Pete Buttigieg, who has been surging in Democratic presidential polls, said he derives his pro-abortion beliefs from scripture.
“I think for a lot of us — certainly for me — any encounter with scripture includes some process of sorting out what connects you with the God vs. what simply tells you about the morals of the times when it was written, right?” he told Rolling Stone in a story reported by The Christian Post. “For example, the proposition that you should execute your sister by stoning if she commits adultery. I don’t believe that that was right once upon a time, and then the New Testament came and it was gone. I believe it was always wrong, but it was considered right once, and that found its way into Scripture.”
Buttigieg said that despite growing up at a Catholic school, he was drawn to the Episcopal church because it is “liturgically conservative and theologically a little more open” — a spot where Buttigieg said he finds himself feeling right at home. He went on to talk about why he deems it important to interpret the scriptures with the proper historical context applied.
“There’s simply no way that a literal understanding of scripture can fit into the Bible that I find in my hands,” he added, because “Jesus speaks so often in hyperbole and parable, in mysterious code.
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“I actually think that if you look at an issue like choice, there’s so many parts of the Bible that associate the beginning of life with breath that there’s plenty of scriptural basis to reach different conclusions about that. But only if you believe that the government must legislate these metaphysical questions does the debate about choice have to be about the government deciding where life begins.”
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Buttigieg insisted that although he still maintains a distinctly liberal view of scripture, he believes Christians should constantly be seeking to find common ground with those they may disagree with theologically.
“I think we’ll find salvation in scripture itself and in the idea of human compassion, too,” he said. “Because even if you have a different view of scripture than I do, we have the same, I think, understanding of what compassion is.”
– Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
