Are Theistic Evolutionists generally liberal?

[Hairy Tic]

Liberal theology is sometimes referred to as modernism. The skepticism of the Scriptures particularly the supernatural aspects were either dismissed or ignored. Liberal theology is really nothing more then a secular philosophy put in theological terminology, German theologians like Spinoza and Tillich come to mind.

## Spinoza was a Dutch Jew & a philosopher, Tillich was German-Austrian.

Theistic evolution is really another instance of taking a secular philosophy (Darwinism) and putting it in quasi-christian clothes. The fact is that Darwinism is really just one long argument against special creation, TE is simply Darwinism for the non-atheist.

## Calvinists have used Aristotle - it's no more pagan than that was.

And if the Bible does not teach or justify "special creation", then so be it. The meaning of the Bible is more important than the orthodoxies men impose upon it. So if the Bible did not narrate a single historical fact, that would have to be recognised. It is unreasonable to split the Church over Sola Scriptura, and then, centuries later, ignore the ascertainable meaning of the text. The Bible was not written to justify or prop up men's mistaken ideas about its meaning, so if it contradicts those meanings, tough.

It is no where more evident that TEs have abandoned the traditional Christian understanding of Genesis then when they discuss Romans 5 and I Cor. 15.

##Luther "abandoned the traditional Christian understanding" of the Bible at various points; so why should his ideas be absolutised and bowed down to ? Those who abandon a tradition cannot require their successors to regard their own traditions as untouchable, sacrosanct, and final. Luther rejected the ideas of others, his Protestants critics rejected his, their later critics rejected theirs; Protestantism has turned all traditions into traditions of men that can be swept aside - so it is only by applying non-Protestant, "Papist" categories that a phrase such as "the traditional Christian understanding of Genesis" can make any sense in a discussion of what are Protestant ideas. Who cares what "the traditional Christian understanding of Genesis" was ? That doesn't make it right. And if it's wrong, it should be trashed, ASAP.

By the same criteria they would have us understand Adam to be figurative the resurrection or even Christ himself could be symbolic. This has never been the way Christians understood Adam or Paul and this modernist interpretation is unknown to Christian theism prior to the advent of Darwinism.

## The use of "modernist" is pejorative. And there is no reason wht why one cannot treat Adam as a fairytale, & Christ as real. The idea that if Adam is a fiction, so must Christ be, is simply sloppy logic. The real existence of Adam is not required for the reality of the work of Christ, either. Our relation to God is not contingent upon our attitude to ancient Hebrew fictions. If St. Paul had written, "As in Popeye the Sailorman all die, even so, in Christ shall be made alive", that would not have affected the reality of the Work of Christ one iota. As for the Resurrection, why can't it be symbolic as well as a reality ? It is the impoverished Fundamentalist mentality that requires things to "only" or "merely" or "no more than" symbolic, or else to be real facts. Most Christians have been members of Churches which had no trouble in seeing real facts as both symbols & real facts. That is (part of) what a sacrament is - a real fact that is also a symbol.

These divisive and contentious arguments against the clear, consistent and traditional meaning of Genesis and the New Testament are liberal theology.

## That may be so, but that does not even begin to explain why that is a bad thing. The Fundamentalist model for understanding theology is woefully inadequate, because it divides theology into either "liberal" or, "orthodox" - as though there could not be a dozen variations on either and on both ! As for contentiousness, Fundamentalism is notable for that very quality. Despite or because of its exaltation of the Bible, there is far more variety of opinion as to what the texts mean than there is among the Biblical scholars

The Petrine texts have a "clear, consistent and traditional meaning" - that hasn't stopped Protestants denying the authority of St. Peter. So the talk about "divisive and contentious arguments against the clear, consistent and traditional meaning of Genesis and the New Testament", are self-serving nonsense.

Origen & Saint Augustine would have had a few things to say to you - for what you call "the clear, consistent and traditional meaning of Genesis and the New Testament" are "clear, consistent and traditional" only for a limited segment of Christianity.

Like everything else in liberal theology when they don't like the connotation of a term they redefine it, often without telling anyone. So they can be conservative and believe in God and the Bible but the meaning of their words become increasingly ambiguous while their animosity toward the despised 'literalist' gets increasingly personal.

