What Is Progressive Christianity?

Question 15.

Progressive Christianity is a movement many believers have heard named but few could define clearly, and that vagueness is part of what makes it so difficult to respond to. It presents itself as a kinder, more thoughtful, more inclusive version of the faith, a Christianity finally grown up and freed from embarrassing old certainties. Beneath the gentle language, however, lies a thorough reworking of the faith around very different foundations.

So what is progressive Christianity, what does it actually teach, and how should we respond to it? I want to take time over this, because the movement is influential, sincere people are caught up in it, and a careless response will do more harm than good. We are called to answer it with both truth and grace, and that requires understanding it properly first.

Defining Progressive Christianity

Progressive Christianity is not a denomination with a fixed creed, which is one reason it is hard to pin down. It is better understood as a movement, a mood, a trajectory. Broadly, it is an approach to the faith that prioritises personal experience, cultural values and a particular vision of social justice over the authority of Scripture and the historic doctrines of the church.

The word progressive is itself revealing. It assumes a direction of travel, away from the old positions and towards something supposedly more enlightened. Where traditional Christianity asks what God has revealed, progressive Christianity tends to ask what a loving, modern person could be expected to believe, and reshapes the faith accordingly. Scripture is consulted, but it is no longer the final word. It is one voice among several, ranked below conscience, experience and contemporary moral sentiment.

It helps to see progressive Christianity as a method as much as a set of conclusions. Its conclusions vary, but the underlying move is consistent. When the Bible and the surrounding culture disagree, the culture is assumed to be right and the Bible is reinterpreted to fit. Grasp that single move and most of the rest follows.

What Progressive Christianity Tends to Teach

Because the foundation has shifted, the doctrines shift too, and certain patterns recur across progressive Christianity. The Bible is treated as a human book of spiritual reflections rather than the word of God, inspiring perhaps but not authoritative and certainly not inerrant. This is the hinge on which everything else turns, and I have written separately on what Paul means by sound, healthy doctrine, which progressive teaching quietly sets aside.

From there the historic doctrines are softened or abandoned. The cross is often recast, with penal substitution dismissed as divine child abuse and the atonement reduced to an example of love or a protest against injustice. Sin is redefined less as offence against a holy God and more as social brokenness. The exclusivity of Jesus, His claim to be the only way to the Father, is set aside in favour of many paths. The bodily resurrection becomes optional, a metaphor for hope. Hell quietly disappears.

Alongside this, progressive Christianity typically embraces the moral positions of the surrounding culture wholesale, particularly on sexuality and identity, presenting agreement with the spirit of the age as the height of Christian love. The pattern, again, is the culture setting the terms and the faith being adjusted to match.

Where Progressive Christianity Came From

It helps to know that progressive Christianity did not appear from nowhere. It grows out of the older theological liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which tried to rescue the faith from modern scepticism by quietly surrendering its supernatural claims. The miracles, the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, all were reinterpreted as symbols, and what remained was a religion of ethics and warm feeling with the doctrines hollowed out.

Progressive Christianity is, in large part, that same project dressed in the language of a new generation. Where the older liberalism appealed to science and reason, the newer version appeals to authenticity, inclusion and lived experience. The vocabulary has shifted, but the underlying move is the same one, the steady accommodation of the faith to the assumptions of the surrounding culture.

Knowing this lineage is useful, because it reminds us that the church has faced this challenge before and come through it. The faith outlasted the confident predictions that liberalism would replace orthodox Christianity, and the same Scriptures that answered the older error answer the newer one just as well. There is nothing in this movement so novel that the word of God has not already met its like and stood.

The Appeal We Must Take Seriously

It would be a mistake to respond to progressive Christianity as though it were obviously foolish, because it is not, and the people drawn to it are not fools. It has a real appeal, and unless we understand that appeal we will never speak to it helpfully. Often it attracts people who have been genuinely wounded, by harsh churches, by hypocrisy, by a faith presented without warmth or thought.

