From: kish@ring1.rutgers.edu (Kish)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Liberal vs. Conservative (was Re: Into the highways and hedges)
Date: 1 Sep 92 07:39:02 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

masimo:
| The fundamental difference between you and I is that I don't need a certain
| unchangeable or immutable authority on which to lean.  God, Godself, and
| God's relationship to me are enough.

REXLEX:
+ You may say this intellectually, but experientially I would hold that this is
+ an impossibility.  Heck, intellectually I'd say this is an impossibility.

Your zeal for "fundamentalism" prevents you from seeing any other possibility.
Also, I don't think you have really responded to masimo's full point.  I have 
included the rest of his paragraph here:

masimo:
| You, on the other hand, seem to need more, you
| seem to need to believe that God laid down some unambiguous truths written in
| the Bible.  This forces you to conform your beliefs to the limited scope of
| scripture and of your even more limited understanding of that scripture.  I
| don't accept the limitation, but neither do I reject the scripture.  I only
| reject giving to it more than it deserves.  I cannot allow it to restrict my
| understanding of God.

I like how this was worded and would like to second its sentiment.  

REXLEX:
+ We were not created that way. We were created with an affinity for the 
+ absolute and we live our lives with absolutes whether they really are as 
+ such or not.

This sounds like a lot of unnecessary suffering and confusion. Maybe its 
possible, perhaps even necessary, to stop manufacturing conceptual reference 
points and then holding them up as substitutes for God.  The 1st and 2nd 
commandments are just as concerned with concepts-as-god as they are with 
golden statues. 

REXLEX:
+ You're the one that mention subjectivity. If you say "God, Godself, and God's
+ relationship to me are enough" you're left with nothing but subjectivity.

If you really live and move and have your being in Christ, then does it even
matter ? If we really live and move and have our being in Christ, wouldn't we
intuitively and spontaneously love God with all our hearts and minds, and 
love our neighbors as ourselves ?  

REXLEX:
+ God? Which God?  

Certainly not the abstractions *most* fundamentalists have created in their own 
image.

REXLEX:
+ God's relationship to me!  What is more subjective.  

In Collosians 13:12 Paul says:

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in 
part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."

If, with St. Paul, you acknowledge that your own understanding is partial, how 
can you say what God may or may not have given to someone else as part of their
subjective experience ?  
	If the danger of a liberal reading of the Bible is a Christianity which
is "soft on sin", then the danger of fundamentalism is myopia.  All too often
being "tough on sin" winds up translating itself into a hardening of the heart 
which is just as opposed to being born of Spirit as shamelessly indulging in 
sins of the flesh.  I would say this hardening of the heart is even more 
insidious since it is very skilled in masquerading as righteousness.  When 
Jesus tells us to "cast the beam out of our own eye", part of what he's talking
about is learning to distinguish between glorifying God and glorifying self.  
I don't get the impression there are many fundamentalists who really have an 
appreciation for how subtle this can become. And yet this sort of issue has to 
be dealt with if we are to say with Paul in Galations 2:20,

"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth 
in me: "

en agape,
-Bill
-- 

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