After my thread on seminary education, I am doing one more about liberal clergy. My previous thread dealt with the idea that their education seemed incompatible with their calling, and this naturally led to the possibility that they may hide an underlying skepticism from their parishioners. In this thread I am asking why many of them present a God whose love goes beyond that of the biblical God or even the God of traditional theology.
The title of the current thread, "God is love," is of course a biblical quotation (1 John 4:8). But we know that does not present the total picture of God contained in the Bible. There is another side presented there. Whether we want to talk about the God who fights the war of Armageddon, or the God whose love cannot be exercised unless his justice is also satisfied, it seems unthinkable to simply state that the Christian God is one of love and let it go at that. And yet, many liberal clergy do just that - they present a God who is totally accepting of everyone with a love bordering on sentimentality. One would not arrive at such an idea either from the foundational texts with which such clergy have to deal, or even from the natural world of which we are a part. So where does it come from?
I can speculate that perhaps early liberals, on their quest for the "historical Jesus," may have isolated certain texts from the Gospels, and this lopsided view of Christ's teachings was retained even when the historical theories were abandoned. But I don't know. It is very strange that such clergy are able to both repress doubt and then present a God-idea which seems as if it were pulled out of thin air and has no foundation in the texts.