Jesus Jargon: Conservative & Liberal

Hey friends, welcome back to our podcast,
Jesus Jargon, the idea that we will be looking
at some terms that we use in the Christian church fairly often and examining what we
mean and what we have meant historically when we use them.
Today,
some loaded terms,
conservative and liberal, terms that we hear regularly,
maybe as much outside of the church,
maybe even more outside of the church recently than inside
of the church.
These are words with a long history,
a lot of application throughout the years of the faith,
and really I would argue some very misunderstood words,
some difficult words to grasp, though we often use them more confidently than I think is merited.
Yeah, I think just to start here,
thanks for tuning in.
We’re glad to have you with us in the conversation.
Now everybody, let’s just take a deep breath.
It’s going to be okay.
We’re not going to be jumping in and lighting any bombs here.
I think part of the interesting aspect of this conversation is that for many,
just seeing the title of this discussion may even have brought some anxiety like,
“Oh my goodness, where are they going today?”
And if that’s true for you,
I want to encourage you to maybe intentionally take a moment here
to reset your expectation.
Because if you came in with some of the cultural, political,
real sort of oppositional baggage
that we’ve all owned and carried in the last 12 to 13 months,
longer than that,
then we have to recognize that when we bring this conversation into the church context,
we’re not talking one to one.
In fact, what it has meant to be conservative and liberal as people of faith actually is
a very rich history.
You can trace throughout the entire history of the church.
We’ll look at some of that today.
And what you may be surprised to know is that it has at varying times in history been paired
with very differing sort of political or social implications.
Some of that is moral and ethical in nature about what you should and shouldn’t do as a Christian.
Sometimes, and the Reformation is a great example of this,
it meant what political leaders
and, in this case, monarchs most often, would you be aligned with?
And that wasn’t alignment in terms of the social policy,
but rather whose authority
should be granted in the religious world.
Should the church defer to this sort of nation state or to another?
And that was a very different conception.
So I just want to start the conversation saying,
we have to check some of our assumptions
at the door here,
because when we start talking about what it means to be people of faith
and we use these terms,
we need to put away some of the assumptions we make about our
current political understanding of conservatives and liberals.
This isn’t about what news channel you watch.
This is about what it means to be people of faith informed by different traditions.
Yeah, I would say that we are not endeavoring in this conversation to be political at all,
but to examine these words primarily and really exclusively within the context of our faith.
And one of the things that makes this challenging is that these are not definitions,
these are labels, these are descriptions, and they’re given at a particular moment in time by a
particular person or a particular group,
and they often evaluate another group.
And that makes them difficult.
I had a very interesting experience with these words as an undergrad.
When I finished at Northwestern College,
an RCA institution that I think with reason could
be called conservative in the general scope of the church,
I as a Presbyterian was probably
left of some of my professors and classmates.
And so in that context,
there are those who would have referred to me as,
if not a liberal,
more liberal.
I had some quote unquote liberal ideas.
Well, I move about 13 hours away,
I end up in Louisville,
Kentucky at a Presbyterian seminary,
and there I stand out as very conservative,
much farther right than most of my classmates.
And so I had jumped camps,
I had moved from being a liberal to a conservative without changing
anything that I thought simply based on who was around me and how they use that words.
And I think how they use those words,
and I think that’s what we have to be careful with.
We need to understand or at least have some understanding of what we are saying
when we use these terms.
And maybe it helps to have some historical sense of what they have tended to mean.
Right.
I think that frame is very helpful.
This idea that we’re not looking at words that have a strict definition,
but words that are rather labels.
And to make that very clear,
you can’t give a definition to what conservative and liberal is,
not in the church,
because that has changed throughout history.
If you were to define it,
you would have to look to something about sort of how they exist in
relation to one another.
The conservative tends to live into that very term,
conserved to seek to try to maintain some of the wisdom insight order that has been inherited.
And that liberal is generally trying to push into a new idea to express how that might be lived out
in the church ethically,
theologically.
And we see this in lots of areas.
I think a great place to see this is in some of the controversies of the Reformation, because today,
we in Presbyterian churches,
we love and celebrate a lot of different sort of images,
and we celebrate different instrumentation in our worship services,
which we think of now today
as being conservative.
Let me be very concrete.
There was a day in which people who now today celebrate the organ as an instrument of worship,
they may not recognize the day that was not that far in the past in which it was the liberal’s
pushing for instrumentation.
