Liberalism, Verbicide, and Love in Christian Discourse

Men often commit verbicide because they want to snatch a word as a party banner, to appropriate its ‘selling quality.’ Verbicide was committed when we exchanged Whig and Tory for Liberal and Conservative. But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative – useless synonyms for good and for bad. – C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words

There is no question that language changes and words morph in their meaning. No serious student of language, especially ancient languages, can escape the ways that the meaning of words changes over time, sometimes to the point that they begin to mean the very opposite of their original meaning. Words can be mistreated to the point they are semantically dead; virtually useless for any meaningful discourse.

C. S. Lewis was being somewhat curmudgeonly when he wrote the above sentences in the introduction of Studies in Words. However, his point is well taken and worth considering, particularly in the way some terms are used in contemporary evangelical discourse.

Liberal and Liberalism

The adjective liberal and the associated noun liberalism have both been killed in contemporary evangelical discourse. They are, as Lewis described, no longer words that effectively describe the content of a theology, but a person’s evaluation that that theology is bad. They are epithets rather than effective labels, in most cases.

This in nowhere more evident than in social media debates surrounding the current president, the use of critical scholarship in theology by orthodox scholars, and religious thinking on nearly any subject.

Do you favor immigration reforms that offer a path to citizenship? You must be a theological liberal. Do you believe that there is a place in public theology to debate the limits of human economic impact on the environment? That makes you a liberal. Do you think that gross public sins make someone untrustworthy? Obviously, you are espousing liberalism. And, if you dare to think that race has an impact on the way people see the world, then there is no question that you have crossed the line into theological liberalism.

These are all examples of publicly discussed policies and ideas for which arguments can be made on explicitly religious grounds. And, if we are honest with ourselves, there are legitimate arguments for different positions (but not all positions) on these policies to be made from distinctly Christian perspectives that fall within the range of historic orthodoxy.

Because of the corrosive properties of theological liberalism, using the words liberal and liberalism to evaluate rather than describe is an easy way to avoid having to consider the merits of the argument. (It is worth noting that the same is true for the way the word fundamentalism is used.)

This form of argumentation is particularly corrosive in contemporary debates because many of the people actively engaged in debates have a vague notion of what the original meaning of liberal was or what the actual, specific theological connotations of it might be. This allows the application of the epithet to concepts that have their roots in sound Christian doctrine as a way to marginalize them.

The Meaning of Liberal

It would be impossible to adequately treat liberal theology in a blog post, but Roger Olson summarizes four common themes of liberalism,[1] which are both fair and helpful descriptions:

1. Acknowledging modernity as an authoritative source and norm for Christian theology. Doctrines that have been ruled impossible by modern standards (e.g., two natures in Christ) are to be abandoned.

2. The immanence of God overwhelms any concept of his transcendence. This is a pantheistic or panentheistic tendency that tends to blur the line between creation and creature.

3. The moralization of dogma; only doctrines that have direct implications are necessary. Thus, the deity of Christ is translated into a metaphor for his moral influence.

4. There is a strong emphasis on the universal salvation of humanity. Sin becomes alienation rather than disobedience to God’s moral law. God is no longer a judge as much as a paternalistic figure waiting for people to accept themselves and focus on loving him. Salvation is primarily therapeutic rather than transformative.

These are general statements. Within theological liberalism there are a wide range of applications of these themes, but Olson’s seems to be reasonably accurate, based on my research.

In some expressions of liberalism, especially Protestant liberalism, the differences between the historic Christian faith and the liberal expression of Christianity can rightly be described as different religions. Many of the same terms are shared between modern liberalism in the tradition of Christianity and orthodox Christianity, but they often mean radically different things.

But the significant point for this context is that theological liberalism isn’t simply a policy proposal that runs counter to the political platform of the Republican party, but a distinct theological method that has radically different theological presuppositions than orthodox Christianity. This also doesn’t necessarily include the process of taking into account the inputs from other sources, like science and sociology, as long as those inputs are subjected to the norms and authority of Scripture.

If we are going to use words, we should try to do so honestly and with knowledge of what they mean.

Love in Christian Discourse

Verbicide, as Lewis describes it, is a form of dishonesty and intellectual laziness. It may be too late to reclaim the terms liberal and liberalism from the lexical graveyard, but at least we can stop abusing the term and our brothers and sisters in Christ. We may, if we are careful, avoid committing verbicide for other useful terms of description by seeking to understand their definitions and use them accordingly.

More importantly, perhaps, we can honestly evaluate the ideas of others and make our evaluative judgments in careful terms that interact with the ideas they express rather than simply categorically rejecting them because they don’t sound enough like a certain brand of contemporary political thought.

Demonstrating Christian love in discourse does not entail agreeing with bad arguments or ignoring factual errors. It does, however, at least require honestly describing our ideological opponents’ ideas before evaluating them.

