Liberal Theology

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Word of prayer, Father, I thank you for this day and thank you for the opportunity to gather together with your people to be about the business of looking at your Word and talking about theology.
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And Lord, as we understand, you're a God who is an orderly God.
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You are not chaotic, but you are orderly and you demonstrate your order in creation.
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And so, Father, we know that your theology, our study of you, is also to be orderly.
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It is to be consistent because consistency is the hallmark of truth and you, O God, are the fountainhead of all truth.
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So we pray, Lord, for consistency in our theology.
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We pray that we would be intellectually honest when we deal with things like liberalism and conservatism.
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And ultimately, Lord, that we would seek to be godly in our speech and encouraging in our behavior.
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In Jesus' name we pray, amen.
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Well, last week we began talking about liberal theology and I began by sort of giving a distinction between liberal and conservative.
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We said that the liberal comes from the Latin liber, which means free, and ultimately the liberal is most concerned with being free from restriction or free from constraint and primarily the restriction of tradition, not wanting to be bound by tradition.
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And we said the conservative is concerned with preserving or conserving tradition.
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And we said traditions can be good and bad.
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There are certain traditions that are not really worthy of preservation.
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They need to be jettisoned.
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They need to be put aside because they're not based on truth or upon the Word of God.
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They're based upon something that has made its way in that's not necessarily godly or true.
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And so there have been times where, you know, I've made this joke.
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I say, you know, sacred cows make the best hamburger.
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Sometimes you have to slaughter the sacred cow of tradition.
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So the thing that we want to understand though, and I don't know if I made this clear last week, we talk about conservative and liberal.
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Where it becomes the biggest issue is the conservative preserving tradition is important, but that's not what is the main importance.
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What's important for the conservative is that he conserve or preserve truth and doctrine, which comes from the scripture.
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Liberals tend to be, and I'm painting with a broad brush and you can forgive me for having to make some generalities because that's the nature of the discussion that we're having, liberals tend to, generally and by and large, want to be free from the restriction of truth and doctrine.
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And that is why oftentimes in liberal teaching you'll have people willing to jettison whole parts of scripture.
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Well, there's no way that Jonah was truly in the whale, in a great fish, was in the belly of a great fish.
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He just, because it can't happen, right? Well, no, no.
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What I'm saying is that's the, that's the argument.
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They say scientifically a man couldn't survive three days inside of a fish.
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He would, you know, he would die from asphyxiation.
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He would die from drowning.
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He would die from the heat.
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He would die from lack of nourishment, lack of water.
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There's all kinds of things that people would come in and say just can't be scientifically.
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And because we have to measure all things, especially in the modern day, by the scientific method, it just can't be.
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So they, so that's, they have to reinterpret the story and say, no, Jonah didn't happen this way.
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It must've happened another way.
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And this is simply poetic.
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And that's how the, the, the liberal comes at scripture often, is through the lens of, of his own experience and his own understanding of how the world works.
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And yeah, and well, what, what happens is, it is doubt and unbelief.
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What I have coined a term, and it's actually when I, when I did my master's thesis at the seminary, I did it on this subject.
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It was anti-supernaturalism.
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That's a big, long word, but we know what it means.
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Anti means against.
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And then the supernatural, supernaturalism, the supernatural is anything that rises above that which we can explain with our senses.
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You know, we, science is a sensory, a discipline.
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It's based on what we observe, what we hear, what we can touch, what we can taste.
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You know, all of these things are, these are the senses, and this is how we measure science, because we don't have any other objective ways of making measurements, right? And as I said, there is a sense in which science has become the deity of the day.
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The science has become the god of the day, because we always say, well, science did this and science did that.
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Well, science doesn't do anything.
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Science is a process that men use to arrive at conclusions or to establish certain things or to understand certain things.
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Yeah, so it can't be that way.
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And you say, now, wait a minute, you're dealing in the natural.
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You're dealing in the sensory.
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We're dealing in the supernatural.
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The thing about Christians, and I do think we've lost this some, Christians are supernaturalists.
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We believe in the supernatural.
