Chapter 7

Liberal Christians Need Encouragement, Too

In spite of our best intentions to the contrary, strongly held and insufficiently examined theological convictions and attitudes can get in the way of careful and thoughtful listening to people’s questions about faith. The previous chapter examined how a narrow theological conservatism can contribute to empathic failures on both sides of a helping relationship, and how caregivers’ appreciation of Christian conservatism at its best can enhance helping conservatively-inclined care receivers find better conservative answers to their own questions about faith. The sections to follow approach Christian liberalism from the same perspective and with the same goal in mind, this time of helping caregivers to help liberally-inclined care receivers find better liberal answers to their own questions. Both chapters build upon the same assumption: caregivers have theological orientations, too, of which they carry a special responsibility to be aware, to ensure that their theologies support the goals of good listening and of encouraging their care receivers to think more deeply about their own.

The Heart of Liberal Christianity

For decades, a small rural church I once briefly pastored put on an annual ice cream social which by all accounts was the surrounding community’s biggest summer draw. For me, the best part of it was the opportunity it provided to mix serious slurping with listening to lively people who were as varied in their points of view as they were in their choices of toppings. Typical of the exchanges was one between a much venerated history teacher in the local high school and several friends she began chastising for “not protesting the recklessness of our country’s political discourse.” With feigned expressions of shock, her friends listened amiably as she went on to express exasperation with self-proclaimed conservatives and liberals who look for everything wrong in the other’s position and ignore anything right in it. “Their mud-slinging,” she said with an eloquence from which not even melting ice cream could distract, “undermines values that our democracy needs in order to survive.”

Standing beside this delightful lady and her group of adorers was the lay leader of our congregation, who chimed in that the conservative-liberal divide in churches worried him even more: “How can people claim to be part of the body of Christ and then tear each other down the way they are doing? When will we learn that we have to take each other’s point of view as Christians seriously, no matter what we may think about it personally?” As discreetly as I could, I inched into the circle in order to hear what another member of the group started to say in reply: “You make yourself sound so fair and objective and above it all, but the truth is that you’re just as much a liberal as our old history teacher is. No offense, Mrs. Atkins.” At that point, I could not stop myself from asking what was so “liberal” about what our lay leader had just said. The answer I got was eye-opening: “It’s like this, preacher,” my parishioner said with a smile, “liberals talk like they’re more interested in getting everybody’s opinion than they are getting to the truth.” And there I was, wondering in front of every ice cream chug-a-lugger for a mile in every direction whether, in more recent parlance, I was being exposed as one of “those liberals” after all! Evidently, my congregation had seen through me almost from the first. With laughter all around, the lay leader made a point of reassuring me with mock seriousness: “they all love you anyway, Reverend. ”

Later that afternoon, the history teacher and I consoled one another, in between mouthfuls of yet more ice cream, over how easy it is to forget that striving to be fair and objective about our politics and our faith is not theology-neutral. It is, indeed, a form of liberalism, but not of the sort that we had heard about earlier. For us, we agreed, getting others’ opinions is a more reliable way of getting at the truth than pursuing the task all on our own. But there are still truths to be gotten at, and these are not reducible to mere opinions alongside a plethora of other ill-founded opinions without value to the determination of what is really true and what is really false. In a word, just as conservatism has a heart, or a vital center, liberalism does too. My own characterization of what that is will follow the pattern of the previous chapter and lift up four convictions for special attention.

Jesus-faith

First and foremost, Christian liberalism affirms that Jesus of Nazareth—in his life, ministry and personhood—represents the standard by which everything else in the Bible and in the Christian tradition must be understood and measured. Jesus is alone the one whom the Old Testament finally anticipates, the New Testament attests, the church remembers, and Christians at all times and everywhere embody as Savior and Lord with rejoicing, thanksgiving, and loving self-sacrifice on behalf of others. Jesus is the canon within the canon of Holy Scripture, the principle by which alone men and women of faith grant the rest of the Bible its place and its rule in their hearts.

