ken wilson online

Why has it taken me so long to see it this clearly? I believe the Spirit is calling the church to ditch, leave behind, renounce as centrally valid, the imbedded assumption that liberal/conservative is a valid category for discerning matters of faith. Better said, individual believers are being called, I believe, to examine, discern, consider thoughtfully and prayerfully the validity of this category as something that guides their response to matters related to their belief, their understanding of what constitutes faithfulness to Jesus and what doesn’t, what’s good for the church and what isn’t, what’s of the Spirit and what’s not of the Spirit. This is going to take time and thought and attention and prayer, but I think it’s actually a kind of spiritual warfare, to use that language, meaning that’s it’s part of the struggle between spiritual powers contending for our hearts.

I‘m working this out as I go, and it won’t be handled by a single post, that’s for sure, and comments especially are welcome, as this is an issue with many different tentacles, and the way you see it is very much shaped by your own experience. So I understand the limits of my limited perspective.

First to be clear: I’m talking about liberal/conservative as a category applied to matters of faith, not to political perspective. The two are not completely separable as faith informs politics and vice versa, but they are distinguishable. I’m talking about something that goes deeper than the question of whether Christians in America have become too allied with a particular political party or political perspective. I’m talking about the way these terms have been used in their description of points of view regarding the nature of the Bible, the framing of the gospel, the understanding of the task of the church, etc.

That goes back a long way, but at least it goes back to the big issues facing the church in the United States at the beginning of the 20th Century. A great history of this is found in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. The church was grappling with the challenge of modernity–especially the challenge of modern scientific discovery (especially Darwinism in the field of biology and the question of the origin of so many different species,) and of modern tools of analysis applied to literary texts, including the Bible.

“Liberal” in this context, came to be associated with a response to modernity that took hold in many of the mainline Protestant seminaries. Traditional approaches to faith were questioned, overturned, thrown out, in favor of approaches informed by this developments. The “social gospel” movement was one expression of this response.

“Conservative” in this context, came to be associated with the reaction to this “liberal” theological response to modernity. It gave rise to “fundamentalism,” named after a series of booklets called simply, “The Fundamentals.” The point of this movement was to reassert the fundamentals of Christian faith: virgin birth, bodily resurrection, etc. (Little known and ironic fact: one of the main contributors to “The Fundamentals” was B.B. Warfield who had many positive things to say about Darwin’s new understanding about the origin of species. Warfield, who found the “inerrancy” approach to Scripture, was anything but a young earth creationist.)

See, this is going to take some hard work. Some thinking. Some loving of the Lord your God with “all your mind.” Mental effort.

The effect of this great wrestling with modernity in the beginning of the 20th Century is that the church at large began to take sides based on this “liberal” vs. “conservative” framing of the debate. In particular those who identified with the “conservative” response began to associate “conservative” with “faithful” and liberal with “unfaithful.” A very handy kind of shorthand, that is the source of great grief today.

Because today, many believers have simply inherited this shorthand. “Conservative” in matters of faith is equal to “faithful” while “liberal” in matters of faith is equal to “unfaithful.”

I see this all the time. I’ve wrestled with it in my own heart. A position or perspective in matters of faith is understood to be “not conservative” (because it’s different than what is understood or stressed in the so called “theologically conservative” wing of the church) and it is automatically viewed with suspicion because it is thought to be “liberal” which means “unfaithful” according to the shorthand. And we tend to rely on these kind of shorthand designations to discern things. Because it’s easier. Requires less mental effort. And all this stuff is complicated and we have other things to attend to.

But here’s the rub: what if both responses to the challenges of modernity (the liberal and the conservative response) in matters of faith were themselves shaped by the worldview that gave rise to modernity? And what if that worldview was quite a bit different than the biblical worldview? Would it then be possible that both theologically liberal and theologically conservative positions contained perspectives that were in fact “unfaithful” to the Scripture? Of course it would be possible. And of course it happened.

“Conservative theology” had some major blind spots. Because the modern worldview had little room for spiritual expereince, and because “liberal theology” emphasied “experience” over “the Bible” as authoritative, conservative theology all but drove the Holy Spirit out of the trinity. Spiritual gifts, healing, miracles, these were all explained away in much of what passed for “orthodox Christianity.”

If it were only a blindspot in one or two areas, we could do a quick correction and keep “liberal vs. conservative” as a handy shorthand for “unfaithful vs. faithful.”

But it wasn’t such a limited blindspot. It affected many areas. Like concern for the poor. So called conservative theology seriously underemphasized this CENTRAL aspect of the gospel, which Jesus himself framed as “good news for the poor.”

Like concern for the environment. Why if God is the Creator of heaven and earth, has it been the case that Christians in the United States who are least concerned about environmental stewardship are also the most “conserative” in their theology? Another blindspot. The modern worldview itself was enamored with technology as a way to master nature. Conservative theology brought this on board as an unexamined assumption.

Why is conservative theology so individualistic? Stressing individual salvation to the virtual exclusion of the communal aspects of salvation? Because the modern worldview is individualistic.

Why does conservative theology tend to underemphasize mystery? Because the modern worldview abhors mystery. It’s worldview that says if we can only reduce things to their smaller parts, we can take the mystery out of most anything.

That’s four things. What if there are more things? Then we’ve demonstrated that “conservative” in matters of theology doesn’t offer a good shorthand for what we’re really concerned with or ought to be, which is faithfulness.

It’s really nerve wracking, isn’t it, when a tried and true code breaks down? How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys if the bad guys sometimes wear white hats? What do you do when that happens? You have to learn to distrust the tried and true code, because when it’s been tested, it hasn’t always been found to be true.

What I’m suggesting is that the “liberal vs. conservative” code when applied to matters of faith, the code that says “liberal means unfaithful” and “conservative means faithful” is so wanting, has failed the test so many times, that it time to let it go. To stop using it. To learn to question it when one does use it. To renounce it as useful in matters of faith. To get over it. To move beyond it.

Maybe that’s why God likes us to number our days, and by extension our years, and our centuries and our millenia. Maybe it’s not an accident that this code was adopted in the 20th Century, but now it’s the 21st Century. It was the second millenium and now it’s the third. Maybe it’s a code that has outlived it’s usefulness, and our job is not to rail against it because we now know better—no doubt we are relying on our own shorthands now that our children will find wanting–but our job is to give it an honorable funeral and get on with our lives.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 7:38 am and is filed under beyond conservative-liberal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.