Last week, inspired by Thomas B. Edsall’s series in the NYT, I put forward my take on what the fundamentalists get right. But what about religious liberals? What do they get right?
Here are three suggestions:
1. Religious liberals see more clearly than conservatives that faith without works is dead (James 2:17). This insight is demonstrated in many ways, but above all in the concern of liberals for the poor, the sick, the dispossesed (including the many of victims of capitalism’s “creative destruction”), and historically marginalized groups such as African Americans, immigrants, women and gays. At the same time, liberals correctly insist that effectively helping these groups will frequently require structural changes to society, including the church.
2. Religious liberals have made peace with science and therefore don’t waste time on the misguided and oftentimes embarrassing efforts of fundamentalists to promote the teaching of creationism in public schools or to deny the challenges modern biblical criticism poses to our faith. Of course, liberals sometimes go to the opposite extreme and mistake whatever the current state of scientific knowledge happens to be for Truth. Consider, for example, that until the Big Bang theory gained acceptance in 1950s and 60s, most scientists denied the universe had a beginning in time, a truth that orthodox Christians had always accepted despite its lack of scientific support.
But the basic attitude of liberals here is correct: Christians have nothing to fear from science. Science, after all, is nothing more than humanity’s attempt to understand the natural world in which we live. And since God created both nature and reason, science can never finally contradict the teachings of our faith. It may seem to do so for a while, but sooner or later we will find either (1) that the science was wrong or incomplete (as with the Big Bang) or (2) that somewhere along the way our theology went off track (cf. Matthew 15:9: “But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men”).
3. Religious liberals take a much more sensible approach to such vexing questions as whether other religions contain truth or their adherents can/will go to heaven. Here we must tread carefully, but, at their best, liberals remind us that the gospel is not the (very bad!) news that God has completely ignored everyone in history except the chosen few Jews and then Gentiles who were lucky enough to have heard of Christ.
On the contrary, the gospel is the incredibly surprising and yet wonderful news that the One whom all people in all times have been seeking and feeling after (Acts 17:27) - the God whom we had at our best always been worshipping, in some way or another, though without full understanding (John 4:22) - has now revealed himself to us in the fullest, most definitive of ways possible here on earth: (1) by actually becoming one of us, living with us as a flesh-and-blood human being, teaching us what it means to love, and then showing us by dying at our own hands, yet forgiving us and then rising again, and (2) by sending his Holy Spirit to live within us so that all that's broken about us and our communities can be fixed and our communion with God and one another restored.
(Image of Joey Velasco's "Hapag ng Pag-Asa" via Resty S. Odon)
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