An important corollary of this first affirmation is liberal Christianity’s commitment to weigh carefully what the church in every generation says and does in the light of what is known on sound historical grounds about the life and faith of Jesus and his earliest followers. In seeking to fulfill this commitment, liberal Christians sometimes find themselves raising questions about even some of the most tenaciously held teachings of their churches—for instance, that Jesus knew he was Israel’s Messiah and the world’s Savior from a very early age. Increasing knowledge of the Jesus of history, in contrast with the Jesus of later imagination and dogma, can even lead to outright rejection of ideas that other Christians have regarded as definitive of genuine faith—for instance, the predominant view of the nineteenth century that Jesus was neither a prophet nor a revolutionary, but only a wise ethical teacher committed to non-violence as a way of life.

From a perspective gained with “eyes fixed on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith,” (Hebrews 12:2), some church traditions can be seen clearly to deserve immediate and summary dismissal. Prohibiting women from speaking or teaching in church is one. Defending slavery as God’s everlasting will is another. Other traditions, however, such as projecting the return of Christ far into the future, serve important functions in the life of faith even if their precedents are less clear in the teachings of Jesus or the early apostles. Separating out accretions of tradition from the historical kernel of Christian belief and practice, therefore, does not necessarily lead to rejecting the accretions and trusting only the kernel. Rather, it means that many of the difficulties and dilemmas that accompany Christian believing and acting over the centuries have no clear precedent in the apostolic age and, as such, raise questions that earlier generations did not think about and that demand fresh interpretations of the gospel message constantly. After 9/11, for example, how are people in every country as well as in the United States to determine not who their neighbors are in times of peace, but who their enemies are in the midst of terrorist attacks? Or: for how long should a mercilessly abused wife continue to honor her marriage vows? Or: which desperately ill patients should receive scarce organ transplants first? As liberal Christians view it, tradition is a process of applying a Jesus-centered faith, that is always open to growing historical knowledge, to situations with which Jesus’ own history and time may have neither envisioned nor coped.

One Lord, many appearances

The second major affirmation of Christian liberalism is that Christianity has always meant different things to different believers and that acknowledging and celebrating the differences is essential to sharing the gospel with integrity, whether in non-Christian societies and cultures or in one’s own. This affirmation follows from the commitment to express the Christian message foundationally in terms of what history discloses about Jesus of Nazareth. For the same historical research that leads to Jesus also opens up a great variety of opinions about and experiences of him in the lives of his earliest followers. Discerning who the “real” Jesus was and is from what those who knew him in the flesh said about him is, therefore, a task that each believer must complete for himself and herself, as must the communities of faith of which they are a part. To the question that Jesus put so personally to his disciples—“And who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29)—there are many ways of answering, positive and negative.

The diversity of the answers began to appear very early. Paul’s Jesus was the Jesus raised from the dead by God; little else from his life, except the crucifixion, seems to have aroused Paul’s interest. Mark’s Jesus was a man with a message, about God and not himself. John’s Jesus was the Incarnate Logos, whose earthly existence manifests in every detail divine knowledge, power, and purpose. Some of Jesus’ followers extolled him as the mediator of Law-annulling Grace, while others insisted that his coming changed neither the words, the letters, nor the obligations of the Law. Some saw Jesus as a political revolutionary, while still others saw him as a prophet of world catastrophe, as an otherworldly ascetic, as a drunkard and glutton, or as a pathetic victim of events and powers he neither understood nor controlled. Who, then, is Jesus, really? Is the Jesus-faith of liberal Christianity merely a collage of wildly varying words and images from Jesus’ time and shortly thereafter, pasted loosely together by people who flit randomly from one anecdote about him to another on the whim of the moment? The answer of liberal Christianity is: the historical Jesus is the Jesus who was confessed by those who knew him best to be the Savior of all humankind. It is this Jesus, and no other, to whom faith’s dependence upon historical inquiry is intended, first and finally, to lead.

