#173 – My liberal Christian worldview

Using the modified Wesleyan quadrilateral to summarize my current understanding of the Bible, God, Jesus and the human condition.

In this episode, I explain how my Christian understanding on several key theological ideas has changed. I came from a very Fundamentalist Evangelical upbringing, and all our listeners know that I’ve completely left behind the Young Earth Creationism and superficially literal readings of the Bible that characterized the Christianity of my first three decades. And they’ll also know that I’ve been developing some rather creative transformations of a variety of aspects of my Christian faith. But what about the very basic core elements of Christianity? Where have I landed on those?

Before we get into that, let’s be clear how I’ve modified and used a centuries-old theological tool for clarifying true, meaningful and practical beliefs: the four pillars of the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Many others emphasize the load-bearing capacity of two of those pillars: scripture and church tradition. How many times haven’t we heard Fundamentalist phrases like: “if the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it” and “we’ve always thought that way”? But I’ve given full flexibility and load-bearing capacity to all four corners so that, in some cases, reason and experience can bear most of the load, sometimes even eclipsing the explanatory power of scripture and church tradition. In response to those two well-worn Fundamentalist phrases I just quoted, I’m not hesitant to ask whether certain difficult Biblical passages are “just ancient Jews talking” (Psalm 137:8,9), and to suggest that “Christianity has ALWAYS been evolving in response to science, philosophy, culture, and politics.” And I’ve added in that ramp of reason that focuses and re-directs the leap of faith.

Using this tool, I explain where I now stand on four central Christian ideas … the Bible, God, Jesus, and the human condition? For this episode blurb, I tried many times to summarize these deeply nuanced shibboleths into just a few pithy sentences. But I kept finding myself adding more and more paragraphs to each. So …. instead of reading it here, you’re going to have to listen to me unpacking those in the conversation recorded with Scott.

Next week, we’re going to talk to Dr. Roger Olson, a very prominent Conservative theologian and scholar. We’ll ask him to comment on my new found theology, and to explain why I can’t call it “orthodox” … in the literal sense of that word (“true teaching”) rather than the traditional one (adhering to a literal reading of Scripture or a long church tradition). And the week after that, we’ll do the same with an equally prominent scholar on the other side of the theological spectrum, Dr. Douglas F. Ottati.

As always, listen and then tell us your thoughts on this discussion …

If you enjoyed this episode and want to dig deeper, you might want to go to our previous episodes on:

• the deconstruction and reconstruction of Luke’s faith
• how humans gave us the Old Testament
• how humans gave us the New Testament
• how humans re-wrote the Biblical texts
• Divine inspiration
• a personal relationship with the Divine
• prayer as a cognitive exercise
• human consciousness and the evolution of our mind and soul
• Jesus as a human Jewish Messiah and a cosmic divine being
• Atonement theology and what science has to say about it
• a new meaning of Easter
• the evolution of human religion and human morality

Episode image by Andrew … thanks Andrew!

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