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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
