Transcript

In a 2009 speech given at an atheistic conference, the late philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the term deepity to refer to statements that seem profound at first glance, but when you look closer, they're just trivially true, like love is just a word, or they're total nonsense like have faith and faith.

And some atheists say that theology is just a bunch of deepities.

And in this episode, I'm going to expose liberal Christian theology that really is just a bunch of worthless deepities.

Before I do that though, I need to say that the existence of bad theology does not prove that there is no good theology, just as the existence of pseudoscience doesn't disprove real science.

One good example of bad liberal Christian theology can be seen in a 2019 New York Times interview with Serene Jones, a Protestant minister and the president of Union Theological Seminary.

Here are a few of her deepities.

She says, The empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed.

Living a life of love is driven by the simple fact that love is true.

The message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death.

When I hear this kind of talk, I think of the episode of The Simpsons where Reverend Lovejoy is selling ice cream flavors like Blessed Virgin Berry and Command Mint.

He then offers Lisa Unitarian ice cream.

Wow, look at all these flavors.

Blessed Virgin Berry, Command Mint, Bible Gum?

Or if you prefer we also have Unitarian ice cream.

There's nothing here.

Exactly.

According to their website, Unitarian Universalist beliefs are diverse and inclusive.

We have no shared creed.

Our shared covenant, our Seven Principles, supports the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

Liberal Christianity at least tries to pay lip service to Jesus, but it often comes off as a Unitarian wannabe.

A good way to expose the emptiness of liberal Christian deepities is just ask simple questions: How is love stronger than death?

What makes love true?

In doing this, you can show that the person is just dressing up secular hopeful thinking with religious language.

I also notice that adherents of liberal Christianity often defend their position by casting traditional concepts of God or faith as just being for simpletons.

But their hasty dismissals, they often reveal their own simple grasp of theology.

For example, Jones says, Crucifixion is not something that God is orchestrating from upstairs.

The pervasive idea of an abusive godfather who sends his own kid to the cross so God could forgive people is nuts.

Now, I expect this kind of misrepresentation of the Trinity from a village New Atheist, but not from a so-called Christian minister.

She should understand that God became man to freely offer Himself as a sacrifice of love that outweighs the evil of our sins.

To misunderstand the crucifixion so badly and to sound so much like an atheist means you really are just Christian in name only.

Jones also says that Christians who are obsessed with the resurrection have a wobbly faith.

She says, What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb?

Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie?

No.

Faith is stronger than that.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but it was Saint Paul who said, If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.

Jones tries to defend her assertion about the unimportance of the resurrection by saying this: The stories are all over the place.

There's no resurrection story in Mark, just an empty tomb.

Those who claim to know whether or not it happened are kidding themselves.

Now, it's true the shorter ending in the Gospel of Mark does not contain an appearance of the resurrected Jesus, but it absolutely contains a resurrection account because the young man at the tomb tells the women, Do not be amazed.

You seek Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified.

He has risen.

He is not here.

See the place where they laid Him.

But go tell His disciples and Peter that He is going before you to Galilee.

There you will see Him as He told you.

This leads to another good question you should ask: How is a non-miraculous Christianity different from morally upright atheism?

Jones says that hell is just a reality we create when we reject love, and in Easter this represents love triumphing over suffering.

But you could be an atheist who has hope and love or patiently endures suffering, so why even bother becoming a Christian at all?

In fact, when the non-Christian interviewer asks if Jones is a Christian in spite of denying Jesus' miracles, Jones answers, Well, you sound an awful lot like me and I'm a Christian minister.

And you might think she is a Christian because she talks about people being saved, which is what Universalists teach.

To be saved means to be the beloved of God and it's as true for all Christians as it is for Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, indigenous faith communities, and for all those who claim no faith, all of us.

But when she was asked in the New York Times interview what happens after death, she said, I don't know.

There may be something.

There may be nothing.

My faith is not tied to some divine promise about the afterlife.

Now, Jones might say her theology isn't equivalent to atheism because she believes in God, but her god is so limited and disinterested in human affairs, he might as well be non-existent.

For example, Jones says she doesn't worship an all-powerful, all-knowing God because that's allegedly a product of Roman juridical theory and Greek mythology .

even though the gods of Greco-Roman mythology, they were limited in power, knowledge, and goodness.

She also claims that God doesn't answer prayers, and instead of controlling the world, He invites us into love, justice, and mercy.

Now this is a fairly common attitude among liberal Christians.

The Protestant apologist William Lane Craig once asked John Dominic Crossan, one of the world's most famous New Testament scholars, if God exists.