Just as the diversity of people’s understanding of Jesus became evident early in Christian history, so did the necessity to accommodate it constructively. For Jewish Christians, whose spiritual roots remained in the land believed theirs by divine right, Jesus was primarily the liberator of their own nation alone, whose saving work on behalf of non-Jews could be seen only through the light of their own patrimony. For Gentile Christians, however, whose concerns reflected the ethos of an Empire that appreciated Palestine’s strategic geography far more than it did her spirituality, Jesus was himself their light, and the Judaism to which he was born was destined only for darkness, dispersion, and death.

Liberal Christianity takes the incorporation of different understandings such as these—e.g., between Christians who saw Jesus as Messiah for the Jews and Christians who saw him as Savior of the world—into a single tradition, respectful of the great diversities that enrich it, as a model for today’s churches to follow. The model is of an inclusive rather than exclusive fellowship, whose members cultivate openness rather than self-protectiveness, and whose witness to others is offered in a spirit of welcoming love rather than of chastising judgment.

Re-visionism

Liberal Christianity affirms the central importance of every generation’s discovering for itself new ways to express the beliefs, patterns of devotion, and principles for action that make up the life of faith. The rationale for this affirmation, too, is historical. It begins with the observation that things did not turn out quite the way that Jesus’ earliest followers—and perhaps even Jesus himself—expected, and that the Christian community has been adjusting to this fact ever since. In specific, the end of the world, that to the first Christians seemed imminent, failed to occur, as it has failed to occur down to the present day. New societies, cultures, and even civilizations continue to rise and fall, each with its own ways of looking at things, to which the church—itself an institution acknowledged only gradually and with reluctance—has had to accommodate. To the extent that anyone can predict, the process of accommodation may continue indefinitely.

One reason, then, for revising cherished ways of expressing basic Christian beliefs and practices is that, until the Christ does indeed come again, believers will continue to encounter people within and outside the church who are unable to grasp the meaning of the gospel in the renderings with which they themselves are the most comfortable. If these members of God’s family are ever to become Christian disciples, liberal Christians hold, their first encounters with Jesus as Christ will have to be on terms more familiar to them than traditional Christian language may be. As the Holy Spirit once spoke to a crowd of Jews “from every nation under heaven,” the church must speak to each person in every generation in his and her own language and experiential framework. (Acts 2:5,6)

An even better reason for remaining open to new ways of glorifying God is that Jesus himself—possibly with John’s offer of baptism for the forgiveness of sins in the background—set the example for doing so, by proclaiming to his own people God’s liberation from the staggeringly large, detailed, and oppressive system of rules, laws, and obligations under which they had languished for centuries. Paul continued the process in his mission to the Gentiles, struggling with his fellow missioners to render a message about God’s Messiah that would have saving power for people who did not share the outlook of the Palestinian Jews for whom the message was intended originally. By way of just one example, Paul did not hesitate to overturn dietary laws and the requirement of circumcision, when Christians not raised as Jews found it difficult to see anything of religious significance in them.

From the perspective of liberal Christianity, the church cannot hope to fulfill Jesus’ “Great Commission” to share his teachings throughout the earth (Matthew 28:19,20) unless it is willing, first, to pay constant and close attention to changing historical conditions and circumstances and to trust that God is working in and through all of them for the world’s good. Then, the church must risk, as St. Paul did, making Jesus’ message of God’s grace, love, and new life heard and understood in forms of expression that may be very different from those with which tradition was comfortable. For example, with the ordering of societies, nations, and institutions by means of hierarchical structures and inequitable distributions of power and resources on the wane, the church will have to become far more lay-oriented, democratically governed, and less patriarchal than it is today. Or, with the earth’s population now large enough to drain natural resources irreversibly, even if its rate of increase continues to decline, some of the church’s most venerable teachings about the family—most especially that begetting offspring is the primary if not the exclusive justification for marriage—will become not only less credible but pernicious. Or, with people who declare no religious belief or affiliation representing the most rapidly growing “religious” group today, at least in America, most of the traditional ways of giving expression to the Christian faith—especially in the structuring of worship—will have little credibility or power to “win their souls” to Jesus Christ.

