Cash was never afraid to be wrong. He said what he believed and his life reflected that. I think he saw life in terms of haves and have-nots more so than liberal and conservative.

Yes, he was hard to pin down. While he opposed the Vietnam War, he also performed for our troops there. And FWIW, I remember shortly after 9/11 there was a statement on his website saying that he and June supported the war against terrorism.

He’s good for a musical trivia question, too: What did Hândel, Schumann, and Johnny Cash have in common (besides writing music)? They all wrote works titled ‘Belshazzar’.

Not trying to be confrontational, but I do want to defend a bit your generalization of “liberal” Christians - since I happen to be one. In my mind, a Christian of whatever ideological leaning must embrace the fundamentals of the example of Christ. By this, I don’t mean a scriptural literalist, nor do I mean an uncritical thinker about doctrinal matters of faith. I mean simply one who takes his or her Christian faith seriously and makes it a central part of his or her life. I know a lot of liberal Catholic Christians who are anti-abortion and anti-death penalty; who are doctrinally orthodox, but socially concerned with the root causes of poverty and marginalization of the most dispossessed of the world’s peoples; who embrace capitalism as an economic system that can produce the best possible solutions to inequality, but who have personally chosen the path of poverty and anti-materialism and consumerism. To be Christian is to be neither conservative, nor liberal - but simply to be a daily exemplar of Christ and His teachings according to one’s best efforts to discern what the Christian example and teaching is. That said, I wouldn’t call Johnny Cahs a conservative Christian, nor a liberal Christian — just a committed Christian.

I generally agree with you, Jimmy, but when it comes to Christians who happen to be famous singers (outside the CCM world), you don’t hear alot about the fundamentals in their music. I’m thinking primarily of U2 and the like—great musicians and fairly obvious Christians, but their emphasis is more on social justice and less on bedrock Christianity. In fact, the Christianity that creeps into their music is usually hidden or cloaked in some way, so that it is ambiguous. Johnny Cash, on the other hand, wrote quite a few songs that could easily find their way onto mainstream CCM recordings (if mainstream CCM artists had any taste, that is) because they are so overtly Christian in content, yet if you had to put him in any political box it would probably be on the left. He was unusual in that sense, I think. That was my point, albeit badly made.

Thanks for a thoughtful reply, Bryan. I understand your point better now. I guess my point is that I wouldn’t consider Cash to be that unusual. One of my little crusades is to try to demythologize the idea that orthodox christianity is somehow inherently contrary to liberal thought.

Well there’s where you will get some argument from me, Jimmy. I would argue that when you have to ignore large sections of the canonical writings of St. Paul in order to square your faith with your politics, as you have stated in the past you have done (on gay marriage, I think), it’s hard to see how truly orthodox you are. By your own admission, when you faced a conflict between your faith and your politics, you opted to side with the politics and thereby alter your faith. That’s not orthodoxy. That’s the kind of thing, though not to the same degree, that the Jehovah’s Witnesses do. For instance, in the Watchtower version of the Bible they have altered John 1:1 to read “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.” All mainline translations omit the “a” article for God, and that one little JW alteration changes the entire meaning of the verse and is therefore no longer orthodox—it posits a multitheism that the Bible itself does not support, in order to make JW theology palatable to its scholars and laymen and to anyone else who doesn’t read their text closely.

In order to be a modern liberal, you have to support gay rights all the way through to marriage (unbiblical if you accept Paul’s take), you have to support legal and unfettered abortion (unbiblical in light of several passages, OT and NT), and generally side with people who try to restrict individual religious freedom and the ability of religious groups to operate in the public arena. It’s hard for me to square those positions with orthodox Christianity, and in fact it’s apparently hard for you to do so as well, since you have had to oppose several of the canonical writings of St. Paul to remain a good modern liberal.

Bryan, you make some good points. I can’t argue with you in terms of my own struggles between some biblical writings and even my own Church’s officially stated doctrine on certain social issues. But I don’t think orthodoxy implies blind doctrinal obedience where informed conscience leads to disagreements. This is true for liberal as well as conservative Catholic Christians. In my Church, there have always been holy people, even great Saints whose lives and work have become part of Catholic Orthodoxy, who were “faithful dissenters” in their times. To give just one example off the top of my head of how this dilemma plays out on both sides of the ideological divide, my Church also unequivocally condemns the death penalty as immoral. Is one who supports the death penalty thus an unorthodox Christian in my Church? By your argument, one would have to say yes, I think. But I think that would be wrong. In my mind, being pro-death penalty is not the full measure of unorthodoxy. And I should also like to mention that, in my Church, social justice teachings in Papal encyclicals are no less orthodox than the canonical writings of St. Paul. Orthodoxy does not mean accepting that St. Paul’s stance on homosexuality and marriage is morally unchallengable, much like orthodoxy does not mean accepting literally and without question the morality of St. Paul’s statements on women’s roles in society and the family and their submission to male dominion. Again, you make some good points, but I think our disagreement boils down to our somewhat different definitions and understandings of what Christian orthodoxy means. G.K. Chesterton’s great work on the subject is a good (but certainly not definitive) place to look for some guidance on the subject.

I’m certainly not arguing in favor of blind obedience, or I wouldn’t be a Southern Baptist. We believe in the priesthood of each believer, which means we’re free to dissent from church doctrine if we believe it is in conflict with Scripture. We can even be good Baptists and dissent, as long as we’re siding with the Bible over the church (I’m a dissenter on the dancing and drinking stuff even though I’m a horrible dancer and never drink, for instance, because the Bible doesn’t clearly proscribe dancing or moderate drinking—just loose or immodest behavior and drunkeness).

