On Progressive Christianity

On Progressive Christianity

I call myself a progressive Christian. Many of my colleagues in ministry call themselves progressive Christians. I guess we must think we know what we mean by that term since we call ourselves that, yet I don’t know how often we stop and ask ourselves what the phrase progressive Christian actually means. Probably not often. Maybe never. If someone asked us to define the term we’d probably start by talking a lot about what we’re not. We don’t wrap cultural prejudices in a cloak of pseudo-religious piety. We don’t condemn people for being who they are. We’re not biblical literalists. We’re not Christian exclusivists who think that Christianity is the only true way to God. Mostly, we’re not that kind of Christian, the kind that has monopolized the public expression of Christianity in this country for a long time, the conservative, judgmental, hellfire and brimstone kind. We’d probably start talking about not being this, that, or some other thing.

Which is all fine and good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. In theory I guess you can define something by specifying what it is not. A thing is what it is not, which makes sense to the philosophical mind but not so much of anyone else. When most of us want to understand a thing we want to know what it is, not what it is not. So what is progressive Christianity? More precisely, what does “progressive” mean in the phrase progressive Christianity? That is the question I will attempt to answer in this piece.

When we’re attempting to define any word dictionary definitions are an obvious place to start. That, after all, is what dictionaries are for, to define words. My Google search “define progressive” yielded these definitions: “happening or developing gradually or in stages; proceeding step by step” and “(of a group, person, or idea) favoring or implementing social reform or new, liberal ideas.” One problem with most definitions is that they contain words that themselves need to be defined. Here that word is “liberal.” My Google search “define liberal” yielded, among others, the definition “open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values.” For our purposes here I think it makes sense for us to put a couple of these definitions together and modify them slightly to give us the definition of progressive “favoring new ideas that open us to new understandings and willing to alter traditional values and understandings in order to bring them closer to God’s will and ways for the world.”

Which again is all fine and good as far as it goes, but there are some significant problems with it. As most any definition is, this one is hopelessly vague. It raises at least as many questions as it answers. It’s full of words the precise meanings of which are far from clear. It doesn’t address the specifically Christian context we’re working in here. So clearly there is lot more to say before we have any meaningful understanding of the word progressive in the phrase progressive Christian.

One key to understanding the phrase progressive Christian lies in the word “new” in the definitions above. Progressive Christianity progresses, that is, it moves. It doesn’t move backward toward what is behind us. It may and should preserve and use the parts of the Christian past that have value and are worth keeping. It may rediscover and use things that are actually old but are new to our current context. Yet it is not primarily or merely an attempt to return to the past or to any part of it. It moves ahead to something new. The world is always being made anew, and progressive Christianity seeks to formulate and propagate Christianity reimagined for a new world while still remaining recognizably Christian.

It will help to understand progressive Christianity if we compare it to its opposite. I’ll do that a lot in what follows. The opposite of progressive Christianity is conservative Christianity. Conservative Christianity is what most people both in the churches and outside them think Christianity is. Conservative Christianity seeks to lock the faith up in the past. It takes the understandings of Christianity from some earlier time and contends that those old understandings are the only true faith. Progressive Christianity understands that the world today is not the world of some idealized, absolutized past. It understands that the Christianity of past times does not speak the word a new world needs to hear.

Conservative Christians today, or at least many of them, insist that the Fundamentalism of the early twentieth century, which they mistakenly think is what original Christianity was, is the only correct understanding of the faith. Fundamentalism posits factuality as the only true way of understanding Christianity. It takes the factualism of scientific rationalism and applies it to the Christian faith. It applies that way of thinking to the Bible and insists that everything in the Bible is and must be factually true. It insists that everything in the Bible speaks in one voice, a Christian voice of course, never mind that much of the Bible was Jewish before it was ever Christian. It insists that there are no contradictions in the Bible because facts that contradict each other can’t all be factually true. It insists that there is nothing false in the Bible despite the immense difficulty of maintaining that position in the face of what is actually there.

