Liberal Gospel

He perfectly characterized liberal Christianity as that in which

“A God without wrath

brought men without sin

into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

- Richard Niebuhr The Kingdom of God in America (1937)

Golden Retriever Churches

"Everyone knows these “golden retriever” churches. If the culture throws a stick, “golden retriever” churches go bounding after it, slobbering and eager to please. Even those who happily own these indiscriminately accepting animals bemoan the fact that if a burglar broke in, the dog would just hold the flashlight for him. Too many inculturated churches are holding too many flashlights for too many burglarizing forces and figures."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

The contrmplative mind is a different mind that does not read the moment in terms of us and them, right or wrong, black or white, gay or straight, catholic or protestant. It  just,  "It  Is". You can see what detachment from your own ego that necessitates. Let each moment be what it is without pigeonholing it. Without putting in in some catorgory, up or down, in or out, with me or agaianst me. If we don't learn this.....  nothing will change..... Even our church; utterly divided between liberals and conservatives. Both convinced that the other has nothing to tell them, which is NEVER true. And, of course, the contemplative mind is the only one who can know that becuse they do not divide the field of the moment."

- Richard Rohr

"Sometimes I feel like the most liberal person among conservatives, and sometimes like the most conservative among liberals. How can I fit together my religious past with my spiritual present?"

- Philip Yancey. Soul Survivor.

Time Interpretation

"Zwingli came as an admirer and student of the renowned humanist scholar Erasmus. As a general principle humanist rejected the church's claim that under the guidance of the Holy Spirit what was implicit in the teaching of the Apostles was clarified and made explicit overtime, which meant that modern teachers were deemed best and most authoritative. In contrast, Christian humanists believe that the sources closest to Christ were most reliable, beginning with the apostles and with the Bible - rather than modern clarifications as the purest source of Christian truth."

- J. Denny Weaver. Becoming Anabaptist. 2nd Edition

The Bible Is Historically Accurate- Or Not - And Is Again

"The critics once insisted, for example, on the nonexistence of ancient Hittites in the Fertile Crescent, of camels in Egypt in Abraham’s time, of writing in Moses’ time, and of Sargon and Belshazzar in much later centuries. Now all learned men are aware that the Hittite empire rivaled the Babylonian and Egyptian, and even the Hittite language has been recovered; moreover, camels and writing have both been restored to ancient Egypt, and Sargon and Belshazzar are no longer dismissed as imaginary. Many other “historical impossibilities” once detailed to discredit the accuracy of the Bible and to caricature any notion of its total reliability have emerged to render ludicrous some gifted critics whose remarkable learning was dwarfed by a prejudice against scriptural reliability. Today the documentary theories of Wellhausen are no longer assigned mantic authority, and what was historically impossible to many biblical critics a few generations ago is frankly conceded by more critical historians to be now convincingly attested."

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 4 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 174.

When Church is Quite Unbearable

“Quite unbearable.”

Written in Bonhoeffer’s diary entry in 1939 in New York where he attended church at Riverside, the church Rockefeller had built for Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick was a great liberal.

"The whole thing was a respectable, self-indulgent, self-satisfied religious celebration. This sort of idolatrous religion stirs up the flesh which is accustomed to being kept in check by the Word of God. Such sermons make for libertinism, egotism, indifference. Do people not know that one can get on as well, even better, without “religion”?.....Perhaps the Anglo-Saxons are really more religious than we are, but they are certainly not more Christian, at least, if they still have sermons like that. I have no doubt at all that one day the storm will blow with full force on this religious hand-out, if God himself is still anywhere on the scene.

~Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer:Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy