Can a liberal follow Jesus?
I remember my dad talking about religion and liberalism. He was a liberal and a Bible scholar and a member of a fundamentalist church--unusual in combination and frequently frustrating to him, but he felt loyalty to his church and felt that a liberal voice was needed for it to grow.
He always held that the early church's attitude toward ownership was very like collective communism--not communism as it played out in the real world, but communism as a idealistic philosophy, one that favored "collectivism" over personal ownership. But the church got away from Jesus' point that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Matt 19:24). Instead the church itself got caught up with money and possessions. Today Christianism has no trouble rewarding those who accumulate tremendous wealth and feel very righteous about it.
And now we have a rich, politically conservative, born-again president whose tax breaks protect the wealthy and whose campaign appealed successfully to the evangelical right to support him as their representative. I think of what Jesus said about the publicly self-righteous pharisees of his time, "do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full" (Matt 6:5).
I feel that Jesus would proudly wear the liberal label in our society—a bleeding heart liberal that Catholics portray quite literally.
And as Christianism has abandoned its liberal heritage, it looks to the Old Testament for rules, producing “Old Testament Christians" who quote from Leviticus and ignore the efforts of Jesus to move his followers away from judging other people, asking them to work instead on themselves: "first remove the hunk of wood from your own eye" and "let the one without sin cast the first stone."
That’s why I’m more comfortable saying that I follow Jesus, but uncomfortable with the term "Christian" and what it has come to mean. I take my philosophy and meaning from Jesus’ teachings. It’s the hypocracies of humankind that bother me.
He always held that the early church's attitude toward ownership was very like collective communism--not communism as it played out in the real world, but communism as a idealistic philosophy, one that favored "collectivism" over personal ownership. But the church got away from Jesus' point that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Matt 19:24). Instead the church itself got caught up with money and possessions. Today Christianism has no trouble rewarding those who accumulate tremendous wealth and feel very righteous about it.
And now we have a rich, politically conservative, born-again president whose tax breaks protect the wealthy and whose campaign appealed successfully to the evangelical right to support him as their representative. I think of what Jesus said about the publicly self-righteous pharisees of his time, "do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full" (Matt 6:5).
I feel that Jesus would proudly wear the liberal label in our society—a bleeding heart liberal that Catholics portray quite literally.
And as Christianism has abandoned its liberal heritage, it looks to the Old Testament for rules, producing “Old Testament Christians" who quote from Leviticus and ignore the efforts of Jesus to move his followers away from judging other people, asking them to work instead on themselves: "first remove the hunk of wood from your own eye" and "let the one without sin cast the first stone."
That’s why I’m more comfortable saying that I follow Jesus, but uncomfortable with the term "Christian" and what it has come to mean. I take my philosophy and meaning from Jesus’ teachings. It’s the hypocracies of humankind that bother me.
posted by Lynn Holleman Rudloff | 4:01 PM
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