From a conversation on liberal and conservative and their use in political theology and applied ethics: The approach to categorization and and systematization of what is reformed, liberal, conservative and political seems strained. For example, For the most part, theological liberalism as it entered the church did not look like liberalism as we think of it today.... did not deny the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, or a literal resurrection from a literal death. Rather, sermons encompassed themes of patriotism, civic virtues, the Golden Rule, and the value of individuals and freedom—and these sermons claimed biblical backing. Horne This redefinition of liberalism might be serving to the arguments but its counterintuitive and contrary to careful analysis. Redefining what has always been understood to be conservative thought as liberal thought might reduce the entire speech to mere name calling. More, we all know that theological liberalism is inherently moralistic; its inherently moralistic not because of an affinity for sacred scripture but due to the abandonment of it. Liberals do not come to no social ethic due to the abandonment of scripture but an unscriptural social ethic, one irreconcilable with the teachings of scripture. Their ethics are at times the promulgation and defense of evils in the words and robes of good. How would we know? Because we measure their ethics by scripture and find them flawed. The reason that we can find moral stances flawed is exactly because we have sufficient biblical instruction for the analysis of human practice. The two categories are not, liberals who think they get their ethics from the Bible and conservatives who think they cannot. The two categories are those who use the word of God as the rule of faith and life and those that do not. Those who do not inform their faith and practice from scripture have always and will always be the liberals. In the Gospels the liberals were the pharisees. During the Reformation it was Rome, but the ana-baptists were right there with them. Today its those that abuse the scriptures to create irreconcilable ethics and those that deny the application of the word of God to ethics in general. When the early presbyterian liberals of the last century began they did indeed move from within the traditional theologically conservative Presbyterianism they were born into; they had a transformative ethic because reformed and presbyterian thought is inherently transformative; they had a political application of the law and the gospel because we always had. None of this was innovation in the mere fact of its existence (todays more antinomian angle might have been thought innovative if it had existed). Their move was one away from the biblical ideas and applications of transformative theologies to unbiblical versions just as their understanding of the virgin birth and the resurrection abandoned the same. The abandonment of applied christian ethics with the intend to preserve conservative theology thus fails on two fronts: it is not conservative and it does not preserve our theology. Neiswonger
Posted on: Tue, 06 May 2014 20:39:10 +0000
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