Progressive Christianity sees the absurdity of these positions. Progressive Christians don’t check their brains at the door when they go to church or when they read the Bible. Beyond that, progressive Christians know their world well enough to know that people today aren’t and in the future won’t be satisfied with a faith that demands unquestioning submission, especially when the faith demands unquestioning submission to propositions that are facially absurd. Progressive Christians know that the world has both developed sophisticated analytical techniques that open the Bible up to be what it really is and is moving beyond any simplistic reduction of truth to fact. The world changes. Conservative Christianity denies that reality and thinks that old Christian understandings are sufficient for a new world. Progressive Christianity knows that they aren’t.

To put the matter more theologically, progressive Christianity readily engages in apologetics. Conservative Christianity doesn’t. While it may conform its worship style to contemporary popular styles it is unwilling to adapt its theology to the contemporary world. Apologetics doesn’t mean apologizing for anything. It is rather a theology that actively seeks to make the Christian faith speak meaningfully to its current context whatever that context may be. The essential elements of Christianity don’t change. How we understand them and how we present them to the world does.

Here’s an example. Once on the Monday after Easter a very conservative Christian pastor asked me if I had preached the Resurrection the day before. I answered truthfully that I had. What I didn’t say was that I almost certainly understand the Resurrection differently than he does. As a conservative, literalistic Christian he certainly understands Christ’s Resurrection as an historical fact as factual as any other historical fact. To conservative Christians if Christ did not rise bodily, physically from the grave there is no truth in the Resurrection at all.

To me and most progressive Christians it doesn’t matter if Jesus rose bodily, physically from the grave or not. The truth of Christ’s Resurrection doesn’t lie in its factuality. It lies in the experience of Christ’s first followers that death was not the end for him. Somehow they knew that he was still present with them after his physical death. They expressed that experience by telling stories of an empty tomb and encounters of some of his followers with Jesus risen from the grave. In their experience of his continuing presence with them God was with them too. That’s the truth of the matter whether Jesus rose bodily from the grave or not.

Understanding the Resurrection that way makes the Christian story of the Resurrection accessible to people in our context who cannot accept the facially absurd notion that a dead man rose from the grave. This understanding speaks to postmodern people who understand that truth is not limited to fact. Actually, the people who wrote the Gospel stories of the Resurrection also understood that the truth of their stories didn’t depend on their factual accuracy. Progressive Christians understand that there is value in ancient understandings of the nature of truth that we need to recapture and apply in our own time. Conservative Christians don’t.

One of the things apologetic theologians must figure out is what the existential crisis is for the people of her or his time and place. All people live with one existential crisis or another. Conservative Christians continue to insist that people’s existential crisis today is guilt over sin and the related fear over the fate of one’s eternal soul. It says that God dealt with those concerns by sending His (always His in this theology) Son to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth for the purpose of suffering and dying as a necessary precondition for God’s forgiveness of sin. Christ’s sacrifice on the cross supposedly procures God’s forgiveness of human sin. Conservative Christianity says that what we must to do procure that forgiveness for ourselves is to believe in Jesus Christ. By believe they mean take certain asserted facts about God and about Jesus as factually correct. Do that, conservative Christianity says, and your soul will spend a blissful eternity in heaven. Fail to do that and your soul will spend a horrible, tormented, painful eternity in the fires of hell. Conservative Christians will proclaim to one and all that that’s what Christianity is all about—procure God’s forgiveness of your sin by believing in that way in Jesus Christ.

That understanding of our existential crisis, however, does not reflect the deep concerns of most people in our context. The questions that torment most people today aren’t guilt over sin and fear about where they’ll spend eternity. Many people today don’t believe in the reality of an afterlife at all. What bothers a great many people today is the question of meaning. Does life mean anything at all? Why are we here? What does my life mean? Preaching about hellfire and brimstone doesn’t address those questions. Christianity can address those questions in profound and powerful ways, but to do so it has to speak a different word than the word of heaven and hell. Progressive Christianity speaks that word, a word of life lived with deep meaning in the service of God and God’s people.

