Liberation Theology Bible Quotes

The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or unphrased), by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural,Transcendence, Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation, Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy, Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday, Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality, Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual, Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic, Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue, or Bible.

But there is no perfect guide for discerning God's movement in the world, Contrary to what many conservatives say, the Bible is not a blueprint on this matter. It is a valuable symbol for point to God's revelation in Jesus, but it is not self-interpreting. We are thus place in an existential situation of freedom in which the burden is on us to make decisions without a guaranteed ethical guide.

It will probably will not be long until the churches will divide as sharply upon political, as upon theological questions; and when that day comes, if there are not liberals enough to hold the balance of power, this Government will be destroyed. The liberty of man is not safe in the hands of any church. Wherever the Bible and sword are in partnership, man is a slave. 1879

when theologians read the Bible through the lens of the Exodus narrative, they are called “liberation theologians,” but their counterparts who read it through the Greco-Roman narrative are never labeled “domination theologians” or “colonization theologians.” Similarly, we have “black theology” and “feminist theology,” but Greco-Roman orthodoxy is never called “white theology” or “male theology.

The fact of the Fall and the accomplished redemptive work of Christ serve as the true foundation for the liberation of black people. The fruits of Christ’s sacrifice are not restricted to any one group of people because of our common human solidarity as sinners.

I do theology as a matter of survival,” explained Rev. Broderick Greer, who is black and gay, “because if people can do theology that produces brutality against black, transgender, queer, and other minority bodies, then we can do theology that leads to our common liberation.

Fifield’s connection to his congregation extended to their views on religion and politics too. In the apt words of one observer, Fifield was “one of the most theologically liberal and at the same time politically conservative ministers” of his era. He had no patience for fundamentalists who insisted upon a literal reading of Scripture. “The men who chronicled and canonized the Bible were subject to human error and limitation,” he believed, and therefore the text needed to be sifted and interpreted. Reading the holy book should be “like eating fish—we take the bones out to enjoy the meat. All parts are not of equal value.” Accordingly, Fifield dismissed the many passages in the New Testament about wealth and poverty and instead worked tirelessly to reconcile Christianity and capitalism. In his view, both systems rested on a basic belief that individuals would succeed or fail on their own merit.

One sunny day, when Jung was twelve, he was traversing the Münsterplatz in Basel, admiring the sun shining on the newly restored glazed roof tiles of the cathedral. He then felt the approach of a terrible, sinful thought, which he pushed away. He was in a state of anguish for several days. Finally, after convincing himself that it was God who wanted him to think this thought, just as it had been God who had wanted Adam and Eve to sin, he let himself contemplate it, and saw God on his throne unleashing an almighty turd on the cathedral, shattering its new roof and smashing the cathedral. With this, Jung felt a sense of bliss and relief such as he had never experienced before. He felt that it was an experience of the "direct living God, who stands omnipotent and free above the Bible and Church." He felt alone before God, and that his real responsibility commenced then.

Over the years, “black theology” has brought profound new insights about race to our understanding of the biblical texts. “Feminist theology” opened our eyes to the prominent role of women in the Bible. “Liberation theology” focused our attention on the Bible’s liberating gospel for the poor and oppressed. Today, “queer theology” is illuminating our understanding of the role of sexual minorities in the biblical text. In each case, the theological insights of formerly marginalized groups have enriched the whole church’s understanding of Scripture. In the process, these liberating theologies have helped to bring many Christians into a closer relationship with God.

The church's theology bought into this ahistoricism in different ways: along a more liberal, post-Kantian trajectory, the historical particularities of Christian faith were reduced to atemporal moral teachings that were universal and unconditioned. Thus it turned out that what Jesus taught was something like Kant's categorical imperative - a universal ethics based on reason rather than a set of concrete practices related to a specific community. Liberal Christianity fostered ahistoricism by reducing Christianity to a universal, rational kernel of moral teaching. Along a more conservative, evangelical trajectory (and the Reformation is not wholly innocent here), it was recognized that Christians could not simply jettison the historical particularities of the Christian event: the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, there was still a quasi-Platonic, quasi-gnostic rejection of material history such that evangelicalism, while not devolving to a pure ahistoricism, become dominated by a modified ahistoricism we can call primitivism. Primitivism retains the most minimal commitment to God's action in history (in the life of Christ and usually in the first century of apostolic activity) and seeks to make only this first-century 'New Testament church' normative for contemporary practice. This is usually articulated by a rigid distinction between Scripture and tradition (the latter then usually castigated as 'the traditions of men' as opposed to the 'God-give' realities of Scripture). Such primitivism is thus anticreedal and anticatholic, rejecting any sense that what was unfolded by the church between the first and the twenty-first centuries is at all normative for current faith and practice (the question of the canon's formation being an interesting exception here). Ecumenical creeds and confessions - such as the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed - that unite the church across time and around the globe are not 'live' in primitivist worship practices, which enforce a sense of autonomy or even isolation, while at the same time claiming a direct connection to first-century apostolic practices.

