The Liberal Church

Christianity has many attractions, but one of them surely is that it offers people sustenance that they can find nowhere else in the culture. It offers, among other unique goods, transcendence, a solid ground for morality, and a solid set of morals to go with it. It is because so many liberal churches have abandoned these benefits and embraced the moral thinking fashionable in the larger culture that their pews are being emptied. People, particularly the young, see no reason to commit to a church that offers them on Sunday morning nothing that the world doesn't offer during the rest of the week.

This is the theme of a new book titled Exodus: Why Americans are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity, by journalist and author Dave Shiflett. Shiflett interviewed Southern Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. and Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission President Richard Land for the book and devotes a lot of Exodus to their thoughts. An article by Jeff Robinson for BP News discusses Shiflett's work. Robinson writes:

Liberal Christianity's rejection of the inspiration, inerrancy and authority of the Bible is to blame for its demise, Land said, adding that is the reason the mainline denominations are losing members and conservative churches are drawing them in.

"... Once you embrace liberal Christianity, you cut loose from your anchor," Land said. "And you keep drifting. Liberal Christianity had totally abandoned biblical authority by the late 1950s. They said they had 'moved beyond' Scripture."

Mohler says the mainline downgrade is perhaps seen most clearly in its views of sexuality.

"[Liberal churches] make no demands, including demands on sexual behavior," Mohler said. "Why should, for example, a sixteen-year-old boy and girl bother to go to a liberal church? What does this church have to offer that's any different from what they get from the culture? The church tells them that if they want, they can have sex. They already know that. That's what society tells them. The church needs to tell them that they can't have sex, and has to explain why.

"The mainline denominations have decided that the most basic human drive, sex, can be permanently separated from the most basic human institution, marriage. There is no room for Christianity in that equation."

There's more about the book at the link, but the main theme presses upon me as I prepare to travel to Orlando in August to participate in the Church-wide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Among the resolutions which will be taken up and voted upon are whether the Church should bless same sex unions and whether it should ordain homosexual men and lesbian women to the ministry.

Affirmative votes on either of these resolutions would be, in my view, a calamity for the ELCA. It may be true for all I know that Lutheran theologians are divided on how to properly interpret the Scriptural passages bearing upon the issue of homosexuality. Even so, it would be extremely reckless, in the absence of a strong theological consensus, to overturn 500 years of Lutheran scholarship and 2000 years of Christian tradition simply to conform church praxis to a contemporary social fashion.

Moreover, should the voting members assembled in Orlando see fit to approve these resolutions, what basis would future assemblies have for refusing to bless or ordain those who live in loving and committed relationships with more than one other person? Why should those people be excluded from the church's grace? On what grounds could the church withhold its blessing from heterosexuals living together in deeply committed but unmarried relationships or sharing in loving but adulterous relationships? Once the church decides that the sex of the two people in a relationship no longer matters then it has no justification left for saying that anything else about the relationship matters either. It will have cast itself adrift with no compass, no rudder, but plenty of sail to be pushed about by whatever wind of prevailing taste happens to be blowing through the culture.

What does such a church offer to people that the wider culture doesn't? Why should anyone bother to commit themselves to it? Certainly not to find spiritual anchorage and moral refuge from the gales of relativism sweeping through modern society. The Church which abandons its theological and moral moorings loses its distinctiveness, and it's only a matter of time before it finds itself wondering where its parishioners have all gone.