Conservative Christians cling to an understanding of Jesus’ death that theologians call the classical atonement theory or the substitutionary sacrificial atonement theory. If you asked most people in the churches or outside of them what the Christian message is you’d probably get a lot of responses along that line. Jesus Christ died for our sins, conservative Christians say. Progressive Christians have so many problems with that understanding of the faith that it’s hard to know where to begin to list them. Feminist theologians call that theory cosmic child abuse. It necessarily leads to the conclusion that before Christ’s suffering and death God didn’t forgive human sin, something that the Bible doesn’t support and progressive Christians can’t accept.

Yet of course a core part of the Christian story is precisely that Jesus did suffer and die on a cross. That God Incarnate would suffer and die doesn’t make much sense on its face, but it is something with which all Christian theology must come to terms. The Christian tradition actually offers at least two other ways of understanding Christ’s suffering and death apart from the classical atonement theory. One is called the ransom or “Christus Victor” theory. This understanding posits that Jesus’ death is paying a price, but it’s not paying a price to God as the classical atonement theory asserts. Rather, it is paying a price, a ransom, to the devil to procure the release of humanity from the grip of sin. This understanding of Christ’s death actually appears far more often in the New Testament than does the classical atonement theory. Most of us don’t see it there because we’ve so had classical atonement drummed into our heads that we read it into passages where it really doesn’t belong.

A third way of understanding the significance of Jesus’ suffering and death is called theology of the cross. That’s not a particularly good way of identifying this theology because classical atonement theory and the ransom theory are also theologies of the cross, but that’s what this one is called. It’s a type of what’s called demonstration soteriology, soteriology being the technical term for a theology of salvation. Theology of the cross holds that in Jesus on the cross we see a demonstration of God’s unshakable solidarity with us humans in everything that happens to us.[1] In God Incarnate on the cross we see God entering into and absorbing the worst that life can bring and showing us that in whatever life may bring us and even in death God is present with us, holding us, and suffering with us. In theology of the cross God meets each one of us in whatever is happening to us. We see that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God. We see that we can hold onto God no matter what, and God will hold onto us. In theology of the cross progressive Christianity has a word from God that speaks far more directly and powerfully to people today than either classical atonement theory or the ransom theory ever could.

Conservative Christianity continues to insist that what God wants from us first of all is that we “believe” in Jesus Christ. By believe it means take as factually accurate certain asserted truths about God and about Jesus. We are to accept as fact that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God Incarnate, that he came to earth to pay the price for human sin and thus procure God’s forgiveness of that sin, and that when we accept those assertions as factually correct we are saved, that is, we are in right relationship with God and will spend eternity in heaven. The foundational demands that conservative Christianity makes on us are all thus cerebral. Conservative Christianity may and does call people to change the way they live, but that change is grounded first of all in what we believe, what our minds accept.

Progressive Christianity finds it hard to believe that God cares that much about what we think, to quote the late Marcus Borg, a great popularizer of progressive Christianity. Progressive Christians find a better understanding of what it is God wants from us in the actual meaning of the Greek New Testament words that are usually translated as some form of believe or belief. Those words all have as their root the word “pistis.” In its original context pistis did not mean accept unproven and unprovable  facts as accurate. It meant something more like to trust, or to be loyal to, or to give one’s heart to. When Christians first translated the New Testament from Greek into Latin they translated pistis as credo. The root word of credo is cor, the Latin word for heart. Pistis was never only about what the mind accepts as true. It was about a commitment of the whole person to something or someone.[2]

Progressive Christianity seeks to return to the original understanding of what Christian faith and the Christian life are all about. Certainly there is a cognitive element to Christianity, for as some sage once said the heart cannot love what the mind cannot accept. Progressive Christians believe however that God cares much more about what we do than about what we think. Christianity is about a commitment of the whole person to God and to love of and service with God’s people. God calls us far less to a certain belief than to a certain kind of life.