[1] Roger Olson, The Story of Christian Theology, 549–551.

How to Read the Bible - A Review

I often read books that I disagree with. It is necessary to read the intellectually challenging disagreement with scholars who oppose my view. This drives me to question whether my answer, their answer, or another might be right.

Recognizing that Harvey Cox is, at least from my conservative Evangelical position, a liberal scholar, I picked up his recent volume, How to Read the Bible with some interest and hope for a fruitful conversation.

This is a popular level book, written with few footnotes and more as a summary of Cox’s religious experience than as a means of engaging in serious debate. 

As such, Cox’s audience appears to be Christians who have not engaged with Scripture seriously and wonder what method the wise sage who has spent a long career proclaiming a version of progressive Christian theology from the respected halls of Harvard Divinity School might encourage them to use. It is, in reality, an apologetic for a liberal approach to Scripture from a post-modern liberal Christian. This statement is not meant in the pejorative (as the label liberal often is) but to clarify my understanding of the author’s actual intent, which is distinct from what he may have actually accomplished; according to his own hermeneutic, his accomplishment will be evaluated as something distinctly different based on the one who actually reads the volume.

Summary

How to Read the Bible is a layman’s book on hermeneutics. It has assumptions (often exposed, but seldom stated) and shows how to apply them to the text of the Bible.

After a personal introduction, which places the book in the context of Cox’s faith journey, there are ten chapters in the text. In them Cox walks through his method of reading of Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Job, the prophets, two chapters on the Gospels (though one ignores John entirely), the Pauline Epistles, and Revelation. The tenth chapter is a summary of Cox’s hermeneutic, which is focused on a contemporary reading of the text. The book has a conclusion in which Cox answers the logical question that arises from his deconstruction of Scripture, namely, “Why should we read the Bible at all?”

Qualification

For Cox, this book is no doubt a very personal book; in fact, the first person pronoun and his own anecdotes prevent reading it any other way. He is explaining how he reads the Bible and gains some spiritual value from it. As such, it would be easy to turn these critiques into accusations against Cox’s faithfulness. That is not my goal. Cox no doubt holds the faith commitments that he has, which have some ties to historic Christianity, sincerely. This book helps to reveal what shape they have and why, but the book does not lead me to question the fact that he believes something about God that approximates a form of historic Christianity and is very personal to him.

Despite this personal nature of the book, he did publish it publicly, which means that it is fair game for analysis and critique. This is not a private expression of faith that, like a discovered diary, should be left alone until the author is deceased.

Assumptions

The logical question that arises from this text on how to read the Bible is why it should be read at all. This is a serious accusation that Cox seems to recognize at the end of the volume and begin to address, but, to my mind he fails.

Cox begins with the assumption that the Bible is solely a human book. In fact, given the option, it seems fairly clear that Cox recommends discarding the notion that any biblical data is factual. He allows that Jesus and Paul did exist, but nearly every other apparent factual claim in Scripture is best rejected at first blush. If some things in the Bible actually happen to correspond to historical truth, this is coincidental to the spiritual truth of Scripture and largely irrelevant.

Additionally, biblical scholarship that rejects traditional understandings of the text or modifies what the text seems to say about history are to be preferred over other scholarships. Throughout the volume, Cox consistently refers to his preferred group of scholars as “the best scholars” or “most scholars.”

In fact, one of the prevailing assumptions that seems to drive Cox’s hermeneutic and general approach to biblical studies is that anyone who accepts the prima facie reading of the Bible is intellectually deficient or ignorant.

For example, the hypothesis that has recently been published that presents a late domestication of camels is valuable explicitly because it undermines the historicity of Scripture and because “it require[s] one to move beyond a literalistic view of the Bible to a more mature comprehension.” (pg. 44) In other words, if only those that believe the Bible to be factually accurate would read the New York Times, which popularized the recent archaeological theory, they wouldn’t be so immature as to believe that Scripture was true. The problem is that the archaeologists conclusions were drawn from a limited data sample and appears to have been interpreted by the New York Times to maximize circulation with a controversial headline rather than critically interact with the study.

Similarly, just a few pages later, Cox discards the notion of the miracle of manna in Exodus by arguing, “The meaning of the ‘miracles’ of Exodus is that these people [i.e., the Israelites of the 7th century B.C.E who he believes wrote the Pentateuch] believe that it was through God’s grace and justice that they were escaping from slavery, and they told their story in their own idiom. Mature and imaginative students of the Bible try to get inside that worldview. They do not simply reject it as superstitious or recast it in terms of modern, if often improbable, scientific rationalizations.” (pg.47)

In other words, speaking from the enlightened cultural perspective of the 21st century, we can know with certainty that these miracles did not happen. This solves two problems simultaneously: (1) It eliminates the weird pseudo-scientific theories about how pre-scientific people may have misinterpreted natural phenomena; (2) It eliminates the need for believing in a God who can do miracles.