Simple question, right?

But Crossan gave a really vague answer saying, God is just what we believe in.

So Craig asked, Did God exist during the Jurassic age when there were no humans to believe in God?

During the Jurassic age when there were no human beings, did God exist?

Meaningless question.

But surely that's not a meaningless question.

I mean, it's a factual question.

Was there a being who, uh, was the creator and sustainer of the universe d- during that period of time when no human beings existed?

It seems to me on your view you'd have to say no.

Well, I would probably prefer to say no because what you're doing is trying to put yourself in the position of God and ask, Well, how is God apart from revelation?

How is God apart from faith?

I don't know if you can do that.

The god of many liberal Christians might as well be a self-help book you pick up every few months for advice.

There's two things I appreciate.

One, when people like this channel and subscribe to it to not miss out on great content and support us at trenthornpodcast.com.

Really appreciate that.

And two, I appreciate when atheists call out liberal Christians for believing in things like a god who can't really do anything at all.

The atheist B.C. Johnson once criticized liberal answers to the problem of evil that say evil exists because God just isn't powerful enough to stop evil.

Johnson writes, Such a god, if not dead, is the next thing to it, and a person who believes in such a ghost of a god is practically an atheist.

To call such a thing 'god' would be to strain the meaning of the word.

With this understanding of god, it's not surprising you have places like the United Church of Canada that have ordained women like Greta Vosper to be ministers in spite of the fact that Vosper is an atheist.

One of her book's titles perfectly summarizes the essence of liberal theology: With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe.

In fact, one of my favorite take-downs of liberal Christianity comes from the late atheist Christopher Hitchens.

In 2012, the Unitarian Universalist Marilyn Seewell interviewed Hitchens and criticized him for not engaging more liberal Christianity instead of what she considers fundamentalism.

Like Serene Jones, Seewell calls herself a Christian, but she believes Jesus was just a model of social justice, and salvation is just a complicated metaphor for being dead to the world and dead to other people so you can be raised to new life.

Here is my favorite part of their discussion.

It seems to me that you're generally referring to fundamentalist faith of various kinds.

Now I'm, I'm a liberal Christian, um, and I don't take the stories from the Scripture literally.

I don't believe in the doctrine of atonement, that Jesus died for our sins, for example.

Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Well, only in this respect.

I would say that if you don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, in other words, the Messiah, and that He rose again from the dead and that by His sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you are really not, in any meaningful sense, a Christian.

Well, I, I disagree with that.

I consider myself a Christian.

I believe in the Jesus story as story, as narrative, and Jesus as a, a, a person whose life is exemplary and that, that I want to follow.

But I do not believe in all that stuff that I just, um, just outlined.

Well, I, I simply have to tell you that, uh, every, every major Christian thinker or theologian has said that without the resurrection and without the forgiveness of sin, what I call the vicarious redemption, um, it's meaningless.

In fact, it isn't If it Without that, it isn't even a nice story.

Thank you!

Our Easter joy is not found in meaningless deepities like hope in hope or faith in faith.

Our hope isn't grounded in the platitudes of liberal Christianity.

I mean, listen to how Serene Jones describes her faith and just how hollow it is compared to God demonstrating His love for us through His life, death, and resurrection.

We are God-created, Jesus-grounded, grace-bounded, love-bounded, church-grounded We proclaim the universal reach of God's love and mercy, and we affirm that we are interwoven in the depths of the earth, bound together and inspirited with the breath of God's life.

And despite the harsh truth that we turn away from it and sin and seek our own destruction, the Spirit moves back through us and calls us to seek life abundant.

That's it.

Whatever that is, it ain't Christianity.

And even within the Catholic Church, you can find nuns and priests and members of the parish council preaching this kind of nonsense.

And frankly, young people are sick of it.

It's why the Associated Press covered a story back in April about the growth of young traditionalists within the Catholic faith.

Young women now who are wanting to enter religious life, they want to enter full throttle, and they want to be like brides of Christ, and to wear a habit is to really signify that every day.

Christianity is grounded in Christ, and the reality of who Christ is is grounded in His resurrection from the dead.

That is the only fact that explains how Christianity began in the first place in an ancient world that did not build religions around platitudes.

The only reason the disciples did not think their rabbi was just another failed messiah like all the others is because He proved He was not a failure by rising from the dead three days later and appearing to them.

God proved love is stronger than death not through deepities or platitudes, but through a glorious, historical triumph over the grave.

As Christ Himself declared, I died, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.

This is the faith in which we have faith, and it is more comforting than the drivel of liberal Christianity.

Thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.