But it was never actually that big a deal. Jenkins didn't really disbelieve in the Resurrection: he merely questioned the historical veracity of the New Testament narratives. It was mildly interesting: one side saying "I really believe that Jesus was the Son of God, and that the Bible gives a journalistically accurate account of the circumstances surrounding his birth," and the other saying "I also really believe that Jesus was the Son of God, but I think that the story of Mary and Gabriel may be a legend." A real disagreement, an important one, but not a fundamental fault line along which a church can split. The people who think that the stone really was rolled away, and the people who think that it was rolled away in a very real sense are clearly part of the same religion. But it is hard to see how people who think that it doesn't particularly matter whether or not the stone was rolled away, provided we live in the way that Jesus would have wanted us to, are part of the same religion; or, indeed, of any religion at all. I think that this is what some evangelicals think some liberals think. I think they may be right.

Endorsement of the ordination of women is not the final step in the process, however. If we look at the denominations that approved women’s ordination from 1956–1976, we find that several of them, such as the United Methodist Church and the United Presbyterian Church (now called the Presbyterian Church–USA), have large contingents pressing for (a) the endorsement of homosexual conduct as morally valid and (b) the approval of homosexual ordination. In fact, the Episcopal Church on August 5, 2003, approved the appointment of an openly homosexual bishop.16 In more liberal denominations such as these, a predictable sequence has been seen (though so far only the Episcopal Church has followed the sequence to point 7): 1. abandoning biblical inerrancy 2. endorsing the ordination of women 3. abandoning the Bible’s teaching on male headship in marriage 4. excluding clergy who are opposed to women’s ordination 5. approving homosexual conduct as morally valid in some cases 6. approving homosexual ordination 7. ordaining homosexuals to high leadership positions in the denomination17 I am not arguing that all egalitarians are liberals. Some denominations have approved women’s ordination for other reasons, such as a long historical tradition and a strong emphasis on gifting by the Holy Spirit as the primary requirement for ministry (as in the Assemblies of God), or because of the dominant influence of an egalitarian leader and a high priority on relating effectively to the culture (as in the Willow Creek Association). But it is unquestionable that theological liberalism leads to the endorsement of women’s ordination. While not all egalitarians are liberals, all liberals are egalitarians. There is no theologically liberal denomination or seminary in the United States today that opposes women’s ordination. Liberalism and the approval of women’s ordination go hand in hand.

To be preoccupied with getting theological knowledge as an end to itself, to approach Bible study with no higher motive than a desire to know all the answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied deception.

At any rate, an attack upon Calvin or Turrettin or the Westminster divines does not seem to the modern churchgoer to be a very dangerous thing. In point of fact, however, the attack upon doctrine is not nearly so innocent a matter as our simple churchgoer supposes; for the things objected to in the theology of the Church are also at the very heart of the New Testament. Ultimately the attack is not against the seventeenth century, but against the Bible and against Jesus Himself.

The heirs of that liberal theology are today keen to marginalize the Bible, declaring that it supports slavery and other wicked things, because they don't like what it says on other topics such as sexual ethics. But if you push the Bible off the table, you are merely colluding with pagan empire, denying yourself the sourcebook for your kingdom critique of oppression. The Sadducee didn't know the Bible or God's power; that's why they denied the resurrection and supported Rome.

Among colleges, the evangelical feminist position is the dominant position at Wheaton College, Azusa Pacific University, and several other Christian colleges. Among seminaries, evangelical feminism is the only position allowed at Fuller Seminary, and it is strongly represented on the faculty at Denver Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Bethel Seminary, Asbury Seminary, and Regent College–Vancouver. Even among seminaries that are committed to a complementarian position, some have begun hiring women to teach Bible and theology classes to men, arguing that “we are not a church” (see discussion in chapter 11 above).2 But it seems to me that having a woman teach the Bible to men is doing just what Paul said not to do in 1 Timothy 2:12. And I don’t think such a position will remain stable for very long, but will lead to further movement in an egalitarian direction.