While I am thankful for the first result, the second result seems unnecessary unless one has accepted the reigning paradigm of naturalism, which allows for only regularity in the natural world. In other words, it requires that God, whatever that being is, does not interfere in history.

From the Pen of Skeptic

At times, Cox seems to be reading the text as a scoffer. He describes the account of the spies of Israel and Rahab as a “dinner-theater fluff piece” (pg. 69) Thus we should read the accounts of the conquest of Canaan much like school boys read Virgil’s Aeneid (pg 76); they're interesting and have some literary value, but certainly aren't true because, after all, a recent book argues that the entire Israelite history may be incorrect, since the Israelites were likely just Canaanites who banded together against their neighbors and created an elaborate nation-myth to justify their actions (pg 76). Since the Pentateuch is just political propaganda, Cox writes, “I do not believe it is necessary for current readers of the Bible to slog through all these grisly verses [about the reasons given by God for destroying the Canaanites.]” (pg. 74)

This brings back that pertinent question that came to my mind while I was reading this volume, why would you read it anyway? I’ll get back to that in a moment.

Cox continues his way through various representative genre’s of Scripture. Job is “explicitly ‘fictional’" (pg. 79); the prophets have meaning according to how modern revolutionaries decide to use them (though not in an absolutely unconditional sense) (pg. 105); the canonical gospels are merely a result of the winning political faction; the synoptic Gospels are a composite of factually erroneous interpretations of history written too far after the events they depict to be remotely accurate; Paul likely didn’t write most of the letters attributed to him and things we find ethically objectionable are either his misunderstandings or later textual additions; and Revelation can be nothing more than an inspiring poem by a political revolutionary.

It is fair to note that few of these assertions are supported in the text; but it is also important to realize that this is not a scholarly volume. Cox merely assumes the validity of scholarship built on the so-called Higher Critical methods and ignores conservative scholarship as immature or poor. This is an evidence of his bias, but should not be counted as a criticism against his method in this volume.

Again, I wonder, why bother reading it if nearly everything that it reports is questionable?

Spiritual Benefit

Cox believes that there is spiritual benefit in reading Scripture. He intimates this throughout. It can inspire the contemporary reader to pursue justice. This he makes clear in the Introduction, where he recounts the inspiration that African American civil rights activists found in the Exodus stories. While he sat bored in his cell (having been arrested during the same demonstration), the segregated African American detainees preached to each other from the account of Moses.

This reading and contemporary application, he notes, is in accordance with the “full-orbed holistic way I have termed ‘spiritual.’” (pg. 8) But it isn’t clear that such a reading is possible once the reader has rejected the factual content of Scripture as mere political fiction.

In other words, if the Bible is just a human book, with a great percentage of it written for political purposes, then why should it be trustworthy for spiritual readings? Why would one trust Scripture more than a contemporary novel for spiritual information?

Cox wrestles with this in part toward the end of the volume, “Why should I spend any time writing yet another book about this strange old collection? One answer is that the Bible helps us to know who God is, and for many people, perhaps most, that is enough. But there is another reason. The Bible also helps us heed the counsel of Socrates to ‘know thyself,’ and the wisdom of all the religious traditions teaches that the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are inseparable.” (pg. 230)

Of these two reasons that Cox offers, it isn’t clear how the shreds of Scripture are helpful any longer in knowing God. He has taken pains to debunk the supernaturalness of God throughout the volume. Gone is the miracle-working God. Gone is the redemptive God that chose a people. Gone is the God that is holy and worthy of judging sin.

The second reason Cox presents is more true to what the tattered text of the Bible can do once it has been explained away by Cox’s “mature” hermeneutic. Once all of the parts of Scripture that conflict with the contemporary reader’s worldview are eliminate, what is left is a reflection of the individual from the ancient text. It isn’t clear why it would take over two hundred pages to explain this fact.

Conclusion

Cox’s book is an excellent example of the reader-response hermeneutic at work. He combines this post-modern approach that rejects a desire for objectivity with an acceptance of the validity of modernistic biblical scholarship to work his way through many genre’s of Scripture.

This is a helpful book because Cox explains what many Christians do on a regular basis. What is masked in the liberal pulpit is made clear in this volume.

In the end, the deconstruction of Scripture and rejection of the supernatural reminds me of C. S. Lewis’ description of creating “men without chests.” They are bidden to be moral, but the means for their morality has been removed. Though this is not Cox’s purpose in writing the book, his demonstration of the failure of the liberal theological method has explanatory power for the slow death of many liberal churches.

How to Read the Bible

$18.71

By Harvey Cox

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NOTE: A complimentary copy of this volume was provided by the publisher for review with no expectation of a positive outcome.