liberal vs. literal Christian

[Bandit]

Originally Posted by Käthe

This is becoming a bit tiring.

I'll move my questions to a new topic, and hope that the people who respond do so seriously.

i agree. it has become very tiring for me also & for the other christians because it is turning our faith into a big laughing joke.

i dont mean that toward you & your questions, because i think you are being sincere/serious here.

i am trying to make a point & i see that others are seeing how tiring it is.

please post & ask.

[Bandit]

bump
for technical problem

[Quahom1]

Can we tone down the sardonic wit please? Now that the thread is more or less back in balance, people are trying to ask serious questions, and present thoughtful views.

Besides, the only kind of humor I know of that Jesus had, was gentle.

Thank you.

v/r

Quahom

[Bandit]

as for me,
i can assure everyone that i am not being funny, witty, humorous or sarcastic
i am being very serious & thoughtful

if i ask is it liberal or literal- i am being serious in my question
every question, answer & info i provide in the last 24 hours here is serious.

i have made several serious posts in this thread

[lunamoth]

Originally Posted by Quahom1

LOL no, just open minded...

Thank you Q.

lunamoth

[lunamoth]

here is some of what Marcus teaches. i dont know if this is liberal or literal but i think most of it is accurate.

And you correctly pointed out above the pitfalls of literalism. The sword does cut both ways. So, which should I choose? Your literalism or Borg's literalism? Well, I choose neither.

He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

it appears they have both 'literally & liberally' tossed about 80% of the NT scriptures.

That's not how I see it at all. How Borg struggles with applying his faith to his life is his. How I struggle with applying my faith to my life is mine.

I do believe that the NT is 100% literal in this sense: 2000 years ago God visited us and once again walked among us. Whether He knew this of Himself at the time I do not know. People listened to his teachings, believed in His message, and patterned their lives and worship after Him. His teachings were the seeds, but hearts of humans are hard. What happened on the cross plows our hearts and makes them fertile ground for the seeds. He came to teach us about love but if this was all then he would not have been the Christ, merely a wise teacher. What happened on the cross and three days later was Real, whether or not it happened exactly as described in the conflicting reports of the Gospels.

The gospels record what the earliest believers knew about Christ and what they knew of his teachings. Most important, they testify that Christ lived, was crucified, and was physically resurrected. They testify that He is God, the Son of God, and that the Holy Spirit was given to us. I could go on, but I don't think I need to. Thus, every prayer, every parable, every miracle and every event, every word of the NT is true. All the Biblical scholarship in the world can't change this.

I think that it has been the practice of sola scriptura, taking the Bible out of the context of the traditions and knowledge of the mother Church (catholocism), that has created this warped idea about literalism and truth in the Bible.

lunamoth

[Thomas]

Bravo, Lunamoth!

Thomas

[Thomas]

"There is a common assumption of our contemporary culture that judgments are the result of arbitrary choice. There is often an assumption that we can choose our moral values or life style; that we choose our opinions about religion or science; that we choose our cultural beliefs and values. Serious arguments will break down when one party simply asserts, 'well, that is my culture,' or 'if that makes you happy so be it.' If arbitrary choice is the basis for judgment, then there is little point in arguing. Arguing presumes there is a rational basis for conclusions. If that is the case then, what is true for me must be true for you. But if arbitrary choice is operating there is no basis for excluding one of contradictory alternatives; different views might indeed be incommensurable, having no common origin and no common basis for discussion."
From Cronin's 'Foundations of Philosophy'
http://www.lonergan.org/Online_Books/cronin/7.htm

[China Cat Sunflower]

I think I owe Quahom an apology for acting like an ass.

I sincerely apologize for acting like an ass.

I've had a busy weekend. There's a quote from Bishop Spong that goes directly to the heart of this topic. I'll have to transcribe it, but I'll try to do that tomorrow. Gotta go to bed, gotta work early tomorrow.

Chris

[Quahom1]

Accepted Everyone has an off day (I get 'em all the time)...

v/r

Q

[didymus]

Originally Posted by Bandit

hey didymus

can you define your beliefs for me? are you a liberal or a literal & what does that mean to you.?
what parts of the bible do you keep & what parts of the bible do you discard?

i know from our last talks you already tossed Paul, but what but the others.

what parts are the fairy tale & what parts are real to you?