But the idea that you would add something to worship,
that you would add this instrument,
was in some Christian traditions anathema.
In fact, you might not know there are some traditions today.
In fact, there is a branch of the Presbyterian church, Presbyterian Orthodox,
I think.
I might need to look that up.
That there are Presbyterians in the United States today who do not have any instrument in worship.
And that is a reflection of their belief that you should not add anything within the worshiping
experience.
It should only be the songs that come from those who sing.
Now, that may, and I expect,
would sound very strange to you.
But that is, in a sense, the conservative theological view and the organ added to it.
Well, today, we might think of things like adding praise instruments,
a guitar,
or a drum set.
And that, to us, may seem strange.
It may seem unhelpful.
It may seem like it doesn’t fit.
And that might even be called more liberal.
But that’s only by frame of where we exist today.
If we’re honest,
the people today who might consider the organ the conservative instrument
of worship were at one day the liberal pushing for it to happen.
Yeah.
So there was a moment in the church’s history where if you wanted an organ in the sanctuary,
you were a liberal.
If you wanted pictures of Jesus in the building or the Ten Commandments painted on the wall,
you were a liberal.
If you wanted to read the Bible in something other than King James English,
you were a liberal.
And so these things have a sort of life cycle as they ebb and flow.
And what is today sometimes called conservative or liberal was,
in a generation prior,
the exact opposite.
And that’s part of the difficulty when we use these terms,
especially when we use them
without knowledge of some of the history.
And when we use them as kind of insults,
we need to be careful.
And that causes a great deal of problem.
Generally speaking, if we were to try and look for some anchor points of the terms,
we could say that conserve means to keep.
Conservatives generally want to keep things the way they are.
And typically,
conservatism represents a certain comfort level with what we might
call the status quo or the current practice and a general reluctance to change things
and a pushback on things that are being modified.
On the other end of the scale,
you have liberal.
Liberal has this idea of
progression,
of moving,
of changing.
And typically speaking,
liberals are looking for places where they believe things need to change.
And so there is this inherent tension between the ones who want to hold the gates and toe the line
and those who want to do the exact opposite.
And that tension has always existed.
It has landed in discussions about scripture,
in pastoring,
in marriage,
in anything the church has talked about.
There has been that inherent tension,
that push and pull between the two groups.
And if we think about it that way,
that I think begins at least to provide a helpful framework.
Conservatives generally want to leave things where they are.
And liberals generally feel the need to change some of the things that currently are.
And maybe that’s a helpful place to start.
Yeah, I think very much.
And I think some of these conversations are very tempered when you look far enough back,
you can see the disparity between these things because of our own present experience.
I once did a research paper on Dutch Reformed theology in early America.
And this is now hundreds of years behind us.
So for most of us,
this isn’t our experience.
But it was common practice in conservative Dutch Reformed congregations for the session,
the elders elected by the congregation,
to do in-home visits for people who worshipped in the congregation.
And they would essentially have conversations with husband and wife and say,
you know, how are things between you?
And if there would be any discord,
if there was any sort of rivalry or infighting within
that marriage or potentially as far out as children misbehaving in school or in the community,
those elders would regularly inform a couple that they would either need to correct
that dispute or correct that child’s behavior,
or they would not be welcome to communion that
would happen the next Sunday.
We generally, as those who live in the 21st century,
could not imagine someone either from
the church coming into our home to have that conversation nor informing us that we were
no longer welcome to take of the Lord’s Supper.
Yet that was the conservative understanding of what it meant to be Christian and to practice
Christian leadership.
Now, is that right or wrong?
That is where we get hung up in these conversations.
We start,
well, we innately as humans turn to value judgments on other people.
We use these labels as ways that we can either identify someone as enemy or friend.
And I think that when we look at this historically,
that’s a generally unhelpful frame
because you can trace through history how the church has continued to seek to have
impact in people’s lives,
albeit through different mechanisms.
And that is the church reacting to different cultural needs,
to living in a different moment
in history and seeking to be faithful in that moment.
And so we shouldn’t be surprised that today we continue with these two very different traditions,
yet they’re going to shift in frame because I think once again,
it’s helpful to recognize
that these labels still describe things that exist.
But the definition of what they’re pointing to is different than what it was.
