In this episode Trent reveals the one question to always ask liberal Christians when they claim you aren’t acting like Jesus.
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Transcript:
The One Question to Always Ask Liberal Pastors
I’ve talked before about how liberal Christian politicians often claim that Christian doctrine demands believers support evils like abortion and so-called same-sex marriage, as well as their pet economic policies.
So I rolled my eyes when Kentucky governor and possible Democratic presidential candidate Andy Beshear said that President Trump is bad because he “hijacks faith” for his own agenda.
Andy Beshear:
“I’m seeing Donald Trump, JD Vance, and others hijack faith. They’re using it to kick somebody while they’re down instead of to lift them up.”
Now, I have previously criticized President Trump’s policies and how he talks about the Christian faith.
But Beshear’s complaint makes me want to say, “Physician, heal thyself,” because liberal politicians do this all the time.
You can see this in the James Talarico campaign posting on their signs, “It’s time to start flipping tables,” which literally hijacks Jesus’ message about the wrongness of monetizing worship and uses it to motivate people to support Talarico’s political message.
So in all of this, there’s one question that you should ask liberal pastors and liberal Christians that shows the massive hypocrisy in making the claim that we ought to follow Jesus’ example.
And it’s this:
Have you subscribed to the Counsel of Trent?
Because if you haven’t, then how can we take you seriously as someone who claims they want to build up the Body of Christ?
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But no. In all seriousness, here’s the question:
Do You Think Jesus Is God?
Is Jesus God incarnate? The God-man?
I mean, if you think I’m a bad person because my political views disagree with what you think Jesus would want, then I’m going to ask you: Why should I care what Jesus wanted if he was just some first-century hippie doing cheap magic tricks?
And why should I believe your interpretation of Jesus’ teachings when you reject the most fundamental truth that Jesus taught—which is that Jesus Christ is the unique way to know the Father because he is the Father’s only Son, not in virtue of something like adoption or emulation, but in virtue of sharing the same divine nature?
This is put together in a hilarious video from Lutheran Satire, which makes the same point: before we debate what Jesus taught about something like homosexuality, we need to first settle the debate on who Jesus is in the first place.
Clip:
“Do you believe that Jesus is God?
“You don’t?
“Well, if you don’t believe that Jesus is divine, then I don’t care where you think he stands on sex or gays or cultural warfare.
“So until you think his claims about himself are really true, then I see no point in debating his other words with you.”
First, I hope that one day we have enough patrons so that I can have a Muppet co-host.
Clip:
“Co-host?”
“Oh, no. No, I’m replacing you.”
And second, when someone says that they’re a true Christian because they follow Jesus’ example to love people, and so because of that they support homosexual conduct or abortion—especially someone like James Talarico, who, as I noted in a previous episode linked below, blasphemously defended abortion by using the mystery of the Incarnation—then we should respond by saying they’re not a Christian at all if they just think Jesus was a wise man.
That is essentially the same view Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and almost every other non-Christian on the planet has about Jesus.
Here’s James Talarico saying that his congregation should follow different “prophetic voices” apart from Jesus if they feel called:
James Talarico:
“It could be, for you, a different prophetic voice from a different faith tradition: Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, Lao Tzu, the Dalai Lama.
“Or it may be a prophetic voice from history: Black Elk, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, Dolores Huerta, Toni Morrison, Mahatma Gandhi, Mr. Rogers.”
This, of course, reduces Jesus from his status of being the one true God that we should follow to just being one wise voice among many.
You can also see this in Babs Miller, the lesbian, non-binary minister at Talarico’s longtime PCUSA church, questioning whether Jesus even existed.
Clip:
“Do we really believe that, like, a virgin gave birth to a baby?
“We have no way of knowing if Jesus really existed any more than we have of knowing that the original Buddha ever existed.
“And whether or not Jesus existed doesn’t really matter to me.
