There are many examples of people rightly taking responsibility in the Bible—and many examples of people trying to avoid it.  The latter was a major component of the Fall.  Adam and Eve both tried to avoid their responsibility by blaming others, but God still held them—and Satan—accountable for their own sins.  A great example of the former is David, who he became a leader by taking on the responsibility for the entire nation by volunteering to fight Goliath (1 Samuel 17).  More importantly, while he sinned in some egregious ways, he was quick to repent when confronted.

And David said to God, “Was it not I who gave command to number the people? It is I who have sinned and done great evil. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand, O LORD my God, be against me and against my father’s house. But do not let the plague be on your people.”
-1 Chronicles 21:17, ESV
In October 2008, two senior leaders were fired for something that happened on the other side of the world.  Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired both the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force when it was discovered that four nuclear missile fuses had been mistakenly shipped to Taiwan from Hill AFB, Utah in 2006.  To make matters worse, the Air Force was still reeling from a 2007 incident in which six nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber and flown from Minot AFB, North Dakota to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana.  Even though the official report from that incident placed the blame on base-level leadership and below, the two incidents taken together proved that the issues were much more systemic.  This highlights important truths about the nature of responsibility, which is a crucial but often overlooked component of leadership.
Leadership Require Responsibility
Responsibility is integral to leadership first because it is integral to any job.  To have any duty is to have responsibility, which means that in formal leadership, to assume a position of leadership is to take on the responsibility of performing all of the required duties of leadership.  In an informal sense, leadership can be defined as taking responsibility for those around you. Therefore, as Simon Sinek pointed out, leadership in a very real sense is responsibility.  In my leadership paper I showed that good leaders care for those they lead in addition to coordinating their efforts for the good of the organization, so a leader is responsible for the people and for the job.  In other words, leadership is taking responsibility, so without taking responsibility for others you cannot be a leader.  Authority therefore exists to enabling leaders to fulfill their responsibilities to their people and the organization, so legitimate authority cannot exist without responsibility. 
Since responsibility can be described as duty, everyone at every level has some measure of responsibility.  And just like in leadership, every duty requires a certain amount of authority.  This means that to delegate a task is to delegate both the responsibility for the task and the authority required to complete the task.  To give people responsibility without authority is a recipe for failure and discouragement.  Unless people the authority required to do the job, can we really claim they have the responsibility to do the job?  The responsibility rests with the one who has the authority, so a leader who fails to delegate authority is responsible for the team’s failures.  It is therefore unjust for leaders to hold subordinates responsible for tasks they did not have the authority to properly complete.  But by the same logic authority is inherent with delegated responsibility, so as a former boss of mine once said, “always assume the authority to do your job”. 
Individual and Shared Responsibility
This brings up an interesting question about responsibility: when you delegate it do you relinquish it?  To answer this, we must look at the concept of shared responsibility.  In our individualistic culture, it is easy to focus on individual responsibility.  In this view, an individual who gives responsibility does not retain it.  But responsibility is not a zero-sum game, so when it is given it is still retained.  The subordinate has responsibility to do the job, but the leader still has the responsibility to ensure the job gets done.  Furthermore, the leader is responsible for the subordinate.  Therefore, they both share responsibility.  So when things go wrong it is proper to hold both individuals and leaders accountable for the particular ways in which they all failed to fulfill their responsibilities.  We are all responsible for our individual actions, words, responses, and negligence.  We are all responsible for the decisions we make and must therefore own the consequences of those decisions.  In essence, we are responsible for ourselves as well as anything and anyone we have authority over.  Both W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran famously place responsibility of “the system”—and therefore the vast majority of issues—on leaders.  This means that while all workers are responsible for the work they do, the leaders are responsible for the tools, training, processes, policies, facilities, environment, organizational culture, and everything else they need to do the job.  When something goes wrong it is often appropriate to point to both workers and leaders, sometimes appropriate to point only to leaders, and almost never appropriate to point only to workers. 
With this in mind, let’s look again at our nuclear incidents.  In the Taiwan incident, various workers were responsible for mistakes in identifying, pulling, and shipping the fuses, so they were justly held accountable for their negligence.  At the same time, the incident was in large part caused by various factors that were outside of the control of those workers and therefore the responsibility of leaders at various levels, so they were also justly held accountable.  Similarly, the Minot incident involved many personnel failing to properly prepare, load, and inspect the warheads, leading to rightly-deserved adverse actions.  But the organizational culture that allowed this perfect storm to happen was the responsibility of leaders at various levels who were also rightly held accountable.  Both incidents together pointed to enterprise-wide issues, which were the responsibility of the Secretary and Chief of Staff, meaning that they were rightly held accountable as well.  To borrow the analogy we discussed here, there were bad apples (individuals), bad barrels (units), and a bad barrel maker (the Air Force as a whole).  Properly solving the problem therefore required people at all levels to be held accountable for what they were responsible for. 