Yeah, and I’ll be honest on the front end of this conversation.
These aren’t words that I like very much.
They’re not words that I appreciate.
I think they’re often used to kind of spread controversy,
conflict.
I think they’re words that often are not used thoughtfully.
And so when someone tells me I’m a conservative or they’re a liberal or I’m a liberal and they’re
a conservative, I often feel like I don’t know what they mean.
What is the standard by which these terms are so amorphous?
I struggle with what do you mean when you say that?
When I say I’m a conservative Christian,
what does that mean?
Does that mean if I’m a woman,
I’m wearing a hat to church?
Because there was a point at which if you didn’t do that,
you certainly weren’t conservative.
You were liberal.
You were changing the status quo when people tell me they’re liberal.
I don’t know what they mean by that sometimes.
And so I think it makes it difficult.
And I much prefer the idea that we could sit and talk to one another and have real conversations
about our ideas and where we agree and disagree than that we could lob these almost meaningless
accusations back at one another,
conservative and liberal.
But again, having said that,
we could perhaps look for some things in our current.
So taking history out of it for a moment,
we could look for some things in our current context
that I think we could talk about as being conservative and liberal.
And please understand,
this is not better or worse.
This is simply this fits the idea of conservative and this fits the idea of liberal.
And there is no value judgment in either of those terms.
I think we could start, Michael, with scripture.
Conservatives have tended,
it will be to no one’s surprise,
to hold on to a more rigid
and a more structured view of what scripture is and how we use it in the church.
Right.
So one of the benefits that conservatives have as they turn to scripture is they have all of
the generational readings of scripture that precedes them.
They have the books of the Christians who wrote and studied and were faithful and they have all
of the practices that contained wisdom through all the generations of the church that have led
to them.
I think this is an area where conservatives not only have a great strength in theological,
biblical interpretation, they sometimes miss the strength is because fundamentally when you come
to the scriptures with all of this writing,
all of this thinking,
all of this prayerful
work that’s been done,
there’s almost this huge weight that you have to bear because
at this point, 2000 years in, we have had some of the most brilliant people in history
who have reflected on,
who have taught on,
who have offered wisdom and insight from the scriptures.
The scriptures are limitless in their depths.
So what ends up happening,
I think, in my very limited estimation is conservatives are the
inheritors of these things.
And because we’re humans,
we can’t grasp all of these things.
We can only grasp certain parts and we hold on to these.
We hold them in tension as best as we can.
And generally,
regardless of where you draw,
you know, if you are not reformed,
you might be particularly drawn to, well, do you have a reading of scripture that’s more close to an
Aquinas reading of scripture or St.
Augustine?
These are sort of pillar figures in the ancient church and in biblical interpretation.
Well,
today,
we’re probably more focused on how much influence do you give to a particular reading
of scripture and conservatives have been historically in our frame.
I think it’s fair to say,
repeatedly turned to scripture and said this reading of scripture,
particularly favoring the most simple reading of scripture.
Sometimes some conservatives take that all the way to a literal reading of scripture,
which we’d have to talk about what they mean in that.
But this idea that scripture should dominate our theological discourse,
it should be the central understanding of who we are.
This is tended to be a theological reflection of what conservatives withhold.
Yeah, I think in general,
that the conservative application of scripture,
and we see it most clearly in regard to social issues.
In other words, I think it is often in the areas of life that we bring to scripture
that we see the conservative approach most clearly.
So for instance,
the conservative is going to stick,
generally speaking, to the most direct application of the text onto the issue.
So in an issue like divorce,
they’re going to take those readings of the Bible that say,
divorce is not in keeping with God’s will.
And they’re going to apply them directly.
They’re going to say,
then we should not have divorced people who serve as elders or pastors.
They’re going to use those things with the most,
I think, one-to-one kind of application.
The person who comes from the liberal side is going to use them more like a framework
and is going to ask questions more broadly about interpretation,
translation,
the culture of the time in which they were written versus our time,
and the history of how the doctrines have unfolded.
That is less compelling to the conservative who looks at the text and says,
“We’re going to preserve this instruction,
this teaching, because it says it explicitly.”
And that’s not literalism.
It can be literalism,
but it more is a sense of being more directly and more
concretely influenced by the words of the text.
And I think there are many such issues.
You could talk about women’s role in church.