There are at least two other issues that our last observation raises that we must address. The first is whether Christianity is primarily about gaining some blissful future life beyond this life or about how we are to live this life. The second is whether we have to do something to merit God’s grace or whether God’s grace is a free unmerited gift to which God calls us to respond with faithful lives lived in the love of God and God’s people. I will consider them in that order.

For centuries their churches have told Christians that their faith is all about how we get our souls to heaven rather than hell after we die. Their churches have told them that that’s what Jesus is all about and what the Bible is all about. Different churches have given different answers to the question of how we do that, but they’ve mostly asked the same question. Some have said we’re saved, that is, our souls get to heaven, through our works, through what we do. Others have said we’re saved through what we believe. Either way the Christian churches, or at least the western churches and as a practical as opposed to a theological matter the eastern ones too have taught that Jesus was all about telling what we have to do to save our souls.[3] Progressive Christians understand that Jesus was hardly about how we save our souls at all. He was about how God calls us to live here on earth. Just what Jesus was all about is a complex issue that pulls us deep into the Bible and the history of Christianity. I’ll handle the issue here only briefly by looking at two passages in the New Testament that Christians have long believed say Jesus about the next life not this life, John 18:36 and John 3:16. They don’t actually say that Jesus is about a next life at all.

In chapter 18 of John Jesus has been arrested and taken before Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor of Judea. The leaders of the Jewish people (but not the Jewish people themselves regardless of what some Gospel may say about the matter) have asked Pilate to crucify Jesus. Pilate has a rather complex conversation with Jesus as he tries to figure out whether this Galilean rube, as Pilate surely thought him to be, deserves such an extreme punishment. In that conversation Jesus speaks a line that has come into English as “my kingdom is not of this world.” That rendering of Jesus’ words certainly does sound like Jesus’ “kingdom” has nothing to do with this world and certainly isn’t located here.

There’s a problem here, however, namely that “my kingdom Is not of this world” is a bad translation of the Greek original of the Gospel of John. In Greek Jesus says that his kingdom is not “ek tou kosmou.” Tou kosmou means this world. There’s no problem there. The problem is with the translation of the preposition “ek.” The traditional English translation of that word, which comes from the King James Version, is “of.” The problem is that ek doesn’t mean of. It means from or out of. A person comes ek a room when she walks out of it. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible that I’m using here translates ek in this statement as “from,” giving us “My kingdom is not from this world” rather than “My kingdom is not of this world.” “From this world” is a much better translation than “of this world.”[4]

Now, the quibbling over the translation of one word that I’m doing here may seem insignificant or even petty, but this translation issue is really important. The translation “of this world” has misled Christians for centuries into believing that Jesus is about some other-worldly life rather about how we are to live this life. The correct translation, “from this world,” may seem obscure, but at least it doesn’t suggest some heavenly realm rather than a worldly one. It points to the source of Jesus’ kingdom not its location. Jesus’ status and authority as sovereign don’t come from this world. They come from no earthly power. They come from heaven, which is to say they come from God. So even if you’re using the King James Version, or the New International Version, or some other English translation that uses “of this world” as your personal Bible don’t be misled. John 18:36 does not say that Jesus and his kingdom exist on some other plane. Jesus’ kingdom is about this life on this earth. In whatever translation you read John 18:36 please keep that truth in mind.

Another verse from John has perhaps misled Christians even more than “my kingdom is not of this world” has. It’s John 3:16, the most frequently quoted verse in the Bible. In the NRSV John 3:16 reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not parish but may have eternal life.”[5] This verse says that “eternal life” is what God sent Jesus to earth to give us Christians, and most Christians have understood it to mean that our reward for proper belief is a blissful eternity in heaven. I can assure you that that is not what the verse means. It was never what the author of the Gospel of John intended to say.

The Gospel of John defines the phrase “eternal life” as meaning something quite different from endless life in heaven. At John 17:1-3 we read:

After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

Notice that John’s Jesus doesn’t say “This is how you get eternal life.” He says “this is eternal life.” Emphasis added. Eternal life then is not some future life on some other plane of existence that we must somehow earn. Eternal life is a kind of life here and now. It is this life lived in the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ. The phrase “eternal life” appears many times in John. It always means a kind of life in this life on earth, not some other life in heaven. The Gospel of John doesn’t deny the reality of life after death, but that hoped for future life is not what Jesus is mostly about. He’s about this life. Progressive Christians understand that truth better than most conservative Christians do.

