The True Nature of the Religion of Liberalism/"Progressivism"

Two men were seeking the affection of a young lady. Both decided that one night each of them would go to the father and ask to court her. The one took the usual long roads that led to the girl's house. The other man, however, thought that if he could get there first, he would have an advantage. So took a shortcut through the pig farm that would give him a straight path to her house. When he showed up first, however, his request was denied by her father. Just then the other man showed up and asked the same question. The father told him yes. The first man was confused as to why he was denied when the other man who came the same night and stood on the same porch with the same question was granted his request. The father replied, "Because what ended up mattering the most was not that you arrived at the same place, but rather what road you took to get here."

I often get labeled as a liberal by fundamentalists. Strange but true since liberal evangelicals see me as the staunchest of fundamentalists. I figure if fundamentalists and liberals both don't like you, it probably means that you're not brainwashed by either one of their cults.

But what is liberalism really? I get labeled that because of the way I may date a biblical book like Daniel, or pay attention to genres that evangelicals and fundamentalists often ignore like in the case of Ecclesiastes, or concede to the idea that a biblical author may have compiled sources in Isaiah or the Pentateuch (this last one is particularly weird since they are fine with authors using sources in any other book since those books state it explicitly, i.e., Luke, Psalms, Proverbs, etc.). 

But none of this has to do with what makes up liberalism. Yes, liberals believe similar things about Isaiah or Jonah or Daniel, but they have attempted to undermine the authority of the Bible with these things and in no way do they accomplish that goal. In fact, the real reason why they have attempted to use this information to undermine the Bible's authority is because they are attempting an apologetic justification for a liberal epistemology. And that is the true identification marker of a liberal, his epistemology. How does he come to know what he knows about God, Jesus, heaven, hell, sin, the atonement, the virgin birth, etc.?

Liberal epistemology is self-referential  à la Kant or Schleiermacher. One knows what is true through his own reason and/or intuitions. The Scripture opposes this idea by saying that man cannot know these things in his finite and fallen nature and therefore must receive and has received revelation from God to inform him.

The liberal does not like that because it refutes his religion so he seeks to undermine biblical authority by showing it to be so human that it is prone to err, and hence, it is in the same boat as any other group of human beings who are left to their own intuitions.

Couple that with the arrogance of the Enlightenment in seeing itself as "progressing" in its understanding of spiritual things (a faulty non sequitur of an assumption made because it has progressed technologically) and now the liberal thinks he or she has some ground to critique the Bible for being more evolved in some places and lesser evolved in others in its understanding when judged by ours.

So liberalism has really nothing to do with whether you think there are one or three Isaiahs. 

Likewise, orthodox Christians better get wise real fast since the new liberals can affirm the Trinity and virgin birth (those were just originally denied by some liberals as a part of their antisupernaturalist apologetic--other liberals were fine affirming them). Instead, they are see in our day in their arguments that degrade the Bible to a compilation of human experience that may contain error about gender roles, sexuality, and critical race theory when compared to our enlightened understanding of these things.

In other words, these fundamentalists who are trying to safeguard Christianity from liberalism because they're looking for external denials of certain doctrines have missed the mark. Yes, whoever denies those things is not a Christian but whoever affirms them may still be a liberal in the church, infecting it with a completely foreign religion due to its completely opposite epistemology. 

In that regard, it isn't simply a matter that the person has come to the same place as other Christians have on certain issues. What really matters is what road they took to get there.