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We believe in angels and demons.
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We believe in God and the devil.
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We believe in rising from the dead, and we believe in miraculous healing, and we believe in the ability for men to communicate with God and for God to communicate with men.
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So, we have a supernatural view of the world, meaning that we believe things that cannot be measured by sensory perception, and thus can't be measured in the sense of scientifically.
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And here's the thing that bothers me, is we try to, we try to, yeah, we try to find a scientific reason for everything.
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For instance, there's a story, and I don't know how true it is, but there's a very famous story of a whaling ship that was trying to, you know, trying to catch a whale, trying to, you know, and a man fell overboard, right? And later on, they, you know, they pulled one of the whales in, and they cut the whale open.
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And lo and behold, the guy's there.
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Now, he's in a coma, but he survived, and he lived to tell the tale of falling into the water with a whale.
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The whale swallowed him whole.
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Not too long afterwards, the whale was caught, lanced open to find the man is alive.
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Not well, certainly not conscious, but alive.
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And I've heard people say, that's proof that Jonah is true.
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And I say, no, that's not.
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It's not.
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Yeah, I mean, now, I could tell the story and say, now, here's a situation where X happened, and it's similar to Y, because, you know, this is a story where this happened, and we know Jonah happened.
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But I don't believe in the story of Jonah because that might have happened.
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I believe in the story of Jonah because it's in the Bible.
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You see, and that's the faith that Christianity is based on.
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We believe it's the Word of God, and we come to it with the ability, or not the ability, we come with the willingness to be taught even something that is supernatural.
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And conservatives often, or liberals rather, are often unwilling to suspend their commitment to the natural.
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They're unwilling to suspend their commitment to the natural until such time as it makes sense for them to have to do so.
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For instance, I was like, how many of you have seen the movie Expelled with Ben Stein? Now, I like that movie.
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Ben Stein is, he is not a Christian.
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I believe he's a Jew, orthodox, but probably not in the sense of orthodox.
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Let me back that up.
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We'll say, I know that he's a Jewish man.
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I don't know how he practices his faith, but he certainly has expressed a belief in God.
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Not, of course, the God of the Christian scriptures, but, you know, we pray that God would open his eyes to that.
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I know that he's done some things with Ligonier Ministries and with R.C.
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Sproul, so, you know, he's heard the gospel, I'm sure, several times, so we pray that God would open his heart to that.
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The reason why I'm bringing up the movie is because at the end of the film, Ben Stein is talking to Richard Dawkins.
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Richard Dawkins is one of the foremost, yes, best part of the movie.
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He's talking, one of the foremost biologists, evolutionary biologists in the world as far as the scientific community is concerned, and Dawkins is a rabid anti-theist.
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He's not just an atheist, he's anti-theist.
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He hates God.
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He hates the idea of God, and especially the Christian God.
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And he, in the conversation, Ben is pushing him back and saying, okay, you believe in evolution, yes, but what caused it? What's the mechanism? What is the intelligence behind the evolution? Because even in Dawkins' own explanation of how evolution occurs, if you read what he wrote or you listen to what he says, even in his own explanations, he has to ascribe some type of intelligence to the mechanism.
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It can't just be random.
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It has to be guided.
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Random energy and unintelligent matter do not make anything.
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Random energy and unintelligent matter is what happens when a tornado hits a parts yard, you know, a pull apart.
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If a tornado hit a pull apart, it's not going to make a 57 Chevy, because it takes intelligence and direction to make a 57 Chevy.
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You might have all the parts, but you can't take unintelligent matter and undirected energy and make anything.
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It doesn't.
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Absolutely.
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It just breaks down.
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It doesn't build up.
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And Dawkins knows he's not stupid.
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As I said, he's a fool because he's denied God, but he's not stupid, and there is a difference.
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He's using the brain God gave him to try to disprove God, which is ironic.
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But the point of what I'm trying to say is, at the end of the movie, he said, Ben Sine said, well, what do you think? What caused it? He says, well, maybe it was aliens.
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He said, perhaps aliens seeded our planet with the information that was needed for evolution to take place.