“The fact remains that that message that was delivered by someone named Jesus, supposedly—and it could have all been made up for all I know.”
This is why I did an entire episode on the emptiness of liberal Christianity, which is linked in the description below.
Seriously, do not give liberal Christians an equal platform to debate Christian ethics if they deny the divinity—and especially the existence—of Jesus Christ.
Because at that point, you aren’t debating a fellow Christian anymore.
You’re debating an apostate or an unregenerate person claiming to be Christian, which is even worse in some respects because they think they have already been saved.
Though in many cases, “salvation” for them is just a metaphor about promoting Democratic and socialist policies in this life.
Because for them, there is nothing about sin to be saved from, and Jesus didn’t atone for our sins, as you can see in this clip:
Clip:
“Jesus was political.”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus was put on that cross not to save us. Jesus was put on that cross because Rome hated him, and they thought he was a threat to their domination of that area.”
And here’s Talarico’s pastor, Jim Rigby, boldly proclaiming Jesus’ Resurrection in a 2023 Easter service.
Jim Rigby:
“It’s very possible that Jesus rose from the dead.
“It’s also possible the body was stolen, right? I mean, that’s possible.
“It’s possible the disciples stole it to keep the Romans from getting hold of it.
“It’s possible the Romans took it because they’re afraid of a resurrection on the third day.
“You want to just bet your entire life on what somebody a long time ago told you because somebody told them that?
“Or is it possible that the symbols are calling you to a deeper understanding of the human condition?”
So yeah, don’t worry about whether any of this really happened.
Just have “faith in faith,” because you can’t disprove something that was never objectively true in the first place.
Christopher Hitchens on Liberal Christianity
This is why I will always be grateful for the late atheist Christopher Hitchens’ ruthless takedown of liberal Christianity when he was interviewed by Unitarian Universalist Marilyn Sewell in 2012.
She considered Jesus’ Resurrection to just be a metaphor for how one can go from being dead to the world and dead to other people and then be resurrected to new life.
To which Hitchens said:
“I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ—in other words, the Messiah—and that he rose again from the dead, by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you are really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”
Sewell replied:
“Well, I disagree with that. I consider myself a Christian. I believe in the Jesus story as a story, as narrative, and Jesus as a person whose life is exemplary and that I want to follow.
“But I do not believe in all that stuff that you just outlined.”
Hitchens responded:
“I simply have to tell you that every major Christian thinker and theologian has said that without the Resurrection and without the forgiveness of sins—what I call the Redemption—it’s meaningless.
“In fact, without that, it isn’t even a nice story.”
I took a similar approach with a liberal pastor who called into Catholic Answers Live and wanted to debate whether the Bible taught that homosexual conduct is immoral.
Clip:
“I’m just trying to understand, Cody, your argument here. Is it just because if someone has a natural inclination, there’s nothing wrong with it?”
“It goes back to the Old Testament, which nothing applies in modern Christianity to the Old Testament.”
“Well, I’m talking about the New Testament right now.”
“Well, you said Genesis.”
“Yeah. Paul refers to—”
“We’ve got to remember that the Bible was written by men. It wasn’t written by God.”
“Okay.”
“It was men’s interpretation of God’s word.”
“Okay, so when the Bible says, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ we don’t have to care about that because it was written by men?”
“Okay, so—wait, wait, wait. Love our neighbor as thyself. So going out there protesting gay people, that’s loving thy neighbor as thyself? I don’t think so.”
“Okay, Cody, here’s the thing. I don’t think your morals come from the Bible. You have your own personal set of morals, and you just choose those that match with the Bible.
“Would you say your morals come from your own ideas about morality and not what the Bible teaches?”
“No, my morals come from the Bible. That’s why I’m going to say I’m a better Christian than most.”
“Okay. So when the Bible says, for example, in Mark chapter 10, Jesus says that remarriage after divorce is adultery—now, do you think Jesus is God?”
“Jesus is the Son of God.”
