I agree with all of that, but I think it's platitudinous. We need to “wrestle” with all great literature since that kind of literature is meant to be challenging. So why prefer Christian literature to that of other religions or of the secular world? Why be a Christian rather than a cosmopolitan appreciator of the world’s great literatures? That’s the problem that Sentell ducks. The more liberal we are in interpreting the Bible, the less reason we have for preferring the Bible to other great stories. Why should liberals read the Bible so much, neglecting the great stories that are central to other cultures?

The real reason, of course, is that liberal Christians are born mostly into Judeo-Christian countries, so they prefer to learn about themselves and where they come from. But the more you read the ancient texts, the more overlap you find between those cultures. The liberal spiritualist is thus led naturally into comparative mythology, and ultimately into secular humanism and virtual atheism. That’s what I take to be the honest interpretation of what’s going on with “reconstructed Christianity.”