Liberalism in the church was a huge problem when my parents came to Australia in 1950.  The local Presbyterian Church that we joined had a good evangelical preacher.  He was of Welsh stock and was loved as a man who faithfully preached the Word.  A year after our arrival the man left and his successor had different views.  I have childhood recollections of my father arguing with the preacher almost every Sunday.  Later I learnt that he didn’t believe in miracles.  So, no virgin birth and no resurrection either!  And the miracles of Jesus were ingeniously explained away.  What particularly made an impact on me, as a child, was that this well-attended little country church emptied overnight.  When the gospel is effectively gutted there seems little point in still going to church.  That was my childhood introduction to what I later learned to call liberalism.

The problem is that liberals want their cake but they want to eat it too.  They deny the miraculous but they still want to be Christians who believe in Jesus and in His saving work.  They are just not prepared to accept some of the key teachings that are the very heartbeat of the Christian faith.  So they kind of reinterpret things in subtle ways.  So, for example, while they deny the actual bodily resurrection of Jesus they do believe that Jesus lives on – even if it is only in the faith of His followers.

Today there is a new kind of liberalism that is capturing the imagination of many in the Christian church.

While in Christchurch I was part of a fortnightly men’s Bible Study group.  Our program at first consisted of watching the popular Rob Bell Nooma videos and discussing them afterwards.  Time and again issues came up that made us wonder where Bell stood as far as generally accepted evangelical teaching is concerned.  This past week I watched a video about resurrection on the Internet, that Bell put out for this Easter season.  What struck me about the video is not so much what Bell says as what he doesn’t say.  I listened in vain for some words to tell me that on Easter Sunday Jesus had risen from the dead.  Instead I heard a lot of talk about death not being the end and about possible new beginnings.  He even went so far as to say that the disciples who visited the tomb were told, “He is not here!”  Bell had a lot to say about resurrections but he never once mentioned “the” resurrection.   To my ear he sounded uncomfortably like the liberal preacher my father challenged.

What Bell seems to be a little coy about spelling out, others in the Emerging Church openly deny.  These people have bowed to post modern culture and question our ability to formulate truth in propositions.  So we must not dogmatically assert that Jesus arose bodily on the third day.  That also makes our faith much more acceptable in a society that doesn’t believe in bodily resurrections.

Paul has no hesitation to say what Bell couldn’t say.  Paul tells us very clearly in 1Corinthians 15, not only that Jesus arose physically but that our very salvation depends on this teaching.  Furthermore, in the Apostles’ Creed the Christian Church did what some post-modern Christians refuse to do – it articulated this Biblical teaching as a dogmatic proposition that we are called to believe: “On the third day He arose again from the dead.”

We live in a culture that asks the same question Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?”  How sad when some Christians succumb to the culture of the day and refuse to give clear and unambiguous answers.

John Westendorp