Sells

I particularly like your thin/thick narrative metaphor. Christianity certainly provides a thick narrative that informs those who are prepared to make the effort to engage with it. The Christian 'narrative', however, can be engaged in depth or shallowly.
Biblical literalism, for example, is a particularly shallow form of engagement with the Christian story. It is so shallow that, in fact, it completely misses the point of the story. Popular evangelism, being so often associated with varying degrees of Biblical literalism, usually fails to tell the story faithfully.

Liberalism can be an excuse for mindlessly dismissing much of the story and becomes susceptible to the criticism you have made. But there is also a strand of 'liberalism' within Christianity that takes the story very seriously while recognising that it is a complex and often ambiguous story. It includes the Church's successes and its failures. It embraces the possibility (some would say the fact) that the Church is getting it wrong.

I would argue that, at its best, liberalism embraces the thick narrative of Christianity as part of the even thicker narrative of the totality of human experience. It is free to break from tradition and 'create' new realities that I would expect to be 'in continuity' with the great tradition without necessarily being a 'continuation' of that tradition. We have the freedom to stop making the same mistakes over and over and I believe this is the important contribution liberalism has to make. Liberalism, of itself, wont 'solve the worlds problems'. Society, as it existed under the Church, is gone. We have moved into a period of instability and change. You said liberalism suffers from the 'fault' of excessive optimism. It may well be a fault in some sense but it also the capacity to embrace the opportunities that this period of social change presents.

davidf

You quote Spong's citation of John 14:6 ("I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes unto the Father but by me" as an instruction to bigotry and murder. No it isn't. Jesus claims to be the exclusive way to the truth. He is not a relativist. But the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20): "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations ... teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you..." must be read against the following from Matthew's gospel:

* "You are the light of the world. ... Let your light shine before men, so that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven." Convert by example, not violence.

* "Do not resist an evil person. ... Love your enemies."
* "Do not judge, or you too will be judged."
* "Watch out for false prophets...." Not 'kill heretics' !
* "Love your neighbour as yourself."

Spong underwhelms me. He follows benign but non-Christian HUMANISM, which you defined as ethics "that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appealing to universal human qualities, particularly rationality, without resorting to the supernatural or alleged divine authority from religious texts."

Yes, secular humanism is different from Marxist atheism. I consider the latter totally evil; the former potentially benign, but still open to pernicious moral relativism. Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) justifies murdering the old pawnbroker as a bloodsucking parasite no one would miss; why should he, a potential Napoleon, be held back by poverty?

In Nietzsche's parable on the Death of God a madman screams the implications of life without a sacred [absolute] beyond:
“How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left?"

Christianity is a firm foundation.

Sells

I read your posting on The Failure of Protestantism (7 Dec 2007) and was struck by the poverty of responses. No one belled the cat of theological differences - all the Mary stuff: "a tale which grew in the telling"; conflicts and gaps between church tradition and scripture; and now over 2000 items in the Cathechism purporting to know the mind of God in detail!

But as an evangelical Protestant, I see much to respect in the present Pope. His sermons to World Youth Day are relevant to your most recent postings:

"There is ... something sinister which stems from the fact that freedom and tolerance are so often separated from truth. This is fuelled by the notion, widely held today, that there are no absolute truths to guide our lives. Relativism, by indiscriminately giving value to practically everything, has made experience all-important. Yet experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead, not to genuine freedom, but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect, and even to despair."

He warned about the "exaltation of violence and sexual degradation, often presented through television and the internet as entertainment". "I ask myself, could anyone standing face to face with people who actually do suffer violence and sexual exploitation "explain" that these tragedies, portrayed in virtual form, are considered merely entertainment?"

Today's liberals, supporters of unlimited "freedom", "choice", and relativism, have little constructive to say here.

John Carroll writes: "In England, the Anglican Church was ideally placed, with its moderate Protestantism and its Catholic tendencies, to provide an institutional basis for an integrated Christianity. In this it failed completely. After Milton, English culture produced no Christian theorist of distinction. In practice, the Anglican Church quickly degenerated into a bastion of upper-class complacency, sheltering within a blurred mental focus and half-hearted beliefs.”

Where do you stand within the Anglican Church in Australia? Aspinall or Jensen? :-)

Glorfindel wrote: "Spong underwhelms me. He follows benign but non-Christian HUMANISM, which you defined as ethics "that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appealing to universal human qualities, particularly rationality, without resorting to the supernatural or alleged divine authority from religious texts."