The issue is not with disagreeing or with taking moral or theological stands. The issue is with using power and force to harm others. It is a matter of people in positions of power knowingly acting to harm others in order to silence dissent, and doing so believing that this is a shining example of upholding the faith.

And all of this then enables Webb to say that Paul’s appeal to the creation of Adam prior to Eve is not proof of a transcultural ethical standard. But if a theological argument has to deny significant portions of Scripture for its support, it should surely be rejected by evangelicals who are subject to the authority of the entire Bible as the Word of God. Webb’s three ways of denying the historicity of Adam’s creation before Eve in Genesis 2 are three steps on the path toward liberalism.

Something should strike us as deeply troubling about such a movement. Is the authority of the Bible really primary for egalitarians? Or is there a deep-seated mentality that actually puts feminism first and the Bible second? The more I have read these egalitarian arguments, the more I have found myself wondering this: Are these writers actually operating from a deep conviction that says, “I know that egalitarianism is right, now let me see if I can find any ways to support it from the Bible. If one approach does not work, I’ll try another, and if twenty-five approaches do not work, I will look for a twenty-sixth, because the one thing I cannot accept is that egalitarianism is wrong”? I cannot say for sure. But I can think of no other viewpoint or movement within the whole history of the Christian church (except theological liberalism itself) that has generated so many novel and ultimately incorrect ways of interpreting the Bible.

(1) Karl Barth was not an evangelical. He was a European Protestant wrestling with how to salvage Protestant Christianity in the wake of World War I, which exposed the debacle of liberal theology. Barth was not an inerrantist or a revivalist, and he was wrestling with a different array of issues than the “battle for the Bible.” (2) Karl Barth is on the side of the good guys when it comes to the major ecumenical doctrines about the Trinity and the atonement. Barth is decidedly orthodox and Reformed in his basic stance, though he sees the councils and confessions mainly as guidelines rather than holy writ. (3) Karl Barth arguably gives evangelicals some good tips about how to do theology over and against liberalism. Keep in mind that Karl Barth’s main sparring partner was not Billy Graham or the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, but the European liberal tradition from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Albert Ritschl. For a case in point, whereas Schleiermacher made the Trinity an appendix to his book on Christian Faith because it was irrelevant to religious experience, Barth made the Trinity first and foremost in his Church Dogmatics, which was Barth’s way of saying, “Suck on that one, Schleiermacher!” (4) Evangelicals and the neoorthodox tend to be rather hostile toward each other. Many evangelicals regard the neoorthodox as nothing more than liberalism reloaded, while many neoorthodox theologians regard evangelicals as a more culturally savvy version of fundamentalism. Not true on either score. Evangelicalism and neoorthodoxy are both theological renewal movements trying to find a biblical and orthodox center in the post-Enlightenment era. The evangelicals left fundamentalism and edged left toward a workable orthodox center. The neoorthodox left liberalism and edged right toward a workable orthodox center. Thus, evangelicalism and neoorthodoxy are more like sibling rivals striving to be the heirs of the Reformers in the post-Enlightenment age. There is much in Karl Barth that evangelicals can benefit from. His theology is arguably the most christocentric ever devised. He has a strong emphasis on God’s transcendence, freedom, love, and “otherness.” Barth stresses the singular power and authority of the Word of God in its threefold form of “Incarnation, Preaching, and Scripture.” Barth strove with others like Karl Rahner to restore the Trinity to its place of importance in modern Christian thought. He was a leader in the Confessing Church until he was expelled from Germany by the Nazi regime. He preached weekly in the Basel prison. His collection of prayers contain moving accounts of his own piety and devotion to God. There is, of course, much to be critical of as well. Barth’s doctrine of election implied a universalism that he could never exegetically reconcile. Barth never could regard Scripture as God’s Word per se as much as it was an instrument for becoming God’s Word. He never took evangelicalism all that seriously, as evidenced by his famous retort to Carl Henry that Christianity Today was Christianity Yesterday. Barth’s theology, pro and con, is something that we must engage if we are to understand the state of modern theology. The best place to start to get your head around Barth is his Evangelical Theology, but note that for Barth, “evangelical” (evangelische) means basically “not Catholic” rather than something like American evangelicalism. Going beyond that, his Göttingen Dogmatics or Dogmatics in Outline is a step up where Barth begins to assemble a system of theology based on his understanding of the Word of God. Then one might like to launch into his multivolume Church Dogmatics with the kind assistance of Geoffrey Bromiley’s Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth, which conveniently summarizes each section of Church Dogmatics.

