From Liberating
Christianity
In 2008 the first edition of my
first book Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New
Millennium, came out.[1]
Recently I have been working on a possible revised edition of that book which
may or may not come out sometime in the future. As I was working on that
revision I reread the final element of the text of the book captioned “EPILOGUE,
What Do We Do Now?” I found the following paragraphs of that Epilogue to be so
powerful and so important that I’m going to reproduce them in a slightly
revised form here. I hope you find them to be as important as I do.
From the Epilogue, Liberating Christianity, Overcoming
Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Revised Edition, © Thomas C.
Sorenson, 2020. All rights reserved.
Liberating Christianity begins with
theology, but it cannot end with theology. Theology far too often remains a
matter of solely academic interest. Academic theologians far too often speak
only to other academic theologians. Indeed, our faith finds itself in such a
crisis today in large part because the insights of academic theologians over
the last century or more have not been widely disseminated in the church. As I
noted in the Introduction, academically trained ministers of the church have
largely declined to share the theological learning they acquired in seminary
with the lay people of the church. They have feared that the people will not
accept new and challenging ways of understanding the faith. We professional
ministers have far too often played the role of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor
protecting people from the truth rather than sharing it with them.
The result has been that Biblicist
Christianity has swept the field, leaving us Christians who have a better
vision on the sidelines wondering what hit us. Biblicist Christianity, with it
bloodthirsty God demanding the shedding of innocent blood and with its narrow
morality grounded not in grace and love but in ancient cultural prejudices has
monopolized the popular understanding of the faith. Those of us with a better
vision have remained too silent for too long. In our silence we have been
complicit in the hijacking of our great faith by reactionary elements that fear
the accomplishments of the human spirit and seek to tie Christianity up in a
straightjacket of literalism and narrow, judgmental morality. We have yielded
the floor to the voices of those who define Christian values as opposition to
the equal dignity of LGBTQ+ people and to the right of women to make their own
reproductive decisions. We have stood by far too quietly as Christ’s values of
nonviolence, radical justice, and expansive inclusion have been ignored at best
and perverted at worst.
The time for our silence is over.
If we truly wish to save Christianity we must now speak up boldly, loudly,
constantly, and in great numbers. We must tell the world every chance we get
that Christianity does not require us to deny our God-give intellectual
capacities as the anti-intellectualism of popular American Christianity insists
that we do. We must tell the world every chance we get that Christianity properly
understood calls for the recognition of the equal rights and dignity of all
people and not only of those who live in a way that the vociferous leaders of
the religious right insist is the only moral way. That insistence is truly
nothing but ancient prejudice wrapped up in a covering of Bible verses chosen
not because they truly express the will of God but because they reinforce the
prejudices of our culture. We must tell the world every chance we get that true
Christianity does not support American imperialism abroad and policies that
favor the rich at the expense of the poor at home. We must advance the
Christian values of nonviolence, radical justice, and inclusion as powerfully
as others have advanced the un-Christian values of war and economic exploitation
of the powerless and marginalized and home and around the world. We must tell the
world every change we get that true Christianity celebrates the world’s
religious diversity and rejoices when people find their connection with God be
that through Christianity or through another of the world’s great faiths. We
must tell the world every chance we get that true Christianity supports the
separation of church and state because it treasures freedom for all of God’s
people. The time for our silence is over. It has been over for quite a while.
We must speak up and speak out.
I will add here only this: May it
be so.
[1]
Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith
in the New Millennium, (Eugene, Oregon, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2008).
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