Good question Bandit. In all honesty I still like reading the Bible. I take the Bible literal in the sense that what I read I believe was truth to the individual that wrote it and the audience he wrote to. I think that the Bible is a beautiful piece of work that puts into words the feelings and emotions that people at that time had for Jesus and God. I don't believe the virgin birth story and I don't belieeve that Jesus is God. The fact that Jesus, whether only Son of God or not left such an enormous impression on people after his death is a statement in itself. He must have done something amazing to create such a legend. I think Jesus, if alive today would be labled a mystic. I imagine he had all sorts of healing remedies that he used when he did his work. I even think that if known some of those techniques would be controversial today.

As for Paul I think he had a different view of Jesus than did the apostles and today's view of Christianity,. In church you hear more of what Paul said than what Jesus said.

I'm reading a book right now entitled "Why Christianity must change or die". The author calls Christians today who profess the right to think and still believe in God as Christians in exile.

[China Cat Sunflower]

O.K., here it is. I apologize for the lenght of this quote, but I couldn't cut it down and preserve the author's intent. I'm also sorry it took me so long to post, but I had to transcribe it from the book and my typing is painfully slow.

For years, I identified myself as one of the liberals. Some, who knew little or nothing of the true academic liberals, even assigned me the label of the ultimate liberal. The very conservative folks wondered out loud whether I believed enough of the Christian story to remain in this household of faith. It might come as a surprise to them to hear me say that I think this liberal approach to scripture and it’s objective truth is as empty, vapid, and meaningless as the conservative approach to scripture is uninformed, unquestioning, and ignorant. I do not believe that Christianity will be saved or even well served by what has come to be called the liberal approach to the Bible. That approach seems to me rather to remove from the Christian faith all of its power and authenticity by looking for a natural explanation for apparently supernatural events.

Does this mean that I have experienced a late-life conversion and am now prepared to return to a conservative understanding of traditional Christianity? Am I now ready to defend the literal truth of the gospel tradition? No, That approach also offers me no hope for the future. No matter how hard I try, I cannot bend my mind into a first-century pretzel. I cannot turn my postmodern mind into a pre-modern shape. I cannot believe in my heart something my mind rejects.

What I do mean by this analysis is that I am convinced that Christianity can be made a viable option for future generations, but only if we adopt an entirely new approach to the Gospels that will avoid the literal/non-literal dichotomy or the conservative/liberal split. This cannot be done, however, until we remove from the Bible the traditional interpretive mind-set that produced the peculiar battles that today mark Catholic doctrinal theology. It is also that mind-set that has given Protestant Christianity its literal versus non-literal divisions first, and which then divided the non-literal camp into its present conservative versus liberal factions. While these various groups battle to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, the Christian faith looks more and more like that sinking ship. There is, in my opinion, a bankruptcy attached to each of these approaches.

The fact that we must recover is that Christianity was not born as a Western religion. A Western mentality has been imposed on this Middle Eastern understanding or revelation of God. The Bible is a Jewish book. It was written by people who thought as Jews, embraced the world as Jews, and understood reality as Jews. Does this Jewish perspective offer a new possibility? Can it provide us with a new angle of vision or with new insights into the wonder and mystery of God? Can it open the Bible to a meaning that we will think is new, but has, in all probability, simply been lost? I contend that it might, and that an exploration into this perspective can be a worthy enterprise. At least it might broaden the scope of the present religious debate so that the options do not seem so dead-end.

The Western mentality concentrates an external world. It is a mentality anchored in time and space and objectivity. It always seeks to answer the historic questions: Is this real? Is this objectively true? Did this really happen? With these questions to guide us, the Western mind has always had trouble embracing the truth found in myth, legend, intuition, or poetry. That was for dreamers, for visionaries, and perhaps for irrelevant mystics. But these questions will determine the shape of the answers that can be given, and thus the perception of reality that determines the boundaries of truth. The Western questions--Did this really happen? Is this real?--always require a “yes” or “no” answer. Only begrudgingly will the Western mentality admit to a hedging “yes” answer, but little more. But when the Bible in all its miraculous magic, its chosen people, its three-tiered universe populated with demons and angels is the subject of the inquiry, a “yes” is such nonsense that it requires a surrender of all intellectual faculties; a hedging “yes” answer is a compromise of both honesty and courage and only postpones the inevitable; and a “no” answer removes the realm of spirit, mystery, and meaning from any objective consideration. That is where we are in the post-Christian contemporary world. In today’s world, the “yes” answer produces the passion of the religious right; the hedging “yes” answer produces the conservative to liberal, but still dying, mainline religious approach; and the “no” answer produces the secular humanists, who want to be done with all things religious. There is little hope and little future for the Christian faith, in my opinion, in any of these alternatives.