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But if that is true, I believe that the aliens were created by some evolutionary process.
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Exactly, exactly.
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He cannot give up, number one, the evolutionary idea.
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And it is an eternal regression at that point.
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Well, where do you go back? Right.
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But you see, he's not anti-supernatural because aliens are supernatural.
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No one's ever documented them from the scientific community to the point that we believe in them.
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And a lot of people said they've seen aliens.
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A lot of people said they've communicated, but most of those people have been demonstrated as fraudulent, you know.
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And no one that I know of would say there's absolute scientific proof of aliens outside of maybe the community that, you know, the UFO chasers and things like that.
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But you understand what I'm saying is Dawkins is willing to dive headlong into the possibility of the supernatural so long as it's not the God of the Bible.
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Right.
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And it's like the one atheist said, he said, he said, I can't believe in God.
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I'll believe in anything else, but I can't believe in God because that, to me, is incredible.
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It's incredible.
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See, we think the word incredible means good.
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Oh, that's incredible.
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Incredible means lacking credibility.
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I can't believe in that because I don't think that it's possible.
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He's willing to believe in the power of nature and the power of the universe, the powers of evolution, but basically he's not willing to believe in the power of the one that created it.
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He's willing to believe that nature on its own has its own power.
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Absolutely.
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And we have personalized nature, haven't we? We talk about mother nature, we talk about father time.
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We have more emphasis on saving animals than saving people.
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Mother nature, that's supernatural.
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Sure, absolutely.
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We need to save our mother, you know, mother earth, mother nature, all that stuff.
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Ken Ham says that, you know, when people discuss creation and they can't believe it's real, he said, but we all look at the same evidence.
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The evidence that's on the earth, dinosaur fossils, blah, blah, blah.
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It's the same evidence and becomes two radically different opinions.
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Based on presupposition.
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Exactly.
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But that's why I consider myself a presuppositionalist because my goal in talking to anyone is to point out their presuppositions because everybody has a presupposition.
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The overriding presupposition of all men is that your thoughts matter.
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Because if you didn't think your thoughts matter, you wouldn't care or to carry on the conversation.
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And to think that your thoughts are logical and consistent and able to understand things, because if you didn't believe that, you wouldn't have a conversation.
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But why do you believe your thoughts matter and why do you believe they're logical and consistent and able to understand things? Because you believe your mind was created.
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If you believe your mind was created, who created it? If you don't believe your mind was created, why do you trust your thoughts? You know, there's a lot of, I mean, it really is an overarching presupposition of all men before they can even have a conversation.
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So anyway, all right.
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So last week we looked at theology.
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This week we're going to go to the second on our list and look at God.
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Under liberal theology, God is imminent.
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He dwells within the world and is not above it or apart from it.
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Thus there stands no distinction between the natural and the supernatural.
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I've heard this said in a different way, maybe I'll, I've heard one man say, I believe in God and I believe in science, and I believe that we understand God through science.
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Ultimately, I believe we understand God through our senses, is what he was saying.
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And so I think that this is what the good doctor is trying to tell us here, is that ultimately God is, God is working in the world, but he's part of the world.
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He's not above it.
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He's not the sovereign over it.
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He's just in it and part of it.
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And, you know, this is very similar in a sense to the spiritual religions of the Native Americans and even in Eastern philosophy and other, you know, that God is, God is in the tree.
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God is in the bushes.
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God is in the, you know, God is in everything.
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God's in you.
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God's in me.
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And I can see God in this or I can see God in that.
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And that it becomes very much a view of God as impersonal.
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If we can depersonalize God, then we are no longer responsible to him because he is not a him.
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He is an it.
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And we're not responsible to things, we're responsible to people.
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And if we can depersonalize God, and that really is what happens in a lot of liberalism, God becomes a force rather than a person.
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And that's part of what I think the good doctor is trying to say here.
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Now the next one, and I do want to make a few, go through a few of these today.
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I'd like to move on next week because we're going to look at the next, the next one, which is liberation theology.
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I think, isn't that what's next on the list? What's existential? Oh, that was going to be fun.
