Churches for People Who Dislike God
By E.M. Cadwaladr, American Thinker:
I have friends and family members who attend liberal churches. I know a little about these institutions and have even attended their services once or twice. Strictly speaking, I don’t think they can be accurately called “Christian” churches. Their authoritative standard is not the biblical Christ, but a pastiche of all-too-human ideas.
Historical Christianity isn’t a collection of warm, fuzzy feelings. It encompasses many things, but at its heart, it makes bold and substantial claims about the way the universe is organized. God is God – the maker of all things, the cause that underpins all mere effects. Man, although loved by God, is merely a creature. The universe does not revolve around how we humans happen to feel about it. Liberal “Christianity” has turned this basic relationship on its head. Liberal Christians believe, typically, that God created the universe and man by an evolutionary process we ourselves can fully understand. Now, they would have you think, God serves us like a kind of rich uncle who whispers helpful advice now and then and rigs the odds a little in our favor.
For two thousand years, real Christians have turned to the Bible as the authoritative word of God, no matter how uncomfortable the consequences. Odd though this may seem to the secular mind, belief in the Bible’s authority is an entirely coherent belief. We believe that God exists and that He spoke by the prophets and the apostles, creating an authoritative written text. The unstated “doctrine” of liberal churches is far less coherent. They believe that the Bible is subject to a kind of literary analysis (the so-called “higher critical method”), which implicitly assumes that the Scriptures themselves are faulty – requiring not merely insightful interpretation, but substantial correction by a purely human means. In other words, they believe that academics can legitimately rewrite the Bible to explain what it would have said but for the errors of its human authors – if not the errors of God himself.
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