Paul Wilczynski's Observations

Hammond: liberal v conservative religious

Unitarian Universalist Minister Rev. Fred L Hammond discusses what the terms liberal and conservative mean in religious terms.

...I believe it is safe to say that ... liberal religions read the Hebrew and Christian texts as the story of a people of faith who are journeying together learning who they are in relation to their world and to their God. These are humans who are applying what they know and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail. When taking the story as a whole; for Jews it is the whole of the Torah; for Christians it is the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian Scriptures; they discover that there is an evolution in how God operates in the world which is with increasing generosity of mercy, with justice, and with loving kindness for all of creation. So this becomes the lense through which these texts are read by liberal religious people. ...

A conservative lense reads these texts as not just as a story of a people but as the word of God. Therefore there is power in the text itself. Revelation is closed. There is no new revelation of the divine that could be revealed that is not already revealed in the sacred texts. The Book of Revelation closes with a statement that anyone adds or substracts to this will receive the afflictions included in the book. Many conservative religious read this as referring to the whole of the Bible and not just the text known as the Book of Revelation. It is a fairly strict command. But it exemplifies how conservative religious view their faith in a theological context. ...

posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 9:53 AM