## I was wondering whether perhaps I was letting my temper get the better of me, & whether I being just a little harsh. I see from that paragraph that I was doing neither.

Fundamentalists are not literalists - if the letter conflicts with the meaning they need to find in the Bible, they ignore the letter. Bible critics, whom Fundamentalists never cease to vilify, are the literalists. It is because they attend to what the text actually says, that they hold positions that do not please Fundamentalists.

You guys are not conservative

If they say they are, then they are. Words may have more than one meaning, inconvenient as that is.

and TE is certainly not in keeping with traditional Christian theism, hermeneutics or soteriology. As far as I can tell all you really do is confront and contradict creationism when God's creation in Genesis 1 has always been understood to be both foundational and absolute. But I suppose if you can twist the meaning of the words of Moses and Paul the semantics of terms like conservative and fundamentalist is child's play.

## In the past, there were no creation-myths from Israel's neighbours to compare with Gen.1. Since the 1870s, there have been. No expositor or commentator can ignore such developments, regardless of their effect upon understanding of the meaning of the Bible.

There has been change because the old way of reading the Bible was not good enough, was not adequate, and could not cope with new questions. Why must we keep the old & worn-out wine-skins ?

 

[Hairy Tic]

I normally don't quote Wikipedia as it's often crap (particularly on topics like this) but I thought that this was a decent definition.


Liberal theology does not necessarily require one to be liberal or have a progressive political agenda, so I don't think it's necessary for those who disagree with that to be threatened. But I think that's a pretty fair characterization of the TE's on this board, as well as the proposition of Theistic Evolution in general so I think that it does fit directly under the umbrella of "liberal theology".

## That understanding of liberalism would make me a bigoted conservative LOL. Doctrinally, I'm extremely ultra-"conservative" but not usually a "trad"; in Biblical matters I can be very "liberal" indeed; liturgically, somewhat old-fashioned. Politically, I would never vote Labour - but UKIP, maybe. Preference: Conservative. I would quite happily vote for a candidate known to be gay & "pro-choice", as long as the rest of the ideas were good. Single-issue politics = bad.

About another point in the extract: revelation is non-propositional, because it is a personal encounter, not a body of infallible or inerrant propositions. And the Bible is not all revelation.

People are complicated, not tidily binary.

 

[Hairy Tic]

As I said above, I don't think there is much in the way of doctrine that characterizes liberals as a group. They do tend to reject recently-developed doctrine such as biblical inerrancy, but there is no real consistency on traditional doctrines like the virgin birth. Probably what characterizes liberals in that regard is the level of tolerance for diversity of belief. The differences that exist are never a source of internal controversy.

Another characteristic that strikes me is that there tends to be more emphasis on Jesus than on scripture. Even out on the fringe where people deny his divinity, there is an understanding that Jesus is the focal point of Christian faith, a model and exemplar. But this is not to say the scriptures are unimportant to liberals. The phrase I grew up with is that we take the scriptures "seriously but not literally".

A more characteristic difference is the tendency to emphasize social and structural sin as opposed to the conservative focus on personal morality. (Of course in the best of both liberal and conservative churches, both get attention.) But typically a liberal will be more concerned about the injustice of poverty than about abortion. Indeed, abortion would also be approached more through social than through moral categories. Justice is a strong focus in many liberal churches, and I have seen a great deal of increase in the understanding that justice and charity must both have a place in Christian ministry: that the charity-only model proposed in some churches is simply inadequate as a sufficient Christian witness.

As for "higher criticism" it is important to understand from the outset that the terms "higher" and "lower" used in the 19th century were not about ranking. "Lower" criticism was directed to study OF the text to determine from the archeological remnants of manuscripts as nearly as possible what the scriptural text is. Today this is usually called "textual criticism".

"Higher criticism" was directed to study ABOUT the text i.e. date & place of composition, authorship, to whom it was directed, for what purpose it was written, in what form it was written, what earlier sources it drew from, what subsequent editing it received and why. And more generally, how various separate sources were brought together to become the canon(s) we have today. Today, "higher criticism" has broken into several different fields such as "form criticism" "source criticism" "redaction criticism" etc. Liberals generally consider all of these to be simply academic disciplines addressing several questions about scripture. Conservatives often see them as an attack on the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy.

