It's pretty fair to say that people don't really care about denominations anymore. Definitely the vast majority of the world doesn't. They hardly notice the difference between a Christian and another religeon let alone all the differences BETWEEN Christians. But even among the church leadership, the divisions between denominations is shrinking. The ministerial here has some good collegiality between the Baptists, Alliance, Anglicans, Pentacostals and us. Needless to say, I'm thankful for that. But there is a divide within our church that seems to be growing - almost as quick as the denominational one is shrinking. The evangelicals or conservatives vs the liberals.
To define it isn't that simple but basically, the evangelicals/conservatives would hold to a traditional, orthodox theology and they would believe that the world needs to be saved through accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior. Liberals have a much more social action oriented faith rather than a "accept Jesus in your heart" one and hold Scripture as allegorical and metaphorical rather than God's inspired word. Within the Presbyterian Church (and all the other mainline denominations), there's a wide diversity along the spectrum.
To survive within our denomination, you need to learn to be politically correct in certain situations. Sometimes that is very difficult - particularly when the pervading theology is vastly different from your own. What makes it harder though is how quickly our church likes to label and dismiss others as useless because of their theology. It's probably fair to say that we treat people that are on the opposite theological viewpoint much worse than those from other faiths or no faith at all. In many cases, it crosses from prejudicial into hatred.
Make no mistake - I'm an evangelical. The longer I'm in this denomination, the more I'm comfortable with that. But that's not to say that us evangelicals have it all right. Most evangelicals talk too much and live too little. We're overly judgemental and too rigid. Both liberals and evangelicals need to learn from each other and just for once, live in humility under God to trust that God will judge as God judges. Let's just let each other be who we are - standing up for the things we're passionate about WITHOUT putting the other person down for having a point of view different than our own.
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I cannot accept your judgment of "others'" interpretation of scripture as allegorical or metaphorical. Many read the Bible in seeking more of God's revelation in their lives. BUT, many of the writers in the New Testament were not writing scripture - but, like Paul, writing letters. When Paul wrote in Timothy that "women should be silent in the church" he MEANT it. Why? Because that was the way it was in the first century. Would he write the same today? Absolutely not. There are other topics of the same import.
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