CHAPTER 1

What ProgressiveChristianity Is Not

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

What is progressive Christianity?

The easiest answer, though insufficient, is to say what it isnot. Lets begin there, clearing up immediately some possiblemisconceptions about the progressive Christian perspective.

Not Only Rejecting the Religious Right

Progressive Christians vigorously distinguish themselves fromright-wing Christianity. Check out the postings in cyberspace,for example, and you'll find self-identified progressives commonlydescribing themselves as Christians who emphaticallyreject the views of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, andJim Dobson.

This widespread rejection is important. During the pasttwo or three decades these three pillars of the religious rightand their followers and funders have managed somehow (lotsof money and organizational savvy were a big part of it) to cooptthe name, language, and morals of the Christian faith. Theyconvinced the public that theirs is the true Christian point ofview, and then they tried to impose their views on everyoneelse. America is, or should be, or was supposed to have been, aChristian nation, the right-wingers claimed, and for the benefitof the rest of us they established themselves as the arbitersof what is and is not Christian. So they sought to use the courtsand legislatures at every level of government to put into lawtheir views, especially on anything having to do with marriage,sex, and reproduction.

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

This negative way of defining progressive Christianity, asI say, is important. But it is not enough. After all, there are anumber—a rapidly growing number, thankfully—of conservativeor evangelical Christians who also reject the Christianright wing, both its views and its tactics. For example, GregoryBoyd, a leading evangelical mega-church pastor, recently saidthe right-wingers are, in biblical terms, guilty of the sin of"idolatry" because they assume theirs to be the only defensibleinterpretation of Christianity and they then conflate it witha particular political viewpoint. They give religious reverenceto a political philosophy—or, to be perfectly blunt, theyequate Christianity with the socially conservative wing of theRepublican Party.

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

Not Liberal Christianity in Disguise

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

When liberal Christianity emerged in the United Statesduring the middle third of the eighteenth century it was oftencalled "the new theology." Its defining viewpoint was expressedsuccinctly in a statement by Charles A. Briggs: "The Bible givesus the material for all ages, and leaves to [us] the noble taskof shaping the material so as to suit the wants of [our] owntime." Making the biblical tradition relevant to the needs of theday—that was the driving passion of liberalism. But how arethe legitimate wants or needs of a time to be determined, andaccording to what criteria do Christians go about shaping thebiblical material so as to make its message relevant? To determinethe needs of the time liberals counted especially on thedemocratic process, particularly as its outcomes were interpretedby the newly emerging social sciences. And the criteriaon which liberals relied to study and reconstruct the biblicalmaterials were also those of the secular sciences, namely reasonedinquiry based on empirical evidence. The liberal interpretationof the Christian message was to be consistent withreason and experience.

A progressive Christian perspective, we shall see, does notminimize the Christian mandate to make the gospel relevantin 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 continuesthe liberal Christian outlook. However, the liberals wentwrong, from a progressive perspective, when reasoning basedon (supposedly common) human experience became for themmore than valued tools and tests to be utilized in shaping theinherited Christian materials; gradually it became also thesource of liberal theology. As that happened, the "material" ofhistoric Christian faith—its stories, symbols, ideas, analyses,and imperatives—moved to the dim and largely optional marginsof liberal Christian reflection. Liberal theology becamesomething more akin to a philosophy of religion.

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

The liberal failure to keep the distinctive resources of theChristian inheritance at the center of their reflection wasrooted in another failure, one common to the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries. Liberals "forgot" that our humanbeliefs and practices, individually and collectively, are fed andformed by our distinctive human histories. In other words,the liberals were seduced by "modernism." Modernism is theidea that there is one truth grounded in the nature of thingsin such a way that thinking individuals can have immediateaccess to this truth through reasoned analysis of contemporaryexperience, without any special dependence on inheritedresources. It is the idea that we don t need history in the pursuitof truth; we can go right to the truth by thinking clearlynow. The point is not that "history is bunk," as Henry Fordonce claimed. Rather it is that our varied histories, traditions,ancient texts, and the like have no special role in guiding andtesting contemporary life.

Gradually moving toward this point of view, liberalChristianity too often became—by the 1940s and 1950s—littlemore than the sanctimonious expression of common beliefsand values. Liberal sermons became secular social commentarythat began with a Scripture and ended with prayer.Liberal Christian education became secular schooling interlacedwith sentimental renditions of stories from the Bible.Liberal Christian morality was reduced to the common culturalinterpretation of rectitude. Like almost everyone else inthat time, liberal Christians forgot the importance of the past,their specifically Christian past—their rich biblical and historicalinheritance.

