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A liberal false Christian rips off the mask and discusses a belief system that, if taken to its logical conclusion, would lead to a denial of Christ.
God-mocking Web site:
Well, duh. How hard would it be for an omnipotent God to honor His promises to preserve His words?
How exactly is that supposed to work? Is it subjective whether you end up in Heaven or hell? Or does God expect us to guess at how to avoid eternal damnation, in which case He is a sadistic monster?
So how does this liberal false Christian discern truth? Here are some of his criteria:
See my comment above about the inerrant Bible. If your secretary behaved in the same way, how long would you continue to employ that person?
Given the wide variations in people's "contemplative experience of the divine" and "how others have experienced God throughout religious history," that has to be the least reliable standard ever.
It does if you stop trusting in your own fallible human rationality and have faith in God's rationality (Proverbs 3:5, Isaiah 55:8-9). Then again, I guess that in order to be a progressive "Christian," you have to have more faith in your own rationality than in that of Almighty God. In that case, why do you need God's words at all?
He should have gone to a seminary that didn't portray the Lord most high as such an incompetent bungler.
The necessary implication is that that person does not think that God really cared about giving humankind an inerrant, objective revelation. Some God that would be.
It is that kind of "rational" thinking that, if taken to its logical conclusion, would lead one out of Christianity altogether.
God-mocking Web site:
I recently wrote two pieces published at Baptist News Global (“A Scripture Lesson on Fundamentalism” and “What does a progressive Christian statement of faith look like?) that ignited a response I repeatedly hear from conservatives.
Their claim is that progressive Christian faith is based on subjective criteria not rooted in any objective reality. Of course, their objective reality is their inerrant Bible.
Their claim is that progressive Christian faith is based on subjective criteria not rooted in any objective reality. Of course, their objective reality is their inerrant Bible.
My response to this line of argument is that all religious belief and experience is subjective – all of it.
So how does this liberal false Christian discern truth? Here are some of his criteria:
the historical-critical study of scripture, especially the Gospels, that is grounded in the rational assumption that fallible human beings produce fallible documents that reveal not God’s perfect will, but what flawed humans think about God’s will and how they interpret their God experience
my own personal contemplative experience of the divine
how others have experienced God throughout religious history, with special consideration given to the mystical tradition
how others have experienced God throughout religious history, with special consideration given to the mystical tradition
[I]f Scripture legitimizes something it must be compassionate and vice versa. So this means that when scripture legitimizes polygamy, slavery, and genocide somehow these practices reflect God’s compassion. Now, does this sound rational?
The seminary’s position was that only the original autographs of the Bible were inerrant. Therefore, it was important to establish the original text.
In a class on New Testament textual criticism I learned the basics about textual critical study. I learned that no original copy of any biblical book existed and that all the copies we have contain numerous variants (errors) – places where the manuscripts disagree with one another.
In a class on New Testament textual criticism I learned the basics about textual critical study. I learned that no original copy of any biblical book existed and that all the copies we have contain numerous variants (errors) – places where the manuscripts disagree with one another.
So I reasoned that if God really cared about giving humankind an inerrant, objective revelation then God certainly would have preserved the original autographs or at least preserved some infallible copies.
It was this kind of rational thinking that led me out of conservative Christianity.
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