A WordPress neighbor wrote briefly about, as I’ll frame it, the compatibility of religion and biblical studies. Some of the responses are quite predictable, but the encouraging part is the openness. Whereas I wonder if at church on Sundays we are not, to some extent or another, being disingenuous. One can go through the same practice, utter the same words, but inside mean something else. It can be consistent with an internal theology, but it is not the theology of the congregation, even if it’s related. Is it close enough? Can one congregant speak of the Gospel of John and another of the Gospel of “John,” and both be participating in the same Bible study? How much can one withhold before he is simply going through the motions? Or does this joyfully free me up to be a church of one?
My relatively minor problems close to the conservative end are amplified by those whose thinking has taken them to liberal Christianity. For many of them I wonder how it remains a “Christian” faith at all; perhaps Christian only in the sense that that is the tradition they are most comfortable with, or it’s simply a cultural identifier. I have tried to understand how some toss everything but Jesus, and even then in a qualified sense, or perhaps entirely existentially. But I can’t see why they don’t want to let go of that last thread. Why claim Christianity at all, with all that ugliness and culpability? I can’t help but think that it’s the bottomless abyss of disbelief, in which case it becomes a question of philosophy and psychology above all else.
