Hillary Clinton Talks Faith In NY Times Interview

Senator Clinton recently sat down for a lengthy interview with a NY Times reporter and answered questions about her personal relationship with God. Check it out.

A snippet or two below:

Q: Is there a favorite book that you return to in the Bible?

Senator Clinton: It depends upon what’s going on in my life. It depends upon the challenges and questions that I’m coping with. Psalms is always a favorite. It’s both comforting and challenging. There are lots of aspects of Isaiah that I find very intriguing and provocative. I have a lot of verses sort of scattered through the Old Testament but I spend most of my time in the New Testament. For me it isn’t like there’s one place I go all the time because my experience changes all the time. I spent a lot of time when I was growing up trying to, for me, work out the balance between personal salvation and the social gospel.

And, I gave a speech or said something at one time about how I thought that in the Methodist church a lot of the churches had drifted too far on the social gospel side which is very understandable because there were a lot of serious issues certainly that were facing me when I was growing up on race relations and on the Vietnam war and so much else. But, you have to keep in balance the feeding of your spirit and your soul and the need to be nurturing your personal faith while you try to have the energy and the support to go out into the world.

There’s that great line in James about how faith without works is dead, but works without faith is too hard. And, that’s kind of how I see the necessary blending of what I want out of faith. For some people a personal relationship with God, a sense that you’re saved, a real belief in your salvation is incredibly both moving and comforting.

Q: And your attitude toward the Bible about how literally people should take it...

Senator Clinton: I think the whole Bible is real. The whole Bible gives you a glimpse of God and God’s desire for a personal relationship, but we can’t possibly understand every way God is communicating with us. I’ve always felt that people who try to shoehorn in their cultural and social understandings of the time into the Bible might be actually missing the larger point that we’re supposed to take from the Bible.