The conservative is going to find some verses in scripture that seem to say clearly that women
shouldn’t be in leadership,
and they’re going to take that more directively than is the liberal,
who’s going to say,
“Well, that represents what they thought at the time.
We’ve changed our ideas.”
That’s not a compelling thought for a conservative.
They see it there to use the language in black and white,
and it seems more clear to them that it shouldn’t be changed.
Would it be fair to say,
Clint, that an image of this is the conservative tends to hold on to
the treasures that the church has unearthed from the scriptures in the past,
whereas the liberal is more lending towards the idea of going into the minds of scripture and unearthing those
treasures that lie ahead.
You can see how each generation of the church has found new wisdom in the text of scripture
that we didn’t know were there previously.
I mean, you could look time and time again where we’ve discovered new insights,
new truth.
I need to be careful with new truth.
I mean, all truth points to the one truth of Jesus Christ,
which is timeless.
But there’s a sense in which we have not always captured the multiple
vantages that scripture speaks to and I believe will continue to speak to.
So there’s a sense in which one is treasuring and holding and valuing that which has been
already unearthed and the other is seeking to flesh out.
I think that you could fairly say that a conservative tends to look at the Bible
as the end of the discussion and the liberal maybe sees the scripture as the beginning of the discussion.
And those viewpoints are often in tension.
And it’s not just in scripture.
We’d see this in other doctrines.
The idea of historically the conversation,
the question about who is saved.
The liberal is going to be much more open and frankly is going to find much more appealing
the idea that salvation is even larger than the Bible may indicate.
In other words,
that yes, the Bible seems to teach that salvation is for those who come to Christ,
but the liberal is going to infer from that this broader idea that salvation could be even for
those who do not yet know that they’re saved,
who do not yet know the grace of Christ,
but will one day learn it.
The conservative is going to hold much closer to the text and say,
well, the text seems to say that some aren’t going to be saved because they don’t come to Jesus.
Now how and why they get there,
that there would be theological rabbit holes we could go down,
but they’re more likely to say this is a fixed number.
It’s a small number.
It’s a number that is not going to include anyone,
but those that we can clearly see
are affected by the gospel.
And again, there is a tension there as one group tries to kind of hold the line
and the other group tries to maybe move the idea forward.
And the church has historically as we’ve progressed,
we found ourselves in this interesting
position in which theology can sometimes work with and sometimes work against practice.
And it’s actually very fascinating because there are moments in which the conservative
theological position has tended the church in towards very different sort of social
ethical expectation than what the liberal theology would lend the church to.
It might surprise us actually to learn that there are times in which conservative theology
in the history of the church has lended towards more what we would today describe as liberal
action.
And when you recognize that,
what you begin to realize is that we are bringing our lens
of conservative and liberal to what is not necessarily a historically accurate
understanding of what the church has meant by it.
Because you can be a theological conservative who is unbelievably passionate and outspoken
for what is considered a socially liberal task.
In fact, some of the early abolitionists were put in that camp that they were extremely devoted to
a particular and very strict reading of scripture.
But it was a different reading of scripture than was considered conservative.
And it led them to very liberal sort of social movement in their time and space.
And so I think salvation is another great example of this.
Sometimes we have some other words that get thrown around, catch phrases,
even on that particular issue.
And what’s unfortunate is,
if you don’t dial into exactly what is being said,
you may miss the sort of undercurrent of both.
It’s not about arguing,
I don’t think, from either of those positions.
What’s the exact number?
But rather, what’s the right starting point in the conversation?
And if you’re more conservative in inclination,
you are going to start with that more historical
sort of scriptural, traditional historical reading of scripture.
If you’re more liberal,
you’re going to use that as an image that’s going to sort of help guide
where you go in terms of your theological reflection.
But that’s still subject to the text at its best.
Typically, it seems to me,
and push back on this,
Michael, if this isn’t correct,
but it seems to me that in general,
those who fall under the category of liberal are more
conversant and more comfortable with culture than are the conservatives.
And so on a wide range of social issues,
we would see the liberal aspect,
the liberal part of our
church, probably more in line with those social ideas of justice and change.
Whether that be homosexuality,
whether that be abortion,
transgender issues,
whatever the political or social issue might be,
I think there is a sense in which the liberals are
likely to find themselves in agreement with the culture and the movement of the culture,
and the conservatives are more likely to find themselves opposed to the movement of the culture.
