What Does a Progressive Christian Believe?: A Guide for the Searching, the Open, and the Curious

by Delwin Brown

Overview

A systematic understanding of progressive Christianity and the reasons for them.
Progressive Christianity is a family of perspectives that vigorously rejects the “religious right” as a gross distortion of the Christian faith. Just as important, progressive Christianity criticizes and moves beyond the (other) conservatisms and the liberalisms of the immediate Christian past. This book presents one progressive Christian standpoint—introductory in character for ordinary people, not specialist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596271920
Publisher:	Seabury Books
Publication date:	02/01/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	344 KB

About the Author

Delwin Brown is Dean Emeritus of the Pacific School of Religion and formerly the Harvey H. Potthoff Professor of Christian Theology at Iliff School of Theology. The author of many books and articles, he is a lay member of the United Methodist Church and resides in Oakland, California.

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What Does a Progressive Christian Believe?

A Guide for the Searching, the Open, and the Curious

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By Delwin Brown

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 2008 Delwin Brown
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59627-192-0

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CHAPTER 1

What Progressive Christianity Is Not

Something new is afoot in Christianity. It is a thoughtful, vital faith offering hope for the Church and the world. Most commonly it is referred to as "progressive Christianity." All of a sudden, especially in the United States, there are progressive Christian websites and e-newsletters, progressive Christian bloggers and discussion boards, progressive Christian periodicals, conferences on progressive Christianity, churches and new organizations arising that claim to present a progressive Christian gospel, and, of course, there are now millions of Christians who identify themselves in this way.

What is progressive Christianity?

The easiest answer, though insufficient, is to say what it is not. Lets begin there, clearing up immediately some possible misconceptions about the progressive Christian perspective.

Not Only Rejecting the Religious Right

Progressive Christians vigorously distinguish themselves from right-wing Christianity. Check out the postings in cyberspace, for example, and you'll find self-identified progressives commonly describing themselves as Christians who emphatically reject the views of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jim Dobson.

This widespread rejection is important. During the past two or three decades these three pillars of the religious right and their followers and funders have managed somehow (lots of money and organizational savvy were a big part of it) to coopt the name, language, and morals of the Christian faith. They convinced the public that theirs is the true Christian point of view, and then they tried to impose their views on everyone else. America is, or should be, or was supposed to have been, a Christian nation, the right-wingers claimed, and for the benefit of the rest of us they established themselves as the arbiters of what is and is not Christian. So they sought to use the courts and legislatures at every level of government to put into law their views, especially on anything having to do with marriage, sex, and reproduction.

Progressive Christians are saying "No!" They reject the right-wingers claims for good historical and political reasons. America was not founded as a Christian nation, which fact is all the more remarkable because its founders were Christians. The founders were careful to acknowledge the power of religion in society and to protect the free expression of religion. But the principles on which the country was founded were not those of a specific religion or, for that matter, of religion itself in some general sense. Progressive Christians therefore oppose the agenda of the Christian right-wing because, in part at least, it is historically and politically inaccurate. (They also reject it for Christian reasons, as we shall see.) America is a democracy. Relative to religion this means at a minimum that no one religion or view of religion, including its rejection, is to be privileged over any other.

This negative way of defining progressive Christianity, as I say, is important. But it is not enough. After all, there are a number—a rapidly growing number, thankfully—of conservative or evangelical Christians who also reject the Christian right wing, both its views and its tactics. For example, Gregory Boyd, a leading evangelical mega-church pastor, recently said the right-wingers are, in biblical terms, guilty of the sin of "idolatry" because they assume theirs to be the only defensible interpretation of Christianity and they then conflate it with a particular political viewpoint. They give religious reverence to a political philosophy—or, to be perfectly blunt, they equate Christianity with the socially conservative wing of the Republican Party.

You can be a Republican and a Christian—indeed, you can be a very conservative Republican and a Christian!—and still see that this conflation is a dangerous mistake, both politically and religiously. You don t have to be a progressive Christian to identify and condemn the idolatry of the Christian right wing. Progressive Christianity, in other words, has to be more than a rejection of right-wing Christianity. But what is this "more"?

Not Liberal Christianity in Disguise

Progressive Christians often define themselves against liberal Christianity—and, as we shall see, against conservative Christianity, too. This distinction gets a little fuzzy. Clearly, both are still developing historical movements with considerable internal variety, and both contribute something of importance that progressive Christians wish to affirm and continue. Still, the distinction is helpful. At the very least the progressive Christian movement today is an effort to criticize and transform the liberal and conservative traditions of American Christianity.