Close to half my students in one class in northern Nigeria, where head coverings are part of the culture, held this view, so after they had finished debating with the other half, I asked why none of them had greeted me with a holy kiss—and they laughed! The holy kiss is an explicit command repeated in Scripture five times as often as head coverings (Rom. 16:16; 1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1 Thess. 5:26; 1 Pet. 5:14), but the usual response is, “That was merely a cultural form of greeting.” Indeed it was, but covering the head (technically, all the hair) was also merely a cultural expression of sexual modesty, as can be demonstrated from a massive number of ancient sources.26Yet a few of my students bordered on calling other students “liberal” because they did not insist on head coverings as a transcultural requirement! Who determines where to draw the line? Is everyone liberal who holds as cultural something we hold as transcultural?

In the battles over the Bible in the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first century, conservatives moved away from the word infallible in favor of inerrant. This happened in part because theological liberals had begun using the word infallible to mean something more like . . . oh, I don’t know, something more like fallible. And that reminds me of something else. How is it that liberals preen themselves for the virtues of frankness and honesty when they do things like this to words like infallible, or to words like frank and honest for that matter? Or even words like liberal. And now, in the latest go-rounds, the same kind of thing is happening to the word inerrant. Men with solemn faces and a shaky donor base affirm the inerrancy of the Bible, and they also affirm that this is not inconsistent with the subtle truth that the Bible has mistakes in it. The serpent was craftier than all the beasts of the field, having completed some post-doctoral work in Europe.

Bonhoeffer was thinking in a new way about what he had been thinking and saying for two decades: God was bigger than everyone imagined, and he wanted more of his followers and more of the world than was given him. Bonhoeffer recognized that standard-issue “religion” had made God small, having dominion only over those things we could not explain. That “religious” God was merely the “God of the gaps,” the God who concerned himself with our “secret sins” and hidden thoughts. But Bonhoeffer rejected this abbreviated God. The God of the Bible was Lord over everything, over every scientific discovery. He was Lord over not just what we did not know, but over what we knew and were discovering through science. Bonhoeffer was wondering if it wasn’t time to bring God into the whole world and stop pretending he wanted only to live in those religious corners that we reserved for him: It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the centre, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness. . . . The church stands not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village. That is how it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little in the light of the Old. How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes is something that I’m thinking about a great deal and I shall be writing to you again about it soon. 468 Bonhoeffer’s theology had always leaned toward the incarnational view that did not eschew “the world,” but that saw it as God’s good creation to be enjoyed and celebrated, not merely transcended. According to this view, God had redeemed mankind through Jesus Christ, had re-created us as “good.” So we weren’t to dismiss our humanity as something “un-spiritual.” As Bonhoeffer had said before, God wanted our “yes” to him to be a “yes” to the world he had created. This was not the thin pseudohumanism of the liberal “God is dead” theologians who would claim Bonhoeffer’s mantle as their own in the decades to come, nor was it the antihumanism of the pious and “religious” theologians who would abdicate Bonhoeffer’s theology to the liberals. It was something else entirely: it was God’s humanism, redeemed in Jesus Christ.

Once, while preaching on this topic, I said in a bold declarative statement, “God doesn’t care where you go to school or where you live or what job you take.” A thoughtful young woman talked to me afterward and was discouraged to hear that God didn’t care about the most important decisions in her life. I explained to her that I probably wasn’t very clear. God certainly cares about these decisions insofar as He cares for us and every detail of our lives. But in another sense, and this was the point I was trying to make, these are not the most important issues in God’s book. The most important issues for God are moral purity, theological fidelity, compassion, joy, our witness, faithfulness, hospitality, love, worship, and faith. These are His big concerns. The problem is that we tend to focus most of our attention on everything else. We obsess over the things God has not mentioned and may never mention, while, by contrast, we spend little time on all the things God has already revealed to us in the Bible.

This has led evangelicals to ethnocentrism, to asserting their historically contingent cultural values as “biblical truth.” In the conservative direction, this has closed off productive dialogue between evangelicals and mainline Christians on gay marriage—because if the Bible has an obvious stance on the matter, as most evangelicals believe, the other side must be intentionally denying the truth. In the liberal direction, this has led green evangelicals to ignore the role contemporary experiences and theology have played in their reinterpretation of the Bible on environmental matters.

