These days, it seems as though it’s almost embarrassing to be a committed Christian. That's because a certain kind of Christianity, a more fundamentalist Christianity, has taken over the playing field. This leaves those of us who are more moderate followers of Jesus scrambling to explain how we are nothing like the Religious Right, seeking to impose our view of morality on others or forcing public schools to teach creationism in place of science and evolution.

But what sort of Christians are we?  We are not simply "everybody’s welcome" "anything-goes" Christians who don’t really believe in much of anything.  At Danville Congregational Church, we tend to be liberal Christians, who stand in the midst of a long and honorable tradition of liberal Christian faith.

Liberal theology was the dominant religious perspective in this country for many years, and it has greatly influenced the evolution of American society and culture.  Even though a very different kind of theology is in ascendancy right now, liberal Christianity is here to stay.

Liberal is a splendid word.  Before it got mixed up in politics (!), liberal was a word with an excellent reputation: liberal arts, liberty and freedom, to give liberally.  According to the dictionary, to be liberal means to be generous, open-handed, and broad-minded.

Liberal Christians are those who are always willing be skeptical, to ask questions, and to seek further evidence.  We are always open to personal spiritual experience and sacred truth - but we want to understand divine truth in the light of reason, data, and personal experience.  We want the pieces to fit together, so that we don’t have to check our minds at the door when we come to worship; and so that no question is off-limits; and so that no faith assumption is so sacred that it cannot be challenged.

Paul Rasor has written an excellent book entitled, Faith without Certainty.  He says that there are four basic themes of liberal Christianity.

The first one is mediation. We seek to mediate between the sacred and the secular. That’s because we liberal Christians believe that our faith must not stand apart from the secular world; that it has to be connected with the fields of science, art, literature, and contemporary culture. From its earliest beginnings, liberal theology has sought to be a Third Way, between religious orthodoxy on the one hand, and secular humanism on the other.  We have sought a Third Way, a middle path, that asks science and culture to take religion seriously, and that asks religion to take science and culture seriously.

A second attribute of liberal theology is flow. This means that reality inevitably involves movement and change.  Everything is in flux, in process; and everything is connected to everything else.  This is an organic view of the world, and it stands over against a mechanistic, analytical worldview.  Liberal theology does not accept a static view of truth as being unchangeable and immutable.  Now, that doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as truth; it simply means that we are aware that all knowledge is shaped by culture and experience, and thus our understandings will continue to change and evolve over time.

Liberal theology thus does not accept hierarchies or rigid boundaries. We liberal Christians refuse to see the world as being black-and-white, in dualisms like good and evil, the saved and the damned, natural and supernatural.  We tend to see the world in terms of continuums rather than dualisms, because we recognize a fundamental continuity and connection in all things.

A third aspect of the liberal religious mind-set is individual autonomy. For many religious people in the world, authority is primarily located in external sources, such as the Bible or the Koran or the Book of Mormon. Or, it is located in the ministry, priesthood, bishops. Or, it is found in church creeds and doctrines. However, we religious liberals tend to be profoundly suspicious of authority. And so, even though we respect our scriptures and our clergy, we also believe that nothing is true simply because an established authority says so. We liberal Christians believe that all people have a right to think for themselves, and make their own judgments.

Another major difference is that conservative Christians tend to emphasize human sinfulness and  moral failure, while we liberals tend to see human nature in more positive terms. While Calvinism emphasizes human depravity, liberal theology contends that each person is a child of God, created in the image of God, and that each person has a spark of the divine within.

This more elevated view of human nature has led to the fourth aspect of liberal Christianity, which is an emphasis on ethics and morality.  Sunday School was invented nearly 200 years ago by American Protestant Liberal Christians, who had the revolutionary idea that young people are not suddenly saved by Christ one day; rather, they are nurtured into the Christian faith, and nurtured toward personal morality and Christian character. Thus, religious education is not just about learning the right doctrines; instead, the primary goal of Christian education is character formation and personal growth. We liberal Christians tend to see religion as a means to develop human potential.

Liberal theology is also well-known for its emphasis on social ethics.  We believe that we are called by God to help make the world a better place, to work with the poor and those in need.  And we are not only to provide services to the needy, but also to help to change things and improve social and economic structures, in order to create a more just society for all.

As liberal Christians, we are people of faith without certainty, and yet people of deep conviction, who put our trust in the restless, elusive, many-faceted, ever-flowing, spirit of God.

A longer version of this theme can be found under Sermons, June 12, 2005.