Properly solving the problem also required an immense amount of pain and effort for everyone in those units and across the Air Force for years.  Many people who were completely uninvolved suffered the consequences of these incidents and therefore bore responsibility as well.  This may seem unfair to our individualistic culture, but this is the reality of shared responsibility. 
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Written by Matthew S. Miller |
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
We have not yet deprived liberalism of one of its most effective criticisms—namely, that conservative Christianity tends to focus on personal salvation and doctrinal precision to the unnecessary exclusion of concern for the poor and the problems of the world.

As a formal movement embedded in mainline seminaries and denominations, American Protestant liberalism has been on the retreat for the better part of two generations now. Outflanked by more progressive strands of liberation and postmodern theologies on the one side and a resurging conservative Christian orthodoxy on the other, liberalism’s once commanding public voice has been reduced to a pleading whimper. Protestant mainline denominations, once the mainstay of American religion, have seen their numbers steadily plummet. As of 2017, “self-described mainline Protestants composed just 10% of the American public,” a statistic further diminished by the fact that of these, “barely a quarter actually attended church.”[1] By such measures, liberalism appears to be dead, or nearly so. But is it?
If we equate liberalism with its institutional form – the kind that took up residence at Harvard in the nineteenth-century, put forward nationally renowned theologians who labored to make Christianity credible to the modern world, published leading journals and Sunday School curricula shaping the thought life of a generation, and was heralded by celebrated pastors like Fosdick – then the bell tolled for liberalism long ago. In his massive trilogy tracing the history of American liberal theology, Gary Dorrien relays the accepted narrative: “In the nineteenth century it took root and flowered; in the early twentieth century it became the founding idea of a new theological establishment; in the 1930s it was marginalized by neo-orthodox theology; in the 1960s it was rejected by liberation theology; by the 1970s it was often taken for dead.”[2]
We would be mistaken, however, to equate liberalism exclusively with its established, institutional form, just as we would be mistaken to equate Gnosticism singularly with the official movement of self-styled Gnostics that early Christianity defeated. Though the published works of gnostic theologians were entirely lost long ago, the impulse of their thought has persisted to the present day (as Phillip Lee and others have demonstrated).[3] In the same way, liberalism in its institutional form has suffered an outward defeat, but that does not mean liberalism itself has been vanquished.
The heart of liberalism has proven to be not its institutions, but its ideological core. That core was clearly identified by J. Gresham Machen in Christianity and Liberalism, in which Machen pointed to liberalism’s (1) naturalistic approach to religion, (2) appeal to human experience (and ultimately individual experience) as a final authority, and (3) exclusively imperatival message. On this last count, liberalism jettisons the grand “indicative” of the Gospel – that is, the announcement of the great things God has done in Christ for sinners (think Romans 1-8 or Ephesians 1-3) – and is thus left to traffic exclusively in commands and aspirations (imperatives). In one of his most profound statements, Machen announces, “Here is found the most fundamental difference between liberalism and Christianity—liberalism is altogether in the imperative mood, while Christianity begins with a triumphant indicative; liberalism appeals to man’s will, while Christianity announces, first, a gracious act of God.”[4]
What happens when we look for liberalism’s ideological core of naturalism, the authority of experience, and the imperatival mood? We find that liberalism has outlived the decline of its institutional citadels. Notre Dame sociologists Christian Smith and Patricia Snell write, “[A] historical nemesis of evangelicalism, liberal Protestantism can afford to be losing its organizational battles now precisely because long ago it effectively won the bigger, more important struggle over culture.”[5] Put another way, if institutional liberalism is effectively dead, ideological liberalism is more alive than it has ever been. Where do we find it?
The Ideological Core of Liberalism in Liberation Theologies
As a formal school of thought, liberal theology took a back seat to a host of liberation theologies arising with Latin American and black liberation theologies in the 1960s and, in the decades that followed, with feminist and gay rights liberation theologies, among others. In one sense, the projects of liberal theology and liberation theology are quite different. Liberal theology privileges the voices of the scientific and cultural elite in its aim of making the Christian faith more credible to the modern world. Liberation theology, on the other hand, privileges the voices of the marginalized and oppressed (it often maintains that “the cry of the oppressed is the voice of God”) with the aim of raising select themes of the Christian faith in protest against the modern world. That is why liberation theologies position themselves as a rejection of liberalism.