Then there’s the issue of the nature of God’s grace. Conservative Christians tend to make God’s grace conditional. Conservative evangelicals are fond of quoting verses like Acts 16:31: “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved….” They present salvation as an if-then proposition, and “if” is always something people do not something God does. For conservative evangelicals the thing we must do is hold the right beliefs. Conservative Catholics say “Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,” outside the church there is no salvation. For these conservative Christians salvation is conditioned upon participation in the Roman Catholic Church. Conservative Christians of whatever stripe make salvation conditional. They make God’s grace conditional.

The way conservative Christians make salvation conditional raises an important question: When salvation is conditioned on something the one being saved does, who does the saving? With conditional grace it seems more like we save ourselves through what we believe or do than that we are saved by God’s grace. Moreover, conditional grace gives us the power to manipulate God. We get God to do what God otherwise would not do.

It’s easy of course to find biblical support for conditional grace. I just quoted one place you can find it from Acts. It’s easy enough to read Paul as  saying that salvation (or justification at least) id conditioned on our faith. Whether we read Paul as saying we are saved by grace through faith or as saying that we are saved by faith alone we hear him making salvation conditional.

Here, however, is the foundational truth of the matter: Conditional grace isn’t grace. When grace is conditional the salvation it brings is a payment not a gift. Salvation becomes something we earn rather than something God freely gives us freely. Grace is God’s love in action upon the world, and love must be un conditional if it is truly love. Making grace conditional on something we do turns grace into a contractual relationship or so it seems to me, a former lawyer. Our fulfilling our part of the contract becomes a condition precedent for God fulfilling God’s part of the contract. A contractual relationship isn’t and can’t be a relationship grounded in love, grounded in grace. Making grace conditional simply makes it not grace.

Just as it’s not hard to find biblical passages that make God’s grace conditional, so it’s also possible to find biblical passages in which God’s grace truly is unconditional. Here’s my favorite one, Romans 8:35, 38-39:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

If nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God then not having certain beliefs can’t do it. Not living the right way can’t do it. Not belonging to the right church can’t do it. Nothing can. God’s  grace, which is God’s love in action, is truly unconditional. If it isn’t it isn’t grace.

I have preached and taught unconditional grace throughout my professional ministry, so I know that some people find it hard to accept. A former congregant of mine (former not because he left my church but because he passed away before I left the church) said to me over and over again that I was taking away people’s motivation for proper living. For this good fellow if God wasn’t going to withdraw grace from us for bad acts there was no reason not to engage in bad acts. The only reason not to be selfish, not to harm others, was to earn God’s grace, that is, to earn salvation.

This congregant of mine was hardly alone in holding that belief. I suspect that most Christians hold similar ones. After all, we’ve had it pounded into our heads that there is something we have to do to earn salvation. Fear of the supposed consequences of false belief or bad actions can indeed be a great motivator for us to hold right beliefs and to act in the way we think God wants us to act. The operative word in that statement, however, is fear. Conditional grace turns Christianity into a faith grounded in fear. Yet Christianity says God is love. 1 John 4:8. Conservative Christians love John 3:16: “For God so loved the world….” True lovers don’t generate fear in their loved ones. Not even human lovers do that, much less does God, whose love so far exceeds ours that we can’t really comprehend it. Conditional grace produces fear. Unconditional grace produces peace.

Yet doesn’t unconditional grace truly remove our incentive for living the way God wants us to? After all, it does say that God is not going to punish us for doing wrong, so doesn’t it? Well no, it doesn’t remove all motivation for living right, but it does change it. When we understand God’s grace as unconditional we no longer seek to live properly out of fear. We don’t live rightly to earn salvation, for we understand that salvation is already ours in God’s love. So no, we don’t act to earn grace, we act in response to grace. And yes, I know. That statement needs a lot of explaining. Yet the concept is actually quite simple. There’s a line in the hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” that states it well: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my life, my soul, my all.” When we truly get how amazing God’s grace really is we can’t help but respond to love with love.

