Deprivileging the Bible: Does “Progressive Christianity” Have a Future?

Bishop John A. T. Robinson was famous for driving a wedge between the Bible, no longer identified with the word of God, and Christ. Below the jump, a characteristic quote. Progressive Christians today think of Robinson as a mentor. Fixed religious beliefs of any kind are considered to be a nuisance. The common denominator of progressive Christianity is not Christianity, except by accident. It is nothing more and nothing less than a version of political correctness. Two questions come to mind. (1) Does the progressive approach to the Bible attempt to read the biblical texts on their own terms? (2) Does “progressive Christianity” have a future? The answer is in the negative on both counts.

Here is a characteristic Bishop Robinson quote:

The centre is Christ, the centre isn't the Bible, the Bible is the record about Christ, it isn't per se the word of God, that I want to hold to Christ and for the rest be totally uncommitted.

It is typical of religious progressives to make this move. It is nonetheless an incoherent position. How can you hold to Christ without holding to the Bible, in particular, the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, the contents of which Jesus privileged with the utmost seriousness along all three components of Aristotle’s trichotomy? You cannot. Read on its own terms, the Bible has a great deal to say about the true (the realm of theology and philosophy), the good (ethics), and the beautiful (aesthetics). If on the contrary the Bible is reduced to a collection of metaphors, only one of which really matters – “all you need is love” [progressives are certain that this phrase is in the Bible, even if they can’t remember the cite] – the Bible is no longer being read on its own terms.

Consistent progressives realize this. They no longer follow Robinson in suggesting that holding to Christ is important. They are aware that once you stop holding to the Bible, it is natural to stop holding to the one of whom the Bible speaks. Gretta Vosper, an excellent example of an up-to-date progressive Christian, puts it this way:

I never had an understanding of a theistic God separate and distinct from me that could intervene in my life and make things happen, whether I wanted them to or not. I never had an understanding of Jesus as offering me salvation.

Vosper has never had these understandings because she was raised in the United Church of Canada, which has not (in its most “progressive” congregations) taught these things since the 1970s. Vosper is aware that the God of whom the Bible speaks and the Jesus of whom the New Testament speaks are precisely what she rejects. I quote:

And one of the first occasions where that came at me, rather suddenly was during a chapel service when the student who was leading it was from the Anglican church, and invited all of us to stand and recite together the Apostles' Creed. Well I had never been faced with the Apostles' Creed in a liturgical setting, and couldn't say it at all, so I fled the chapel.  

That’s the trouble with Anglicans. They still recite the creed, even if they don’t believe it.* That doesn’t make sense to a true progressive. Why repeat stuff you don’t believe in?

Back to the Bible. Here is Vosper again:

I think that the critical scholarship that was presented and so many of the inconsistencies and even the fact that the Bible is 2,000 and more years old, all come together to question its validity as a moral document and a moral compass for our time. And so in the Bible there are incredibly beautiful passages that call us to live in very good, compassionate ways, that respect each other and respect the world around us. But there's also so much horrific stuff that if we continue to present it as the authoritative word of God for all time, and just disregard certain passages that we don't like, in other words, cut and paste, which I think is the unwritten history of Christianity, if we do that, we are still allowing it to exist as a document that could be by anyone picked up and those passages that we don't like held as authoritative as the passages that we do.

So I think it's far more important for us to acknowledge that the Bible is not the authoritative word of God, and so therefore we approach it bringing to it our contemporary understandings of the world around us, of science, of ethics, of anthropology, of relationship, and we lift out of it what can help us live those aspects of our lives, those challenges and relationships that we have, to the best that we can, and the rest we set aside into archival records.

It seems to me that all people, believers and unbelievers alike, ought to be in favor of reading the Bible with contemporary understandings “of the world around us, of science, of ethics, of anthropology, of relationship” in mind. But if the Bible is read on its own terms, it will be allowed to call contemporary understandings into question.

In progressive Christianity, reading the Bible becomes an exercise in putting its contents into two baskets – (1) the beautiful passages we read to inspire us to do random acts of kindness and buy organic vegetables, and (2) the other passages which say judgmental things or suggest that there is a place for war, coercive justice, boundaries, and lines of authority. The second basket is a waste container. Without wishing to suggest that the exercise is completely useless, it is a solipsistic and narcissistic approach to reading the Bible. It is symmetrical to those traditional readings of the Bible which are likewise closed to the possibility of the Bible speaking a word that has not been given sufficient credit to date by tradition, or has been ignored altogether.