And this has long been historically true,
though surprisingly,
in places,
it has been the case that as we look back,
some of the conservative victories we celebrate are when the church stood up and said to the culture,
“No, all religion is not equal.
There is something about Jesus Christ that is unique and that matters.”
And when the church held the line on that,
we look at that as a victory.
We look at that as an important moment in which we preserved or conserved the historic truth of the gospel.
In other places, we look back and we celebrate the work of liberals who said, “Look,
blacks and whites should not be treated unequal,
that we should move toward justice,
we should move toward civil rights.” And the church got involved in that,
and parts of the church
said we were wrong in doing it,
and parts of the church said we have to do it.
And we now look back,
even with work to do,
and say, “We’re glad that there were people
who, because of their faith,
were willing to engage in that battle.”
So I think it is important that we understand whatever camp we think we fit in,
we in the church have benefited from the efforts of both groups in different ways at different times,
and that provides for us a sense of history,
but also, I think, a sense of humility.
Yeah, if it’s possible that we got to the part of the conversation where we said that we really
don’t view these terms with value judgment,
some may have scoffed at that idea,
because that’s so innate to our human reaction,
but as best as we can, we mean it.
And I think a good image of that
actually comes to us historically,
once again, often it’s easier to see things in hindsight.
You look, and we reflect on as people in the Presbyterian tradition on the Reformation,
and we put that with a capital R, right?
But what we forget is that the church for
a thousand plus years before the Reformation capital R had many reformations, plural.
And one of the things that I think is so helpful to look at historically is you would have people
like St.
Benedict who would look at the practice of the church and say,
“Hey, you know what?
We’ve gotten really high and theological.
We have really gone all in on thinking the faith,
but we’ve not been all in on service.
We’ve not been all in on personal prayer.
We’ve not done some of the things that it seems that the Scriptures clearly point to.” So what happens?
Well, you have a movement,
a Reformation within the church in which the Benedictine order happens,
and that moves the church historically in a new direction with a new emphasis.
And instead of it
breaking off and becoming its own denomination,
it actually guided the church on its own path into
a more nuanced direction that included both,
both the Benedictine order in the Catholic church
and then the sort of traditional Catholic movement.
Now,
that isn’t necessarily our historical story
as we tell it,
right?
That comes before our understanding of the Reformation.
And in some ways,
the Reformed movement did change how churches shape and adapt,
and that may be an interesting
conversation for another time.
But it’s worth noting that at its best,
these things always exist
in relation to the other because the other has a perspective advantage that helps move the church
in a direction that ultimately we can look back upon historically and see that the Spirit of God
was at work in that.
One is holding on to these truths,
the other is seeking to be open to
revelation that might continue to come by the leading of the Spirit.
And in this push and pull
relationship between the two,
there tends to be this movement in which the church is sort of
restrained in a positive movement forward in a way that accommodates the proclaiming of the
gospel in whatever time,
place, culture is necessary at that time.
So I think as you look at that,
Clint, you begin to realize that if you assert or give either one of these labels value judgments
over the other, you’re going to foreclose on the opportunity to see in that thing the shades of
truth and perspective that are necessary for the overall guidance of the church when you frame it
in the course of decades and hundreds of years as opposed to our current present moment.
That’s an important point,
Michael, and I think maybe we see it clearly in Christ himself.
As we read the gospels, we see a portrait of this central figure of our faith who really lives under both labels.
Jesus is criticized for being a liberal.
He talks to women.
He doesn’t follow all the rules.
He does things on the Sabbath.
Those around him slung the label of liberal,
had they known it,
they would have pointed that directly at Jesus.
In other ways,
Jesus is a staunch conservative.
He’s calling the people back to something they had lost,
back to a more profound and beautiful reading of Scripture,
back to a kind of faith that was prior
to legalism and divisiveness.
And so Jesus simultaneously lives out both of these realities.
He is conservative and liberal depending on what you’re talking about and who’s talking.
And I think we see in that model,
I think we see in that example,
the idea that these two aspects of
the faith need to live together.
There are clearly moments to hold what we’ve done and hold on to the
past and the present.
There are other moments where we have to be pushed into the future,
and there are things in any system of trying to be church and trying to live out the faith
that need to be changed and challenged.
And it is the interplay of “conservative” and “liberal,”
I think, that often fuels the church’s evolution and movement into a new era, new ages.