Progressive Christianity offers such people what looks like a way to keep Jesus while leaving behind the things that hurt them. It promises intellectual respectability in a sceptical age, a faith that need not be defended at the dinner party. It promises a clear conscience in a culture that brands historic Christian ethics as cruel. And it promises belonging, an embrace of everyone exactly as they are, with nothing required to change.

These longings are not wicked. The desire to be thoughtful, compassionate and welcoming is good. The tragedy of progressive Christianity is that it meets real and worthy longings with a counterfeit, offering acceptance without transformation and a Jesus remade in our own image rather than the living Lord who calls us to Himself. We must honour the longing even as we reject the answer.

I want to be especially careful here, because it is easy for those of us who hold the historic faith to grow smug, and smugness has driven more people into progressive Christianity than almost any argument ever has. If our churches had been warmer, more honest about doubt, more willing to sit patiently with hard questions, fewer of the wounded would have gone looking elsewhere. Part of our response has to be repentance for the coldness that made the counterfeit look attractive in the first place.

Where It Departs From the Faith

For all its gentleness of tone, progressive Christianity departs from the faith at its load bearing points, and honesty requires us to say so. When the authority of Scripture is exchanged for the authority of the self, the entire structure changes, because there is no longer any fixed reference outside our own preferences. We are left, finally, worshipping a God who agrees with us, which is to say worshipping ourselves.

The specific departures matter enormously. If the cross is not a real atonement for sin, there is no gospel to preach, only good advice. If Jesus is one way among many, then His own words in John 14:6 are simply false. If the resurrection did not happen bodily, then, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, our faith is futile and we are still in our sins. These are not peripheral adjustments. They cut the heart out of the faith while keeping its vocabulary.

This is why I cannot treat progressive Christianity as just a different flavour of the same religion. The continuity is largely in the language. Words like grace, love, Jesus and gospel remain, but they have been refilled with new meaning. Recognising that the same words now carry different content is essential, which is part of the wider skill of learning to detect false teaching.

Responding With Truth

How then should we respond? Truth comes first, because love without truth is not love at all. We respond by knowing the faith well enough to recognise where progressive Christianity has changed it, and by holding firmly to the authority of Scripture as the settled foundation. If the Bible is the word of God, then it judges the culture, not the reverse, and we cannot surrender that point without surrendering everything.

We respond by asking good questions rather than only making assertions. Where does this teaching get its authority? If experience and culture decide what is true, what happens when the culture changes again? Is a Jesus who never confronts our sin actually the Jesus of the Gospels, or a comfortable invention? Gentle, probing questions often do more than arguments, because they expose the foundations the movement prefers to keep hidden.

And we respond by actually teaching the historic faith with clarity and warmth, because the best answer to a counterfeit is the genuine article well presented. Much of the appeal of progressive Christianity feeds on caricatures of orthodoxy, the cold church, the unthinking believer, the cruel God. A faith taught with both rigour and tenderness removes a great deal of that appeal at a stroke.

Responding With Grace

Truth without grace, however, will only confirm every suspicion that drove people towards progressive Christianity in the first place. So we must respond with genuine grace, remembering that many in the movement are not hardened enemies but disillusioned wanderers, often hurt by Christians, looking for a faith they can hold without breaking.

Grace means listening before pronouncing, taking the time to understand a person’s actual story rather than firing at a label. It means distinguishing the leaders who knowingly dismantle the faith from the many followers who have simply absorbed a mood and never examined it. It means being the kind of believer and the kind of church whose warmth and integrity make the counterfeit look thin by comparison.

Grace also means patience and prayer. People rarely reason their way out of progressive Christianity in a single conversation, because the issues are as much of the heart as of the head. We hold out the truth steadily, we keep loving, and we trust God to open eyes, knowing that some of us were once lost in our own errors and were brought back by patient grace rather than by being shouted down.

