From time to time when I get involved in a discussion on hermeneutics with more conservative friends, they object to my more liberal views, which they consider to be in conflict with Scripture.
“You can’t simply pick and choose which parts of the Bible count,” is the invariable charge, whether it’s something like gay rights, the conquest of Canaan, or nomial covenantism. “You have to take the Bible as it is.” The implication: Their views are based on what the Bible actually teaches, while I’m taking a lazy way out and twisting the Bible around to support my own liberal views
I’ve always found that a little insulting, honestly. It’s like the hours I’ve spent in study and in prayer, wrestling with deep issues like Scriptural inspiration and progressive revelation, divine justice and authority, the history of Christianity and Judaism, and everything else, fail to matter simply because the conclusion I have reached differs from theirs.
As in politics, too often differences of faith aren’t a question of being traditional or nontraditional; it’s a case of which tradition we want to follow. The Bible itself expresses a broad range of views that aren’t always in accord with one another, and questions of how to interpret it are at least as old as the books of the Bible themselves.
In other words, if you look around, you may find some of the most liberal and progressive ideas are actually pretty old, and hold a place of high esteem in church history.
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