One can say that liberation theology adopts no particular methodology. But starting from its own socio-cultural and political point of view, it practices a reading of the Bible which is oriented to the needs of the people, who seek in the Scriptures nourishment for their faith and their life.

Klan. White supremacists were very active then. “Liberation theology, why is the Vatican so worried?” Death row. The battle of the Bible Belt. In 1985, racists in the U.S. were preaching revolution: “U.S. conservatives push new order—the push to the right.” And religion was a significant part of that whole movement: “Racism and religion a potent brew,” “Evangelist moles running for U.S. president,” “The power and influence behind America’s right”—meaning the rise of the Religious Right.

I maintain that it is the Bible’s intention to reduce humanity’s problem to their delivery from slavery.

Often people say to me, “How is it that you seem to be able to communicate with these far-out people? You seem to be able to talk in such a way that they understand what you’re saying, even if they do not accept it.” There may be a number of reasons why this is so, but one is that I try to get them to consider the biblical system and its truth without an appeal to blind authority—that is, as though believing meant believing just because one’s family did or as though the intellect had no part in the matter. This is the way I became a Christian. I had gone to a “liberal” church for many years. I decided that the only answer, on the basis of what I was hearing, was agnosticism or atheism. On the basis of liberal theology I do not think I have ever made a more logical decision in my life. I became an agnostic, and then I began to read the Bible for the first time—in order to place it against some Greek philosophy I was reading. I did this as an act of honesty in so far as I had given up what I thought was Christianity but had never read the Bible through. Over a period of about six months I became a Christian because I was convinced that the full answer which the Bible presented was alone sufficient to the problems I then knew, and sufficient in a very exciting way.

The God of Exodus and the prophets is a warrior God. My rejection of this God as a liberating image for feminist theology is based on my understanding of the symbolic function of a warrior God in cultures where warfare is glorified as a symbol of manhood and power. My primary concern here is with the function of symbolism, not with the historical truth of the Exodus stories, with questions of how many slaves may or may not have been freed, nor by what means, nor with questions of the different traditions that may have been woven together to shape the biblical stories. Since liberation theology is fundamentally concerned with the use of biblical symbolism in shaping contemporary reality and the understanding of the divine ground, this method is appropriate here. In a world threatened by total nuclear annihilation, we cannot afford a warlike image of God. The image of Yahweh as liberator of the oppressed in the exodus and as concerned for social justice in the prophets cannot be extricated from the image of Yahweh as warrior. In Exodus Yahweh is imaged as concerned for the oppressed Israelites. Exodus 3:7-8 is a good example. ‘Then Yahweh said, ‘I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters: I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians.’ People in oppressed circumstances and liberation theologians find passages like this inspiring. I too have been profoundly moved by the image of a God who takes compassion on suffering, but this passage has a conclusion I cannot accept. The passage continues ‘and to bring them up out of the land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.’ Here Yahweh promises ‘his people’ a land that is inhabited by other peoples. In order to justify this action by Yahweh, the inhabitants of the land are portrayed in other parts of the Bible as evil or idolators (a term that itself bears further examination). More recently liberation theologians have portrayed these other peoples as ruling-class opponents of the poor peasant and working-class Hebrews. However that may be, the clear implication of the passage is that Yahweh intends to dispose the peoples from the lands they inhabit.

In the Forgotten Books of Eden, an apocryphal book allegedly translated from ancient Egyptian in the nineteenth century, we are told that Satan and his hosts were fallen angels who populated the earth before Adam was brought into being, and Satan used lights, fire, and water in his efforts to rid the planet of this troublesome creature. He even disguised himself as an angel from time to time and appeared as a beautiful young woman in his efforts to lead Adam to his doom. UFO-type lights were one of the Devil’s devices described in the Forgotten Books of Eden. Subtle variations on this same theme can be found in the Bible and in the numerous scriptures of the Oriental cultures. Religious man has always been so enthralled with the main (and probably allegorical) story line that the hidden point has been missed. That point is that the earth was occupied before man arrived or was created. The original occupants or forces were paraphysical and possessed the power of transmogrification. Man was the interloper, and the earth’s original occupants or owners were not very happy over the intrusion. The inevitable conflict arose between physical man and the paraphysical owners of the planet. Man accepted the interpretation that this conflict raged between his creator and the Devil. The religious viewpoint has always been that the Devil has been attacking man (trying to get rid of him) by foisting disasters, wars, and sundry evils upon him. There is historical and modern proof that this may be so. A major, but little-explored, aspect of the UFO phenomenon is therefore theological and philosophical rather than purely scientific. The UFO problem can never be untangled by physicists and scientists unless they are men who have also been schooled in liberal arts, theology, and philosophy. Unfortunately, most scientific disciplines are so demanding that their practitioners have little time or inclination to study complicated subjects outside their own immediate fields of interest. Satan and his demons are part of the folklore of all races, no matter how isolated they have been from one another. The Indians of North America have many legends and stories about a devil-like entity who appeared as a man and was known as the trickster because he pulled off so many vile stunts. Tribes in Africa, South America, and the remote Pacific islands have similar stories.