Does progressive Christianity have a future? Does it care to have one? Perhaps its unconfessed hope is euthanasia, a “good death.” Comments by leaders of the United Church of Canada, adherence to which has been in free fall for decades, suggest that the UCC, not unlike the church with the same acronym in the United States, might very much prefer to fade into the woodwork of a progressive society to which it is perfectly accommodated.

Note that the United Church of Canada contains many congregations that continue to read the sum and the parts of the Bible as a lamp unto their feet, and continue to think of Christ as Savior and as far more than a metaphor for random acts of kindness. Furthermore, as Canadian society continues to polarize politically, the likelihood increases that the more Bible-affirming components of the UCC will find the cultural resources they need to resist the temptation that progressive Christianity poses to warm-hearted people of many stripes. They will vote Conservative or NDP rather than Liberal more and more, but if all goes well, they will allow the Bible to resource a meta-critique of their own political allegiances, lifestyle choices, and intellectual and spiritual proclivities. Otherwise, why bother reading the Bible in the first place? The attachment of progressive Christianity to the Bible is vestigial in nature.

* Many Anglicans believe the creeds, or recite them in the hope that someday, they will believe them, or are so happy that others believe them, that they recite along. Those who outright disbelieve them are pretty unusual.    

Comments

[Rev. Bryant J. Williams III]

Dear John,

You said, "Fixed religious beliefs of any kind are considered to be a nuisance."

Yes, it is a nuisance; that is the nature of Theology. This is also about the same as those who claim that "they are not interested in theology." It is still a contradiction because every person as a theology = worldview = belief system. When that theology = worldview = belief system comes into contact with what the Bbile says, then what that person does in response to the claims of the Bible and of Christ will very much determine what will happen in their life.

Furthermore, this almost sounds too close to Neo-Gnosticism or Neo-Marcionism: the God of the OT is not the God of the NT, etc.

BTW, you are right about the Progressives contradicting what Jesus said in Luke 24 with regards to the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms.

Rev. Bryant J. Williams III

[smijer]

Is there a difference in your mind, or in the minds of the adherents, between "progressive" and "liberal" Christianity? I have noticed that the most liberal of liberal Christians are indistinguishable from atheists in their propositional beliefs.

On the other hand, I have noticed a fair set of supernaturalists who believe God and Jesus are in heaven interpret or apply the Bible in very non-traditional ways.

Do you think, in principle, the Bible and a Christian ethic derived from it can be privileged outside the context of language like "God's word", or even outside the context of belief in God?

A big point of divergence between me and more conservative Christians is my constant advocacy that "right and wrong" must trump any religious consideration, including the notion of "Biblical"... if a person is to truly prefer right to wrong. That isn't to say that a person cannot work through their moral intuitions in part by reflecting on religious considerations that help clarify thought. But at the end of the day ethical considerations duly reasoned must be the standard by which any religious position is judged - and not the other way around. Doing it that way gives hope of getting the "right" answer. Doing it the other way only gives hope of getting the "religious" answer.

[smijer]

To clarify what I said above: when I said the point of divergence between me and "more conservative Christians"... I did not mean to imply that I was a "less conservative Christian". I meant to say that this was a point of divergence between me a subset of Christians who were "more conservative". As you know, but other readers may not, I am an atheistic non-Christian Unitarian Universalist.

[Ryan]

Well said. And I agree with you, for the most part about my church. The Bible is seen as something that must be eventually progressed past because it is, as Barth said "a strange new world" that is not consistent with mainstream understandings of society or "progress" as such.

Having said that, many supposedly bible-centric Christians appear to be mere pale imitations of their liberal counterparts--especially those who see voting Conservative as some sort of subversive act against the secular society. The Bible "says what it says" and only speaks to personal stuff like homosexual intercourse and "believing in Jesus" without radical transformation or incarnation. They are against gay marriage and abortion, but live lives exactly in the same way that most Canadians do. They go to work for X Corp, drop their kids off at daycare, and go to Sunday to sing songs and think happy thoughts about how much Jesus loves them.

The same goes for "progressive" Christians who are pro gay marriage and pro-choice, but only take the bible seriously on things that a moderate social-democratic state can do--such as welfare programs and environmental legislation. There is no radical critique of the consumer society or global capitalism, of the commodification of sexuality, gender, childhood or anything else.

Both groups live lives of alienated production and consumption, worshiping Mammon 7 days a week. They are not called out to be the people of God or Christ's body on earth. To merely give assent to the Creeds doesn't seem enough to me. A mechanical exercise isn't any better than not doing it at all.