When liberal Christianity emerged in the United States during the middle third of the eighteenth century it was often called "the new theology." Its defining viewpoint was expressed succinctly in a statement by Charles A. Briggs: "The Bible gives us the material for all ages, and leaves to [us] the noble task of shaping the material so as to suit the wants of [our] own time." Making the biblical tradition relevant to the needs of the day—that was the driving passion of liberalism. But how are the legitimate wants or needs of a time to be determined, and according to what criteria do Christians go about shaping the biblical material so as to make its message relevant? To determine the needs of the time liberals counted especially on the democratic process, particularly as its outcomes were interpreted by the newly emerging social sciences. And the criteria on which liberals relied to study and reconstruct the biblical materials were also those of the secular sciences, namely reasoned inquiry based on empirical evidence. The liberal interpretation of the Christian message was to be consistent with reason and experience.

A progressive Christian perspective, we shall see, does not minimize the Christian mandate to make the gospel relevant in each new age, and it does not object to the sciences, democracy, empirical evidence, and certainly not to reasoned inquiry. In those respects, progressive Christianity unabashedly continues the liberal Christian outlook. However, the liberals went wrong, from a progressive perspective, when reasoning based on (supposedly common) human experience became for them more than valued tools and tests to be utilized in shaping the inherited Christian materials; gradually it became also the source of liberal theology. As that happened, the "material" of historic Christian faith—its stories, symbols, ideas, analyses, and imperatives—moved to the dim and largely optional margins of liberal Christian reflection. Liberal theology became something more akin to a philosophy of religion.

Philosophy is not at all a bad thing, of course. But what of the distinctive insights offered in the Scriptures and historic Christian reflection? Is there nothing of value in Christian understandings of creation, humanity, freedom, sin, hope, healing, history, and the meaning of life? Do these offer no critical edge, no distinctive perspectives worth introducing and developing as a Christian contribution to the contemporary search for truth?

The liberal failure to keep the distinctive resources of the Christian inheritance at the center of their reflection was rooted in another failure, one common to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Liberals "forgot" that our human beliefs and practices, individually and collectively, are fed and formed by our distinctive human histories. In other words, the liberals were seduced by "modernism." Modernism is the idea that there is one truth grounded in the nature of things in such a way that thinking individuals can have immediate access to this truth through reasoned analysis of contemporary experience, without any special dependence on inherited resources. It is the idea that we don t need history in the pursuit of truth; we can go right to the truth by thinking clearly now. The point is not that "history is bunk," as Henry Ford once claimed. Rather it is that our varied histories, traditions, ancient texts, and the like have no special role in guiding and testing contemporary life.

Gradually moving toward this point of view, liberal Christianity too often became—by the 1940s and 1950s—little more than the sanctimonious expression of common beliefs and values. Liberal sermons became secular social commentary that began with a Scripture and ended with prayer. Liberal Christian education became secular schooling interlaced with sentimental renditions of stories from the Bible. Liberal Christian morality was reduced to the common cultural interpretation of rectitude. Like almost everyone else in that time, liberal Christians forgot the importance of the past, their specifically Christian past—their rich biblical and historical inheritance.

Like almost everyone else, but not everyone! Not conservative Christians. To be conservative means to conserve a heritage. Conservative Christians, against the majority of the culture and, indeed, also against much of the Church, retained a sense of the special importance of Christian history for Christian people. In that respect, progressive Christianity allies itself with Christian conservatism. But not entirely, by any means, as we shall see.

Not Conservative Christianity Polished Up

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, conservative Christianity in America has tended in one of two directions. One emphasized right action, the other right belief. Neither totally dismissed the others concern, to be sure, but their different emphases led nevertheless to quite different forms of conservative Christian piety. The focus on right belief was especially indebted to the great sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin. In America, however, its most influential intellectual shaping came through the scholarly "fundamentalism" of the Princeton theologians in the late 1800s, a school of thought to which we shall return shortly.

The emphasis on right action in nineteenth-century conservatism was motivated in large part by the active piety of John Wesley, an Anglican priest who founded Methodism a century earlier, even if it spread well beyond the confines of the Wesleyan movement and its theology. Its blossoming in the middle of the nineteenth century is often called the Second Great Awakening. Its message was a call for personal and social "holiness," that is, for personal discipline coupled with the vigorous pursuit of a just social order. The term "evangelicalism" is an apt designation of this emphasis, and it is a form of conservatism that the evangelicals of today would do well to emulate more fully.

The nineteenth-century evangelicals—represented, for example, by the "hellfire and brimstone" revival preacher Charles G. Finney—were zealots in the movements to abolish slavery, establish women's rights, and overcome poverty. Finney and like-minded evangelicals denounced the mainline preachers for their moral timidity—or as one of them (Theodore Weld) said, for their "truckling subserviency to power ... clinging with mendicant sycophancy to the skirts of wealth and influence ... [and] cowering before bold transgression when it stalks among the high places of power with fashion in its train...." Evangelical couples in their wedding vows renounced the rule of husband over wife sanctioned by civil law. About the same time, evangelical groups like the Wesleyan Methodists, Free Methodists, Church of the Nazarene, and Christian and Missionary Alliance came into being in order to minister to the poor who, they said, were demeaned by establishment churches and "oppressed" (their term) by the "rich and powerful."