So just what is so amazing about God’s grace? It is that God offers it to us though we know and God knows we don’t deserve it. Paul knew that truth. So did Martin Luther. That’s why they both came to rely on God’s grace rather than on their own actions as the source of their salvation. I know that a lot of progressive Christians don’t like the idea that we don’t deserve God’s grace. They think they are without sin and so don’t need unconditional grace. They’re wrong. As Paul says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23. Years ago I did a seminary internship at a progressive church in which the people wouldn’t let the pastor include a prayer of confession in the weekly worship service. Wrong. We all sin and fall short of the glory of God.

I’ll use myself as an example. I don’t think I’m a bad person, but I know that I’m not a perfect one. I don’t love God’s people as much as God wants me to. I harbor anger in unhealthy ways. I convince myself that my anger is righteous. Some of it probably is, but not all of it. There are people I have to confess I have hated rather than loved. I don’t do all the good work in the world that God wants me to do. Most of the time I don’t do any at all, excusing myself by saying that my skills are writing and public speaking rather than hands on work with people in need. I know those things about myself, and I know that God knows them too. I know I don’t deserve grace, but I know that I have it and live in it anyway. That’s why it’s grace and not a reward. I also try, imperfectly to be sure, to respond to God’s love with love. I served God’s people as a pastor for several years later in my life. I have served on the boards of a few nonprofit organizations that do good work in the world. I love and care for my family. I am committed to, preach, and try to live God’s nonviolence. I tell myself that I do what I can, but in truth I just do what I’m willing to do. The greatest miracle there is or ever could be is that God loves me anyway. God loves you anyway no matter what you may have done in your life. God doesn’t make us earn salvation. God wants to respond to love with love. That’s the motivation for proper living with unconditional grace.

Here's one more issue that I think is important in understanding progressive Christianity. Conservative Christians insist that their faith, their version of Christianity, is the only path to salvation. It is the only way to be right with God. Once again it’s easy enough to find biblical passages that appear at least to support that conviction. We’ve already noted that conservative Christians love John 3:16. They’re less likely to say so publicly, but they also believe John 3:18: “Those who believe in [Jesus] are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” Sure makes it sound like believing in Jesus is the only way to avoid God condemning us. Here’s another one, John 14:6: “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”[6] The spread of Christianity from Europe to the rest of the world resulted at least in part from the belief of conservative Christians that if people who had never heard of Jesus didn’t convert to Christianity their souls would spend eternity in hell. Progressive Christians believe no such thing. Here’s why.

The New Testament texts that appear to establish Christian exclusivism were all written around 1,900 years ago by and for a very small group of people. There just weren’t that many Christians at the time, and they were utterly powerless. They lived in a world that was considerably smaller than ours. They had far less exposure to people of other great religious traditions than we do. They were mad at the Jews for their failure to accept Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. So they wrote that belief in Jesus was the only way to God.

From our perspective they were just wrong about that. We know in a way that they did not (and could not) that there are a great many people in the world who live good, faithful lives and find a real connection with ultimate reality in other faith traditions. We know that there are lots of people who live good, moral lives without believing in God at all. We can say that only Christians are right with God only by closing our eyes and our minds to the reality all around us. We also know, as they did not and could not, that Christian exclusivism has had horrendous consequences around the world. Christians backed by the power of European empires were so convinced that everyone had to convert to Christianity to avoid eternal damnation that they sometimes forced conversion at the tip of a sword or the point of a gun. In doing that they violated the autonomy, freedom, and moral integrity of the people they were forcing to convert. Such a conversion is of course no real conversion at all. It is something of which all us Christians must repent.

