Saturday, February 18, 2006
Generous Orthodoxy
In Generous Orthodoxy on page 59 Bryan McLaren quotes a mentor of his as having said "Scratch the paint of a liberal and you'll find an alienated fundamentalist underneath." Coming from a fellowship, the churches of Christ, that fractured a religious body over having pianos in worship, I know what he is talking about. This is one example among many of particular doctrinal points that could get one into trouble. Such rule keeping and enforcement, I think, has produced a lot of liberals. Some of these are so liberal that they switched to the Baptists. Some went to seminary/grad school where they fanned out to cover the theological spectrum.
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2 comments:
I had a conversation recently with one of my professors at Lipscomb. He was marveling about how many Bible students come out of the (quite conservative) Bible program at Freed-Hardeman University and become liberal. He speculated that the modernistic, inductive, fact-based method of Scripture study that they taught tended to cause a reaction in the opposite direction. Yet, the people at FHU seem oblivious to the results of their modernistic take on the Bible. I've seen the same reactionary post-graduation reversal among my own fellow-Bible majors as he observed with his friends in the 70s.
Bren,
Just noticed your post yesterday. I have been thinking along the same lines recently. I was a 70's Harding graduate and as I was in school there I distinctly had the belief that either "we" were right or Christianity was wrong. After all, all my life I'd heard about the rational mistakes made by the rest of Christianity. They couldn't even parse Acts 2:38 correctly. I didn't know at the time that there was an alternative to a modernistic, inductive, fact-based philosophy, as you say. Well there was existentialism, but it didn't persuade me. Since our fellowship, in practice if not in word, denies feelings and spirit, it is quite logical that many from our heritage become theologically liberal.
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