Two weeks ago I debated filmmaker Brian Flemming on a panel here in Louisville. Flemming produced and directed The God Who Wasn’t There, a Michael Moore-style “expose” of Christianity (I call it “Fahrenheit 3:16”). Flemming and I went round and round, of course, on such details as whether a corpse in Palestine could have come back to life (he seems amazed that I would find such an idea credible). But Flemming and I had one thing in common: neither of us could understand the position of the liberal Protestant on the panel: Joe Phelps, pastor of Highland Baptist Church in Louisville.
Phelps believes in a resurrection, but denies propositional truth, and denies for that matter that Christianity makes propositional truth claims. Some of his church members said at the forum that they believed Jesus’ bones are still in the ground, and that that doesn’t bother their faith in the least bit. Neither the atheist nor I can fathom this. As Flemming put it on his website:
The biggest division on the panel was not between Moore and me, however. I think that fundies believe crazy things, but I acknowledge that once you step into their fantasy world where a hateful, disturbed god wrote a book called the Holy Bible, the hateful, disturbed conclusions of Christian fundamentalists do make some kind of internal sense.
Liberal Christianity, despite being non-hateful and on many issues even ethical, is hopelessly incoherent, however. Liberal Christianity says a perfect God wrote a perfect book–but he made mistakes. Or, alternately, liberal Christianity says the book is an extremely flawed and even disgusting work written by men–but special attention should still be paid to it. Liberal Christianity says religion shouldn’t stand in the way of science–but a dead man did really rise from the dead. Probably. Or, at least, it’s not unreasonable to believe that he did (or that he turned water into wine and walked on water). Liberal Christianity says the love of Jesus is the only way to Heaven–but if some people don’t believe that, it’s fine to let their deluded souls go off to Hell without even trying to stop them. Or maybe Heaven and Hell don’t exist at all–but it’s still very, very important to praise this figure called “God.” For some reason. Liberal Christianity wants to drink the Kool-Aid but pretend there’s no cyanide in it.
I’m not the first to say this, but if Jesus’ body is still in the ground, the atheist filmmaker and I both have better things to do on Sunday morning. I’m not sure I would call what liberal Christians are selling “Kool-Aid,” but I think Jesus might speak of it as old wine in incredibly trendy wine-skins.