But beneath these above-ground differences, liberation theologies borrow and build upon liberalism’s substructure. Both liberalism and liberation theology see men and societies as facing their problems without the help of heaven—everything is interpreted and remedied naturalistically, within what philosopher Charles Taylors would call the “immanent frame.” Moreover, both place the seat of authority in human experience. Harold O. J. Brown, former professor at RTS-Charlotte, emphasized the underlying connection: “Because this standard [of liberation theology] is drawn from human feelings and experience—although limited to those of a particular group or class—liberation theology also resembles classic Protestant liberalism after Schleiermacher: it has made human feelings and human sensitivity a source of divine revelation that can be placed alongside Scripture.”[6] Finally, both sound their messages entirely in the imperative mood, whether that is the call of liberalism to “end war and poverty,” or the call of liberation theology to “resist oppressive power structures.” If Machen had lived to critique liberation theology, he would only have needed to add an appendix to Christianity and Liberalism rather than write a new book.
The Ideological Core of Liberalism in Progressive Christianity
Second, the core features of liberalism abide in the many leading voices of self-styled “progressive Christianity.” Granted, the term “progressive Christianity” is quite vague. Some define it as liberal Christianity that adopts certain insights and accents of liberation theology. Others find that progressive Christianity is a large umbrella term under which self-identified Christians who prefer egalitarian approaches to marriage and ministry and who support the LGBTQ+ movement can publicly identify (often without having to do the hard work of examining whether these commitments are actually compatible with their other theological positions).[7] Progressive Christianity lacks the established tradition and formidable theological giants that liberal theology in the first half of the twentieth century boasted—liberal theology was a disciplined school of thought, while progressive Christianity consists mostly of a patchwork of blogs, social media influencers, and authors of easy-read books (think Rob Bell). Roger Olson’s observation that progressive Christianity is a kind of “halfway house” between fundamentalism and liberalism seems apt: “Some get stuck there, but some move on to the ‘left’ into liberal Christianity without understanding that tradition.”[8]
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Theologically, we believe that all the words of Scripture were written by God’s Spirit for his people. They are meant to both inform us—ultimately of Jesus Christ—and change our behaviour (for e.g. 2 Tim 3:16–17; 1 Pet 1:10–11; 2 Pet 1:20–21). Yet we also know that they are human documents, not transcendent of history, but records of it and within it (e.g. Luke 1:1–4; 1 John 1:1–3). Taken together, as both a divine and human document, the word of God for us should be read according to the moments that it addresses.

I’ve been teaching a class on biblical theology and interpretation. The aim is the examine how we read and understand the Bible, how it fits together, culminates in Jesus and applies to us today. One of the key principles in biblical interpretation is that the text doesn’t say something different to us than what it said to its first hearers. That is, there’s nothing new or hidden in the text, we just need to work hard to understand it and its context.
After class one week a student said to me, “Can you tell me why it is that we need to understand the passage in its original context before we apply it to ourselves?” He wasn’t doubting that this is a good thing to do, just wanting to press deeper into why it’s the right thing. How do we know that this is how we should read the Bible?
At one level the answer seems like common sense. However, given the earnestness of the question I wanted to think a bit deeper.
The Theological Reason for Reading in Context
The philosophical and theological reason for reading in context is because the Bible is a serious and intentional text. Something written simply to entertain or amuse may not require paying attention to context in quite the same way—although the upheaval of context might be part of such a text’s ability to entertain. However, something written with a serious intention, whether to convey information or change people’s behaviour, always needs to be understood according to a context. That could be the context created by the narrative and/or a context created by the historical moment being spoken into (in the case of a letter).
The Scriptures were not written simply to record stories for their own sake nor to entertain. They were written for the purpose of changing the minds of those who read them. This is abundantly clear in certain places (for e.g. Jn 20:31). But theologically, we believe that all the words of Scripture were written by God’s Spirit for his people. They are meant to both inform us—ultimately of Jesus Christ—and change our behaviour (for e.g. 2 Tim 3:16–17; 1 Pet 1:10–11; 2 Pet 1:20–21). Yet we also know that they are human documents, not transcendent of history, but records of it and within it (e.g. Luke 1:1–4; 1 John 1:1–3). Taken together, as both a divine and human document, the word of God for us should be read according to the moments that it addresses.
The other part of my answer I’m going to share here, by way of example, is that contextual reading of the Bible has always been required.
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