After walking quite a distance, my wife and I sat to rest in a large tent where someone was serving Turkish coffee.  We both sat on little stools and the terminology “classic liberal” came into the conversation.  After someone else commented, I was asked by a hippie-looking younger man what I thought liberal was.

I said that I relate conservative and liberal to the U. S. Constitution when it comes to a political definition.  The liberal takes what many call a “loose construction” of the constitution.  With that approach, the liberal can conform the meaning of the words to what he wants.  The constitution is malleable.

You have heard progressive applied to liberals.  The Constitution is an evolving document.  According to liberals., it can progress in its meaning.

Related to a loose construction of the constitution is a view of government that says man gets his rights from democratic government.  Man gives and takes away rights.  They can change.  Meaning changes, because it is subjective.  Taking it to an extreme, a man can self-identify as a woman and vice-versa.

Since power comes through human construct, forms of power are human constructs, using language.  This can change using language through deconstruction.  Some would say by synthesizing an antitheses with a thesis, forming a new thesis.

On the other hand, a conservative takes a strict construction of the U. S. Constitution.  His goal to to find what the authors meant by what they said.  This is sometimes called originalism.  The conservative looks for author’s intent.  The constitution is objective in its meaning.  It can’t change in what it means.  The goal is to find out what they meant, not read into it something that he wants it to mean.

I continued by saying that this approach to reality and truth affects everything.  An engineer building a bridge or an airplane must follow the laws of physics.  He can’t read whatever he wants to natural laws.  This was a good hopping off point into evangelism.

Our rights are not given by government, but by God.  Meaning is objective because it proceeds from God.  Natural rights from God are self-evident truths.

Theological conservatism or liberalism are not much different, except that instead of the constitution, someone interprets scripture according to either a strict or loose construction.  Someone can look into the text of scripture and see what he wants, everyone having his own take, his own opinion.  Or, he interprets the text of scripture according to original intent, what God and His human authors intended, what they meant by what they said.