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The Trinity.
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The Father works, not supernaturally, but through culture, philosophy, education, and society.
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Liberal theology is usually Unitarian rather than Trinitarian, recognizing only the deity of the Father.
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Jesus was full of God, but was not God incarnate.
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The Spirit is not a person within the Godhead, but is simply God's activity in the world.
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The Father, again, working supernaturally through culture, philosophy, education, and society.
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That's something that, again, when you go out, you see this.
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How is it that the liberal churches, and again, painting with a broad brush, forgive me if I'm overgeneralizing, how is it that the liberal churches often say that they are sharing the love of God? Is it not through social programs, particularly programs associated with social justice? This is why we see a lot of churches that are so focused on giving out food.
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Now, giving out food is wonderful, and we do food drives here, so I'm not discounting that, but if we give a man food and we do not give him the gospel, have we done good to him? Well, someone would say, yes, we've done good to him because we've given him food, and we've shown him the love of Christ, because Christ did say, if you give a man a cup of water in my name, you will by no wise lose your reward, right? So there is a sense in which we are called to certain levels of philanthropic behavior, you know, to love men.
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But in certain instances, and I've seen this, there is actually a withholding of the gospel, primarily because it's not believed even by the people who are doing it.
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They give the food, but they don't give the bread of life.
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Is that an issue? It's a major issue, and again, I've heard people say, well, they see Christ in me, and my issue with that is atheists hold doors.
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Atheists give to needy causes.
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Atheists do a lot of things.
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People don't see Christ naturally in what we do.
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We have to tell them about Christ, but go ahead.
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Yep, they'll see Christ in us.
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Absolutely, and this is the hallmark of the modern liberal, and it's not just liberalism in the sense of your kind of wild leftist churches.
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This has made its way into mainstream Christianity, is we no longer want to share.
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You've all heard the phrase, you know, share the gospel, use words when necessary.
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That's not true.
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You have to use words to share the gospel.
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There's no other way.
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Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.
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You know, that has to happen.
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We have to share.
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We have to talk.
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We have to tell.
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That's part of sharing our faith.
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Now, if I see a man hungry, James tells me this in his epistle, if I see a man who's hungry and I go up and I say, hey, be well and be fed, and I leave him without giving him food or something to drink or, you know, help, then that's not right either.
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So, there has been sort of a balance.
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You've got people over here who have no interest in helping anyone, but they want to go around sharing the gospel.
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You got people over here who have no interest in sharing the gospel, but they want to help everyone, and so there's a sort of, there's a balancing act that hasn't occurred.
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When I say social justice, though, it goes above and beyond just food or clothing.
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Oftentimes, I've seen churches get involved in political movements so as to work for social causes.
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For instance, the Disciples of Christ Church, which this church actually was affiliated with so many years ago, you know, more than 20 years ago now, because we left the Disciples well before we ever changed our name.
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We left the Disciples in the 90s, and the Disciples of Christ, the last General Assembly that our former pastor went to, when you walked into the room, there were bowls of condoms they were giving away.
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At the General Assembly, there were tables set up for pro-choice things.
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There were, why? Because that's all about women's rights, right? Now, we know that's foolishness, but that's the, that again, social justice, right, is women's rights, is social justice.
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One of the keynote issues was the blood diamonds of Sierra Leone and trying to eliminate the slavery and the conditions that were involved with the mining of those blood diamonds.
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Is that the business of the church? Now, you might say, well, of course, they're slaves and we want to liberate.
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Again, though, that's where liberation theology makes its way in place of biblical theology, because liberation theology sees the major concern, and that's why I thought it was next week, but in a couple weeks we'll get there, it sees its major concern not with liberating man from sin, but liberating man from slavery and bondage, and so it becomes very popular in certain cultures that have dealt with slavery in the past.
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They look at liberation theology as something that they can attach themselves to, and then you get guys like Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of our president, who would make his sermons not based on the gospel, but make his sermons based on freedom from oppression, right? And that's the social gospel movement, and it has nothing to do or very little to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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It has more to do with the gospel of social reconstruction.
