Stretching for Health - Liberal and Conservative Living in Tension in Christianity

What do you mean when you say "conservative and liberal"? It seems that, more and more, our society is divided along the lines of liberals and conservatives politically, culturally, and even theologically. How do you understand these labels and the difference they make in our lives?

The verb form of conservative is "to conserve," as in "to hold on to". Theological conservatives trust in the tradition. Beliefs are usually clearly stated and definable. They are based on absolute truth and derive from a clear and trustworthy authority.

Liberal means "free" or "belonging to the people". A liberal arts education suggests freedom of thought and unrestricted learning that befits a free person. Liberals tend to tolerate the differing beliefs of others and so beliefs are not so clearly defined. Liberals tend to question authority and question tradition.

The congregation of which I am the pastor tends to be leaning more toward the liberal side of things. This was certainly clear to me from the beginning of our conversations together prior to my becom111Cing their pastor. It was clear by the questions they asked and the authors they liked. It is also clear, from conversations and from reading their statement of core values that there are some fairly conservative views represented as well.

In response to my invitation, one member asked me, "Why don't we ever stretch our conservative side?" The question seemed at the time to have something of an accusatory tone, but it did prompt my thinking. What did the questioner mean? The question was submitted anonymously, so I could not ask the person. Did it mean we should think more conservatively in our theological understanding? Should I be trying to interpret faith according to a more conservative perspective? Or did it mean that we need to cause our conservatism to stretch? I have finally decided the answer to all these questions is "yes."

Why should we deal with this question today? Gaining perspective on being liberal and conservative for ourselves is part of discerning our identity: defining ourselves to a bigger world and entering that world as people and congregations committed to being church for the long haul. My congregation and I are culturally pretty liberal. We value freedom very highly in our worship, our theological exploration, and even in our church polity. We love to be expressive. Theologically, we are probably a more complex blend of liberalism and conservatism.

Conservative and liberal are related terms. Each is different at different times and in different settings. They are poles of a continuum. Absolute conservatism, at one end, never moves and never changes. Absolute liberalism, at the other end, is always changing. Nothing is trustworthy except questioning and challenging everything. People of faith are always on that continuum. Church is always on that continuum. Our society exists on that continuum. Each one of us lives life on that continuum. Growing as people on the journey of faith means to recognize and embrace the struggle we all share as we seek to find ultimate truth underneath.

For those of us who call ourselves Christian, we need to recognize that Jesus lived on that continuum as well. He challenged the conservatism of the religious leaders with their entrenched power. He also treasured the older traditions of Moses and the prophets. He called people back to conserve the authentic tradition.

After Jesus' life, the followers of the Way of Jesus struggled to understand and interpret their experience of him and their sense of his continuing presence with them. There were different ways people understood those experiences. Many of them were preserved in written form, including Paul's letters and other letters. Some of these were included in the New Testament and others were not. Paul actually represented a more liberal branch of what would become Christianity. He proclaimed freedom from bondage to the Jewish law for Gentiles.

As the first generation or two of Jesus' followers began to die off, their written material was gathered together. Gradually, it was given a higher degree of reverence until finally some of it became Holy Scripture. The followers of the way of Jesus gradually became believers in the Lordship, and then the divinity, of Jesus. Jesus became Messiah, then Christ, then Lord and God.

The literary form known as gospel had developed by the end of the first century. There were the four that we still have in our New Testament and there were others as well. Many of these others were lost through the centuries, though a number have been rediscovered within the last century - the so-called "Gnostic Gospels". These differing depictions of Jesus' teachings and some of the events of his life highlighted the diverse ways in which the early believers interpreted who he was and what the meaning was of his life.

By the early second century, Gentile Christianity was largely separated from its Jewish roots. Much of the context in which Jesus taught, and in which the Pauline letters and the earliest gospels were written, was no longer present for those who called themselves Christian. In response to Roman persecution, Christians had less tolerance for a variety of beliefs. Efforts to delineate the nature of true belief had the effect of seeking to develop unity through uniformity. One5B4 of the first of these doctrinal statements was called the Apostles' Creed, though it did not reflect was we know of the original apostle's theology. This led eventually to the Nicene Creed (325), a statement of belief that had the effect of determining who embraced the true real faith - who was "in" and who was "out".

The Nicene Creed became the tradition to be conserved throughout the Middle Ages. Around the same time, Christianity became the state religion of Rome - very useful to Constantine and his successors in their efforts to unify the crumbling empire. Christianity was no longer counter-cultural. That's when its focus turned to personal salvation more than social transformation. The church's leadership now had a vested interest in the status quo. The Church became conservative.

Ecclesiastical Latin was the language of the faith in the Middle Ages. The Bible was only available in this form of Latin and it was only available in churches. Virtually no private citizens owned a copy of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Even the clergy had limited access to the scriptures and were generally not trained in biblical preaching.

