- The Problem with Progressive Christianity, Part 1
- The Problem with Progressive Christianity, Part 2
What is “progressive Christianity”? The term is a little harder to define than the terms “evangelicalism” or “Protestant liberalism.” Evangelicalism is a form of Protestant Christianity that is biblicist, crucicentric, conversionist, and activist. Protestant liberalism is a form of Protestant Christianity that completely abandons historic Christian orthodoxy and replaces it with a human religion based in human religious experience. Many adherents of Protestant liberalism now refer to themselves as “progressive Christians.” Meanwhile, many Christians who have distanced themselves from fundamentalism and/or evangelicalism to varying degrees without fully embracing Protestant liberalism also refer to themselves as “progressive Christians.” “Progressive Christianity” thus refers to a somewhat wide spectrum of Christian theological positions.
Since progressive Christians seem to consciously define themselves in opposition to evangelicalism, perhaps the best way to define progressive Christianity is to contrast it with evangelicalism. Evangelicalism is biblicist. In contrast, progressive Christianity rejects the Authority of Scripture. Evangelicalism is crucicentric. While some progressive Christians retain a belief in the salvific significance of Jesus’s death, many do not. Evangelicalism is conversionist. In contrast, progressive Christianity tends to affirm universal salvation, downplaying the need for radical personal repentance and conversion in favor of a belief in the immanence of God in all people. Evangelicalism is activist. Progressive Christianity is, in a sense, activist as well, but it is an activism focused on bringing about “social justice” in society, rather than on costly discipleship and evangelism.
The Method of Progressive Christianity
The starting point for many who embrace progressive Christianity is “deconstruction.” Deconstruction is essentially the rejection and repudiation of historic Christian orthodoxy, as embodied in fundamentalism or evangelicalism. The progressive Christain then builds from scratch a form of Christianity that seems more reasonable and likable to them.
Typically, the process of deconstruction is motivated by: 1) a reaction against a rigidly narrow and anti-intellectual fundamentalism, 2) a reaction against the problematic aspects of the religious right, and/or 3) a reaction to personal suffering or religious trauma caused by individuals or churches who are doctrinally committed to historic Christian orthodoxy. Now, a reaction against such deplorable things is certainly understandable. But they provide no good reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is absolutely no reason why a church cannot be firmly committed to historic Christian orthodoxy and at the same time express open-mindedness, thoughtfulness, ecumenism, political wisdom and discernment, and genuinely Christlike love. Many churches do (And anyone who examines progressive Christians writings will see that progressive Christians are perfectly capable of being just as arrogant, narrow-minded, dogmatic, self-righteous, and judgmental as the most Pharisaical of fundamentalists).
There are certainly many serious problems in contemporary American evangelicalism, and the existence of these problems should lead us to call for reformation. There is a saying, “ecclesia semper reformada”: “the church must always be reformed.” This saying has been lived out by faithful Christians committed to historic Christian orthodoxy throughout church history. Most of the New Testament epistles themselves are attempts to reform corrupt first-century churches. The Church Fathers worked tirelessly to reform the church as it was beset by heresy and hypocrisy. And there were reform movements in the church throughout the Middle Ages, culminating in the Protestant Reformation (which, contrary to its intent, unfortunately caused a schism in the church). Various reform movements have taken place in the modern church, and it is essential that such reform movements continue to take place in the future. A firm commitment to historic Christian orthodoxy should lead us not to blind traditionalism, complacency or narrowly rigid thinking. Instead, it should lead us to a fervent desire to continually work to reform the church.
If this is the case, what is the problem with “deconstruction”? The problem is that reformation and deconstruction are two radically different things. Reformation seeks to modify the church’s teaching and practice to be more faithful to God’s word. For example, the Protestant Reformers critiqued certain aspects of late Medieval church teaching and practice, not by abandoning the authority of Scripture and church tradition, but by repeatedly citing Scripture and the early Church Fathers in order to argue that the late Medieval church had gotten off track and had become unfaithful in some significant ways. Deconstruction, in contrast, arbitrarily seeks to create a new form of Christianity that will better align with one’s personal preferences and the values of the surrounding culture.
Historic Christian orthodoxy has recognized four sources for the church’s theology: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. These four sources are not equal. As the word of God, the source of Divine revelation, Scripture is the church’s primary authority. Tradition, reason, and experience then help the church to understand and elucidate the teachings of Scripture, relate those teachings to other areas of human knowledge, and apply those teachings to new situations and contexts.
Progressive Christianity turns this orthodox theological method on its head. For progressive Christianity, it is reason and experience which are primary, while Scripture occupies a subordinate position. Meanwhile, the authority of tradition is essentially abandoned. This denial of the authority of tradition is egregious because the authority of tradition provides an important safeguard against the church being controlled by knee-jerk reactions and passing fads, “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming” (Eph 4:14). Without the authority of church tradition to guide it and to ground it, progressive Christianity easily becomes controlled by the winds of postmodern teaching and deceitful secular ideologies, rather than being controlled by the Spirit of God.