And I think it’s very helpful and probably, again,
humbling in the best way to look at Jesus and understand
that He simultaneously lives out both of these labels that we tend to think of as so binary
and so opposed to one another. I do think this leads us to one of the really practical implications of a conversation like
this.
And I think that once again,
it introduces another thing in tension.
That is, we are called as Christians to be people of conviction who live that out in humility.
So I want to make it very
clear in this conversation,
when we talk about this historically,
it may, to some, sound like we’re trivializing something that is very,
very important to a person listening in the conversation.
I mean,
there are some people who might find themselves on that conservative spectrum and say,
“It sounds like you’re saying that Scripture isn’t as important as I think it is,
particularly in this particular way of reading and understanding Scripture.” And that,
by the way, could be said on
the other side as well.
I don’t think either of us are in any way suggesting that Christians should
not be people of conviction.
In fact, I would say it has been,
when you look back on history,
people who are wholly convicted on either side that have been willing to come together and to
duke it out.
In some cases,
to simply have the conflicts, the theological arguments,
the sort of groaning and struggling of churches together seeking to be faithful in our times and places,
and it is out of that very difficult,
humbling process of living in relationship to one another
that we can look back and see the providential work of God at hand.
So I want to make it very clear,
we’re not saying that Christians should be people who don’t have any conviction,
who should say, “Well,
you know, since there’s no value judgment attached to either of these things,
I shouldn’t be either.” I don’t think that’s true.
I think those who are being faithful and who are practicing
their conviction with humility,
that is the process in which God leads the church forward.
So I do hope that we’re clear on that point.
Darrell Bock Yeah.
The danger in these labels is that they
separate things that belong together,
as if caring about the poor and social issues and
social justice and sociological righteousness is different than reading the Bible carefully
and holding up the truth of Scripture and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.
And the danger
that this dichotomy poses is that you allow yourself to say,
“Well, I live in this camp.
I’m conservative, so the liberal people are off taking care of social issues and the poor and the
poor. That’s not my thing.
I’m conservative.” And the liberal is saying,
“Yeah, I don’t need to know
Scripture.
I’ve got this stuff that I’m doing that’s more important.” And it separates something
that belongs together.
And again, I think we see the ultimate example of that in Jesus Christ.
And as the church,
we are called to the best of what lands under the label conservative and what
lands under the label of liberal.
They are not to be isolated.
They are to be in conversation with
one another, at times in tension with one another because it’s that tension that often spurs
growth and challenges us to new ideas and new practices.
And we need both the commitment to
hold on to the past and the commitment to make changes in the future.
We cannot settle for either
one of those things.
And when we allow ourselves to be on team conservative or team liberal to the
exclusion of the other,
then we’re doing the church and ourselves a disservice because each
has something to offer the other.
And it is in the relationship that I think we find it.
Yeah.
And what’s very unfortunate about choosing one over another is that ultimately we become
tempted to make false choices and false dichotomies.
So as to say,
well, I’m going to wear the label liberal.
So therefore,
that means that I cannot theologically believe that Scripture speaks
authoritatively on this subject or that I’m unwilling to entertain that there are some truths
with a capital T.
These are some things that we sometimes unfortunately see divvied out to a camp.
Well, if you’re in this camp,
then this is the whole bundle of things that you must adhere to, believe or accept.
And fundamentally, the church has never been helped by that.
The church has never been helped by pairing people off into groups and saying you shall not pass because
ultimately that’s led to religious extremism instead of the faithful work,
ministry and discernment of the church in the largest sense,
the capital C church.
And I think, Clint, that ultimately we as Christians must be willing,
therefore, to make distinctions between our identity as people
of faith and the identities that are on offer in culture.
And I recognize how unbelievably
difficult and in some cases impossible that is to do in any time,
but certainly the time in which
we live.
And I do hope that we as Christians resist our faith as people and followers of Jesus
Christ, which should be the thing that defines everything that follows it,
that it should be
whether you consider yourself conservative or liberal,
being a follower of Jesus Christ
should be above it.
We cannot apply our labels to Jesus.
Jesus defines every label that follows.
And I think we need to be very careful to not let those labels sort of suck in some of the
political assumptions that come with it in our own time because certainly the differences between
political labels and some of these historic Christian labels,
they have their own differences,
but all of that is subject to the revelation and truth of Jesus Christ.
