We all have the God given ability to categorize things within our minds to help us make sense of the world. Our lives would be total chaos if we couldn’t group thing together in our heads to simplify things.

            Knowing that there are varying belief systems out there for Christians, we use labels to help us understand the differences. Though labels have a benefit, we must also recognize that all people do not neatly fit under the categories we create. Labels can easily over simplify our complex and personal systems of beliefs that we hold dear to our hearts.

            Being sensitive to the limitations of labels, I want to share with you some of the categories John J. Turner used to help him evaluate biblical commentaries on the market. Where the authors of commentaries tend to fit in these categories usually says something about the conclusions they have drawn in their work. You probably don’t care about Turner’s opinions about the commentaries, but you might appreciate these categories:

1.      Conservative evangelicals strongly support the verbal inspiration and authority of the scriptures, tend to accept and defend the authorship claims of the Bible and of ancient tradition, and tend to resist explaining away the claims about history and the supernatural.

2.      Moderate evangelicals tend to adopt more complex views of authorship while still holding to the inspiration and authority of the scriptures; moderate evangelicals differ from conservative evangelicals in emphasis if not in substance by the heavier interpretive weight they give to the contrast between the ancient and modern world-views.

3.      Moderate mainliners see the Bible consisting of historically-conditioned human descriptions of the saving and revelatory acts of God; while the primary revelatory initiative may still rest with God, moderate mainliners differ from moderate evangelicals in that they no longer describe God’s initiative as verbal inspiration.

4.      Liberal mainliners, while not necessarily eliminating God’s revelatory role, see the Bible as consisting of the gradually evolving human search for God; this perspective emphasizes the theologizing and politicizing by the human writers.

Which of these categories best describes your position?

Peace of Christ,