There is a rather bizarre post by Chris Hallq on his blog “The Uncredible Hallq” in which he takes aim at liberal Christians, and in particular myself and Fred Clark.
He begins by arguing that, because fundamentalists sometimes acknowledge they were wrong, therefore the generalization is incorrect that inerrantists identify their own interpretation with “what the Bible says” and thereby end up in practice treating themselves as inerrant.
Exceptions do not mean that generalizations are not essentially accurate. Todd Wood is a young-earth creationist who acknowledges that evolution is not “a theory in crisis” and that the scientific evidence supports it. But that doesn’t negate the fact that young-earth creationists generally adopt a very different stance than Wood’s.
Hallq then suggests that liberal Christians don’t point out that the problem with fundamentalists is not their own flawed perspective but the flawed text of the Bible itself, saying that this would involve admitting something that is “embarrassing to Christians of every stripe.”
To which I can do little but shake my head in disappointment that someone would criticize a phenomenon they understand so little and about the history of which they are so poorly informed.
Liberal Christianity pioneered Biblical criticism, the tools and methods that exposed the Bible’s fallibility. The methods and the results of that approach are widely embraced by atheists like Hallq. For them to then turn around and suggest that the results of them are an embarrassment to liberal Christians, rather than something liberal Christians were among the first to draw attention to, is rather insulting – as I’ve said before.
I am grateful to Hallq for mentioning my post. But hopefully if he wants to interact in the future, he will learn something about liberal Christianity first.
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