And we must practice the
humility to keep that separation.
I agree completely, Michael.
And I think one of the
problems, one of the struggles is that we live at a time where people love labels.
They love to box things in.
They use these words as kind of signifiers of who belongs on my team and who is my team against.
And I want to be clear,
labels are not unimportant.
When we call ourselves
white Christian,
black Christian,
conservative Christian,
liberal Christian, gay Christian, straight Christian, it’s not as though those labels have no meaning and no importance.
But when they are important to us more than the thing they modify,
in other words, when whatever I put in front of Christian becomes more important than the word Christian itself, the ultimate label,
then we are in danger of minimizing Christian to maximize the label.
And when we do that,
we’re really building a faith that is about us and not about Jesus.
The only label that I need to put my full trust in and my complete support behind
is that of Christian,
follower of Jesus Christ.
Anything else is simply a subset of that.
Am I conservative?
Maybe.
What are we talking about?
Am I liberal?
Possibly.
What’s the issue?
In other words,
I need to take from Christian to define my other labels,
not the other way around.
I cannot bring my label to Christian and think that Christian serves what I think I mean when
I use another word,
and it has to go the other way.
It has to be Christian first,
and then we can talk about the rest,
hopefully with a real conversation of respect,
of understanding, of listening to one another,
because that’s how things happen.
It’s unfortunately rare,
but that is the tension that has moved the church.
And at times,
maybe we weren’t better off when we moved.
At times, we definitely were.
So there is never a moment where the church gets to lock in and say,
“We should never change anything.” We never possess all the truth.
And until we,
I think,
acknowledge that, until we come to terms with that,
we’re going to struggle,
because we have to allow for the movement of the Spirit through the people.
I do think that when we engage this topic,
it can be incredibly practical.
And I hope that that’s sort of where we land,
because often the merit of ideas can be evaluated by the place where they take us.
The stuff that we think should be on some level evaluated by how it gets lived out in our hands and our feet.
And I think this is particularly important in this conversation.
Wherever you stand in this
cycle, and I sit here right now thinking of people that I know and love who would call themselves
both conservative and liberal,
who would be very disappointed with this conversation right now.
And I think some of that realization comes down to the point of saying that fundamentally,
though we may be people of conviction,
that this is the way that everybody would just see it,
if they would see it like I see it,
then it would be a better world.
That’s a gift.
But if that idea
leads you to separation,
to division,
to fighting and name calling,
if that drives a wedge in the
body of Christ, because we’re unable and unwilling to behave as beloved children and as adopted
sons and daughters of God,
then I would caution us that our theological perspective has
essentially trapped us and has boxed us in from seeing the full breadth of the Gospel.
Theology
that is lived out robustly is one that is reflected in the body being full and being
drawn together and reflecting the kind of reconciliation and grace and love that we
see in the ultimate truth,
Jesus Christ.
So as we sort of now pull back on this,
as we naturally do in conversations,
and we begin to reflect on,
well, where do I stand
in this interesting tension?
I mean, I hope that we can look at how has my vantage and perspective
in life drawn me into deeper fellowship and union with God and with my neighbor.
And if it has helped
me to draw close,
to find humble and grace-filled relationships with people,
even people who think
and see the world differently than I,
that’s a good sign.
If we find ourselves excluded and isolated and unwilling,
unable,
not possessing the vocabulary to talk and engage with other people,
I think that’s a sign that maybe we need to draw back and ask some questions about where our
fundamental presuppositions have maybe kept us from hearing the full weight of the Gospel.
And that is, in some ways, I think I have to confess,
unsatisfying to people who might wear those labels
on either side.
And I recognize that.
At times, I felt that myself.
But I am convicted.
That is part of being those who stand under the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
is that ultimately, though we may have conviction,
that conviction should draw us deeper into relationship with others,
even who may be otherwise convicted, and that’s essential.
Yeah, I think we want to be clear that if you are a person predisposed to holding on to what is,
if you are conservative by nature in regard to your faith and you’re reluctant to rush headlong
into changes for fear that we lose something or get something wrong,
there’s nothing wrong with that.
That’s a wonderful gift to the church in many instances.
If, on the other hand,
you’re a person who’s inclined to push at the edges and to tackle the next thing and to try and see what else
we can change or what needs to be fixed,
that also is a great gift.
