Now I can go along with Christianity needing to change according to its historical context, but I am not singing from the same hymn sheet as the Progressives. The change I speak of regards methodology, that is how we communicate the gospel; not the message, for I believe the content of the gospel cannot change.
Not so the Progressives. They believe that doctrine evolves. Therefore, the historic creeds of the Church or the five solas of the Protestant Reformation have little or no relevance to modern day Christianity. Believers, they say, do not unite under the banner of historic Christian doctrine, rather they are connected by simply claiming to be Christian.
According to
this kind of thinking, a person can deny all the historic tenets of the
Christian faith and still believe themselves to be a follower of Christ.[1]
Can you
imagine walking into a mosque and shouting: ‘I don’t believe Muhammad existed.
The Qur’an is a made-up book, and I am sure Allah approves of same sex
relationships. Oh, and by the way, I’m a Muslim’. I am sure, amongst other
things that might be said, you would be told you are not a Muslim.
So where did
this idea of Progressive Christianity begin? We may be tempted to believe that
it is surely a product of our increasingly liberal culture, perhaps a movement
flowing from the so called ‘Emergent Church’[2];
but its proponents are keen to trace its roots back to the late 19th
and early 20th century, claiming that it was borne out of
theological and scientific scholarship.[3]
This
scholarship, they say, led to the ‘rethinking’ of the Christian faith. Many
Christians said that to survive the Bible must line up with new ‘scientific’ truth
and new ‘biblical’ scholarship.
This means
rather than the Bible speaking wisdom and truth to the world, the wisdom of the
world speaks truth to the Bible. The Bible must be understood and interpreted
by the latest scholarship, the latest discoveries, and the sharpest minds.
Without
this, the absolute best that we can hope to get from Scripture are the
ramblings of men and women who sought to understand the world around them and
who grasped at the idea of a God.
Brian
McLaren a leading voice in the Progressive Christian Movement says:
“Scripture faithfully
reveals the evolution of our ancestors’ best attempts to communicate their
successive best understandings of God. As human capacity grows to conceive of a
higher and wiser view of God, each new vision is faithfully preserved in
Scripture like fossils in layers of sediment.” [4]
The arrogance of this statement is astounding. McLaren is basically claiming that people in the past were a little bit stupid, but they tried their best bless them! But it is okay as we are now blessed to have the ‘evolved’ Brian McLaren who has a ‘higher and wiser view of God’. Astonishing! Whatever Abraham, Moses, David, Mary, Peter and Paul thought they knew of God, pails into insignificance compared the likes Brian McLaren and Rob Bell.
For the
Progressive then, whatever the Bible is, it is not a source of divine
authority. Some of them may concede that the Reformation call to sola
Scriptura was an appropriate response for the 16th century, but only
because they did not know any better. Most Progressives would vehemently deny
the validity of sola Scriptura today.
Progressive Christianity and The Bible
The Bible is not considered an accurate, absolute,
authoritative, or authoritarian source but a book to be experienced and one
experience can be as valid as any other can. Experience, dialogue, feelings,
and conversations are equated with Scripture while certitude, authority, and
doctrine are to be eschewed! No doctrines are to be absolute and truth or
doctrine must be considered only with personal experiences, traditions,
historical leaders, etc. The Bible is not an answer book.[5]
Progressive Christians have a low view of the Bible. They do not regard Scripture as God breathed[6], as the inerrant, infallible Word of God. Rather the Bible can either be dismissed or re-interpreted and aligned to accommodate modern thought. Such would be the belief of Steve Chalke:
We do not believe that the Bible is ‘inerrant’ or ‘infallible’
in any popular understanding of these terms. The biblical texts are not a
‘divine monologue’, where the solitary voice of God dictates a flawless and
unified declaration of his character and will to their writers. Nor are they
simply a human presentation of and testimony to God. Rather, the Bible is most
faithfully engaged as a collection of books written by fallible human beings
whose work, at one and the same time, bears the hallmarks of the limitations
and preconceptions of the times and the cultures they live in, but also of the
transformational experience of their encounters with God. … As such we
recognise that it contains various, sometimes harmonious, sometimes discordant,
sometimes even contradictory voices, each of which contributes to the
developing story of humanity’s moral and spiritual imagination which, through
this conversation is challenged, stretched and constantly enlarged. [7]
As we will see in part 2, Progressives are not just a group of harmless Christians who are trying to modernise Christianity; in denying the historical doctrines of the Christian faith they preach another gospel.
[1]
So that would include Mormons, JWs, Christadelphians, Unitarians etc.
[2]
https://www.gotquestions.org/emerging-church-emergent.html
[3] What
is Progressive Christianity? Fred Plumer
(https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=what+is+progressive+christianity
)
[4] Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, p.103
[5] Ibid p. 52.
[6]
2 Timothy 3:16
[7] Steve Chalke, Restoring
Confidence in the Bible, p.6
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