{"id":1679,"date":"2013-02-12T13:09:36","date_gmt":"2013-02-12T18:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/ellenpainterdollar\/?p=1679"},"modified":"2013-02-12T13:11:59","modified_gmt":"2013-02-12T18:11:59","slug":"what-kind-of-christian-are-you-and-does-it-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/ellenpainterdollar\/2013\/02\/what-kind-of-christian-are-you-and-does-it-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"What Kind of Christian Are You? (And Does It Matter?)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Roger Olson, an evangelical blogger here on Patheos, wrote a post last week on \u201cWhy I Am Not a Liberal Christian.\u201d <\/a>He offered six criteria by which to evaluate whether someone is a liberal or conservative Christian. For example, a conservative Christian believes in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, whereas a liberal Christian might see the resurrection as a symbol for how Jesus\u2019s disciples recognized the eternal nature of Christ\u2019s wisdom.<\/p>\n

For the most part, I think Olson\u2019s six points are indeed useful for discussing ways that some liberal Christians\u2019 theology differs from traditional Christian theology. Tony Jones, a fellow blogger here on the Progressive Christian channel, did a good job of calling Olson out <\/a>on a few areas where his assertions about liberal Christians were questionable. For example, in response to Olson\u2019s question, \u201cDo they believe salvation is forgiveness and reconciliation with God as well as being made whole and holy by God\u2019s grace alone or do they believe salvation is only a realization<\/em> of human potential\u2014individual or social\u2014by spiritual enlightenment and moral endeavor?\u201d, Jones remarked that he knows of no<\/em> Christian who sees salvation as something to be earned by enlightenment or endeavor, as anything other than gift.<\/p>\n

By Olson\u2019s reckoning, I am a conservative Christian. This fits with my usual way of describing myself as \u201ctheologically conservative, and socially\/politically moderate to liberal.\u201d Olson has done a great service to our faith by making clear that defining Christianity is, and should be, primarily about theology, and not about one\u2019s opinion on hot-button issues such as gay marriage and abortion. Commenters on this blog regularly tell me I am not worthy of the label \u201cChristian\u201d because I think abortion should be legal within some limits. During the election, some evangelicals questioned President Obama\u2019s Christianity<\/a> because of his support for same-sex marriage and other ways in which Obama\u2019s faith doesn\u2019t mirror that of white evangelical America. Olson\u2019s focus on theology is an important corrective to this tendency to judge other people\u2019s faith by how they vote or how they apply biblical wisdom to today\u2019s controversies.<\/p>\n

But while I appreciate Olson\u2019s focus on theology, and hope his fellow evangelicals take note of it, I\u2019m also frustrated. I\u2019m frustrated by his need to undertake this kind of evaluation in the first place. While Olson rightly refused to make any claims about liberal Christians\u2019 salvation, his need to define some other<\/em> kind of Christian, and draw clear lines between his kind of Christianity and theirs, seems as unnecessary, and potentially destructive, as the more traditional evangelical concern with who is and is not saved.<\/p>\n

It is human nature to categorize and label ourselves and others. And to the extent that doing so helps us better understand and accept each other, categorizing and labeling can be a good thing. Olson\u2019s criteria for what makes a \u201cliberal Christian\u201d is potentially helpful to anyone exploring the landscape of modern American Christianity. The danger of such categorizing, however, is that the Christians in one category decide that they are the only \u201creal\u201d Christians. Such categorization not only smacks of the Pharisees and fails to model Jesus Christ\u2019s hospitality, but also robs people of the opportunity to be part of a varied, vibrant, messy, life-giving community with people who are not like them in many ways, but who share the fundamentals of the Christian faith.<\/p>\n

As I wrote last year about my own experience as a \u201cmixed-label Christian,\u201d<\/a> labels can divide, but if we\u2019re willing to engage the human beings behind those labels, our faith is enriched by engagement with those brothers and sisters whom we might not immediately recognize as kin:<\/p>\n

In dividing up my Christian connections and smacking labels on them, I realize I\u2019m doing everyone a disservice. Labels can diminish people. We slap a label onto a complex human being and BAM, we think we understand them. The labels themselves aren\u2019t very important. But by occasionally trying to figure out what they mean, I hope that those who are firmly in one camp or another, for whom those \u201cother Christians\u201d are a strange, foreign bunch of weirdos they don\u2019t quite get, will learn to see the good stuff they\u2019re missing by deciding that only one brand of Christianity is okay.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roger Olson, an evangelical blogger here on Patheos, wrote a post last week on \u201cWhy I Am Not a Liberal Christian.\u201d He offered six criteria by which to evaluate whether someone is a liberal or conservative Christian. For example, a conservative Christian believes in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, whereas a liberal Christian might […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":424,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,44,12,331,188,36,330,329],"class_list":["post-1679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abortion","tag-christianity","tag-church","tag-conservative-christianity","tag-evangelicalism","tag-god","tag-liberal-christianity","tag-theology"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Kind of Christian Are You? 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