What is Progressive Theology? is a collection of essays (189 pages) written by Rollin G. Grams (available from the book shop on www.bibleandmission.blogspot.com for $1.99). See https://bibleandmission.blogspot.com/p/bookstore.html.
Through 28 essays, this book explores how progressivism is dominating Western culture and being embraced by some Christians, including some Evangelicals. The book aims to understand what this latest challenge to orthodoxy is. After an anchor essay, 'What is Progressive Theology?,' the essays address various features of progressivism and provide some alternative responses in a variety of areas.
Many Christians have felt like deer in the headlights as the four-wheel, off-road, hunter's vehicle of Progressivism has suddenly appeared over the hill. Some have melted in place, believing all the accusations against them. Others have joined the hunt, as though they had no 'deer-identity' of their own. And others have darted this way and that into the shadows, without direction, fearful, and hoping only to survive.
This book, while by no means comprehensive, seeks to provide some better understanding of what this Progressivism is and how it is infecting the Church and its mission. We need to reach deep into the bedrock of our Christian civilization in the Church and respond to this Progressivism with what is good and lasting in our faith. The charge of racism in every institution must be met with the Bible's theology of mission and the long history of the Church's mission in the world. Post-Christian sexuality is not an issue of justice but of perversion--a perversion of God's good creation, and Progressivism needs to be challenged not with dialogue and shared experiences but with the truth of the Divine Word and the historic teaching of the Church, including the Good News that, in Christ, sin is forgiven and sinners are transformed. Christians need to affirm the convictions of Christian orthodoxy established in the time of the Church Fathers, affirm the convictions of the Reformation (sola Scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solo Christo, soli Deo gloria), affirm Evangelicals' focus of belief on Scripture as God's Word, Christ, and conversion, and our focus of activism in light of these, and conserve our identity over against today's post-Christian Progressivism.
'Progressivism' is today's heir to several post-Enlightenment '-isms' in Western intellectual thought. While Western, it has taken firm root in cities, governments, and institutions throughout the world.
Like Romanticism, it believes that the 'Noble Savage' (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) is essentially good, rejecting the doctrine of human depravity and the Church's understanding of sin, evil, and suffering. It therefore wants to affirm sinful practices and orientations, claim the high ground of virtue in its tolerance and inclusion, and oppose conversion.
Like Liberal Theology, it distances itself from doctrine, considered to be divisive, and focusses instead on shared experience (cf. Paul Tillich's 'correlational theology'). As classically stated by Adolf von Harnack (What is Christianity?, 1900), Liberal Theology sought to represent Christianity in the most general terms as about the fatherhood of God, the 'brotherhood of mankind,' and the infinite worth of the human soul. Harnack rejected any continued use of the Old Testament and any concrete theological content--notably any Christology or Soteriology--as well as any historical content in doctrine.
Like Existentialism, Progressivism rejects the notion that humanity is created a certain way--having an essence--and instead believes that we are blank slates that must choose, form relationships, and act in order to create our own identities. Existence precedes essence, as Jean-Paul Sartre, the atheist existentialist, put it. Notably, Progressivism is anti-natural and anti-creational in promoting self-identities such as homosexuality and transgenderism. Yet it opposes nature in a variety of other ways as well, including gene editing, interference in birth (abortion) and death (euthanasia), and the politicisation of environmental concerns.
Like Postmodernism, Progressivism entertains an 'incredulity towards metanarratives' (Jean François Lyotard), although it inconsistently has adopted its own metanarrative in 'Wokism' or 'Political Correctness.' It further opposes any objectivity, insisting that truth is constructed, local, and subjective. This, too, contributes to a disinterest in history and doctrine except as tools that can be wielded to promote its own activist agendas.
Like Marxism, Progressivism makes 'social justice' its primary concern, defines this in its own way, and opposes the idea that theology provides a ground and direction for social action. Rather, theology is merely 'reflection' on praxis (Gustavo Gutierrez).
Continuing with this trajectory, Progressivism affirms Critical Theory's project of liberation from all forms of oppression, not just political and economic. It seeks to bring about a radical cancellation of past culture and rejects an interpretation of European history as 'civilisation'. This 'cancel culture' is, like Critical Theory, not utopian in the sense of Communism, but it does approve a heavy, authoritative hand from government and a socialist approach to economics. In this, it has increasingly sought to overthrow the Modern values of freedom and equality and introduced instead other social values. In Early Postmodernity, its values were tolerance, equal opportunity, and multiculturalism. In Late Postmodernity (from about 2010), these values have evolved into inclusiveness (not just tolerance), equity (equal outcomes and thus unequal opportunities), and diversity (again in the sense of exclusion or undermining the roles of some, notably white males). This Late Postmodernity is a Western form of tribalism--heavy handed, socialist, racist, conformist, subjective, and so forth.
