Liberal Christianity

A couple of fellow bloggers (http://canadaconservative.blogspot.com/ and http://ellenacious.livejournal.com/) have linked to this rather interesting article:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-allen9jul09,0,2668973.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

A couple of points to note. I was listening to a message by John Lennox, and he said when you relativize the absolute you end up absolutizing the relative. This is certainly true about our legal system. A system which worked quite well when most people acknowledged a higher moral law abandons justice when a constitution becomes the absolute authority in the land. I think this applies to liberal churches as well. As soon as they relativize the Bible, they absolutize their own ideas.

A second point. Protestant churches since the time of the Reformation have taken the Bible as their source of authority (i.e. the revealed truth of God). The Roman Catholic church says the Bible was given by the church and so the church is the source of authority, together with the Bible (as interpreted by the church). The charismatic movement takes the Bible plus new revelation as the source of authority. But interestingly enough, most evangelical churches reject the Protestant position when it comes to church truth (particularly with regards to church government, but also including the nature, purpose and composition of the church). And so they end up falling for one of three errors. They adopt a Roman Catholic position (i.e. our denomination does it like this), a pragmatic position (we do it this way because it works better than the Biblical way) or a relativistic position (you do it you way and we do it our way, but who’s to say one way is better than another). But when a church follows this way of thinking about one area of doctrine, it’s easy to fall into this way of thinking for other areas of doctrine.