This is the draft introduction to a book I have begun writing with the working title "The Principles of Progressive Christianity. I'd appreciate any comments you might have.
Introduction
(c) Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2018. All rights reserved.
It may seem a strange way
to begin a theology book, but let me tell you a little bit about myself. Why I
want to start that way will, I trust, become clear shortly. I began life as a
premature twin who wasn’t supposed to live through my first night. I’m
seventy-one years old now, so I guess I beat that prediction by a good bit.
Still, I grew up a skinny, uncoordinated, unathletic, quite mousy and meek boy.
My story here sounds a bit trite I suppose, since I’m hardly the only one to
have lived it, but it is true nonetheless. I was always the last kid chosen for
the grade school sports teams. I was an easy mark for bullies. Once when I was
in about the fourth grade some bullies stopped me as I was walking home from school,
harassed me verbally, and wouldn’t let me keep walking. Once when I was in high
school I came out of a neighborhood convenience store and some bullies blocked
my way, berating me and not letting me go on my way home. I was never cool. I
was never “in.” I was never very good at anything at least until I got to
college, where all of a sudden I became a pretty good student. I never felt
fully accepted anywhere but at home. I’m straight, but I didn’t have a
girlfriend until I was well into my twenties. Even being a good college student
made me a bit of an outsider with the small circle of friends and roommates I
did develop there. I was the brainiac, not the party guy, not the fun guy, not
the popular guy. I was a weakling, a nerd, a geek, and in my own mind at least
always an outsider.
So why do I begin a book
on the principles of progressive Christianity with that bit of biographical
background? Because progressive Christianity is about, among other things,
justice, and I have long had a passion for justice. I have long taught and
preached that Christianity is about transforming the world from its typical
worldly ways, the ways of violence, exploitation, hatred, and war, to the ways
of God as taught by Jesus Christ, the ways of nonviolence, justice, love, and
peace. My parishioners have known me as having a passion for justice. My clergy
colleagues know me as having a passion for justice. And in my later years of
life I have come to understand the connection between that passion and my
perhaps not atypical but certainly unpleasant childhood and young adult years.
I am passionate about justice because I have felt the injustice of the bullies
who picked on me when I was young. I am passionate about justice because I have
felt the isolation of being the outsider, of not being accepted or at least not
feeling accepted. And I am passionate about justice because I am a Christian.
I have just about every
kind of privilege it is possible for an American to have. I’m male, white,
straight, reasonably able-bodied, Christian, not wealthy but not poor either,
very highly educated, respected by most who know me, looked to by some as a
teacher and maybe even as a prophet. Yet I know at least a little of what it is
to be none of those things for the reasons I just stated above. Even my twin
brother, who was always bigger than I was, picked on me sometimes. I knew then
and remember now what it is to be vulnerable, never to know when the tough guys
were going to bully me. I know what it is to feel unaccepted and unacceptable.
I don’t claim to know what it is to be Black in America, or gay, transgender,
poor, female, or undocumented. I’ve never been any of those things, but I know
at least something of what it is to be the outsider, to be unaccepted. So I
stand for justice. I argue for justice. I get angry at all the injustice that
is always afoot in the world, and I tie my Christian faith to Jesus’ demands
for justice. To Jesus’ rejection of all prejudice. To Jesus’ inclusion of the
excluded. How I see Christianity as entailing all of these things will, I
trust, become apparent in the pages that follow.
Here’s another relevant
thing about me. At least since I began seminary at age fifty-one I have been
accused of living way too much in my head. I readily admit that I do, although
I know that there is an emotional and even a sentimental side of me that isn’t
always as apparent to others as is the intellectual side. Why do I live so much
in my head? Perhaps I’m just built that way, but I suspect that it is because academics
was the first thing I was ever any good at. If academics is what you’re good
at, you spend most of your time being academic. You approach subjects, issues,
maybe even life itself as an academic exercise, and academics is head work. So
what follows here is theology. It is head work. That’s what I write mostly.
Head work. So be it.
Yet the head work of
theology matters. How we think about God, about Jesus Christ, and the Bible
matters. Elizabeth Johnson, the great Catholic feminist theologian, says the
God image functions. It works in the world. It determines a lot of things,
including what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false, what is
normal and what is abnormal, what is beautiful and what is ugly. I write
theology because I love theology, but I also write theology because theology
matters. It really matters in the world whether we see Christianity as
progressive or conservative; and, by the way, I am convinced that the phrase
“conservative Christianity” is an oxymoron. So here I go again into another
piece of head work. Yet what I say here really matters. If Christianity can’t
free itself from the straitjacket in which conservative faith tries to
constrain the faith it will die; and in that case, die it should.
