I must confess to being an old-fashioned liberal (note small l ). What does that mean, and what connections might it have with the Christian faith?
The word liberal is often connected with a similar word liberty, which of course is about freedom. When liberals read the bible, they should be able to do so in a way that is free from dogmatic and apologetic concerns. Put in other words: There is no need to defend the Christian faith from important questions. I’ll give you an example: If we consider the different accounts of the resurrection of Jesus we find anomalies. In Mark’s gospel the women go to the tomb when the sun had risen, whilst Matthew and Luke place the visit at early dawn. John’s gospel, however, insists that it was still dark. Whilst that might possibly harmonise with Matthew and Luke, it cannot possibly be dark when the sun had risen. It seems to me that we need to be at liberty to ask the question which gospel has it right? Or do any of them?
This is the heart of what it means to be liberal when reading and interpreting the bible. For the liberal there can be no orthodoxy, no truth which is not the result of questions freely asked and freely investigated; with the proviso, of course, that any answers that we find are, in and of themselves, still provisional; they may have to change in the light of further evidence. Until the Christian Church as a whole is able to fully embrace this liberality, it remains able to speak only to itself and to those who require certainty, whether or nor that certainty is true.
Liberality has another connotation. I was a guest recently and was blessed by the liberality of my host whose generosity was remarkable.
Liberality, generosity; they mean the same thing. He might have said be free with all that is mine. Liberality, to my mind, ought to be at the heart of Christianity. When asked how many times should we forgive another, Jesus replies seventy times seven. This is a piece of rabbinic overstatement, didactic exaggeration to drive home a point. A generous, liberal attitude is requisite for those who seek to follow Jesus. For God is liberal, big-hearted as the writer of Ephesians reminds us
“but God who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together in Christ. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”
What we see here is a generous God who liberally distributes his mercy.
In the words of a former Bishop of Ludlow, John Saxbee: We serve a Christ-like God who calls us to be Christ-like so that we might win others to the likeness of Christ.
Put another way, we serve a generous God, a loving God, who calls us to be generous and loving with one another, so that through that generosity, that liberality of spirit, others are won to the way of .
Whether you believe in God or not, you can practice in liberality and grace, for in their practice perhaps the world becomes a little kinder.
