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(82,333 posts) Tue Feb 12, 2013, 10:47 PM Feb 2013

Progressive and Liberal Christianity

February 10, 2013
By James F. McGrath

Several posts have come to my attention in recent days, related to the subject of liberal/progressive Christianity.

Roger Olson has a post on why he doesn’t self-identify as a “liberal Christian.” He offers interesting discussion of the terminology and his own understanding, which is worth clicking through to read. Towards the end he sums up as follows:

So what’s wrong with being liberal theologically in that way? I find it thin, ephemeral, light, profoundly unsatisfying. It seems to me barely different from being secular humanist. Sure, theological liberals (in the sense I have defined that type above) can be profoundly “spiritual,” but I don’t think they are profoundly Christian. Their commitment is greater to modern culture, the Zeitgeist of the Enlightenment, than to Christian sources. Their “Christianity” is barely recognizable if recognizable at all—compared with anything that was called “Christian” before the Enlightenment. Ultimately, I believe, theological liberalism robs Christianity of its distinctiveness, the “scandal of particularity,” its prophetic edge and makes it easy, respectable and dull.

I have to strongly disagree. The reason why liberal Christians are committed to the insights of science and other approaches to knowledge associated with the Enlightenment is because they are almost universally agreed to represent improvements on what went before, allowing us a better understanding of the world we live in. And there is no reason to think that, when pre-Enlightenment Christians adopt a stance different from that of the Enlightenment, it is because they had considered that approach and evaluated a different one as preferable. No, they differ from Enlightenment thinking simply and precisely because they lived before it. We can’t know what the Biblical authors (for instance) would have said about the Enlightenment. But I think I can safely say this: What made the Biblical authors have a prophetic edge in their own time is not merely the fact that they reflected more their own context than our own. If it were, then presumably liberal Christians, by reflecting our own time, would be automatically the most prophetic simply because of the ways in which we reflect our own time and context. Olson, by making pre-Enlightenment vs. post-Enlightenment worldviews the crux of Christianity, treats context as substance. It is a rejection of this view – that an ancient culture and its assumptions can be adopted by people today, and that that culture must be accepted along with the Gospel – that was the heart of Bultmann’s work on demythologization.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2013/02/progressive-and-liberal-christianity.html