As a result of the fall of the Eastern branch of Christianity known as Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks around the fifteenth century, there was a huge influx of Greek-speaking Christian scholars as well as Hebrew speaking Jewish scholars to Western Europe. These scholars brought a first-hand5B4 knowledge of these ancient biblical languages that had been largely absent in the western world for many centuries. In addition, this was the Renaissance period and there was an intense interest in learning the original languages of scripture. This new study of the classical tradition actually challenged efforts by the Church to conserve the status quo. The new way of western Christianity had become the tradition to be conserved as rediscovered ancient paths suddenly become a new way!

The invention of Guttenberg's printing press made the Bible available to more people. With the Protestant Reformation, the Bible was translated into the vernacular and made widely available to individuals. People could read it for themselves. The motto of the Protestant Reformation was "Scripture alone!" We are virtually compelled then to ask, "which version?" Which language is correct? With the Protestant Reformation, a literal interpretation of the Bible became the cutting edge perspective. It was, in effect, the liberal view, moving away from the authority of the Roman church and its traditions that had become oppressive.

The Age of Enlightenment, also known as modernism, embraced the power of the human mind. Such new and liberal questioning turned rational thinking and scientific method to studies of the Bible. Its sources were questioned. Is it really the "word of God" and how could this be? Rationalism came into tension wi5B4th conservative piety and biblical literalism.

The mass production of Bibles accompanied a tremendous missionary movement into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More and more people outside of western European culture were reading and interpreting the Bible. An increasing number were doing their reading and interpreting in frames of references that were completely different from those in Western Europe, not to mention from those in first-century Palestine. In the twentieth century, advances in science and an increasing secularism brought more questioning of faith and its traditions. Such questioning raised fears by many of losing faith. The result was the development of a reactive movement called "fundamentalism".

Many of the conceptual frameworks of the Enlightenment (modernism) are coming into question today. Christianity in its contemporary style can be good at asking questions, challenging questions, about theology, the Bible, and our concepts of God and Jesus. Modern scholarship challenges many traditional and familiar ways of expressing Christian faith. There is compelling evidence from archaeology, literary criticism, and historical study to challenge many traditional ways of understanding the Bible. In our post-modern age, religious and cultural pluralism are questioning the traditional Christian monopoly on access to God. We are again challenged to stretch familiar understandings and consider new wa5B4ys of thinking about God and faith. This, in itself, is nothing new. The questions that remain include: "will we hang around to work out some answers? Can we live by faith without clear answers?" "Will we, indeed, live by faith?"

The Apostle Paul is often regarding as the champion of conservatives today. In the first century, though, he was a spokesman for the liberal branch of believers. He taught that a Gentile did not have to become Jewish first in order to be Christian. The Jewish Law was no longer in force. There is no distinction in Christ between Jew and Gentile, between slave and free, and between male and female.

Many contemporary Christians think the church is at the point of a New Reformation. They are asking many questions: "What is the Bible saying to us and to all people living today? What is the truth of the Christian tradition and of scripture on which we can stand now? "What do we have to say to the community around us?"

We can respond to these questions by affirming that God is the eternal reality who is not beyond questioning, but often beyond our ability to explain. We can affirm that God connects with each of us personally and with all of us intimately. God knows what's inside us and is not threatened by questions or by conserved traditions. None of these can separate us from the love of God revealed in Jesus.

When I was in Italy several years ago, the tour guide showed us a m5B4odern road built over an ancient Roman road. It was as straight as arrow. They're always this way, we were told. That was Roman efficiency and strategy. With a straight road, you can always see where you're going and it's more difficult to be ambushed. There is certainly a value in a clear and linear approach to faith. At the same time, the path of discipleship Jesus taught was a winding and narrow road. To follow this Way requires more faith than sight.

Science tells us the our dimensions of space-time are not absolute. They differ depending on our perspective. Theological interpretation is also not an absolute. It differs depending on our perspectives - sometimes more liberal, sometimes more conservative. More basic to faith than what we believe is how we believe and our ability to trust even when we don't know for sure. Only the reality of God is absolute. On the continuum between our experience and our faith, we live and move and have our being.

I've been a pastor for 30 years and currently am the senior pastor for Crossroads Church of Kansas City. I have earned a doctorate degree from Princeton, two master's degree (one in theology and one in music). I've worked as a musician, a church musician, a drama coach and actor, as well as a pastor. I'm married with two children, three dogs, and two cats. 4B2When people ask me what I do for a living, and I know they won't listen to me more than 30 seconds, I tell that that I work with people who are on a journey. Many struggle with finding answers to their deepest questions. Some had given up ever finding these answers - even stopped asking the questions until they came to Crossroads. Someone told me recently that they had "never conceived of church as a place that actually encouraged you to think for yourself [before Crossroads]." That's what we do and that's what I do.

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