As a religious liberal I can quite understand the impulse to constantly renew and reform my spirituality. This process requires me to rid myself of the unnecessary and superfluous. I also have a tendency to be skeptical of and rebel against bastions of authority. In these respects I have quite a bit in common with religious reformers of the past.

Many of the Old Testament figures rebuked the practice of idol-worship. The religion of the supreme, unified God in which Abraham and his descendants believed was strikingly different than those of neighbouring peoples. According to Jewish tradition Abraham’s father Terah produced idols and that Abraham rebelled and smashed up the contents of his fathers workshop. Another example is of King Josiah who destroyed the idols of all the gods besides YHWH that were in the Temple. Unlike the neighbouring polytheistic cultures the Israelites tried to maintain their distinctiveness by not allowing practices of other religions to be mixed with their own. It was by ardently avoiding foreign practices that Jews avoided the apotheosis common in other cultures, in which the ruler was elevated to godhood. This could be considered the first step toward the separation of church and state.

In the New Testament, Jesus opposed the hypocrisy and corruption he saw in the religious establishment. He was quite confrontational about it. Many time Jesus is reported to have gone into synagogues to preach. Often the crowds were amazed by his wisdom, but on occasion they were disgruntled with his iconoclastic message. Even in his own hometown, his message was not well-received (Luke 4:28-30). And who could forget the time he drove the capitalists out of the Temple? The essential theological conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees (the sect from which all forms of modern Judaism are descended) was their regard of the Oral Law. The Pharisees held to the extra-textual traditions, but Jesus rejected them. For better or worse, Jesus’ rebellion got him executed.

History repeated itself a millennium and a half later when the likes of Jan Hus stood up against Catholic hegemony and were summarily executed. It was not until Luther, Zwingli and Calvin that the Reformation began to gain ground. Protestants took Christianity in a very different direction than the Catholic Church. Their reforms have been summarized in the Five Solas. They did away with the concept that good works could absolve a sinner, and that only faith in Jesus Christ, and through his grace could the soul be saved. Another major difference was the rejection of a number of books as not being the word of God.

While I can admire the spirit of these religious reformers and even draw inspiration from them, there is something vastly different between them and myself. All of their reforms were of a conservative nature. According to these men, they were returning back to the original religion. It is a very common claim made by many religious reformers in the past including Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra and Muhammed. In Chinese religion the ancient kings were held as the quintessential model, and many major Chinese thinkers attributed their beliefs to these kings. In Islam innovation is generally frowned upon. The Bible, it is believed, has been corrupted over time by human intervention, and Jews and Christians have deviated from God’s will. If one listens to the rhetoric of a fundamentalist of any religious background their message will be one against innovation.

As both a religious liberal and a student of religion I know just how necessary and inevitable innovation is in religion. For a religion to survive, it must change. If religion cannot adapt to new conditions in which people find themselves it will die. Religions, philosophies and other belief systems that do not sufficiently allow people to address the things that happen in their lives will naturally be discarded.

In the major reforms of “the” Judeo-Christian tradition there is a pattern. The reformer brings a religion that is more individualized than its predecessor. The Old Testament Patriarchs led people away from the religion of their more powerful neighbours, needing not idols to connect with the divine. Jesus lead people against the priestly class of the Temple, needing not sacrifices to connect with the divine. The Protestant reformers lead people away from the Catholic Church, needing only a Bible to connect with the divine. With each reformer the religious authority is given to the individual, but over time the authority is returned back to an institution. I speculate this is because people need to feel part of something bigger.

It is only through liberal religion that one can be part of something bigger and still maintain ultimate authority. In liberal religion, one is able to see the divine manifest in numerous ways. A certain religious text might not be divinely inspired, but that does not mean it does not contain wisdom. It seems to me that the Protestant reformers threw the baby out with the bathwater in a number of ways. To my mind one of the most powerful concepts in Catholicism is the Seven Deadly Sins. Gluttony, vicarages and pride are especially alluring sins in our culture. It could also be argued, that by focusing only on faith and not on works Protestants have rid themselves of any obligation to do good. And in rejecting texts they do not find canon and forgetting about the saints, they have severed themselves from a great wealth of lore and mythology. The fact that popular media like Dogma and Sandman tap primarily into a Catholic cosmology is attests to this.

Likewise, it seems to me that Jesus was rather hasty in rejecting all of the Oral Law. There exists a wealth of Jewish folklore outside of the Bible, including the above story about Abraham. Today the Talmud contains the Oral Law. Without this exegesis, the bulk of modern Jewish practice would not exist. This is because the commandments that appear in the Torah are primarily do-not’s, whereas the Talmud offers do’s.

I think that even the ancient Israelites were a bit rash in trying to set themselves apart from other cultures. No man is an island, and the Bible demonstrates it. A number of elements appear in other cultures, the most well-known being the Flood story, but even Proverbs 22:17-24:22 appear to have been taken from the Egyptian text Instruction of Amenemope. Father Abraham may have lead us to more abstract conceptions of God, but he also set the precedent of righteous indignation that has been the underlying cause of innumerable wars about or justified by religion.

In liberal religion I can take a critical look at both side of any theological claim and come to my own conclusions that work for me. I can read the works of any scribe, rabbi, classical philosopher, protestant reformer, or theologian and be inspired. Or choose to respectfully disagree. The beauty of liberal religion is that I am constantly forced to galvanize my beliefs and worldview. Like a religious debate with another person, I can read a text to challenge my beliefs and either strengthen them or replace them. By avoiding a conservative mindset that thinks in absolutes I am opening myself up to unlimited sources of wisdom and inspiration. That is why I am glad I belong to a tradition that questions tradition.