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In this episode, Trent takes on the empty absurdities of liberal Christianity.
Transcription:
In a 2009 speech given at an atheistic conference, the late philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the term deepity to refer to statements that seem profound at first glance but upon closer examination turn out to be trivially true at best like (“Love is just a word”) or just nonsense (“Have faith in faith”). Some atheists say theology is just a bunch of “deepities” and in this episode I’m going to expose liberal theology that really are just a bunch of worthless deepities.
Before I do that though the existence of bad theology doesn’t prove there is no good theology just as pseudo-science doesn’t disprove real science or philosophy that is just word salad, like the word of Deepak Chopra, doesn’t disprove real philosophy.
One good example of “junk” liberal Christianity can be found in a 2019 New York Times interview with Serene Jones, a Protestant minister and president of Union Theological Seminary. Here are a few of her “deepities”:
- “[The] empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed.”
- “Living a life of love is driven by the simple fact that love is true.”
- “The message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death.”
When I hear this kind of talk, I think of the episode of The Simpsons where Rev. Lovejoy is selling ice cream flavors such as “Blessed Virgin Berry” and “Command-mint.” He then offers Lisa “Unitarian ice cream”. But it’s just an empty bowl. Lisa remarks, “There’s nothing here,” to which Lovejoy responds, “Exactly.”
According to their website: Unitarian universalists “beliefs are diverse and inclusive. We have no shared creed. Our shared covenant (our seven Principles) supports “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Liberal Christianity at least tries to pay lip service to Jesus but it often comes off more like a unitarian wannabe.
A good way to expose the emptiness of liberal Christian “deepities” is to ask some simple questions: How is love stronger than death? What makes love “true”? In doing this, you can show that the person is just dressing up secular, hopeful thinking with religious language.
I also notice that adherents of liberal Christianity often defend their position by casting traditional concepts of God and faith as being for simpletons. However, their hasty dismissals often reveal their own simplistic grasp of theology. For example, Jones says, “Crucifixion is not something that God is orchestrating from upstairs. The pervasive idea of an abusive God-father who sends his own kid to the cross so God could forgive people is nuts.”
I expect this misrepresentation of the Trinity from village atheists, but not from a so-called “Christian” minister, who should understand that God became man to freely offer himself as a sacrifice of love that outweighs the evil of our sins.
Jones also says Christians who are “obsessed” with the Resurrection have a “wobbly faith.” She writes, “What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie? No, faith is stronger than that.” Well, tell that to St. Paul, who declared, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14).
Jones tries to defend her assertion about the unimportance of the Resurrection by saying, “The stories are all over the place. There’s no resurrection story in Mark, just an empty tomb. Those who claim to know whether or not it happened are kidding themselves.”
Now, it’s true the shorter ending of Mark does not contain an appearance of the resurrected Jesus, but it certainly contains a resurrection account because the young man at the tomb tells the women, “Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you” (Mark 16:6-7, emphasis added).
This leads to another good question to ask: How is a non-miraculous Christianity different from morally upright atheism? Jones says hell is just the reality we create when we “reject love” and in this Easter represents “love triumphing over suffering.” But you can be an atheist who puts hope in love and patiently endures suffering, so why even bother being a Christian? Indeed, when the non-Christian interviewer asks if Jones is a Christian in spite of denying Jesus’ miracles, she answers, “Well, you sound an awful lot like me, and I’m a Christian minister.”
You might think she’s a Christian based on her saying all people are saved, which is what universalists teach. But when she was asked in the New York Times interview what happens after death she said ““I don’t know! There may be something, there may be nothing. My faith is not tied to some divine promise about the afterlife.”
Jones might say her theology isn’t equivalent to atheism because she believes in God, but her God is so limited and disinterested in human affairs that he might as well be nonexistent. For example, Jones says she doesn’t worship an all-powerful, all-knowing God, because that’s a product of “Roman juridical theory and Greek mythology” (even though Greco-Roman deities were limited in power, knowledge, and goodness). She also claims that God doesn’t answer prayers, and instead of “controlling the world,” he merely “invites” us into love, justice, and mercy.
