Yesterday I was invited to attend a breakfast for evangelical pastors. most mainline denominations seem to be split between an evangelical / liberal divide. personally I tend to recoil from aligning myself with either camp. I'll usually joke that I'm liberal enough for evangelicals to disown me and evangelical enough for liberals to disown me be. The thing that both camps seem to do is interpret the biblical story through their theology rather than let their theology be formed by the biblical story. I realise this is some what of an over simplification, but in the same way that when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, when you have a fixed theological view there is plenty of scripture to support that view. The "are you liberal or evangelical?" question just makes me nervous.
2 comments:
"but in the same way that when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, when you have a fixed theological view there is plenty of scripture to support that view."
Exactly, very well put. I have long held that nearly 'any' position can be argued if you read scripture in a 'particular' way. The bible can, and has, been used to justify MANY things.
The difficulty is in actually doing what you suggest, as we are all so deeply infiltrated by our 'worldview' that it is in fact very difficult to NOT read that into the scripture. Very difficult indeed.
i tend to say that I'm both post-liberal and post-evangelical having been disowned by both extremes at any point of my life.
throw the question back, are they evangelical or liberal, and why do they call themselves such?
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