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njlauren -> RE: Do Liberal Christians Hate The Bible? (7/9/2013 9:28:10 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Charles6682
I would have certainly been considered a "Liberal Christian" growing up. And I still do appericate the Liberal Christians today. They at least show that not every Christian is a hateful,intolerant, right winger. That said, the Bible is pretty clear on some issues. I appericate that Liberal Christians are trying to bring the Bible into the 21st century but the hateful biggots still far outnumber those who are more tolerant. The first thing the "holy rollers" do is point straight to the words in the Bible to justify their hate. But anyone can use words to make thier aurgument. I consider myself to be Spiritual, Non-Religous these days. I don't follow any one particular religion.
The problem is that 'pretty clear' isn't all that clear, people are citing biblical passages and saying "see, see, it is in the bible, black and white".....only problem is, they are reading a translation of books that were written in an ancient language, that has been translated (and often mistranslated), and represents in the case of the OT, thoughts of a totally different religion. Not to mention that there is no such thing as an 'authentic' NT, Christians, especially fundamentalists, believe it came from God like the 10 commandments, but it didn't, the NT text we have in the bible are not original, they have been edited, modified, changed, miscopied and who knows what else in the time since Christ. Much of what is cited on gays, for example, is not clear, there is context to those things, but we are expected to believe they are literal truth. I remember some old church lady type saying "The King James Bible was good enough for Moses, good enough for me" *lol* (on top of everything else, the KJV is one of the more inaccurate versions around).
The difference with liberal Christians is they look at scripture as what they believe it to be, works of authors inspired to write them, to explain what they felt and how they saw things, and in reading it it is our duty to figure out what they really meant. Scripture was never meant to be read literally, that is a phenomenon of the 19th century, discernment has always been part of the process. Jews are supposed to read scripture, and each time they read it ask themselves what God is saying, and various Jewish traditions have taken that further; the Catholic Church doesn't rely on scripture alone, they also have church teaching; the anglican based faiths talk about the 3 legged stool, of scripture, church teaching and individual discernment. The literal words came out of a movement in the 1850's, in part because of the challenge of science, it is where fundamentalist Christianity came from. The problem is, they are claiming words in a bible as truth that we don't even know what was original and what wasn't, and was written by men, no more and no less. At least Jewish scripture was copied correctly, it was kept under the hands of scribes, and copying is tightly controlled, plus Hebrew text uses what is known as checksum to make sure copies are correct (each letter in the Hebrew Alphabet has a number associated with it, and you can sum up the rows and collumns, those numbers are known, and if a copy doesn't add up, something isn't right). By the time of the first 'real' bible, the vulgate bible of Jerome, several centuries had passed, and scripture had been copied many times, often by slaves who were illiterate copying text with no spaces, no punctuation, nothing, just rows and rows of greek and aramaic text, written on both sides of a parchment.....there are over 1500 ancient greek texts of the gospels, ranging in age from 4th century AD on, and they have 350,000 items that they disagree on.
What a liberal Christian will do is tell you that the bible is not perfect, that it contains things which are man made, things that are mistakes, things that represent local culture 2500 years ago. Fundamentalists do that, they will argue leviticus when it comes to gays but dismiss the rest as "jewish cultural law", yet to a Jew that is not only ridiculous, but blasphemy, for all the leviticine text is law, period, and to reject 99.9% of it to take the one thing you like is pretty dicey. The key difference is liberal Christians filter the bible through knowledge, experience and what their heart tells them, and hope that is what God wants them to do. I think that liberal Christians take Christ's admonishment that the law is loving others as we would love each other and God, all else is commentary, whereas fundamentalists seem to take the idea that being a Christian means judging others and using the bible as a sledgehammer against others who don't believe as they do, and who find ways to patently make themselves look like horse's pitoots when they support things that directly contradict the very scripture they proclaim.
I think Joseph Campbell explained the difference, when he said reading the bible fundamentally is like walking into a restaurant, seeing steak on the menu and eating the menu.
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