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Absolutely, and one of the big issues that is arising is like the gay Christian network, which is an oxymoron, but it does exist.
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These places that are intended to do what? They're intended to take any allegiance to truth or doctrine from the church in regard to that issue, jettison it, and replace it with a progressive free view of homosexuality, and because why? Because there are kids who commit suicide because they're made fun of for being gay, and do you want that to happen? Do you want somebody to commit suicide? Because when you talk about homosexuality, you're promoting suicide, and that's people who are afraid, because I don't want to promote suicide.
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People who commit suicide are disturbed.
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But you see what I'm saying, though, is they'll say they've been mistreated by the church, they've been mistreated by their families, they've been mistreated by communities, and the church should be a safe haven for these people and should not be a place where they're condemned, and so this social justice movement pushes out the truth, pushes out the sin, pushes out the issue of our goal is freedom from sin, not freedom from oppression or freedom from, you know, and it replaces the gospel with a pseudo-false gospel.
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Exactly, exactly, and that's very well said.
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Derogatory names like fags or things like that because I don't want to, I want to get to teach them the truth, and so I don't want to put up a barrier by that, but homosexual is a scientific, you know, name or whatever, so I use that rather than gay.
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That's a that's a nice word that's been taken over by them for use of it, but I want to, you know, I want to make sure that people understand what we're talking about.
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Not, and not to just give you another thought on that because I don't use the word homosexual on general.
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I don't use, I don't allow for the, I don't allow for the idea that someone has to be identified by their sinful condition, and so if somebody comes to me and says I'm a homosexual, I say, no, you're not.
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You're a person who has desires for sexual behavior with someone of your own sex.
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Those desires are sinful.
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If you keep identifying yourself as a homosexual, you're never going to have an opportunity for redemption.
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You're going to maintain this position that that's who you are.
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I had a lady sit in my, I've had people sit with me and say, you know what, I have same-sex attraction.
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That's a little SSA.
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That's another phrase.
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It's become more palatable for me.
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Somebody with same-sex attraction.
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No, no, no, yeah, and I understand where you're coming from.
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I'm just telling you because, because I had one lady come to me.
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She said, my son just told me he's gay, and I said, so he's identified himself as being this.
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Now, I never did get a chance to talk to the young man.
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He wouldn't come and see me, but I was trying to tell his mom.
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I said, he's identifying himself with the community.
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He's identifying himself with a sinful behavior.
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It'd be like if I came in, I said, I'm a murderer.
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He said, have you ever killed anybody? No, but I want to.
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Because I asked her, I said, has he had sex with a man? No, but he wants to.
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I said, well, he's not yet behaving as a homosexual.
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He has homosexual desires.
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I said, but if somebody comes to me and said I'm a murderer, yeah, murder anybody you want to, I'll join the club.
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Sorry, sorry, no, but you see my point, and even somebody who's engaging in that, you, what has happened is we have bought into, and again, I'm not challenging what you said, but just for the general, we have bought into the mindset of the world which says there's a community, the LGBT community.
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There's no such a thing.
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There's no community, because number one, LGBT are all four.
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They're four vastly different things.
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Now, a lesbian and a gay man do share a sense in which they both have homosexual desires, but a bisexual person has a universal desire to have interrelation with anyone, but a transgender person may not have a desire for intercourse or interaction, rather, with somebody.
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They may just desire to be something else, and they're four different categories, and yet, we lump them together, and we call them a community.
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Where's the community? Where they have their meetings? Well, they're not.
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Now, there are people who force them into this community, and they try to take people.
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You see a little child who's a girl who's playing with masculine toys.
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Well, she must have a gender identity issue, right? No, but it's happening in our community.
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They're pulling.
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There are parents raising their girls as boys or boys raising their girls.
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I mean, I could show you stories where this has happened, where they're raising them as boys or raising them as girls, because that's how they identify.
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Rather than saying, um, no, you're a girl, say, well, you think you're a boy? Okay, and we've gone full-bore loony with this nonsense, huh? Yes, well, yeah, there's, like I said, I've, no, it's fine.
