JAC Online

On Liberalism
by Captain Grant Sandercock-Brown


I am not a fan of liberal theology. It’s nothing personal. I know some very nice people who are liberals. It’s just that for me, an evangelical, underneath our surface similarities there is a radical divergence in our world view.

It’s why my liberal friends and I so often talk past each other. I say, ‘Of course I believe X, that’s what the bible says’, and my liberal friend replies ‘I know the bible says X but I can’t accept it. (This conversation is usually repeated in varying paraphrases). We then walk away, baffled by the other’s refusal to accept the obvious truth. However, the bafflement springs, not from insufficient communication skills, but rather mutually exclusive worldviews that will always talk past each other.

I’m not saying that liberal theology is all bad. The liberal social gospel has been a reminder to evangelicals that the gospel is also a call to help others; to make the kingdom a reality in the present. Evangelicalism is too often self-centred. At its worst it becomes, ‘I thank God because He is there when I need him’. Sadly, in practice, that seems to be not very often at all.

Nevertheless, Christianity is still about a personal relationship with God. Remember, Amazing Grace is written in the first person. We shouldn’t just dismiss a theology that embraces what we think, feel and experience. It’s hard for me to see how all meaningful theology is not, at some level, personal and experiential. So yes, it’s true that modern spirituality is often centred on personal experience. But in a piece of delightful irony, so is classic liberal theology.

For my hypothetical liberal friend, ‘I can’t accept it’ actually means, ‘I can’t understand miracles or believe in the resurrection or accept that God was involved in inspiring the bible or understand how Peter wrote such good Greek’. What underpins all of that is the word ‘I’. Here also is a ‘me’ centred worldview. Liberal theology is not born out of the failure of the bible under scientific scrutiny or a disproved God. It too is an experiential world view, where my reason trumps the mystery of God. Therefore I must cut God down to size. I may worship God the Father, but he is the father only in the sense that Ingmar Bergman is the father of modern cinema. That is to say, he retired a long time ago and has been rather ineffectual for years, admired but no longer potent. In fact he died a little while ago didn’t he?

Isaiah, in chapter 46, mocks the Babylonians for this very thing. ‘How can you worship a God of your own invention? You pour out gold, hire a goldsmith and make it into a god, you set it in place and there it stands’. “Though one cries out to it, it does not answer”. Of course. Ultimately, the problem with liberalism is that you can’t worship a question mark.

British playwright David Hare, a self-confessed agnostic, was asked to address the Lambeth Bishop’s conference some years ago. Hare said that while he appreciated the compassion of liberals in the church, as an observer he was rather surprised by their reluctance to mention their founder. “If Jesus Christ really did rise from the dead, then call me a fanatic but I think you have to tell people about it”. He’s correct. The centre of an evangelical faith is grounded in the truth of a real and risen Lord.

And because of that truth, by the grace of God, I am a believer. I believe that in Jesus I can know the living God; believe that I may not have all the answers but I serve the One who is the answer. Surely ‘me’ at the centre of faith is never enough. There are truths beyond my ken.

C.S. Lewis once wrote “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important”. God is God or he is not. For me? I believe.

 

 

 

   

 

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