## They are modes of Bible study - at a different level from what one thinks of as Bible study. They are academically rigorous, and there is a lot of disagreement. For example:

• Did Joshua 4 influence Exodus 15, or vice versa ?
  
• What is the relation between the prose narrative in Exodus 14 & the poem in 15 ?
• Is the crossing of the Jordan in Joshua 4 a cultic narrative, a memory of an event, a pseudo-historical narrative in the form of a cult-narrative, or a combination
• What part, if any, was played in the formation of these three texts, by the mentions of the Exodus in the Psalms ?
  

This kind of criticism is very largely a matter of literary criticism. There's nothing inherently "liberal" about such operations, still less is criticism an attempt to tear the Bible to shreds. The issues that bother Fundamentalists are often beside the point: issues such as inspiration and inerrancy are not being attacked, because they are not issues for the critics in the first place.

Fundamentalists don't think theologically, they think doctrinally (sometimes); so they seem not to realise that the theological attributes of the entity we call "the Bible" are not accessible to critical study. Pretty much as alleged miracles are not accessible to historical study; only their epiphenomena are.

I see a bit of a parallel to the issue of evolution here. Evolutionary creationists hold that we are both evolved and created beings and see no contradiction in this. Evolution is simply a mode of creation. Non-evolutionary creationists see evolution and creation as mutually exclusive such that they necessarily contradict. In much the same way, liberals accept the conclusions of higher criticism without rejecting the inspiration of scripture, whereas conservatives are unable to see a way to accept both, forcing a choice between modern biblical scholarship and their theology of scripture. Interestingly, the "higher criticism" controversy and the evolution controversy overlapped historically and it is not surprising that those who rejected higher criticism also rejected evolutionary theory and vice versa.

## Very nicely put

One final observation: when it comes to Christian education, there is very little difference between a conservative and a liberal Sunday school class. This is because the higher criticism-which is probably THE definer of liberalism-is academic. Most people don't encounter it much before college level studies. The typical fare in Sunday school is the content of scripture, not academic discussions about how scripture came to be. For the same reason, there is often little difference between the Sunday sermon in liberal and conservative churches -- except when the topic is one of the flash-points of controversy. But I expect that most of the time, it would be very difficult to tell if a homily on the Good Samaritan or Paul's letter to the Galatians came from a liberal or conservative preacher. We really do have a lot more in common than the issues that divide us.

One instance: Canada was recently host to the annual G8 & G20 meetings (and you may even have seen news reports about some of the events in my home town, Toronto). Preparatory to the G8/G20, the Canadian Council of Churches ("liberal") and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada encouraged congregations to collaborate with other people of faith to hold interfaith dinners for Members of Parliament where the MPs would hear our concerns as people of faith about the needs of the world. There were two such dinners in Toronto. Both included sponsors from conservative denominations (Salvation Army in one case and an Alliance congregation in the other). I expect liberal and conservative Christians will continue to find more and more common ground with each other, and even with people of other faiths as in these dinners.

## That sounds promising - and good news

 

[BrendanMark]

Not in my case. I came to Christianity via a rejection of Relativism and Sophistry (man is the measure of all things) as providing no basis for any logic, science, art or civilization - indeed, that such Sophistry is utterly inimical to Western thought and has been since Protagoras. Only subsequently did I come to appreciate theology and experience the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.

None of this entailed any rejection of science whatsoever, and still does not. I reject atheism and humanism (Sophistry) because it undermines the logic and science that evolution is based upon, and the logic and evidence is such (mutating viruses need new drugs, so we can see the truth of evolution every time we visit the hospital) that both God and evolution are undeniably real.

 

[Son of Israel]

(Gen 1:1) In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I believe in this, whatever one of those are called.

 

[KTskater]

I'm very conservative and traditional on some views (salvation), and more liberal in my theology on the beginning and the end of everything. (Theistic evolution, and I've toyed with the idea of annihilationism, but there are some real problems with it)

 

[Z3AL0T]

I'm pretty much a right wing conspiracy nut. So no, I'm not liberal.