That’s where you and I differ, I think. The Baptist view is that we should accept our church’s teachings unless we see clearly that they are in conflict with Scripture, in which case Scripture always wins. Not politics, not what the preacher says, not what the hymns say, not what the guy on the radio says but what Scripture says. We place no church doctrine on a par with Scripture, and frankly that’s one of my two main arguments against the Catholic view (the other being its views on Mary—neither a Virgin throughout life since she had other children after Jesus, and certainly not the Queen of Heaven, since her “fiat” wasn’t an order, but a show of fearful submission). Scripture, the God-breathed Word to His flock, is the bedrock bylaw of Christianity; church doctrine should but does not always follow what the text says, and where there are differences the text should always win. Church doctrine does not always follow the Word for obvious reasons—human foibles, factionalism, the influence of sin or politics or changing culture, whatever. Churches split over the pettiest of reasons, often having nothing to do with the Bible but with some guy’s “new” interpretation of it.

So the Christian conscience should put the Word above all else when considering a moral or human dilemma, and whatever conflicts with Scripture should be the loser. That is the bottom line, as I and my fellow Baptists see it.

So to take gay marriage as an example, the SBC hasn’t said all that much about it, but what it has said has been uniformly against. What should I do about that? I should first look at the issue for myself (since I’m a priest in our way of thinking) by turning to Scripture, then see what my church says. If the obvious scriptural point of view (which is against sanctioning the gay lifestyle and in favor of defining marriage as a male-female union, from various espistles and Genesis) is in conflict with the SBC view, then the SBC view should lose—but I can still be a Baptist in good standing even if I dissent. If my own view is in conflict with the scriptural view, my own view should lose, though it might cause me pain or even ostracism or persecution. The obvious scriptural view should always win, or we are taking on the task of individually rewriting the Bible to comport with our own views. There’s no telling where think kind of thing will end, as I’m sure you’ll agree. And if we’re rewriting the Bible when it suits us, we’re promoting division and factionalism within the church, two obvious no-nos. We’re also in danger of taking things so far that the faith we claim bears no resemblance to the Biblical worldview. I think the Mormons and JWs, to name two, have rewritten the text to such an extent already and are therefore no longer inside the family of orthodoxy.

Faith demans certain things of us, or it isn’t faith. Christianity demands certain things, suggests some things, proscribes some things, promotes some things and is silent on some things. Most of these things aren’t salvaic—they don’t effect your salvation. A few do—you can’t be a Christian if you don’t believe certain things about Christ, for instance. But they all do effect your relationship with God and your effectiveness as His witness. I would strongly urge you to worry less about what your church says (that’s the Baptist in me talking), but focus more and more on what the Word says. It’s God’s word to you as an individual, as well as to the world generally. He put things in there for specific purposes, and I’d be very hesitant to philosophically rip them out unilaterally, especially if the same issue is treated in the same way in both testaments.

Just for the record, I’m not stating here or anywhere that I believe you’re somehow not orthodox in your beliefs. That’s not my call, unless you ask specifically or I see some glaring error that conscience compels me to call out. I’m just sharing my thoughts and offering a perspective you may not have heard about the church’s role in understanding Scripture and where the individual believer fits into the scheme.

Bryan - You are one sharp theologian! Yes, our faiths do tackle the issue of authority and orthodoxy a bit differently. I am quite familiar with the Baptist tradition as I am happily married to a woman who is a Baptist and very involved in her Church (She’s an ordained deacon.) And my daughters are both being raised in my wife’s faith. I myself participate in the activities and services of my wife’s church regularly. I even play on the Baptist Church’s softball team! (I guess all this makes me an unorthodox Catholic!!)

I do take the Scripture as the most important guide for behavior. And, I do have a mild protestant streak in me when it comes to favoring individual conscience over church doctrine. But you should know that I am not a scriptural literalist. I am a contextualist and I believe the revealed Word of God comes out of the scriptural text, though not necessarily verbatim. The Bible is not only God’s Word, but it is also a love story between God and His Creation told in the context of the times in which it was written. It is a book, after all (albeit the Good Book!). And while I think the overall Judeo-Christian message is timeless and universal, I don’t buy that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, and I don’t think that disagreeing with Paul’s epistolary style and expression is necessarily wrong. And this says nothing about the accuracy of scriptural translations of his original writings. While the Bible is the Word of God, it still has been filtered through the minds and hearts and pens of fallible humans. In fact, one of the things I admire about the Catholic Church (though I often disagree with it) is its claim to authority over individual scriptural reading and its expectation of conformity to official Church doctrine on matters of serious importance. If we, as fallible humans, are all “priests” when it comes to interpreting the Scripture, then I think the position you outline gives room for many different individual interpretations of Scripture, depending on which translation of the Bible you use, and which Books of the bible are included in your version, which the Catholic Church doesn’t readily tolerate. If I understand your position clearly, it seems to me that my Scripture CAN be different than your Scripture - since we each must go back to the Scripture on our own. It may even be the exact same words on the page; but that doesn’t mean we read it the same way. Anyway, I appreciate your willingness to engage theological discussions and I am quite impressed by and respect the firmness and thoughtful rootedness of your conviction.