Dear Glorfindel,

It is standard for Christians or other people to cast out from the group those they disagree with. Thus, you refer to a person who was made a bishop of his Anglican church as following non-Christian HUMANISM. He is a Christian who is honest enough to examine how the texts were formed and the milieu in which they are formed. As a non-Christian I see that he is in good standing in his church so I see no reason not to regard him as a Christian.

He recognizes the moral bankruptcy of claiming that one has an exclusive truth as Jesus supposedly claimed in John 14:6.

It is the mark of a religious fanatic to claim that only his belief is truth.

It doesn’t how good a life you led or how considerate you were to other people. Spong recognizes the humanity of all people and rejects the hateful sectarianism of those who demand that all follow their ‘truth.’

He is a Christian who recognizes that humanity and goodness can reside in those who do not follow his faith.

I accept his church's judgment as to his Christianity rather than yours.

His Christianity is one that non-Christians can live with.

I have a Fundamentalist Christian cousin who tells that my grandmother who was the most loving and caring person I have ever known is suffering the torments of hell because she never accepted Jesus.

Do you believe that?

That sort of Christianity is despicable

The conversion of Constantine the Great assured the church a privileged place in society and from this point it became easier to be a Christian than not to be one. I was generally taught for this to have been a good thing – perhaps a type of Christian triumphalism, where winning the political battle (through a form of divine intervention) settled all the arguments. The Church then fostered and was identified with a civilization bound to ecclesiastical dogmatism and obscurantism.

Christianity may well have elucidated generous liberal feeling through saying, “go and live out your lives in freedom” but its institution lacked any real munificence – on the contrary, it authoritatively legitimised the advanced slave systems of medieval Europe. There was a re-enslavement to a god where Christianity would provide the intellectual and institutional support for social bondage. Iconically (and ironically), with the rise of the cult of the saints, the notion of enslavement to Christ, the redeemer of humanity, was extended to the saint, the imitator Christi par excellence, who, as healer and liberator of the stricken assumes, by that very fact, the role of master over those who receive his aid.

Christianity bore the contradiction of marginality and integration arising from the existence of slavery. The slave was part of the Christian community in which all were equal (integration) but on the social level he or she was a ‘non-person’ (marginality). This contradiction, however, had it resolution from outside of Christianity. Despite its ‘high points’ the Christian faith in the Middle Ages had been used to sanctify oppression. Liberalism (with its ‘warts and all’) intervened through its opposition to literalism and its demand for tolerance and served to free an enslaved Church

The threat of excommunication is the implicit understanding of the slave as a ‘non-person’. This punishment replicates on the religious level what occurs on the social level. For those who advocate, on religious grounds, resistance to their ‘masters’, they will suffer ecclesiastically what the slave experiences socially - exclusion from the community. Through their evangelical zeal, religious dogmatists and fundamentalists are often very good at this.

I think that pretty much says it all, Glorfindel.

>>Where do you stand within the Anglican Church in Australia? Aspinall or Jensen?<<

When religion is reduced - by an insider, no less - to the question "which sect leader within a major division of one particular religion do you follow", it lays bare its true nature.

Which is, clearly, nothing more than a series of man-made power structures, built upon the intensely narrow interpretation of events that may, or may not have occurred many centuries ago.

This self-importance somehow empowers its adherents to pontificate about the evil of others.

>>Yes, secular humanism is different from Marxist atheism. I consider the latter totally evil; the former potentially benign, but still open to pernicious moral relativism. Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) justifies murdering the old pawnbroker as a bloodsucking parasite no one would miss; why should he, a potential Napoleon, be held back by poverty?<<

Such a superficial analysis of Dostoevsky's work would be at home in a suburban book club meeting, but doesn't bear a great deal of honest scrutiny. For starters, Glorfindel carelessly overlooks the deliberate confusion of Raskolnikov's motives, the guilt that pursues him, and his response to that guilt.

To suggest that this is an illustration of the moral vacuum that exists within in secular humanism is typical of the religionist. Coming to a conclusion that is not only wide of the mark, but that demonstrates a narrowness of thought that should, on reflection, be embarrassing.

>>Today's liberals, supporters of unlimited "freedom", "choice", and relativism, have little constructive to say here.<<

Oh, that sad old chant.

Liberalism equals unlimited freedom. So they must all be potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles. Oh, please.

"Little constructive to say" is a fair description, I suggest, of these trite, cut-and-paste accusations.