What's the solution? In speaking with some UCC ministers (lay and otherwise) on a course a couple weeks ago, I found complaints similar to the ones that you've made--especially on Greta Vosper. There is an openness to the Bible as transformative text within the congregation--I just don't see the so-called "conservatives" you mentioned embracing this. Rather, it might be neither the regular social-justicers or "the bible says what it says" types leading the charge, but those who are dissatisfied with both.

[JohnFH]

Ryan,

I'm going to begin with your comment because I really like this remark of yours:

"many supposedly bible-centric Christians appear to be mere pale imitations of their liberal counterparts--especially those who see voting Conservative as some sort of subversive act against the secular society. The Bible "says what it says" and only speaks to personal stuff like homosexual intercourse and "believing in Jesus" without radical transformation or incarnation. They are against gay marriage and abortion, but live lives exactly in the same way that most Canadians do. They go to work for X Corp, drop their kids off at daycare, and go to Sunday to sing songs and think happy thoughts about how much Jesus loves them."

That's very insightful. The whole idea that voting for anyone is a subversive act is plain pitiful.

I try to vote responsibly, but I believe that, from the viewpoint of the politics of God, what the slavegirl does in 2 Kings 5 is more important than anything she might have done (and of course couldn't) in the strictly political sense.

Somehow we have to recover this insistence on the primacy of healing and sheer counter-productive grace which is the opposite of self-help and feel-good therapy. Voting against the party you love to hate falls into the latter category.

[JohnFH]

Bryant,

I hear you.

Smijer,

You say,

"[T]he most liberal of liberal Christians are indistinguishable from atheists in their propositional beliefs."

I'm sure that's true, that one shades into the other. But that is only because, where we are, atheists are, culturally speaking, Christians. That's what Dawkins says, that he is a cultural Christian. There is a lot of truth to that.

However, other atheists are in the Nietzsche mold; the Ayn Rand mold; or the Hitler/Stalin/Mao mold. From the point of view of right and wrong (admittedly now, I am speaking out of the common denominator of which Dawkins speaks), these folks make the average Christian look pretty good. Though they are soul mates, some of them, of Torquemada. So it depends.

You ask:

"Do you think, in principle, the Bible and a Christian ethic derived from it can be privileged outside the context of language like "God's word", or even outside the context of belief in God?"

I certainly do. The Bible really is too good to be true in the best sense of that phrase. Even if by some quirk of biography the God of whom the Bible speaks doesn't exist in your mind, it makes sense to let the Bible, its apocalyptic for example, but also, its ethics, meta-critique society and you as an individual. This is easier to do now for atheists than before. No one is forcing you to do it. It's your own choice.

Think Zizek; Taubes; Walzer. Note how many of the serious atheists, Eagleton, Paglia, to name two very different examples, have Bible-envy and/or Jewish and Christian envy.

For the rest, smijer, you are a UU who knows your Bible very well. I think you know how to read it on its own terms, even if you don't buy it. That's a rare gift.

[smijer]

Well, I was only dealing with propositional beliefs about external reality - not overall world-view, values or ethics. It is in those terms that is difficult to draw a distinction between any given atheist and certain among the most liberal of Christians.

[JohnFH]

That's true. Transcendentals of all kinds, not just God but embodied mind, are out of the question for atheists, and don't fit well with liberal/progressive versions of Judaism or Christianity either.

I would also add that there are plenty of atheists who see eye-to-eye in terms of values and ethics with (so-called) *conservative* Christians.

My grandfather, a self-made millionaire when a million was a lot of money, was an atheist. He was a Goldwater Republican. I'm not sure which caused him greater distress, my Christianity or my namby-pamby politics. He was somewhat relieved when I married a beautiful, vivacious Italian who looked very good in a bathing suit at poolside at his home in Tucson AZ. I hadn't completely lost my head, apparently.

[G. Kyle Essary]

John,
Anglicans in SE Asia (and there are a lot), believe the creeds. Your comment seems only to work with a sunset in England, Australia and of course the Episcopalians.

[JohnFH]

Kyle,

And of course, there are plenty of Anglicans everywhere who believe the creeds. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. All I wanted to say is that Anglicans, not to mention Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox, are happy to recite the creeds even if they wouldn't necessarily claim to thoroughly understand them, even if they don't believe them but only want to believe them, even if they don't believe them but are convinced enough of the value that others do that they go along.

All of the above has its own authenticity, which is very different from authenticity as understood by standard-issue progressive Christians. If they can't explain it, they won't affirm it. The older way is to affirm something in the conviction that, if not in this life, it will come to make sense in the next.

