Are liberal Protestants hypocrites?

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ltwin said:
Your knowledge of Pentecostalism is what is rediculous. I, and the majority of Pentecostals throughout world, don’t believe what you claim we believe.

Some of us believe that the normative physical sign of being baptized with the Holy Spirit is that one will speak in unknown tongues. Many more of us believe that speaking in tongues is just one gift among many and not a sign of Spirit baptism or empowerment.

However, that is not the same thing as denying that other Christians have the Holy Spirit. We believe that all born again Christians are indwelt by the Holy Spirit and are members of the Church. We believe, as other Protestants believe, that justification is by faith alone. Those who have faith and repentance will be saved, whether they speak in tongues or not.
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Then forgive me. I actually knew that and meant to add “except for educated Pentecostals”.
 
newenglandsun said:
I was once a liberal Protestant and my family is starting to lean toward liberal Protestantism although my extended family is far more fundamentalist. I was just wondering if liberal Protestants were hypocrites. For instance, my father would state believes we should interpret the Bible in light of the creeds but nevertheless, still feels the need to write up the notion of Mary as Theotokos completely unnecessary and keeps referencing some sort of turtle. My family meets with a couple of friends of ours every weekend to discuss different current issues and how Christians should deal with them. Penal substitutionary atonement is always enforced. Statements about the Catholic faith are brought up that I look up afterward and find out were eggregious errors (Catholics struggle with works, Catholics added the “apocrypha” into the Bible, Catholics added to the traditions). Statements are made about homosexuals and they insist one moment that it’s all right and the next moment that it’s not all right. Of course, they maintain to conservative viewpoints on the historical Jesus as well and fight for women in ministry (which for them means women pastors, priests, bishops, etc.). All based on their criticisms of Biblicism which they seem to still maintain.

It makes no sense. Are liberal Protestants hypocritical in this sense? Are they actually living up to their own standards?
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I was raised in a very fundamentalist sect and I deffinately think they are the wrong ones. I was taught that anything done in church had to have ‘permission’ from the bible to be valid even flowers candles and organs were forbidden by them.

How can this be anything but idolatry for the bible?

Maybe your relatives confusion about homosexuals can be attributed to the fact that homosexual orientation is not considered a sin on it’s own. It is when people act on their homosexuality that it becomes a sin.
 
newenglandsun said:
Then forgive me. I actually knew that and meant to add “except for educated Pentecostals”.
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Apology accepted. But you would still be incorrect even saying that “uneducated” Pentecostals “typically” believe that anyone who doesn’t speak in tongues isn’t or can’t be saved. Whether they are educated or not, most Pentecostals agree that speaking in tongues is not a “sign,” “requirement” or “work” in any way necessary for salvation.
 
JonNC said:
For example?

Jon
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There was one Lutheran fella on here who is from Minnesota I believe. He said his rite was good with homosexual marriage, it baffled me and I said “I wonder what JonNC would say.” Someone chimed in and said your group of Lutherans are against it.
 
dronald said:
There was one Lutheran fella on here who is from Minnesota I believe. He said his rite was good with homosexual marriage, it baffled me and I said “I wonder what JonNC would say.” Someone chimed in and said your group of Lutherans are against it.
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Agreed. This is reinterpreting scripture in order to fit a social or political belief.
Of course, I would contend they are no longer Lutheran, but that’s a confessional view.

Jon
 
Everyone is a hypocrite.

Either this next week, or at least by the next month, both you and I will do something we don’t think we should.

When Jesus told Peter that he would deny him before the cock crows, Peter denied that would happen.

Having said these things, it is one thing if you realize your mistake and work to be more holy and quite another to not care about your sin.

