Part 1, The Problem With Liberal Theology

My focus is on Debunking Evangelical Christianity for several reasons outlined here. Let me stress at this point that one of the reasons I do is to dislodge the evangelical Christian off of center. I say this is the hard part because it is. Liberals will say that I’ve chosen an easy target. It’s easy only so far as the arguments are against it. But it is also extremely tough to do. Once dislodged from this center, former evangelicals can go in several theological directions. But no matter what direction they travel, they are less of a threat to people with differing opinions because they know what it’s like to realize they were wrong. They will also cease quoting a Bible verse to answer every problem, and learn to think through the issues at hand.

The evangelical already rejects many cults, liberalism, pantheism, Islam. So by leading them to reject their faith some will jump ship entirely and embrace either agnosticism or atheism. That’s not what they all do. I didn’t initially. I embraced liberal theology in varying degrees for several years first. I even described myself as an existential deist. Later on I described myself as a soft-agnostic, and later still as an atheist.

For me, once I abandoned evangelical Christianity I started on a slippery slope which ended in atheism. It’s hard to remember how long it took me because as I was struggling with my faith, I still sought to maintain it. And I kept my struggles to myself, remaining in the church. But it was several years.

Now granted, Christians on this slippery slope do not slide down to agnosticism or atheism like I did. But many do. Let me mention a few of them: Robert M. Price, Gerd Luedmann, Hector Avalos, Bart Ehrman, William Dever, Michael Shermer, Farrell Till, Dan Barker, Ed Babinski, and me. There are other Christians who deeply struggle to maintain their faith in the onslaught of philosophical and scientific knowledge, like Ruth Tucker, James F. Sennett, and Terence Penulhum, seen here. I have also heard that Howard Van Till has rejected Calvinism and adopted “a more ambiguous position on religion.”

In a future post or two I’ll try to respond to liberal versions of Christianity and show why they should be rejected as well as the evangelical views. I won’t spend a great deal of time on this subject since to adequately do justice to it I should take on one theologian at a time. I intend instead to lump them all together for the most part, and in so doing it will appear superficial to the liberals out there, but that’s the most time I want to spend on it for reasons I’ve specified earlier. The bottom line will be that if evangelicals don’t have much by way of evidence for their faith, liberals have even less evidence to believe.

Part 2 can be found here.