And there’s nothing wrong
with celebrating that aspect of what historically we mean when we use those terms,
conservative or in that case liberal.
However,
if we allow the term to lead us to believe that we can judge
someone else’s faith and intention and place within the body of Christ,
then that label is not helping us.
Then that way of applying these words is not beneficial,
because at that point,
they are separating us and they are causing judgment between us in a way that shouldn’t happen.
And it does.
In the world every day with those exact words politically,
they’re lobbed back and forth at one another.
Networks are drawn up by those words.
Political philosophies,
ideas,
rallies,
all the rest.
But in the church,
we have tried to commit ourselves to a pattern
that makes room for both and maybe even honors both,
celebrates when both have helped.
And it is a much more difficult,
it is a much more complex,
it is a much more nuanced way
to treat these words,
that by and large can be unhelpful.
But if we understand them and I think
if we’re willing to wrestle with them a little bit,
it can also be redeemed.
I think what helps
me a lot as I reflect on this,
and the history of the church certainly helps.
I think it can
provide for us a real anchor as we try to navigate this in our present time.
But what really helps
me is when I remember that central, reformed tenant,
that God is going to lead the church
by God’s own providence.
God is sovereign.
God is leading.
And I can have many,
and I do have many
convictions in my life,
theological things that seem to me to be true.
And I believe them strongly.
Yet I just celebrate and give thanks to a God who’s able to rule and overrule even those who are wrong.
And there’s a sense in which it’s freeing to recognize that I stand in a long line
of Christians who have been wrong theologically and yet God has led the church forward by God’s own spirit.
And you could really point to some movements of the church pre-Reformation where
lots of those things,
people change, the church change, but the church stuck together institutionally.
Post-Reformation,
we’ve got to confess we’ve had a temptation whenever we
disagree to just start a new church.
And there’s historical things,
pros cons, and that’s maybe a
conversation for another time.
I just want to point out that even if we do go and start another
church, God is still ruling and overruling.
Even if we find ourselves in places where we cannot resolve the tension,
we seem to have reached the end.
God is able to rule and overrule and we will see in 100,
200,
300, however many years until the Lord returns and we say come Lord Jesus,
right, until that point happens,
God is going to lead this church that the Reformers talked about,
this invisible church, the church of God,
capital C,
that thing that we have in the
midst of that movement,
God’s sovereignty is the last word.
And I think that can be
unbelievably helpful because it frees us from the need to always be right,
which we can’t be,
and it also frees us from this sort of being let loose into this malaise that we shouldn’t
believe anything because it doesn’t matter.
Neither of those are Christian.
We are called to be people
of conviction, yet we stand under the sovereign grace of God who will rule and overrule.
So if we’re wrong in our conviction,
we can trust God to right that in the course of God’s movement by
the power of the Spirit.
At any given moment,
both for individual Christians and for churches and the church,
there are beliefs and practices that we have right and that we should not abandon
and we should hold on to and we should fight for.
And at any given moment,
there are beliefs and
practices that need to be altered,
that need to be changed,
in some cases that need to be abandoned.
There are new things that we need to do that we’re not yet doing.
There is always this balance in
our life of faith,
whether it be individually or corporate,
where we have some of it right
and some of it wrong.
And we need people on both sides of that equation that help us see it.
And we are better for coming together in that way.
Now, I don’t call them conservative and liberal.
I don’t find those terms helpful,
but the ideas of conservatism that is holding on and liberalism
that is changing, I think are very helpful ideas.
And the tension between them helps us
seek to be a faithful church as we are led by God in the Spirit of Christ moving forward.
And I think if we can understand that and if we can even celebrate that,
we are much less likely to use these words as a club,
which doesn’t help us to that goal.
Yeah, I’m so glad that you would join us for this conversation.
And we know when you
deal with a topic like this,
that we all might bring some assumptions,
maybe even some anxieties
about having the conversation.
We hope that you’ve heard in it, something that’s new,
something that might challenge you,
something that might encourage you to find yourself in
that spectrum and realize how you can offer your gift of perspective to the larger church
and to God’s movement with us together as a family.
We would welcome conversation.
Of course, if you have questions,
give us a call at the church,
send us an email,
put in a comment, spark a conversation.
But thanks for spending this time with us.
And we look forward to our next conversation with you.
Thanks for listening.