At the end of 2017 I
retired from parish ministry. I resigned as pastor of the First Congregational
Church of Maltby and entered into what in my local Conference of the United
Church of Christ, in which I hold ordained ministerial standing, we call active
retirement.[1]
The Rev. Kimbrough Besheer, LMHC, the Jungian analyst and retired Episcopal
priest whom I have seen regularly for the last twenty years as my therapist,
told me once as I neared retirement that he wants me to be a voice of
progressive Christianity in my retirement, a voice that he says isn’t heard at
all or at least not nearly enough today.
(About the voice of progressive Christianity not being heard enough
today at least he is right.) Kimbrough says he can’t think of anyone better
able to be that voice than me. As flattering as that statement of his is, I
don’t know that I will ever be such a voice. Yet shortly before I retired at a
meeting of the West-side Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest
Conference of the United Church of Christ on which I serve the Rev. Catherine
Foote, doing our devotions, read something from a book that leaped out at me. I
don’t recall the title or author of the book, and most of what she read didn’t
mean much to me. There was however that one line that jumped out. Catherine
read: “Make your limitations part of your story not an obstacle to your story.”
At least, that’s how I recorded the line in my notes that day. My limitations
are many, and they prominently include the utter inability to be a
self-promoter. When I say I doubt that I will ever be the voice of progressive
Christianity that my Jungian analyst wants me to be it’s not because I don’t
think I have a voice that deserves to be heard. It’s because the voices that
get heard are for the most part the voices of self promoters. I am not and
never will be a self-promoter. I’m too introverted for that. I may be too
insecure for that. I wouldn’t know how to do it even if I wanted to. Yet for
all that I do have things to say. I am a lousy self-promoter, but I am a good
theologian and a decent writer. I will make my limitations as a self-promoter
part of my story not a limitation to my story. I won’t let my shortcomings in
promotion stop me from using my gifts as a theologian and writer though the
audience I reach may be small. One way or another as I retire from parish
ministry I will be a voice for progressive Christianity in our current
disturbing, even appalling, American context.
Perhaps a few brief
stories from my time as a parish pastor will illustrate why we must transform
Christianity back into the progressive faith that it really is, why we must
help Christianity rediscover its true self. Sadly, for most people both inside
the church and outside it, Christianity isn’t progressive at all. In other
words, they don’t get what Christianity really is. As a progressive Christian
pastor in conservative communities I have accumulated several stories that at
least show what we progressive Christians are up against. So here, for what
they’re worth, are a few of those stories.
At times during my career as a
parish pastor it was my practice most every Friday or Saturday to send out an
email to the members of the church I was serving telling them a little bit
about what would be happening at the church on the coming Sunday. Once I said
in such an email that I was going to disagree with some Gospel text or other
because I think it reflects first century anti-Jewish prejudice rather than any
kind of divine truth. Right before that service one of my congregants, a good
man who served as the church’s treasurer, told me he would like a couple of
minutes after my sermon to say a few words. I should perhaps have put him off,
but I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t because I knew, though the congregation didn’t,
that I had already decided to resign my position as pastor of that church.
Whatever the reason, I said OK. After I finished my sermon I recognized him,
and he stood to speak. He said that every word of the Bible was inspired and
that therefore we had to find truth in every part of it. At least, that’s what
I remember him saying. I didn’t argue with him though I strongly disagree with
his statement. I did respond by telling the congregation that I was about to
resign as their pastor.
In 2017 during Advent I was leading
the worship service at the church I was serving at the time. During the time
for the prayers of the people a woman who I always called (to myself, not
publicly) my Fundamentalist offered a prayer that people remember what
Christmas is really about and that it isn’t about shopping and gifts and all
the cultural falderal that we surround it with. Up to that point I couldn’t
have agreed with her more, but then she said what Christmas is all about for
her. Indeed, I suspect that what she said sums up pretty well what the whole
Christian faith is about for her. She said Christmas means that “he came down
so we could go up.” Over the years I had gotten pretty good at finessing prayer
concerns that included statements I didn’t want to affirm as I repeated them
for the congregation, and I guess I handled this one well enough. Trust me,
Christianity is not about “he came down so we could go up.” That widespread
understanding is both hopelessly simplistic and totally misunderstands what the
Gospels tell us about Jesus.