Following the trajectory of Marxism and Critical Theory further, Progressivism has latched onto a racist view of the world under the clever cloak of Critical Race Theory, seeing and treating individuals not as individuals but as members of their race--either undermining or promoting them accordingly. Thus, quixotic activism is centered around race, although other activist agendas include 'climate change,' 'immigration' (actually, opposition to borders and any special notion of 'citizenship'), opposition to Christianity, extension of the sexual revolution of the 1960s to homosexuality and transgenderism (which, ironically, is an attack on feminism), and a peculiar version of socialism that includes an activist elite made up of technocrats, bureaucrats, and the wealthy.
Progressivism, then, is an odd contradiction in many ways, including in its being a Western version of post-Westernism. Its promotion of non-Western religions for their minority status in the West means the undermining of Christianity without recognising the contradictory beliefs and practices of these other religions for its own agenda. Its beliefs will eventually be challenged when the alleged, essential goodness of humanity meets with the horrors of war or the brutal and radical practices of certain religions, when its opposition to the family meets parents putting families first (e.g., in adoption and education), when its culture of death meets people who affirm life, when women are protected from men invading their uniqueness by pretending to be women, when its insistence on group conformity meets individuals who value freedom, when the Church reaffirms (or rediscovers) its Christ-centred identity in its community and mission instead of making race the catalyst for identity, community, and activism, when Christians challenge its post-Christian ethics with their affirmation of Christian ethics, particularly sexual ethics, when the Church affirms over against Progressivism the power of God to bring life-transforming conversion, salvation, and transformation, even for people with entrenched, sinful orientations and perversions.
Progressivism may well fail in the face of radical religions, warfare, and the disgust of decent people. Yet it has made strong gains in Christian circles. Mainline denominations had already undermined their Christian convictions and practices with Liberal Theology and have continued their decline through their embrace of Postmodern Progressivism. There is very little 'Christian' still to be found in these once orthodox expressions of the Church, and there is no hope of bringing reform within them (as there still was in the 1980s).
However, Progressivism has also established a foothold in some sectors of Evangelicalism, not least when pastors, seminary administrators and faculty, activist students at Christian colleges, Evangelical 'elites' (editors, writers, organisational directors, speakers, etc.--self-importantly saying that they are 'leaders') want the culture's affirmation. Fearing to be labelled as 'racist,' they allow this interpretation of society and the Church to dominate and introduce agendas that focus the Church on 'social activism' led by the culture, turned away from any Christ-centred focus. Spurred on by the failure of denominations of the past and the growth of non-denominationalism, they encourage Progressive activism over doctrinal depth and convictions. They find the battles of the Church Fathers for orthodoxy or the hard-fought convictions of the Reformation to be, at best, interesting academic exercises but irrelevant in large part for the affirmed moral revisionism of the present day. Lauded by their circle of supporters, these elite Evangelicals think themselves to be leaders of a moral reforming of the Church, even as they have little understanding of ecclesiology or missiology in the orthodox sense of these terms. Instead, they are educated in little other than the news of the day.
These essays touch on these subjects, as the table of contents indicates. The essays provide some perspective to the issues facing Godly believers who understand that the West's version of social justice is a threat to their determination to know Christ and Him crucified above all. The book has been updated several times since publishing. If you purchase the book online, you can find the additional chapters on this blog (or contact the author for an updated version).
Table of Contents
Forward
Progressive Theology
What is Progressive Theology?
Some Characteristics of the
West’s Postmodern Tribalism
Enquiry and the LGBTQ+ Debate:
From Teacher to Lecturer to Dialogue Partner to Warrior
The Heresy of Critical Race Theory
About Those New, Western
Values—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Biblical vs. Progressive Notions
of ‘Equity’ in Social Justice
A Holistic Gospel or a Holistic
Ministry?
Identity
The Rise of Identity Ecclesiology
Identity Ecclesiology: Regarding Willie James Jennings’ ‘Can
‘White’ People be Saved?’, and a Positive Alternative in a Biblical Theology
and Ethic of Unity
Diversity
The Church is Not a Zoo: Unity, Not Diversity, is the Church’s Communal Value
Is Diversity a Christian Virtue?
How and Why Paul Avoided Celebrating 'Diversity' as a
Christian Value--and Why This Matters for Us
Not 'Multicultural Diversity' but 'Cultural Transformation':
A Christian Reflection on Culture
Racism, Politics, and an Ecclesial and Missional Perspective
Government and Freedom
The Challenge of the State
Conscience and Freedom
The Changing Meaning of Freedom: From Conscience to Coercion
Freedom: A Universal Human Right versus A Value
Within A Particular (i.e., Christian) Tradition
Against Nature
From Naturalism to Anti-Naturalism: Understanding the Enemy in Today's Culture Wars
The Antinaturalism
of Late Postmodernity
When Marriage is No Longer Understood as a Moral Act
Some
Alternatives
How Institutions Change Their
Original Mission, Values, and Practices
Some
Redirection: Peter Viereck and an Alternative to Ideological
Conservatism
and Progressivism
Christians and Academic Enquiry in
a Postmodern Age
Rethinking Christian Education:
Primary through High School, Colleges, and Seminaries
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