with members of all different visions of how the Bible should be interpreted and distills, in the end, what they all eventually agree on. As times change and the composition of the council changes, so does the Catechism. Its evolution, of course, is not adrift in the winds of change. It is supposed to be anchored in the Bible itself and the Tradition of the Church.

It may not be Liberal in a Hillary Clinton kinda way, but it sure is Liberal in the terms of the OP.

[Miller]

@Cisco

Liberal Christians, it seems, do not believe this to be the case. However, it was relentlessly preached in the schools and churches I went to growing up that if one word of the bible was wrong - if there was one inconsistency - then it was all wrong. I’ve got to admit that this makes a lot of sense to me. The bible either describes an omniscient God or it doesn’t. If he were flawless, it seems he’d make damn sure his user’s manual was too.

Aside from all the other excellent reasons given why this would not be so, there’s also the matter of free will. What’s the point of giving us free will, if all he wants us to do is follow a script? It seems to this atheist that, if God is testing us for our moral quality, he’s not going to give us explicit instructions about how to behave. That would ruin the whole point of the test. Rather, he wants us to figure out what’s right and wrong on our own: to do good because we want to help others, not because we want to be rewarded, and to avoid evil because we don’t want to harm, not because we fear punishment. The Bible, then, is not a “user manual,” but a testament written by humans on their experiences with what they perceived to be God, and how they think God regarded their actions. How much weight one gives to these accounts, and how much you agree with the writer’s conclusions, is up to the individual.

[Sapo]

Former Catholic seminarian for four years [turned something else] clocking in.

Catholicism is basically the Liberal Christianity the OP is referring to. It is official doctrine (as per the Catechism) that the Bible is inspired by God (only Revelations claims angelic dictation). Some books are historical (although that doesn’t mean they are perfect recounts of the events), others are allegorical and others are prophetic.

All in all, details notwithstanding, there is a unifying message that carries through the Bible (which you could basically summarize with the Nicene Creed).

Different books were written in different times to carry that same message to different audiences. A study of the Gospels offers a fascinating glimpse of how the story was presented differently to suit the different perspectives of Romans, Jews and Greeks. Similarly for all the Epistles.

Our modern times are different but we know enough of those times to figure out what the basic message was and translate it into our modern worldview (it is not that difficult of a message, really). Several gaps remain as new issues have emerged since then, but the gist is clear.

Different people will do the updating differently but that doesn’t mean a cafeteria religion where anyone just chooses what they want. The Catechism should be taken as the baseline doctrine and if someone chooses to believe differently, he should have some good excuse to give himself.

The Catechism is the product of a thinktank with members of all different visions of how the Bible should be interpreted and distills, in the end, what they all eventually agree on. As times change and the composition of the council changes, so does the Catechism. Its evolution, of course, is not adrift in the winds of change. It is supposed to be anchored in the Bible itself and the Tradition of the Church.

It may not be Liberal in a Hillary Clinton kinda way, but it sure is Liberal in the terms of the OP.

What is the point of it? Well, I guess the question can be easily shot back? What is the point of Conservative/Fundamentalist Christianity? Why be stuck in a literal interpretation of a series of books written with different audiences in mind (that are all gone from the face of the Earth). Or why invent something out of whole cloth just to avoid the stigma attached to a particular group of Christians (that they don’t believe to be right in the first place)?

[Sapo]

Sorry for the quasi-double post. The first was accidental, incomplete and I thought hadn’t gone through. Mea Culpa.