The strong witness of the evangelical conservatives flourished until the Civil War. In the immense social strife after that war, however, their concerns turned sharply inward and private. By the 1870s evangelicalism was no longer preaching "social holiness." Now the focus was on personal piety, which increasingly became trivialized as abstinence from card-playing, smoking, drinking, dancing, and other "sins of the flesh."

Why the tragic retreat from a full-bodied Christian witness? The answer in large part, I think, was the absence of a full-bodied theology, a theology adequate to guide and sustain the evangelical spirit when it encountered the recalcitrance of social injustice. In other words, its heart was not nourished by the head; it "conserved" an evangelical spirit but not a credible belief system to support that spirit. In a manner analogous to the later decline of liberalism (which, interestingly, was also debilitated by a war, World War I), evangelical conservatism became little more than the baptized mores of its populist and conservative social order.

The other form of American conservatism rising to prominence after the Civil War is best represented by the "fundamentalism" of the Princeton School. How ironic that today this term connotes anti-intellectualism. Exactly the opposite was true of the Princeton fundamentalists in the 1880s and '90s. They were stalwart intellectuals who endeavored to validate the claims of the Christian faith intellectually. Scholars like A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield sought to do so by grounding Christian beliefs in what they said was the unique character of the Bible, its "inerrancy." They debated their views of Scripture openly, paid attention to new biblical scholarship without fear, and revised their views on the Bible when the evidence required it. In fact, based on their own biblical study, they eventually concluded that the term "inerrancy" could apply only to the original manuscripts of the Bible, now lost. Therefore any contradictions in Scripture (such as the two different stories in Genesis 1 and 2) came about through human error that crept in later while copying and recopying the original documents. Obviously, if the original manuscripts were lost, the claim that they were without error could not be challenged. The unique character of the "original autographs" was therefore protected, but at great cost—they were not available to guide subsequent Christians life and thought. The fundamentalist insistence on biblical inerrancy was thus untenable, if applied to the current Bible, or inapplicable, if applied to Scripture in its earliest form. In time, fundamentalism could only continue as an anti-intellectual mass movement wedded to a rhetoric of biblical inerrancy that no reasonable study of Scripture could sustain.

A progressive Christian theology shares the nineteenth-century evangelicals commitment to social justice (even though in retrospect their views were naive regarding issues of race, gender, sexuality, and even class). But a theology that can endure must be much more deliberate than that of the evangelicals in its intellectual awareness and articulation. The mind is not all of human nature by any means, but it is part of and essential to a healthy humanity. Similarly, a full and credible theology is essential to a healthy Christianity. Hence a progressive Christian movement, if it is to be more than a fad, must be resolutely theological as well as active in the pursuit of justice.

In this respect the model of the nineteenth-century fundamentalists is strangely—perhaps shockingly—to be respected by progressive Christians today because the early fundamentalists certainly used their minds. Eventually, though, the fundamentalist movement let a dogma about the Bible obscure the truth about the Bible and thus, too, the nature of biblical truth and biblical authority. That failing continues today in much of conservative Christianity. Conserving the Bible as it is is one thing; conserving the Bible as conservative dogmatists imagine it to be is another. The Bible is not inerrant, in history, science, and ethics—nor is it inerrant in theology. And, as we shall see, it does not need to be in order to ground, guide, and sustain Christian identity.

What, then, do progressive Christians learn from conservatives? They learn the very thing that liberal Christianity forgot—that all people, including Christians, are historical people. We are formed by our past. More than that, as Christians we live today, fully in the present, drawing from that past. The Bible, and the tradition of debate, disagreement, reflection, correction, and innovation that stems from the Bible, is the distinctively Christian contribution that we bring—as one set of voices among politically equal others—to our contemporary public discussions about what is true and good.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from What Does a Progressive Christian Believe? by Delwin Brown. Copyright © 2008 Delwin Brown. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments....................     ix     

Preface....................     xi     

Chapter 1 What Progressive Christianity Is Not....................     1     

Chapter 2 Bible: Negotiating the Heritage....................     15     

Chapter 3 Christ: Overturning the Categories....................     29     

Chapter 4 God: Exploring the Depth....................     43     

Chapter 5 Humanity: Continuing the Creation....................     57     

Chapter 6 Sin: Failing and Hiding....................     69     

Chapter 7 Salvation: Seeking and Finding....................     83     

Chapter 8 Church: Serving and Being Served....................     95     

Epilogue Rightly Mixing Religion with Politics....................     111     

Notes....................     123