Social action

Fourthly and finally, liberal Christianity affirms that Christian congregations must have as their primary concern building inclusive fellowships of believers who are ardent about ministering to people in need. Whether their members also satisfy certain experiential and doctrinal tests (e.g., mystical encounters with Jesus, speaking in tongues, orthodox beliefs, etc.), is of distant importance only. As biblical support for this affirmation, most liberal Christians appeal to two texts in particular. The first is Luke 4:14-30. At the beginning of his ministry in Nazareth, Luke wrote, Jesus went to the synagogue on the Sabbath and read the lesson of the day, from the prophet Isaiah:

The spirit of the Lord Yahweh has been given to me,
For Yahweh has anointed me.
He has sent me to bring good news to the poor,
To bind up hearts that are broken;
to proclaim liberty to captives,
freedom to those in prison;
to proclaim a year of favour from Yahweh . . . (Isaiah 61:1-2, JB)

Then, Luke continued: “Jesus rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and all eyes were fixed on him. He began to address them: ‘Today,’ he said, ‘in your hearing this text has come true.’” (Luke 4: 20-21, REB) The second text is Matthew 25:31-46, an apocalyptic vision of Jesus’ return to earth and his final separation of those favored from those unfavored by God, on the basis of how well people care for the hungry, thirsty, homeless, unclothed, and imprisoned. As Matthew renders Jesus’ words, anything that believers do for these, their brothers and sisters, they do for him.

Two movements within the church over the past 100 years have exercised particular influence on the development of liberal Christianity. One is the “Social Gospel” movement of Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, with its emphasis on bringing about the kingdom of God on earth by means of a transformation of institutional structures through people especially committed to social justice. The other is the great variety of “liberation” movements of more recent decades, each concerned with the oppression of particular groups of people—the poor, women, the handicapped, people of color, the aging, to cite only a few—and with proclaiming God’s work of ensuring for them equal justice and opportunity, and their fair share of the created order’s abundant resources. Leaders of both these movements draw heavily upon the biblical texts just cited and those like them in both Testaments, interpreting them in the direction of defining the Christian life itself as a life of serving others, and in the process contributing to others’ experiencing the abundant life promised them in Jesus Christ. People are indeed saved by God’s grace, through faith. But, as liberal Christians also emphasize strongly, “faith divorced from action is dead.” (James 2:26, REB)

Resolving Liberal Christianity’s Current Crisis of Faith

For conservative and liberal Christians alike, holding onto the best that their respective outlooks contain, and letting go of the worst, is what their churches most need in order to present the gospel message of grace, hope, and love convincingly to individuals, families, tribes, and nations who are on the verge of becoming utterly overwhelmed by mutual suspiciousness, scornfulness, and despair. Just what the best is in liberal Christianity has been the focus of this chapter up to this point. But liberal Christianity does not always express itself at its best. What to do about it is the subject of this section.

Faith beyond the limits of historical awareness alone

Liberal Christians sometimes become overwhelmed by the difficulties that accompany their own commitment to pursue God’s truth by means of historical inquiry and fall into an unhealthy skepticism about the reliability of the historical information now widely available about Jesus of Nazareth. One especially vivid example of this process is the notorious “Jesus Seminar” of a few years ago. This seminar attracted random assortments of biblical scholars to a series of meetings attempting to determine once and for all exactly what Jesus did and did not say and do during his lifetime. The primary purpose of their efforts was to extract the true gospel from the many versions of it that they believed the early church contrived without adequate historical warrants. A major influence on many seminar members was the 1945 discovery at Nag Hammadi in Egypt of documents believed hidden for safekeeping in the fourth century because they conveyed understandings of Jesus significantly at variance from the texts of the New Testament. What made these documents—especially The Gospel of Thomas—particularly intriguing was the (indefensible) claim of several scholars both within and outside the Jesus Seminar that their sources pre-date those of the canonical gospels. Early on, seminar members bogged down in major disagreements over the extent to which the New Testament itself represented Jesus’ words and deeds accurately. Incredibly, its leaders proposed to resolve the disagreements by putting the reliability of each passage from the Gospels to a vote. Then, they gathered passages with the greatest number of votes on their reliability index into a new, fifth Gospel that they pretentiously offered as superior to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