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I went a little off course myself, because this issue bothers me only in the sense that we are told that you, we can't say anything, can't say anything about a man going into a woman's restroom, because we might hurt the man's feelings, because that's the way that he is.
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He has a desire.
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He's a man trapped in a woman's body.
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Here's the funny thing.
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They'll say, uh, gender is a social construct and shouldn't be respected.
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Shouldn't respect the idea of gender, because gender is a social construct.
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Men and women are absolutely equal, right? That's what, but then they'll say, this man believes he's a woman.
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We should respect him, but wait a minute.
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You said gender is a social construct.
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Which is it? Either gender is a social construct and doesn't matter, or this man believes he's a different gender, and we should respect that, because if one's true, the other one can't be true, because if it doesn't, that's why we've kind of talked about this.
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Like, really, what's the...
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Yeah, it's, and like I said, it's growing, it's changing, and I do, and again, using the broad brush of just using the word liberal, it really has infiltrated so many levels, and it's infiltrated into the church, because what's happening in the church is there's this call to affirmation for every sin, except for the sins that we don't like, because no one is calling to affirm murder.
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Except for abortion, because we like that one.
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No one's calling to affirm theft, except for socialism, because we like that one.
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No one's calling to affirm adultery, except for, you know, in the cases where the guy really wanted to marry somebody else.
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In that sense, we'll affirm that.
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There's even cases where people to younger people.
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Oh, well, that's, that is coming, and if you don't think that that's coming, you are out of your mind, because that is the next thing, because if transgenderism can be seen as a natural expression of the human condition, why not pedophilia? And you say, well, we can't, we can't, here's the argument, here's the argument, and if you ever have this conversation, here's how you respond, because they'll say, they will say, well, the reason why we can never affirm pedophilia is because a child is not old enough to consent to the act, and then my response is this, so the only moral problem you have with pedophilia is the inability to consent.
31:33
That's the only moral problem you have with a man having sex with a child, is moral consent.
31:39
That's the only problem you have.
31:42
That's your moral standing.
31:45
You're nuts if that's your only problem with it, is that they can't consent, because that's the only thing they say about bestiality.
31:53
I know that's gross, and nobody wants to talk about it, but it is true, and if you don't like the fact that I put these things together, Moses did it in the book of Leviticus.
32:00
He put all these things together.
32:02
Homosexuality, bestiality, and all these things, and here's the issue.
32:06
You ask them, why is that wrong? Well, the animal can't consent.
32:09
That's the only reason it's wrong.
32:11
It's because the animal can't consent.
32:16
For sure, like I said, this is why the removal of restriction, removal of the constraints, leads to so much negative, so much badness, and that's why so many people identify themselves either conservative or liberal, and they do so with a broad brush.
32:37
As I said last week, and I think I was fair to say that we're all liberal in some areas.
32:41
We're all conservative in some areas.
32:42
Depends on the issue, but particularly in regard to the issue of the supernatural, the liberal will say, typically, that in limited circumstances, God may interact in some ways, but for the most part, I'm concerned with scientific reasoning only.
33:01
What can I see? What can I observe? What can I test? That's what allows me to make my decisions.
33:08
Now, time has come and gone.
33:11
We have gotten to Christ, and this one I really want to deal with because next week, I'm putting a mark on the page.
33:19
How does the liberal see Christ? Well, it says here, it gave a moral example in humanity, did not die to pay the penalty for our sins or impute our righteousness to man, and that's the key.
33:32
Oftentimes in liberalism, and again, not always, not always, and I'm trying to be fair and all that, but oftentimes in liberalism, the biggest issue comes down to what was the purpose of the cross.
33:44
Because if you can't identify sin, and if you can't name sin for what it is, and often liberals won't, then where do you go with the cross? It becomes a moral example and not a perpetuatory sacrifice, and that is a danger.
33:59
So let's pray.
34:00
Father, I thank you for time to study together.
34:02
I pray it's been fruitful, and that you would use it to glorify yourself in Jesus' name.
34:07
Amen.