Hang on a second…there is a mote in my eye, I’ll be right back…
 
I think you need to understand where they are coming from. I find nothing hypcritical in the views of liberals such as Marcus Borg. They simply approach Christianity from a completely different viewpoint. They start somwhere along these lines:
  • The resurrection of Jesus is more than an historical event. It is a powerful spiritual transformative experience of Jesus as living, and that has happened to Christians throughout the centuries. The early Christians came to believe that Jesus was not dead, that they could actually experience him as alive and that they in some way met God in him, that he was more than a mere man.
  • The early Christians interpreted their powerful spiritual experience in terms of their three tiered worldview. So, if Jesus was no longer powerless in Sheol/death, but was available here and now as a life giving spirit (1Cor 15:45), then he was with God. And God’s heaven was located above the sky, “up there”. And so he must have ascended into heaven.
  • They interpreted Jesus’ death in terms of their Jewish heritage and came to think that it was a sacrifice for human sin, in the same way that animals were slaughtered in the Old Covenant. That is how they made sense out of the senseless death of Jesus.
  • As time passed, stories were told and retold about Jesus, and the further one moved away from the actual historical events, the more imagery and symbolism was added, and the more physical the resurrection became. The physicality of the resurrection narratives was also developed in response to the gnostic Christians, who thought the physical world was evil and that Jesus never actually was a real human.
  • Many liberals today may have had a powerful Jesus-experience. They belivee that it is real, and not merely a brain induced hallucination. The question is: what to do with it. Do we today, who have a radically different view of the cosmos, need to adopt a first century worldview in order to make sense out of the experience? Or can we try to reinterpret the foundational experiences of the early Christians in light of our modern worldview? This is the crux of the matter: they need not look at the Bible as the inspired word of God at all. It is written by people who were transformed by God, but their interpretation of their experience of the divine was colored by their woldview, as is inevitable in any age. In stead of asking, “Did the literal virgin birth happen?” They may ask: “why did the Christians at the time use such symbolism about Jesus. What was it about him that made them compare him to emperors and greek gods who were also claimed to be born by virgins? And if we agree with them that Jesus was far more than a mere ordinary human and that such language was appropriate at the time to express how they felt about Jesus, then is this not more important than whether or not the event literally happened that way?”
While we may not agree with this view, it is not incoherent and it is not hypcritical. You can see it constrasted with conservativism in this debate between Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright:

amazon.com/The-Meaning-Jesus-Visions-Plus/dp/0061285544/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1384794709&sr=8-8&keywords=marcus+borg
 
Just because one finds that a better method of biblical interpretation is not to believe what our particular religious institution tells us to believe…but that we must study and seek to understand scripture within it’s historical context, to whom was it written. for what purpose, what was going on during that time in Israel’s history or in early church history that caused a book to be written or a letter to be sent.

Just because we seek to understand the mind set of those who were influenced by history and their own limited understanding of things as they sought to convey themes and beliefs that they had come to believe at that time.

That is not hypocritical…
 
concretecamper said:
The one thing I see as hypocritical is a protestant thinking other protestants are wrong in their interpretation and that they are correct.
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ltwin said:
Why would that be hypocritical?
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I second that question. The aforementioned example – regarding one’s own beliefs as correct – doesn’t fit any definition of hypocritical that I’ve ever learned. Perhaps there’s a new definition. 🙂
 
I think it’s probably worth pointing out that there’s a difference between someone being politically liberal and subscribing to Liberal theology.

Specifically, Liberal theology believes that the Bible should be interpreted as you would any other ancient document and that no kind of special consideration should be shown to it with regards to textual criticism or hermeneutical interpretation.

So, basically, what you’re looking at in Liberal theology is someone who doesn’t think that Bible is inspired (let alone inerrant). It is, in their view, only a record of the thoughts of the people who wrote it.

Now, that usually leads to rather liberal views politically as well, but not always. I was privileged in my lifetime to meet and to discuss theology and politics with George MacPherson Docherty (i.e. the man who put “under God” in the Pledge) and, while he was certainly a proponent of Liberal theology, his politics were more moderate to even conservative, at least on some points.

Conversely, look at someone like Rob Bell. He’s certainly liberal politically, but he nevertheless holds a rather high view of scripture.
 
I read Bell’s book Love Wins back when I was a liberal hoping I could hail him as a universalist hero. Boy did he certainly shock me and give me a tough pill to swallow finding out he didn’t support such teachings and rebuts universalism in his book.

I think liberals read into a lot of things.
 
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