If the Jesus Seminar and the newest quest for the historical Jesus based on the Nag Hammadi materials are taken as examples of liberal Christianity’s contribution to interpreting the Christian faith for today, it is little wonder that many conservative Christians write liberalism off as either hopelessly mired in conjecture and controversy, or as grandiosely making up the gospel as it goes along. But these ventures are anything but good examples of liberal Christianity at its best, most basically because their methodologies exclude from the outset the cardinal liberal tenet that the Jesus of history is also, always, and most importantly, the Christ of faith. Thus, the faith of Jesus’ followers is as much a part of God’s work in history as the events of Jesus’ life and ministry are.

When it is a question of what was and was not said and done in the past, believers must always be open to what historical research has to say. When it is a question of how to believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior, though, faith must speak to faith and historical study can never by itself fully determine the process. For example, when St. Paul wrote to the Corinthian church about the importance of believing in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead—“ . . . if Christ was not raised, then our gospel is null and void, and so too is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14)—the Jesus about whom he wrote was not, is not, and can never be a subject amenable to purely historical reconstruction. For even if the resurrection of Jesus were itself a directly observed historical event—or, as some philosophers and theologians put it, the kind of historical event that is observable in principle even though not observed in fact (no one was in the tomb at the moment of God’s action)—his Lordship can only be inferred from the outward expressions his followers gave to an inward transformation of their own hearts. History can describe the outward expressions but not the inward processes that gave rise to them. The latter are accessible only through the kind of contact with the Gospels that faith, and not mere historical research, makes possible.

On not re-creating history in our own image

For liberal Christianity, the life of faith inevitably includes a struggle to reconcile two indisputable statements of historical fact: (a) Jesus of Nazareth is the center of the church’s faith, and (b) At different times and places, the church has affirmed very different understandings of Jesus’ message and meaning for a suffering world. Most of liberal Christianity’s critics find the second of these statements especially troubling. To them, the admission that historical reconstruction yields many opinions about Jesus, and not just one, implies that every believer is left to his or her own devices to make sense of the church’s pluriform witness to Jesus as the Christ. Jesus becomes anything that anyone wants him to be, and every church tradition becomes just as good as any other. There is some justification for this concern. In particular, some liberal Christians have become so bewitched by recent discoveries of extra-biblical traditions about Jesus that they have granted to them an authenticity that more careful historical analysis does not support.

One example of such bewitchment is the Re-Imagining agenda of radical feminist groups in both Roman Catholic and Protestant communions. Immediately following a Re-Imagining Revival meeting, a former student of mine, Karen, wrote me that she had “had it with feminism” and that she was heading to see her bishop to ask for forgiveness and to be permitted to “return to the fold.” I knew that her (female) bishop would be pleased but was surprised at Karen’s apparent change of heart. For years, she had been an ardent and eloquent spokesperson for more radical forms of women’s spirituality, including rituals created exclusively for women, with some even devoted to the praise of “our maker, Sophia.” As she had described it in some of my classes, the Re-Imagining movement, particularly its re-casting of Jesus as Sophia’s (Wisdom’s) child rather than Son of God, represented the best hope women had for a Christianity that could speak to women’s issues long ignored or even rejected by the institutional church.

After reading Karen’s letter, I called her to find out more about the new direction in which she seemed to be heading. One interchange in our conversation went as follows:

Leroy: So what happened up there, for heaven’s sake?

Karen: You wouldn’t have believed it. It was one long denunciation of everything about the church that I grew up with, but had been working to change. None of my gang ever thought that celebrating the Eucharist with milk and honey should replace doing it with bread and wine. It’s only a way of reminding folks that women are important to God, too. Sophia is another name for God, and a valuable one. But Sophia isn’t God, and neither are we. I knew I had to get out when the Nicene Creed came up at the conference and everybody broke out with jeering. And then there was that business with biting apples as a symbol of resistance to patriarchy. I can’t be part of a church that is open to only half the human race, even if that half is female rather than male.