Here's one of my favorite stories about the error of Christian exclusivism. With a bow to Marcus Borg I’ll say that I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know that this story is true. A Christian missionary, operating of course from a belief in Christian exclusivism, quoted John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me” to a Hindu sage and asked that good man what he thought of that statement. The Hindu sage answered: Oh yes. I believe that completely. The Christian missionary was confused. The man he was talking to wasn’t a Christian and had no intention of becoming one. The Hindu man explained: To understand this saying we must understand what the way is that Jesus is. It is the way of peace, love, and reconciliation. Yes, that is indeed the way. This non-Christian understood Jesus far better than far too many Christians have. Christian exclusivism is wrong. I will go so far as to say that it is sinful. We really do have to get over it.

There is of course a lot more that could and needs to be said about progressive Christianity, but I’ll conclude this piece with what may strike you as a surprising or even an absurd contention. The phrase conservative Christian is an oxymoron. It is internally contradictory. One cannot at the same time be a true Christian and be conservative in one’s political, economic, societal, and cultural beliefs and commitments. The reason why that is so is simple enough. To be a Christian is to follow Jesus. Believing in him is part of it, but it isn’t all of it.

In the story of Christ’s Transfiguration the voice from heaven doesn’t say “believe in him.” It says “listen to him.” Mark 9:7. When we listen to Jesus what do we hear? We hear a rebel who turned everything in his world on its head, and of course he did that nonviolently. He said the first shall be last and the last shall be first. He lifted up the despised and condemned the powerful. He said the poor are blessed and lauded the peacemakers not the warriors. He made women the equals of men among his followers and served sinners and tax collectors. He blessed the poor in spirit and fiercely criticized the religious establishment of his day. He said resist evil, but do it nonviolently. He praised the hated Samaritan and welcomed the prodigal home unconditionally. He didn’t say a word about homosexuality or abortion but spoke volumes about justice. Jesus rejected all violence and wouldn’t let his followers use it even to save his own life. Nonetheless he stood every convention of his day on its head. One of the best ways to understand Jesus is to take every cultural, economic, social, and political norm of one’s time and place and turn it on its head. That’s what Jesus did.

He calls to do the same. Jesus analyzed his world and called people to reconstruct it by transforming themselves one heart at a time. No one who claims to follow Jesus can accept unjust political and economic structures and wrap them in a blanket of sentimental piety. Jesus would never put a national flag in a worship space or equate God’s realm with any existing political entity. To follow Jesus is to be laser focused on the injustices and violence of one’s context and to work to change them, to work nonviolently for radical social transformation. Jesus was anything but conservative. He was a nonviolent revolutionary. We fail to be truly Christian when we are anything less.

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[1] For a more complete consideration of theology of the cross see Chapters 8 and 9 of my Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2008.

[2] For a more complete discussion of the meaning of pistis see my Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised edition, Volume 3, The New Testament, Coffee Press, Briarwood, NY, 2019, pp. 160-164.

[3] The Orthodox churches, the largest of which by far is the Russian Orthodox Church, ask a different foundational question than the western churches both Catholic and Protestant, or at least in theory they do. The foundational question the Orthodox churches ask isn’t how do we save our souls. It’s how do we become divine. Orthodox Christianity is a fascinating variety of Christianity that most western Christians know nothing about. For a good introduction to it see Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, An Introduction to Eastern Christianity, Penguin, 2^nd revised edition. 1993.

[4] Unfortunately the New International Version, the most widely purchased English translation, leaves this line as “My kingdom is not of this world.” This retention of the King James Version’s bad translation probably reflects the conservative theology of the NIV’s translators. It can only foster a continuing misunderstanding of what Jesus is all about.

[5] There is actually more than that about this verse that is problemati. For a fuller discussion of this verse see my Liberating Christianity, op. cit., pp. 160-167.

[6] You may have noticed how most of the verses I cite as typical of conservative Christianity come from the Gospel of John. Conservative Christians love John more than they love the other New Testament Gospels or most any other New Testament text for that matter. For a more complete discussion of John’s Christian exclusivism see  my Liberating the Bible, op. cit., pp. 170-179.