“Is he just as divine as the Father?”
“That’s a trick question. But no, he’s not.”
“Well, that’s interesting because Christians are people who believe Jesus is God.
“So that was funny when you said you’re a better Christian than other people, because the definition of a Christian is someone who believes that Jesus is God.”
I have an entire episode on the question of what Jesus said or did not say about homosexuality linked in the description below.
Definitely check that out, because it segues nicely into a secondary question I often ask liberal Christians.
Which Teachings of Jesus Actually Count?
Liberal Christians will take Jesus’ teachings about poverty and use them to justify an economic system the people in Jesus’ time could never have fathomed.
But then those same Christians will ignore Jesus’ clear teaching on divorce and remarriage.
Some people try to diffuse the force of Jesus’ teaching on this subject by saying that Jesus was trying to be ironic because wives were not allowed to divorce their husbands.
But although wife-initiated divorce was rare in the ancient Near East, it was not unheard of either.
Exodus 21:10–11 describes how a slave married to her master can leave him without paying any sort of penalty if he fails to provide for her needs, including marital rights.
A second-century divorce certificate, called a get in Hebrew, addressed to a husband from his wife was even discovered in the Judean Desert in 1951.
The text says:
“I, Shelamzion, daughter of Joseph Qebshan of Ein Gedi, with you, Eleazar son of Hananiah, who had been the husband before this time, that this is from me to you a bill of divorce and release.”
According to David Instone-Brewer in his study on divorce and remarriage in the Bible:
“Normally women would not write a divorce certificate such as this one, but they would ask a court to persuade their husbands to write one.
“Perhaps this nonrabbinic practice was influenced by the Greco-Roman world where women could initiate divorce, as wealthy Jewish women in the first century are known to have done.”
And while economic systems have dramatically changed in 2,000 years, the temptations to leave a marriage—like wanting to have your brother’s or another man’s wife—are still very similar.
Jesus certainly talked about helping the poor, and I’m grateful we live in a world where global poverty has dramatically declined.
But sexual immorality has also dramatically increased.
And it’s simply not true that Jesus did not care about “pelvic issues,” because he spoke plainly about the wrongness of remarriage after divorce, as I noted in the Catholic Answers Live call.
And if Jesus would not justify remarriage because it contradicted the lifelong plan for marriage found in God’s plan in Genesis, then Jesus absolutely would not justify homosexual conduct that contradicts the male-female complementarity found in God’s plan for marriage in Genesis.
And the fact that Jesus Christ inspired the Apostle Paul to describe homosexual conduct as gravely sinful in Romans 1, and also as something that would keep people from inheriting the kingdom of God in 1 Corinthians 6, further shows what Jesus thought about this issue.
Even though, like child sacrifice, Jesus never specifically talked about homosexual conduct.
But of course, a liberal Christian will claim that we can’t trust Paul.
“He was a misogynist. He was a fanatic. Blah, blah, blah.”
Which goes back to the main question:
Is Jesus God?
Did he call apostles?
Did he establish a Church built on those apostles to be the custodian of inspired Scripture?
And if so, where is the divine authority of Christ today to guide us into understanding what God has revealed?
Who Do You Say Jesus Is?
Our Easter joy is not found in something meaningless like “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 with God demonstrating his love for us through Christ’s 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 inspirited 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.”
Whatever that is.
It’s not Christianity.
And the surest way to get a counterfeit Christianity is to follow a counterfeit Christ who may look like the real Jesus but instead exists to be a ventriloquist’s dummy for a worldly philosophy.
Which is why, when we discuss “What would Jesus do?” with people, we must always guide the conversation back to the question Jesus posed to Peter:
“Who do you say I am?”
And ask the person whether they believe what Peter told Jesus:
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
For more on this subject, I recommend my book Counterfeit Christs: How to Find the Real Jesus Among the Impostors, available from Catholic Answers Press.
Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.