Why is it so problematic to elevate reason to a position higher than the Authority of Scripture? It is problematic because there is no neutral, self-evident, universal standard of what is “reasonable.” All human reasoning operates based on certain assumptions. If Christian theological reasoning does not begin with assumptions grounded in Scripture and Christian tradition, then it will begin with assumptions uncritically absorbed from the ideas that happen to be popular and fashionable at the moment in the surrounding culture. When that happens, our theological reasoning becomes speculative and arbitrary at best, and twisted and heretical at worst. Christianity is an apocalyptic faith, a faith based in a belief in a radical, miraculous inbreaking of a new order, the Kingdom of God, into the midst of the old. This means that the church simply cannot allow what is “reasonable” according to the wisdom of the world to determine its beliefs and practices.
Why is it so problematic to elevate experience to a position higher than the Authority of Scipture? The problem is that our personal experience, if not shaped and held in check by a firm commitment to be faithful to the teachings of God’s word, is entirely subjective. What makes a person feel happy or unhappy to a large extent is determined by what kind of person they are. A virtuous person feels pleasure and pain at the right things, while a vicious person feels the opposite. Basing church doctrine and practice on what seems to be the best for making people feel happy is thus extremely dangerous. “The human heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). Our intuitions about what constitutes genuine human flourishing, which we have absorbed from our surrounding culture, are not reliable guides for knowing what genuine human flourishing actually is. In order to know this, we must listen to what God’s word has to say about it.
It turns out Jesus and His apostles have some quite radical things to say about what the path to genuine human flourishing is. They tell us that it entails living in light of the radical inbreaking of God’s New Creation, which often means a radical rejection both of our own desires and of the way the world works. They also tell us that genuine human flourishing only comes to those who follow Jesus on the way of the cross and share in the sufferings of Christ. This means that our experience of what will allow us to feel happy and to avoid suffering is not a reliable guide for determining correct church doctrine and practice. Instead, we must submit all of our subjective experiences to the Authority of Scripture, and only then allow our experience to help guide us in living wisely and faithfully as followers of Jesus Christ.
The theological method of progressive Christianity is thus deeply problematic. In fact, progressive Christianity has no coherent or consistent theological method. When speculative human reasoning and personal experience are given more weight than the authority of Scripture, our theological method becomes arbitrary. Progressive Christians make selective use of Scripture, believing the parts they like and want to believe, while rejecting the parts they do not want to believe. This is an inconsistent and unreasonable method for determining theological truth.
Some progressive Chrstians will claim that they do have a consistent theological method, one that looks to Jesus alone as the Word of God, and submits to His Authority alone, rather than the authority of the Bible. However, as I argue here, it is incoherent and wrong to pit the Authority of Jesus and the Authority of the apostles against each other. The Gospels are just as much an apostolic testimony about Jesus as the epistles are. So, it is arbitrary to accept what the Gospels have to say about Jesus, while rejecting the Authority of the rest of the New Testament.
Some progressive Christians appeal to the guidance of the Holy Spirit as the basis for their theological beliefs. But, divorced from submission to the Authority of God’s word and the authority of Church tradition, claims regarding the Holy Spirit’s guidance become arbitrary and meaningless. The term “Holy Spirit” can very easily become merely a cover for what is actually just one’s personal intuitions, or ideas uncritically absorbed from the “spirit of the age.” “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). We need the objective standard of Scripture to test every “spirit” in order to determine whether this spirit is in fact the Holy Spirit.
When all else fails, progressive Christians will appeal to mystery and uncertainty in order to justify their rejection of aspects of historic Christian orthodoxy. The problem is that this appeal to mystery and uncertainty is made in a highly inconsistent manner, since progressive Christians are not at all uncertain about many of their beliefs; this includes highly debatable beliefs such as believing that all Christians must support very specific secular social and political agendas. There are certainly many things which God has not told us, leaving them mysterious and uncertain. But this does not mean that, when God’s word does tell us something very clearly, we are free to reject it based on an appeal to “mystery” and “uncertainty.” If we really are uncertain about a particular theological or moral issue, then it is clear that what is most reasonable is to bow to the authority of tradition on the issue. But progressive Christians abandon this reasonable approach in favor of elevating one’s personal feelings and intuitions to the place of highest authority.
The progressive Christian appeal to mystery and uncertainty highlights a disturbing tendency in progressive Christianity to denigrate the importance of theological doctrine in favor of a focus only on ethics. As I argue here, this denigration of the importance of doctrine is deeply problematic, since 1) we can only know what is truly morally right and wrong if our beliefs about morality are based on theological truth, and 2) speaking theologically truthfully about God is itself a moral responsibility of the church. Progressive Christianity’s drift away from historic Christian orthodoxy is thus not only logically problematic, but morally problematic as well.
Many progressive Christians do retain some basic Christian doctrines and try to submit to the Authority of Jesus, even as they deny the authority of Scripture. But many other progressive Christians do not, even going so far as to deny the Deity of Christ. As one progressive Christian writer puts it, “the Progressive movement. . . currently seems more interested in a Universal Christ (‘another Jesus’?) than in Jesus Christ.”[1]https://www.patheos.com/blogs/duncanedwardpile/2021/12/understanding-progressive-christianity-part-3-holding-fast-to-jesus/. This is the danger of progressive Christianity. Without a firm grounding in God’s word, it easily slides into a rejection of the fundamentals of the faith and becomes essentially the same as Protestant liberalism, which is not genuine Christianity at all.