Limbaugh : I would submit to you that people on the left are religious, too. Their God is just different. The left has a different God. There's a religious left in this country.
And, the religious left in this country hates and despises the God of Christianity and Catholicism and whatever else. They despise it because they fear it, because it's a threat, because that God has moral absolutes. That God has right and wrong, that God doesn't deal in nuance, that God doesn't deal in gray area, that God says, "This is right and that is wrong."
Most of us when we hear the words "Protestant Reformation" think of Martin Luther and his powerful points challenging an established religion and its priests about their behavior and how they had twisted doctrine to support and sustain their considerable social authority.
If in his dissent Luther had great fear for his salvation and the Judgment Bar of God he dealt with that concern very well. Subsequent events are proof that one person's absolutes are not the absolutes of another and certainly not the absolutes of God.
Had the Catholic absolutes of that time been the absolutes of God - and the Roman authorities certainly attempted and succeeded in many cases in intimidating those who agreed with Luther - God would not have allowed the rise of Protestantism into the "formal" status it has today.
In thinking literally and inerrantly - as the Catholic priesthood had for years insisted it was doing on behalf of all Christians - successful suppression of the Protestant movement leading to its extinction would have been a repudiation by God of dissent and of the Protestant movement itself with the portent of one terrible day of judgment at the hands of an offended God.
Obvious now is the fact that God did not intervene on the side of those who pretended to a possession of absolute biblical Christian truth. If there was repudiation, it was at the least an indication that the harsh, inflexible and unchanging God was in fact an illusion.
Today among Protestants we find ourselves widely divided over authority, the literal definition of what it means to be Christian and a conflict between traditional inerrant letter-of-the-law advocates and so-called "liberal Christians" who emphasize an approach to organized religion based more on including reason with faith and an open-minded application of the meaning of scripture.
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Arthur C. Ruger's Liberal Christianity topic, please visit the Discussions page.