One of the most important critics of both naiveté and of radical skepticism about what we can know about Jesus is still the great musician, theologian, physician, and missionary, Albert Schweitzer. In his monumental scholarly study of a hundred years ago, entitled in English The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Schweitzer reviewed in detail the efforts of nineteenth-century scholars to reconstruct an historically accurate life of Jesus and concluded that even the best of their biographies failed to rise above the biases that they brought to the writing of them. Many regard Schweitzer’s devastating dismantling of naively constructed biographies of Jesus to be the heart of his study. However, Schweitzer also went on to argue that responsible historical study still yields a picture of Jesus of Nazareth sufficiently reliable to serve as an anchor for faith, even though the picture that finally emerges is of a strange, apocalypse-oriented prophet whose vision of how things work in the present and how things will be in the future remains at odds with much that modern men and women people take for granted about nature and history.

As Schweitzer finally had to acknowledge that if the rational examination of the New Testament is to be faithful to historical methodology at all, we will have to admit, however reluctantly, that its texts contain well-attested testimony to phenomena that liberal Christians tend not to dwell on, especially demonic possession, exorcisms, spiritual healing, and miraculous acts in general. Further, the New Testament as a whole—in contrast with compilations of passages such as those of The Gospel of Thomas that depict Jesus only as a wise, if sometimes enigmatic, teacher—situates him at the very center of all this testimony as exorcist, healer, and even wonder-worker. Liberal Christianity at its weakest summarily dismisses such references as reflecting only the erroneous misunderstandings of a by-gone age. By contrast, liberal Christianity at its strongest lets historical evidence, and not merely modernist world-views, determine what the church can and cannot proclaim in the name of a responsibly grounded biblical faith.

The One in the many

Respecting and honoring “indigenous” forms of Christianity—beliefs, worship, and action situated in people’s own native languages, customs, and attitudes—is for most liberal Christians essential to communicating the church’s message effectively in a pluralistic religious world. Sometimes, however, indigenizing the expression of the gospel message enhances one group’s understanding and appreciation of it at the expense of another’s fear of losing its own sense of Christian identity and unity.

Some time ago, I led a weekend retreat on what church leaders were writing about “indigenous Christianity,” and on what their writings could contribute not only to missional outreach in general but to revivifying their own congregations. In general, the reactions to the materials we reviewed together were very positive. But they also conveyed a fair amount of anxiety over what one thoughtful pastor called “winding up with a gospel that not even we could recognize anymore.” Other pastors quoted some equally distressed reactions of people in their own communities and parishes, such as:

My last visit in the home of our refugee family really took me aback. There I was, being asked to kneel before a little make-shift altar dedicated to venerating all of their ancestors. It was all I could do not to ask, “Aren’t we supposed to leave kith and kin behind for the sake of following Jesus?”

On my last business trip to Africa, some Christian friends there introduced me to a group of church leaders who practice and advocate polygamy. Just like King Solomon did! This is Christian? And that wasn’t all. To a man, those leaders told me—I’m putting it in my own way—that a non-polygamous Christianity just won’t attract followers in that part of the world. That’s going way too far.

The single most startling expression of what was worrying the participants about the indigenization of Christianity came toward the end of the evening session:

Look, folks, if we really believe that the risen Lord is with us, it doesn’t make a dime’s difference what beliefs people hold, how they worship God, and what they think they have to do, as long as they are truly convinced that they’re living as God wants them to. We have to get over making people genuflect to our official party lines.

The issue that needed attention then, and still does, is the issue of showing how belief in Jesus as Lord is at once a matter for individual decision and life and also the basis of a genuine community of faith shaped by a set of commonly-held norms—always subject to reassessment—for belief, devotion, and service. For liberal Christianity in its most compelling forms, Jesus-faith is an actively shared faith with an intentionally universal appeal. It is not a set of only personal beliefs dictated by each believer’s own conscience, or a congeries of parochial outlooks each lived out in small gatherings of only the like-minded, after the fashion of Third World “base communities.” Even though Christian history provides ample warrant for expressing what is believed to be God’s Word in a manner that is as accommodating as possible, liberal Christians are also keenly aware that there are limits beyond which accommodation cannot go, if the church’s message is to have any integrity at all.