Like almost everyone else, but not everyone! Not conservativeChristians. To be conservative means to conservea heritage. Conservative Christians, against the majority ofthe culture and, indeed, also against much of the Church,retained a sense of the special importance of Christian historyfor Christian people. In that respect, progressive Christianityallies itself with Christian conservatism. But not entirely, byany means, as we shall see.

Not Conservative Christianity Polished Up

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, conservativeChristianity in America has tended in one of two directions.One emphasized right action, the other right belief. Neithertotally dismissed the others concern, to be sure, but theirdifferent emphases led nevertheless to quite different formsof conservative Christian piety. The focus on right belief wasespecially indebted to the great sixteenth-century theologianJohn Calvin. In America, however, its most influentialintellectual shaping came through the scholarly "fundamentalism"of the Princeton theologians in the late 1800s, a schoolof thought to which we shall return shortly.

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

The nineteenth-century evangelicals—represented, forexample, by the "hellfire and brimstone" revival preacherCharles G. Finney—were zealots in the movements to abolishslavery, establish women's rights, and overcome poverty.Finney and like-minded evangelicals denounced the mainlinepreachers for their moral timidity—or as one of them(Theodore Weld) said, for their "truckling subserviency topower ... clinging with mendicant sycophancy to the skirtsof wealth and influence ... [and] cowering before bold transgressionwhen it stalks among the high places of power withfashion in its train...." Evangelical couples in their weddingvows renounced the rule of husband over wife sanctionedby civil law. About the same time, evangelical groups likethe Wesleyan Methodists, Free Methodists, Church of theNazarene, and Christian and Missionary Alliance came intobeing in order to minister to the poor who, they said, weredemeaned by establishment churches and "oppressed" (theirterm) by the "rich and powerful."

The strong witness of the evangelical conservatives flourisheduntil the Civil War. In the immense social strife afterthat war, however, their concerns turned sharply inward andprivate. By the 1870s evangelicalism was no longer preaching"social holiness." Now the focus was on personal piety, whichincreasingly 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 afull-bodied theology, a theology adequate to guide and sustainthe evangelical spirit when it encountered the recalcitrance ofsocial injustice. In other words, its heart was not nourished bythe head; it "conserved" an evangelical spirit but not a crediblebelief system to support that spirit. In a manner analogous tothe later decline of liberalism (which, interestingly, was alsodebilitated by a war, World War I), evangelical conservatismbecame little more than the baptized mores of its populist andconservative social order.

The other form of American conservatism rising to prominenceafter the Civil War is best represented by the "fundamentalism"of the Princeton School. How ironic that today thisterm connotes anti-intellectualism. Exactly the opposite wastrue of the Princeton fundamentalists in the 1880s and '90s.They were stalwart intellectuals who endeavored to validatethe claims of the Christian faith intellectually. Scholars likeA. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield sought to do so by groundingChristian beliefs in what they said was the unique character ofthe Bible, its "inerrancy." They debated their views of Scriptureopenly, paid attention to new biblical scholarship withoutfear, and revised their views on the Bible when the evidencerequired it. In fact, based on their own biblical study, they eventuallyconcluded that the term "inerrancy" could apply only tothe original manuscripts of the Bible, now lost. Therefore anycontradictions in Scripture (such as the two different stories inGenesis 1 and 2) came about through human error that creptin later while copying and recopying the original documents.Obviously, if the original manuscripts were lost, the claim thatthey were without error could not be challenged. The uniquecharacter of the "original autographs" was therefore protected,but at great cost—they were not available to guide subsequentChristians life and thought. The fundamentalist insistence onbiblical inerrancy was thus untenable, if applied to the currentBible, or inapplicable, if applied to Scripture in its earliestform. In time, fundamentalism could only continue as an anti-intellectualmass movement wedded to a rhetoric of biblicalinerrancy that no reasonable study of Scripture could sustain.

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

In this respect the model of the nineteenth-centuryfundamentalists is strangely—perhaps shockingly—to berespected by progressive Christians today because the earlyfundamentalists certainly used their minds. Eventually, though,the fundamentalist movement let a dogma about the Bibleobscure the truth about the Bible and thus, too, the nature ofbiblical truth and biblical authority. That failing continuestoday in much of conservative Christianity. Conserving theBible as it is is one thing; conserving the Bible as conservativedogmatists 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 Christianityforgot—that all people, including Christians, are historicalpeople. We are formed by our past. More than that, as Christianswe live today, fully in the present, drawing from that past. TheBible, and the tradition of debate, disagreement, reflection,correction, and innovation that stems from the Bible, is thedistinctively Christian contribution that we bring—as one setof voices among politically equal others—to our contemporarypublic discussions about what is true and good.