I agree with you - a Christian can be open minded about many things, but at least the belief of an interventionist, creator God, and Jesus being his son/god himself, and a belief in the at least approximate accuracy of the New Testament, seem to be things on which a Christian cannot be truly open minded. Or perhaps that is putting it too strongly - maybe a Christian CAN be open minded even about those things, but such Christians tend not to remain Christian for long.
For example, I found myself wondering, as I was reading Kenneth Miller's "Finding Darwin's God", whether or not he would be open to multiverse theories, should somehow science provide good evidence that we do live in a multiverse, created by a principle of quantum physics, a principle that produces bubble-universes with pretty much random laws of nature.
Or would he reject that evidence, because it would make a creator deity redundant?
I take Kenneth Miller as an example because he is probably the most open minded Christian I know of - his world view is as close to fully naturalistic as a theists' can be, without rejecting the notion of a deity. He's got no problem with evolution - completely undirected evolution with no inteligent intervention at any point, evolution that does in no way guarantee the emergence of humans - nor does he have a problem with abiogenesis. He is not a deist though, because he does believe that god may interve occasionally, in human history; he believes that God making humans in his image is a metaphor meaning that God made a species with high intelligence, in this respect like himself, but that species didn't have to come from the hominid line, nor did it have to look like humans; nor did it even have to emerge on Earth - any planet capable of supporting life would have surved his purpose.
But is he open minded to the notion of a multiverse? Or the evidence I spoke of elsewhere on this forum of cognition being a complex thing in need of an explanation, and thus not a likely thing to pre-exist everything else? The former is still easy for a theist to reject as it is little more than conjecture at this point, but the latter is something we have mountains of evidence for. Could he honestly evaluate the evidence?
It seems to me that on these matters, every Christian's belief does restrict his options as to the thoughts he may seriously entertain.
I recently saw a bumper sticker that read, "Open-Minded Christian". This person had other bumper stickers that I agreed with, but this one puzzled me. Obviously it is possible that this person is the most "Open-Minded Christian I have ever crossed paths with on various topics, but the question I have is whether this, or any other religious person professing to be open minded, can truly have an open mind about their religion or view points that conflict with their teachings, in this case Christianity but others can be substituted in nicely.
To be fair, I assume this person was talking about issues such as the right for Gays to married in the United States after seeing their other bumper stickers and not referencing other questioning of their religion, but the question still holds. My first thought was basically, " You may not be in line with the majority of your fellow believers in believing that Gay's are on the fast track to eternal damnation, but when it gets down to the details there is a large amount of things you (person driving the car now stands in for all the religious) simply have no ability to be open-minded about.
Depending on the religion there are large number of things that have to get set off to the side when one opens up their mind or at least this is my assumption. Questions such as the existence of God or the belief in the bibles story of Jesus are required to be a Christian hence making them off limits if one wants to stay a Christian
The point of this post is to start a discussion on whether the idea of an "Open Minded Christian" can hold up to closer scrutiny or whether the bumper sticker should have read, "Open Minded Christian On A Few Things".