Once when I was leading a
worship service I was disagreeing with a Gospel text that had Jesus saying
somehow that belief in him is the only way to be in good with God. It was
probably from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says lots of things that sound
like that. A couple of people I didn’t know were visiting that Sunday. They
were sitting in a back pew near the front door of the church. One of those
folks, a woman, stood up, shouted “You’re wrong!” and walked out. Other
visitors to that same church on a different Sunday when I was saying that Jesus
isn’t the only way to God approached me after the service and asked me if I
really thought Jesus hadn’t said that he was the only way to God. I said yes, I
don’t think he ever said that. One of the visitors replied “that really
troubles us.” I was relieved to see in the church’s guest book that they were
from out of town and wouldn’t have been back in any event.
The first church I served
as pastor became what we call Open and Affirming early in my time with them,
and our being Open and Affirming, that is, our fully accepting gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgender people as worthy and fully equal children of God, got splashed
all over the front page of the weekly newspaper in the little town that church
is in. A woman I knew in the town to be a Pentecostal minister called and said
she wanted to come see me. I didn’t find that request surprising because I was
serving on the board of a community organization she had organized. We held our
board meetings at my church. I knew there was trouble, though, when she walked
into my office with little bits of Post-it notes sticking out of the Bible she
was carrying. She apparently thought that I must not have been aware of the
places in the Bible where conservatives say, mistakenly, that God condemns
homosexuality. I assured her that I was well aware of those passages and still
believed that God loves and accepts LGBT folks on the same terms as God loves
and accepts straight folks. Our relationship ended shortly thereafter when she
asked the members of the board to suggest places we could meet other than at
the church I was serving.
I knew another minister
in town when our acceptance of gay people got splashed all over the local
newspaper. He was a very conservative Spanish-speaking pastor of a Baptist
church of some sort. He called and said he wanted to come see me. Of course he
wanted to talk about our heretical position of not hating gay people. He kept
asking: Do you really believe what the paper said you believe? I said that the
paper had gotten a couple of minor details wrong but that on the whole yes, I
believed what the paper said I believed. He couldn’t actually believe that I, a
Christian pastor, could believe such a thing. I suggested that he read Marcus
Borg’s The Heart of Christianity, which was a fairly new book at the
time, if he wanted to understand how I see the faith.[2] He said that he would
and would get back to me; but as he left my office he said: “Until then I can
have no more contact with you because I consider your position to be apostate.”
I never heard from him again. I’d never been called apostate before. Apostate
means abandoning some religious belief, principle, or tradition. It applies
historically to people who were once Christian who renounced their Christian
faith, often when threatened with persecution or martyrdom because of it. I
certainly hadn’t been aware that to be Christian you have to hate gay people.
I’m still not.
After that local news
story came out the phone rang in my office one day. I made the mistake of
answering it. The caller identified herself as a Christian who lived in a
nearby town. She said: How can you call yourself a Christian pastor if you
believe those things? To her, it seems, you couldn’t be a Christian if you
didn’t hate gay people. She spouted Leviticus 18:22 at me, the verse that calls
lying with a man as with a woman an abomination.[3] I asked her
if she ever wore clothing made of mixed fibers, say a cotton wool blend. She
allowed as how she did. I told her Leviticus prohibits that too. See Leviticus
19:19. She said “It does?” I assured her that it does, and I must give this
woman her due. She said that if it does prohibit that, then probably we
shouldn’t do it.
Allow me just one more
story about that church becoming Open and Affirming. I knew the pastor of a
conservative church across the street from my UCC church. He is a good man. He
has served as chaplain for the town’s police department for many years, and he
was a wheel in the town’s pastors association to which I nominally belonged but
had never had anything to do with. He told me that he and the pastor of the
largest conservative evangelical church in town, who was also the head of the
pastors association, wanted to see me. We met the Monday after Easter. I
expected my church and me to be thrown out of that association, so I asked a
lay member of my church to come with me to that meeting. I thought that if we
were going to be thrown out of the only pastors association in town, I wanted
my people to hear it from someone other than me or at least in addition to me.
