Subject:  How Liberals and Conservatives view the Bible differently... |
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Liberal
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Date Posted: 10:39:35 08/24/04 Tue
In the last Fellowship gathering, we discussed the Liberal view of the Bible. Let me summarize why Liberals view the Bible so differently from the Conservatives.
Traditional Christian theology holds that Man is fatally-flawed sinners and cannot reliably determine what is true and what is right; Man needs an external source or revelation. The answer has been claimed to be the Bible, the divine-inspired Word of God and hence an absolutely reliable standard for knowing what is true and what is right. The crucial question, however, is that is the Bible really an external revelation from God? Or is the Bible just another piece of literature created by the "fatally-flawed" Man? Nothing is more dangerous than obeying words from flawed authors as if they were absolutely trustworthy orders from God. Conservatives are doing exactly that and, therefore, view the Bible as more reliable than all human knowledge, reason, and conscience added together. For example, to find the physical origin of mankind, they will simply accept an ancient story in the first chapter of the Bible instead of collecting evidence and formulate a probable mechanism, and modify the latter when new evidence emerge. Another example illustrates the grave distortion of ethics as a result of mistaking human words as divine orders. God must be ethical. If He order mass killing of babies, His order of mass killing must be ethical because He is the very standard of ethics. Conservatives really think so. They forget that a more likely explanation for the divine order of mass killing is the rationalisation of brutal behaviour in wars by putting the killing order into the mouth of God by Old Testament writers.
Recognizing these serious problems, Liberal Christians do not follow biblical teachings uncritically. They read the Bible for guidance but not absolute answers. The Bible is like a map, it points to the territory but it is not the territory itself. We will use a map, but we will also look at the terrain around us. To look for God, in addition to the Bible, we will also look at good deeds and Nature around us. Conservatives misuse the Bible as if reading a poem as a law book. Like a wise person, what the Bible says may be in the way of story, poem, song, metaphor, which may not in any literal sense true. It is this very quality which renders it alive and open, leaves it availale to different people of different times and places, allows a dialogue rather that requiring simple assent to a set of logical propositions. It is for this reason that the Bible, like other sacred scripture, has outlived any million volumes of philosophy, logic, or science.
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