LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE
1. The main issue in Christianity today is not so much differences between denominations, but rather the conflict between conservatives and liberals within each denomination. Often conservatives feel more in common with other conservatives in another denomination than they do with more liberal people in their own denomination.
2. Each large denomination has a range of people from those tending towards liberal to those tending towards conservative. In other words, a church would be made up of many individuals, and each individual might be at a different spot on a line between conservative and liberal.
3. A person or church could be conservative about one topic but liberal about another, so to analyze a church completely one would have to draw many lines: for example, one line about preferences in music, another line about feelings toward women's role in the church, and many other topics.
4. The topic which is helpful for understanding the others, because it is foundational, is "View of Bible." In non-technical terms, the conservative take the Bible at "face-value." On the other hand, the attempt to "judge which parts are authentic" would correctly be called a liberal view.
5. The large churches that were formed between the 1500's and 1700's are often called “mainline churches.” They could be visualized as a long box stretching from the liberal to the conservative end of a spectrum, since there is a wide range of opinion within most mainline churches, from liberal tendencies to conservative tendencies. Some branches of mainline denominations would be drawn as smaller boxes near the conservative end. For example, the American Baptist church would have both conservatives and liberals in it, while the Southern Baptist church is usually regarded as made up mostly of conservatives. Sometimes conservatives leave mainline churches and form new churches. Most of the "Bible churches" and "nondenominational churches" of today were formed in this way.
6. The technical terms for the two views of the Bible are sometimes called "higher criticism" for liberals, and "lower criticism" for conservatives. The word "criticism" here does not mean criticizing, but means "research." Lower criticism, which conservative Christians accept, includes two things: finding which words of the Bible are most likely the original words, and researching the correct meanings of the words and concepts. Higher criticism goes farther. It forms opinions about questions like "who really wrote the books of the Bible" and "which words of Jesus in the New Testament were really spoken by Jesus." As higher criticism developed in the 1800's, it applied two theories to the Bible: one was assuming that miracles probably did not actually happen, and the second was trying to fit the Bible into a theory of the development of religion which thinks that people originally worshipped many Gods and gradually changed to worship one God. This led some of them to look at some stories in the Bible, such as stories about Abraham, and conclude that "These stories couldn't have come from 2000 BC, because people at that time couldn't have believed in only one God so early in history. Therefore these stories must have been written later." The important thing to note is that the data for these conclusions did not come from the Bible itself. Rather, theories emerged from outside the church and were imposed upon the Bible.
7. The following words are often used to describe Christians near the conservative side of the spectrum: fundamentalist, evangelical, and “confessional.” "Fundamentalists" was the name given to conservatives early in the 1900's. The term means they stood for the historic, fundamental concepts of faith such as the virgin birth of Christ and the physical resurrection of Christ from the dead. After World War II, many fundamentalists preferred to be known as "Evangelicals". Both groups have equally conservative views about the Bible. One difference is that today's fundamentalists refrain from cooperating with other Christians who have differing views, while evangelicals are more open to working together. A famous example is Billy Graham, an evangelical. His views are conservative, and are the same as fundamentalist views, yet most fundamentalists criticize him because he is willing to invite all churches to help him in his crusades. The word "evangelical" is used both to describe the conservative people within mainline churches, and to describe the churches that have been formed by conservative people who have left mainline churches. The terms "fundamentalist" and "evangelical" are used within the "reformed" church tradition, that is, among the churches that look to Calvin for their theological stance. Among Lutherans, the term for conservatives is "confessional." The origin of this term is that during the 1500’s and 1600’s documents were written by protestants to explain their positions. These documents were called “confessions.” For example, Lutherans produced a document called the "Augsburg Confession" in 1530. Augsburg is the name of a city. Today, a Lutheran who wants to emphasize that he or she agrees with the understanding of Christianity that was written in the Augsburg Confession will call himself or herself a "confessional Lutheran." Most of the denominations wrote "confessions" during the years after the reformation, so logically, a conservative member of a "reformed" church could use this term, but today the label "confessional" is used mostly among Lutherans.
8. Another difference between conservative and liberal groups is their view of morality. Conservative groups are concerned with personal behavior standards, such as avoiding sex before marriage and avoiding abortion. Liberal groups are more likely to concern themselves with social issues: the phrase "social justice" is often heard. Examples would be calling attention to the problems caused by big business in the under-developed countries. This does not mean a conservative church would never be involved with social justice. It means that many liberal churches are also characterized by an emphasis on social justice issues, and many conservative churches are also characterized by emphasis on personal behavior.
9. Another tendency is for conservative groups to emphasize Jesus as savior, taking care of our sin problem by being a ransom, and liberal groups to emphasize Jesus as example.