We weren’t thrown out of the association, but a couple of interesting things
happened during that meeting. These two ministers wanted to know if I had
preached Jesus’ resurrection the day before, on Easter. I assured them that I
had, twice. I didn’t bother to tell them that I probably understand the
resurrection much differently than they do. I didn’t think there was any point
in doing that. During that meeting I explained that modern science understands
human sexuality much differently than the ancient world did, that the worlds of
the Bible had no understanding of homosexuality as a naturally occurring
variety of human sexuality. The fellow who was the lead pastor of the big
conservative evangelical church responded: “Yes, but the problem with applying
your sociological understandings (sic) to the Bible is that then you don’t know
what to take literally.” I allowed as how that was true. I didn’t explain that
while he tries to solve the problem by taking it all literally, I solve it by
taking none of it literally.[4]
Again, I didn’t think there was any point in doing that.
All of these stories
illustrate a central truth about Christianity in our world today. In our
context today most people are ignorant of true Christianity. They think that
“evangelical Christianity” is true Christianity. It isn’t. They think that
Christians vote for Donald Trump and other politicians of his ilk. Most of us
Christians don’t. Even many people who attend Christian churches and have done
so all their lives think Fundamentalism is the true old time religion. It
isn’t.[5]
A great many people would agree with that person I mentioned who summed up the
meaning of Christianity as being “Jesus came down so we could go up.” That is
most definitely not what Christianity is mostly about. It is however
what most of the Christian church since the fourth century CE has succeeded in
convincing people that Christianity is mostly about. The understanding of
Christianity as being about what we have to do and believe and not do and not
belief so that our eternal souls will go to a blissful eternity in heaven after
we die is a gross distortion of biblical faith. Ancient Judaism, the original
biblical faith and the originating faith of Christianity, did not believe in an
afterlife that involved judgment and either eternal bliss or eternal agony at
all. It hardly believed in a human soul at all, only that we all end up in some
place of a sort of shadowy pseudo-existence called Sheol, often translated as
“the Pit.”
Christianity grew out of
that ancient Judaism (as indeed did today’s rabbinical Jewish faith at essentially
the same time). The earliest Christians believed in an afterlife that involved
judgment, but it wasn’t an afterlife of an eternal soul. Rather, it entailed
bodily resurrection at the end time here on earth. It is not clear whether
Jesus shared that belief, though he may have. It is clear that it was not what
his life and teaching were primarily about. It is not what today’s progressive
Christianity is primarily about either. So just what is today’s progressive
Christianity about? What are its principles? What follows is an attempt to
state in relatively condensed form what those principles are.
Progressive Christianity
is true Christianity. Progressive Christianity is the old-time religion, though
original Christianity wasn’t just progressive, it was revolutionary—nonviolently revolutionary. Jesus of
Nazareth, the one most Christians confess to be God Incarnate and to be the
world’s Lord and Savior, preached a radical overturning of the ways of his
world—and ours. He called that overturning the kingdom of God. Today we don’t
much like his use of the word “kingdom,” for it is too male exclusive and
domination centered for our liking. Many progressive Christians today replace
Jesus’ word kingdom with words like realm or, one I really don’t like, “kindom.”
I don’t like “kindom” because it is entirely too cutesy for my taste, and it
isn’t really a word; but I suppose it is preferable to kingdom in today’s
world. In what follows I will use realm of God rather than kingdom of God. I
think that phrase conveys Jesus’ meaning to people today without the negative
connotations of kingdom.
The important point,
however, is what Jesus meant when he said realm (literally kingdom) of God. He
meant a world turned on its head. In the realm of God the last are first and
the first are last. The poor are blessed and the rich are sent away empty. The
meek shall inherit the earth, and the peacemakers are the children of God.
Enemies are loved and prayed for, and all violence is rejected. The
transformation of the world comes not through violence either human or divine
but through the transformation of human hearts and minds one person at a time.
In the realm of God the highest value is justice, and justice means not due
process but real care about and care for the poor and the marginalized. All are
equal, and no one is judged or rejected because of any aspect of her or his
God-given humanity. The principles of progressive Christianity which follow are
grounded primarily in Jesus’ teaching of the realm of God.
One criticism that is often
leveled against progressive Christians both by conservative Christians and by
progressive Christians themselves is that progressive Christians can easily
state what they are against but have a hard time explaining what they are for.