This is fairly common among liberal Christians. William Lane Craig once asked John Dominic Crossan, one of the world’s most famous New Testament scholars, if God exists. Crossan gave a vague answer saying God is just what we believe in. So he asked if God existed during the Jurassic age when there were no humans to believe in him?
William Lane Craig:
During the Jurassic Age when there were no human beings? Did God exist?
John Dominic Crossan:
Meaningless question,
William Lane Craig:
But surely that’s not a meaningless question. I mean, it’s a factual question. Was there a being who was the creator and sustainer of the universe during that period of time when no human beings existed? It seems to me on your view, you’d have to say no.
John Dominic Crossan:
Well, I would probably prefer to say no because what you’re doing is trying to put yourself in the position of God and ask, well, how is God apart from Revelation? How is God apart from faith? I don’t know if you can do that.
The God of many liberal Christians might as well be a self-help book you pick up every few months for advice. By the way, I appreciate when you guys like our videos and subscribe to the channel, since that is one part of my work where self-help won’t help, your help is always greatly appreciated.
I also appreciate when atheists call out Christians who believe in such a concept. For example, the atheist B.C. Johnson once criticized liberal answers to the problem of evil that claim evil exists because God just isn’t powerful enough to stop it. He writes: Such a God if not dead, is the next thing to it. And a person who believes in such a ghost of a God is practically an atheist. To call such a thing a god would be to strain the meaning of the word.
With this understanding of God, it’s not surprising that places like the United Church of Canada that have ordained women like Gretta Vosper to be ministers in spite of the fact that Vosper is an atheist. One of her books’ titles perfectly summarizes the essence of liberal theology: With or Without God: Why the Way We Live Is More Important Than What We Believe.
One of my favorite take downs of liberal Christianity comes from the late atheist Christopher Hitchens. In 2012 Unitarian Universalist Marilyn Sewell interviewed Hitchens and criticized him for not engaging more “liberal Christianity” instead of what she’d consider fundamentalism. Like Serene Jones, Sewell calls herself a Christian but she believes Jesus was merely a model of social justice and that salvation is a metaphor for how one can go from “being dead to the world and dead to other people, and can be resurrected to new life.”
In response, Hitchens bluntly said, “If you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”
Our Easter joy is not found in something meaningless such as “hope in hope” or “faith in faith.” Our hope also isn’t grounded in the platitudes of liberal Christianity. Listen to how Serene Jones describes her faith and how hollow it is compared to God demonstrating his love for us through his life, death, and resurrection.
Serene Jones:
We are God created, Jesus grounded grace, bounded love founded church grounded. We proclaim the universal reach of God’s love and mercy, and we affirm that we are interwoven in the depths of the earth, bound together and in spirited with the breath of God’s life, and despite the harsh truth that we turn away from it and sin and seek our own destruction, the spirit moves back through us and calls us to seek life abundant. That’s it.
Whatever that is, it isn’t Christianity. And even within the Catholic church you can find nuns and priests members of the parish council preaching this kind of nonsense. And young people are sick of it. It’s why the Associate Press covered a story back in April about the growth of young traditionalists within the Catholic faith.
Christianity is grounded in Christ, the reality of who Christ is grounded in his resurrection from the dead. That is the only fact that explains the advent of Christianity in an ancient world that didn’t build religions around platitudes. The only reason the disciples did not think their rabbi was just another failed messiah like all the others is because he proved he was not a failure to them three days after his crucifixion. God proved “love is stronger than death,” not through humanistic platitudes, but through a glorious triumph over the grave. As Christ himself declared, “I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev. 1:18).
*This* is the Faith in which we have faith and it is more comforting than the drivel of liberal Christianity. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a blessed day.