[Muscat]

I think the picture you paint of progressive Christianity is a bit broad of brush. It seems a bit like the mirror of liberal Christians painting all conservative Christians as knee-jerk fundamentalists. Both are caricatures, at best. Bishop Robinson has certainly been influential on progressive Christianity, but I would venture to guess most contemporary progressive Christians are more familiar with figures such as Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong. Spong being much akin to Robinson but Borg not so much (for example, Borg affirms the primacy of the Bible in Christian practice, is fairly comfortable with affirming Mystery that can't be explained/understood easily, etc, albeit in a different way than more conservative Christians), and most progressives in the circles I travel in being much closer to Borg than Spong. But perhaps this just means that progressive Christians are predominantly "inconsistent" in your estimation.

Perhaps this is beside the seeming main point of your post, which is to say that progressive Christians are guilty of keeping the parts of the Bible they like and throwing out what they don't like, and therefore do not allow the Bible to critique their own lives and the society they live in. But, I don't think this accurately describes a fair number of progressive Christians, and perhaps more to the point progressive Christians are not particularly guilty of doing either of these things - they are rampant in all quarters of modern Christianity, and I think this is really where your critique becomes problematic.

[JohnFH]

Muscat,

Thank you for offering nuance to my admittedly broad brush description. Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong have less and less in common as time goes on, since the latter shows less and less respect for the Jesus of Scripture.

It is possible, I think, for a classical Christian to find common ground with Marcus Borg (as Tom Wright did in a famous work), but that is much harder to do with Spong. His stuff is so off the wall that it does not rise, as others have noted, to the dignity of heresy. It is twaddle pure and simple.

That progressive Christians take Spong seriously is a sign of what might be called intellectual suicide. Will Willimon has spoken of the intellectual death of liberal Christianity.

Nothing you note convinces me that progressive Christianity has a future. UUism is far more coherent as a proposal, though it doesn't have long legs either. Vacuousness is a problem for serious souls. A very earnest young woman I know switched from UUism to Bahai. That makes perfect sense to me.

I am happy when progressive Christians meta-critique traditional Christians from Scripture. Preach it. But I see this happening less and less. The deprivileging of the Bible among progressives has reached the point that they are becoming incapable of offering a critique of traditional Christianity. Their historical raison d'etre is vanishing. And they are vanishing with it.

[Tim Bulkeley]

John, I don't want to discuss whether "Progressive Christianity" has a future, but I to ask about your picture of Robinson. I have not read any of his works since the 70s, and not much since the 60s, but back then it did not seem to me he was ditching much of traditional Christianity except the notion of a god in the sky with a long white beard, a ditching which seemed and still seems to me thoroughly in line with the Bible - just see Solomon's prayer for the dedication of the temple... Is this a case of people taking someone as a poster child who is actually not as like them as they think? Or is my memory of Robinson plain wrong?

[JohnFH]

Hi Tim,

I'm thinking a little of both. I remember reading Robinson with pleasure but I may have been reading him over-sympathetically if that makes sense, from a classical Christian position.

There is so much I can agree with in detail in Robinson. But his deprivileging of the Bible IMO sows the wind and reaps the whirlwind. The full harvest is ripe, I think, among up-to-date progressive Christians like Vosper.

As for the future of progressive Christianity, blogger Drew Tatusko is worth reading on this. He is a committed progressive Christian but absolutely realistic about its ongoing and inevitable decline.

[Charlie J. Ray]

Justification by good works and antinomianism are flip sides of the same coin.

Justification by faith alone produces good works which are acceptable to God. A "changed" life may be a good witness and pleasing to God but ONLY after one is elected, regenerated, effectually called and given the gift of faith.

The sovereignty of God is the solution to modernism, progressive Christianity and various other departures from biblical and Reformation Christianity.

Although you're one of those Methodists, I do like your blog and what you have to say about the objective genitive and the New Perspectives on Paul.

I'm not a scholar in biblical languages but I do read Koine Greek and biblical Hebrew with the help of my Logos software and the lexicons.

I became a Calvinist while I was a student at Asbury Seminary. Go figure.

Anglicans in general are just as confused as the Methodists--or maybe more???

Charlie

[JohnFH]

Hi Charlie,

I would also point out that God seems to elect, regenerate, call and give the gift of faith to a lot of people, beknighted Methodists and Anglicans included, who are not very good at putting those things into words. It's amazing what God gets away with.

I'm a Waldensian (a kind of paleo-Protestantism, our confession of faith is old Reformed, like the Gallican Confession of Faith), but that's how I got started: in a revivalist setting drenched in Arminian theology. But that's the thing: God sees to it that preaching brings about the obedience of faith even if that preaching is faulty from more than one point of view.