A faith that works

Finally, for liberal Christians the fact that the church has held very different understandings of Jesus’ message and personhood through the centuries should in no way undermine the integrity, confidence, and rejoicing with which it still proclaims the Lordship of Christ to all the world. The primary reason that this is so is that the foundation of Christian unity has always rested less on doctrine than it has on action. In specific, it rests on the commitment to express love for God especially by reaching out to people in need, wherever they may be. The first Christians made their own impression on the world less by the eloquence of their preachers and teachers, and more by the willingness to share their own resources for the benefit of all. (cf. Acts 2:43-47) Today’s Christians must do the same. Most especially, they must meet in every way they can the immediate needs of the poor, the oppressed, the helpless, the sick, and the dying while also remaining at the forefront of today’s struggles for lasting justice and peace.

No conscientious Christian could quarrel with the idea that faith must actively seek remedies for the debilitating conditions under which billions of people all over the world are suffering. However, many Christians object strenuously to what they see in liberal Christianity today as a misguided effort to frame the gospel message in terms of social activism and nothing more. As one layperson put it, “I’m getting pretty suspicious of theologians who tell me that the only thing that counts in my preaching is whether it motivates people to identify with the oppressed, and most especially, with the poor.” He shared this as we left a worship service at which the preacher announced boldly that God loves only the poor. For this preacher, heaven seems to be a place to which the rich need never apply.

When Jesus hinted to his fellow Jews in Nazareth that he was himself the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of liberation (Luke 4:21), he gave to the church that would follow him the perspective on Christian activism in the life of faith that is a benchmark for understanding liberal Christianity at its best. For the prophecy that Jesus said was coming true in its very hearing was coming true as the work of God and not just of God’s servants in the world. What this means is that all who help to make Isaiah’s words come true in their own hearing of them must do so in the full knowledge that their actions are but signs pointing beyond themselves to the God who alone is their guarantor.

Just a little more from an ice cream social

After we had folded the last of the tables on the lawn and returned them to the church basement, Jack, a member of the social’s planning committee asked if we might chat a little about the conversation that took place earlier that day. Abbreviated slightly, it went this way:

Jack: It bothered me a little that Ted (the lay leader) and you sort of left it in limbo about liberals being so open and all.

Leroy: I’ve been wondering about that myself, Jack. Limbo is a place I’ve never been comfortable with.

Jack: I’m sure you didn’t know that Ted has been my lay shepherd for a while.

Leroy: No, I didn’t, but I’m sure you know that I’ll keep this information to myself.

Jack: Lately, we’ve gotten into some questions I’ve had about the direction my faith is taking, and he has really been helpful as I’ve tried to sort through them.

Leroy: That doesn’t surprise me. To me, Ted is a great listener and a very insightful man. Would you care to tell me a little more about the sorting through?

Jack: The big thing is with my confusion about all the different and conflicting ideas about even what I used to think were the non-negotiables about our beliefs. I got myself confused in the first place because I was so excited about all the possibilities out there. I didn’t want to miss out on anything. That Da Vinci Code book, for instance, really turned me on.

Leroy: And lately?

Jack: Well, I guess the best way to put it is that I’m working hard to get un-confused.

Leroy: In what way?

Jack: By trying to figure out what’s basic to my sense of being a believer, even if I also have to see it as something I can change my mind about down the road.

Leroy: Like, not non-negotiable?

Jack: I promise not to tell Mrs. Atkins about the double negative, but yes, that’s it exactly.

Leroy: So for you Ted isn’t an anything-goes kind of liberal.

Jack: No he isn’t, but he’s also not the kind of liberal who tells someone they have to think things through just the way he has.

Leroy: He’s a real blessing to you right now, isn’t he?

Jack: I’ll have a scoop of chocolate on that. Care to join me?