There is significant truth in this criticism. One purpose of the principles
which follow is to state concisely and precisely what progressive Christians
stand for. These are of course my
principles of progressive Christianity. Progressive Christianity does not
insist that everyone believe the same thing. Some, perhaps many, progressive
Christians will disagree with the inclusion of some of these principles and
will wish that others that are not included here had been. So be it. The
acceptance of diversity of opinion as well as diversity of people is one of
progressive Christianity’s primary virtues.
Finally, before I begin
setting forth the principles of progressive Christianity it is, I suppose,
incumbent on me at least to attempt to define progressive Christianity.
Anything close to a full understanding of progressive Christianity will come
from studying its principles, yet we should have some common understanding of
what we’re talking about when we talk about progressive Christianity before we
begin. There are, obviously, two words in the phrase progressive Christianity.
They both deserve definition. Christianity is perhaps the easier of the two to
define. Christianity is the conviction of the reality of a transcendent,
spiritual dimension of being that we call God experienced through Jesus of
Nazareth as the Christ, that is, as God’s Anointed One, come to reveal to
humanity as much of the nature of God as humans are capable of comprehending.
It is a decision and commitment by a person to live her or his relationship
with God through the myths, symbols, and rituals of the Christian tradition. It
is a commitment of the entire person, body, mind, heart, and spirit. It is not
an uncritical commitment precisely because it includes commitment of the mind
with all of its God-given capacities, including the capacity to critique,
analyze, and change.
The word “progressive” is
harder to define in the context of progressive Christianity. One of the
difficulties in defining progressive in this context is that one tends to start
by saying what it is not, thereby running the risk of falling into the
shortcoming of much progressive Christianity I mentioned above that I’m trying
to avoid here. I’ll run that risk. Progressive Christianity is not conservative
Christianity. It is not conservative evangelical Christianity. It is most
definitely not Fundamentalist Christianity. To turn to what progressive
Christianity is, it is a Christianity that emphasizes Jesus’ teaching of
personal and social transformation rather than personal salvation understood in
any other way. It is a Christianity that seeks to recover, build on, and live
into Jesus’ teachings about the realm of God. It is a Christianity that takes
the Bible and other ancient sources of the faith seriously but understands them
as human documents that we must study carefully and in depth if we are properly
to understand them. We are then free to accept or reject them as we see fit. It
is a Christianity that looks toward a transformation of the earth away from the
earth’s usual violent, oppressive, and materialistic ways to the nonviolent,
liberating, and spiritual ways of God as found in Jesus’ teachings on the realm
of God and in the way he lived it during his lifetime. It is, in short, a
Christianity that dreams of and works toward the world transformed into that
realm of God. It intends its word progressive as the opposite of conservative.
It dreams of a world progressing toward the ways of peace and justice, indeed,
to borrow from Borg and Crossan, a world progressing toward peace through justice.
Yet progressive
Christianity is one more thing. It is original Christianity. It is Christianity
focused on Jesus’ teachings of peace and justice, that is, on the things Jesus
cared about most. It is in some ways Christianity before Christianity. It is
Christianity as it was before the Constantinian establishment that so changed
the faith and distorted it away from the teachings of Jesus. It is Christianity
that focuses on this life and is content to leave the next life up to God. It
is Christianity that can save the world. It is Christianity that can save
itself from the straitjackets of literalism and otherworldliness in which it is
so confined today but from which it is at least beginning to free itself. If
Christianity has a future, which by the way is something that isn’t at all
obvious, it will a progressive one. The better we understand progressive
Christianity the better we will be able to bring our great faith to that
promising future.
[1] The First Congregational Church of
Maltby is not a UCC church. It is a member of the National Association of
Congregational Christian Churches. I served it under an arrangement with the
Pacific Northwest Conference of the UCC that maintained my UCC standing while I
served that non-UCC church.
[2] I would have suggested that
he read my Liberating Christianity, but I hadn’t written it yet. See the
list of my other works at the beginning of this one for the cite to this book.
[3] This verse does not
actually condemn homosexuality. The world from which that verse comes knew
nothing of homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality,
so it can’t have condemned that understanding.
[4] For
a discussion of the nature of the language of faith see Liberating Christianity, Chapter Three.
[5] Fundamentalism
dates from the early twentieth century, when some conservative Christians
published a series of pamphlets titled “The Fundamentals.” In its inception
Fundamentalism was, and remains, a reactionary movement resisting the work of
the higher biblical criticism of the nineteenth century and the then relatively
new science of evolutionary biology. It is not old time religion. It is
modernist reactionary religion.