But having reached that conclusion is far from entering some kind of godless religious despair for me. The fact is that I am more deeply persuaded of and moved by the truth that I find in Christianity at this moment than I have ever been before. That persuasion, however, has not come from arriving at the ultimate and irreducible bottom line of faith the erstwhile liberal always seeks. It has come rather by stepping out of my Western mentality altogether and seeking to absorb the Jewish origins and Middle Eastern nuances of my faith story. I am no longer concerned about discovering whether certain biblical events actually occurred. I am far more interested in entering the experience that lies behind the description that found expression in the biblical text. I no longer ask, “Did it really happen?” or, “is it true?” Rather, I ask, “What does it mean? Why was this image chosen to convey this insight?” The Jewish originators of the Gospel tradition, I now see, wrapped around their descriptions of Jesus’ words and deeds the narratives of their own religious past. When they confronted what they believed was the presence of God in a contemporary moment, the interpreted this moment by applying to it similar moments in their sacred story when they were convinced the presence of God had also been real to their forebears in faith. They wrote, therefore, in the timelessness of valid religious experiences. So the Gospels were not descriptions of what happened or what Jesus said or did; they were interpretations of who Jesus was based on their ancient and sacred heritage. That was the only way they could understand and process the God presence they found in Jesus that was so powerful. That is also why they located their hopes for salvation in him. Through this Jesus they believed themselves drawn into the wonder of both God and that mystical sense of oneness with the divine that they found in him.

<snip>

I do not today regard the details of the gospel tradition as possessing literal truth in any primary way. I do not believe that the Gospels offer us either reliable eyewitness memory or realistic objective history. I do believe that the Gospels are Jewish attempts to interpret in a Jewish way the life of a Jewish man in whom the transcendence of God was believed to have been experienced in a fresh and powerful encounter. I do believe that the God met in Jesus is real, and that by approaching the scriptures through a Jewish lens, saving reality can be illumined and--even more important--can still be entered.

John Shelby Spong, Liberating The Gospels- Reading the Bible Through Jewish Eyes

[lunamoth]

Thank you for the long quote Chris. From what little I know about Spong he tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I think this particular passage does capture some of the reason for the turmoil around literal interpretation of the Bible. That's why I like to say that I view the Bible as Sacred.

2 c,
lunamoth

[China Cat Sunflower]

Originally Posted by lunamoth

Thank you for the long quote Chris. From what little I know about Spong he tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I think this particular passage does capture some of the reason for the turmoil around literal interpretation of the Bible. That's why I like to say that I view the Bible as Sacred.

2 c,
lunamoth

In my experience a great many people have difficulty understanding what the worth of the Bible is if it cannot be taken literally. I get this from both mainline Christians and those on the very opposite extreme whose only interest in the Bible is debunking it. I've read most of Spong's books, and I really like what he's saying. I think many people's opinions of Spong are formed without actually reading him.

Chris

[path_of_one]

I've read Spong's "Liberating the Gospels" and appreciated the content regarding early organization of scripture and the liturgical year in Judaism, and what some of the content of the Gospels could mean in light of Judaism.

I do agree with Spong that the message and meaning of the Bible is the main point, and that it is pointless to explain the sacred and the supernatural, or to debate about whether or not all these things literally occurred.

Yet at the same time, I think there is a problem, at least for me, with Spong's argument that he cannot accept miracles and supernatural happenings- that he cannot bend his mind into a first-century pretzel. As a scientist and a mystic, perhaps I'm just different from Spong, but I would say that part of growing in faith in Christianity is learning to accept the miraculous. Of not needing to have a natural explanation for everything. Of accepting that God has no limits, and that Christ could have been bodily resurrected, that He could have raised Lazarus from the dead, etc. I do not base my faith on miracles, but an outgrowth of my faith is the belief that miracles can and do happen.

Does that mean that I believe everything in the Bible literally happened? No. And for me there is no need to, for the message/meaning of the events is that for which I am looking. But I do think part of trusting God is being open-minded. I think part of what the Bible does, if we allow it to, is not to bend our minds into a first-century pretzel, but rather to open them up to ways of thinking beyond our cultural, historical, and material mindset. Rather than feeling the Bible challenges me to accept or reject literal events, I feel that the Bible challenges me to open up my heart and mind. The mystery of it all is like a series of koans, getting me out of rational, ordinary thinking, so that I can grow in spiritual, supernatural thinking. I do not think faith is supposed to be entirely rational, or it would not be the "evidence of things not seen," and would simply be philosophy, social theory, or science.