The atonement and substitution of Christ, the personality of the devil, the miraculous element in Scripture, and the reality and eternity of future punishment are all calmly tossed overboard like lumber in order to lighten the ship of Christianity and enable it to keep pace with modern liberal views. If you stand up for these great truths of the Bible, you are called narrow, intolerant, old-fashioned, and theologically outdated! Quote a biblical text, and you are told that all truth is not confined to the pages of an ancient Jewish Book, and that free inquiry has found out many things since the Book was completed!

First, the conventional approach to discovering God’s will focuses almost all of our attention on nonmoral decisions. Scripture does not tell us whether we should live in Minnesota or Maine. It does not tell us whether we should go to Michigan State University or Wheaton College. It does not tell us whether we should buy a house or rent an apartment. It does not tell us whether we should marry a wonderful Christian named Tim or some other wonderful Christian guy. Scripture does not tell us what to do this summer or what job to take or where to go to grad school. Once, while preaching on this topic, I said in a bold declarative statement, “God doesn’t care where you go to school or where you live or what job you take.” A thoughtful young woman talked to me afterward and was discouraged to hear that God didn’t care about the most important decisions in her life. I explained to her that I probably wasn’t very clear. God certainly cares about these decisions insofar as He cares for us and every detail of our lives. But in another sense, and this was the point I was trying to make, these are not the most important issues in God’s book. The most important issues for God are moral purity, theological fidelity, compassion, joy, our witness, faithfulness, hospitality, love, worship, and faith. These are His big concerns. The problem is that we tend to focus most of our attention on everything else. We obsess over the things God has not mentioned and may never mention, while, by contrast, we spend little time on all the things God has already revealed to us in the Bible.

What theological conservatives need to guard against, though, is thinking that because we affirm the Bible to be God’s inerrant and authoritative word, we have therefore submitted to the Bible. We can be conservatively confessional and functionally liberal. In other words, submitting to the Bible is far more than affirming an orthodox statement of Scripture. Affirming such a statement is crucial and essential. We should never minimize that. But affirming a high view of Scripture is only the first step of submission. We fully submit to God’s Word when we accept its authority over our lives as we read it.

My Christian faith has always been important to me and has usually served me well. Before the church (the white church in my case) was taken over by its most conservative elements and before a literal interpretation of the Bible became de rigueur in some circles, the mainline churches set the bar for Christian orthodoxy; their basic liberal theology held sway over its national reputation and agenda. This would change over the years until today the church is seen as basically a reactionary and even exploitative force, more associated with anti-abortion than civil rights.

If the Bible is infallible, my professors all say, and if the parts about Jesus dying for our sins are true, then a host of other things must also be true, including the sinfulness of homosexuality, the pro-life platform, and the imminence of the rapture. In Liberty’s eyes, the ultra-conservative interpretation of scripture carries the same inerrancy as scripture itself, and if you don’t buy it all—if you’re a liberal or moderate Christian—you’re somehow less than faithful. That sort of prix fixe theology, where Christianity comes loaded with a slate of political views, is a big part of the reason I’ve been hesitant to accept Liberty’s evangelicalism this semester. Somewhere down the road, I might be able to believe in Jesus as Lord, but I could never believe that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle or tell my future wife to submit to me as her husband.

Since the time of ancient Israel, the people of God have read and responded to the word of God written in ways that are formative of culture—that complex whole of beliefs, values, and practices. Patristic, medieval, and Reformation readers alike valued the liberal arts and especially grammar. Indeed, the twin foci of Bible reading were God and grammar.