I am not indifferent to questions of doctrine in the least, as this post exemplifies. But if the history of the church teaches anything, it is that God so loves the world that he ministers to it through an entire zoo full of distinct Christian traditions, each of which gets some things right and some things wrong, in theory and in practice.

[Brooke]

John commented:
All I wanted to say is that Anglicans, not to mention Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox, are happy to recite the creeds even if they wouldn't necessarily claim to thoroughly understand them, even if they don't believe them but only want to believe them, even if they don't believe them but are convinced enough of the value that others do that they go along.

Volunteering myself as a token Anglican, I can affirm this. Sometimes I think I most enjoy saying the creeds when I am most in doubt about some element of them. I realize that this sounds odd to some folks, and the only reply I can offer is, "Isn't this at least a part of what church is for?"

[JohnFH]

I agree with you, Brooke, and I'm not even Anglican.

As I see it, belief and doubt are contiguous; in the opposite corner, "I don't know," ennui, and acedia are contiguous. Faith is described well by, "I believe, help thou my unbelief."

[Jonathan Bartlett]

John -

Having just graduated from a progressive seminary, I think you might be a little off the mark of what they believe.

First of all, what they are committed to is not so much the *things* that Jesus taught or the *things* that the Old Testament taught, but rather their mode of critique. They love Jesus because he fought for the poor and elevated them above the rich. They love Jesus because he was subversive against the religious leaders of his day. They love the Old Testament because the prophets cried foul against their governments, and God's blessing was always toward those unfavored by the culture.

In addition, since they see the early church as having remolded Jesus into a character that matched their circumstances and problems, so they view that their own *responsibility* is to remold Jesus into a character that speaks into our present day.

As for "miracle", I think that the progressives are quite divided on this. One common opinion I've found, however, is that all matter is spiritual and in communion with God. Therefore, there aren't "miracles" per se because God isn't any more-or-less active at any time than any other time. God is always working, teaching, speaking; but to elevate any particular event as being a "miracle" is simply to misunderstand the way nature works. Thus, science and faith get blended in an interesting way - science sets the limits for which miracles can occur.

[JohnFH]

Hi Jonathan,

I agree. The Jesus and the prophets progressives love is the one that puts them in the right. Progressives love to elevate the poor above rich - not in everyday life, but in terms of political choices. They are big on subverting Christian tradition if they are Christians; Jewish tradition if they are Jewish. They like to cry foul against their governments, especially, as is usually the case, the people in government are more conservative than they are. So progressives think of Jesus and the prophets along these lines.

It makes me want to be careful, as a pretty thoroughly self-conscious traditionalist, not to fall into the same trap from another direction.

[Angela Erisman]

Is it possible to be progressive and Bible- (or tradition-)centric? I suspect it is. But it means accepting the good, the bad, and the ugly in the tradition as part of your inheritance and finding something to learn even from the bad and the ugly. Perhaps, as with our personal histories, we must embrace, own, and learn from even the parts where we go wrong - or we cease to be whole.

[JohnFH]

I think you're right, Angela. At the very least, it is possible to be fully modern in some sense and yet deeply traditional.

It's just that progress, historically considered, is a very mixed bag. It runs from increased rates of literacy to mass ennui; from contraception to Hiroshima; from equality to a crisis of authority and one-sizes-fits-all solutions. I don't know if you are familiar with Walter Benjamin's definition of progress. It rings true to me:

Benjamin begins by quoting a poem by Gershom Scholem in which a painting by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, is the focus:

My wing is poised to beat,
gladly would I turn back;
were I to stay for endless days,
hapless I would remain.

-- Gershom Scholem, “Greetings from Angelus" [my translation, indebted to that of Richard Sieburth]

Benjamin comments:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(Thesis IX in “On the Philosophy of History.” I reproduce the translation of Lloyd Spencer (which depends on earlier translations, like that of Harry Zohn, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 2003), 392-93). For Walter Benjamin’s 1940 work, "On the Concept of History," see idem, Gesammelte Schriften I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974) 691-704. Scholem's poem on the Klee painting was written for Benjamin's twenty-ninth birthday -- July 15, 1921. Sieburth's translation is found in Gershom Scholem, The Fullness of Time: Poems (Jerusalem: Ibis, 2003.))

The New Testament analogue to Benjamin's philosophy of history is found in Paul: “[H]owever much sin abounded, grace abounded even more” (Romans 5:20).

[Frank]

Radical spiritual transformation is almost impossible until one goes beyond a common, traditional-Christian, understanding of the Bible.

As a member of fundamentalist churches for thirty-eight years, I could easily wish this were not true. but belonging to a conservative Christian church can be a hindrance to being "born again."