Phrases That Should Make You Listen Carefully

Because progressive Christianity keeps the old vocabulary while changing its meaning, it helps to recognise some of the phrases that often signal the shift. Talk of the Bible as a conversation rather than a revelation, of a God too loving ever to judge, of deconstructing one’s faith as a goal in itself, or of love as something that never calls anyone to repentance, frequently marks the trajectory I have been describing.

None of these phrases is automatically heretical, and I would not want anyone to become a suspicious word policeman pouncing on every unusual expression. People reach for fresh language for all sorts of innocent reasons. But where these phrases cluster together, and where they consistently move in the direction of softening Scripture’s authority and dulling the offence of the cross, they are worth noticing and gently questioning.

The wise response is not to react to a single phrase but to ask where the whole pattern is heading. Is this teaching driving people deeper into the Scriptures and into wonder at the cross, or is it quietly loosening their grip on both? That question, asked patiently over time, will tell you far more than any checklist of suspect words ever could.

Guarding Yourself and Your Church

Finally, a word about prevention, because progressive Christianity advances most easily where the genuine faith is held weakly. The believer who barely knows what the Bible teaches, who has never thought through why the cross matters or why Jesus is the only way, is easy prey for a confident teacher offering an updated model. Depth is the best defence.

So guard yourself by going deep into the Scriptures, by understanding not just what you believe but why, by learning to tell primary doctrines from secondary ones so you know what may never be surrendered. A church that disciples its people thoroughly, that teaches the whole counsel of God rather than a thin gruel of inspirational talks, builds a congregation that progressive teaching cannot easily unpick.

Guard your church too by valuing both truth and love together rather than pitting them against each other. The churches most vulnerable to progressive Christianity are often those that became cold and harsh, making the warmth of the counterfeit irresistible. A community that is both unshakeable on the truth and unmistakably kind offers people what progressive Christianity only pretends to give.

And do not underestimate the quiet power of a settled, joyful believer. Progressive Christianity often advances among people who have only ever seen the faith held nervously or angrily. When they meet a Christian who holds the historic truths with calm conviction and evident warmth, who is neither defensive nor cold, the contrast does its own gentle work. Sometimes the most persuasive answer to the movement is simply a life that shows the genuine faith is neither narrow nor unkind.

So, now what?

So progressive Christianity is a movement that reshapes the faith around personal experience and cultural values rather than the authority of Scripture, keeping the old vocabulary while refilling it with new meaning. At its load bearing points, the authority of the Bible, the meaning of the cross, the uniqueness of Jesus, the reality of the resurrection, it departs from the faith, even as it appeals to real and worthy longings for thoughtfulness, compassion and belonging.

Our response is neither to panic nor to sneer, but to answer with truth and grace together. Know the faith well enough to recognise where it has been changed, hold the authority of Scripture without flinching, and love the people caught up in the movement with the patience God has shown us. If someone you know is drifting in this direction, do not write them off. Listen, ask good questions, live the genuine article in front of them, and keep praying. Could it be that the best argument against the counterfeit is simply a believer who holds the truth firmly and wears it warmly?

Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness.

1 Timothy 4:7 (ESV)

For Further Study

Those wishing to study progressive Christianity and its background more closely will be helped by the wider discussions of biblical authority and apologetics found in the standard evangelical works. Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology both lay out the doctrines of Scripture, the atonement and the person of Jesus that progressive teaching tends to revise, and reading them clarifies exactly what is being given up. Lewis Sperry Chafer and John Walvoord are valuable for grounding the believer in a coherent, Bible centred system that resists the piecemeal erosion progressive teaching relies upon, and J. Dwight Pentecost’s pastoral writing models the warmth that should accompany conviction. Arnold Fruchtenbaum is useful on reading Scripture as a unified whole rather than the fragmented collection progressive readings assume. Above all, the surest study is the careful reading of Scripture itself, particularly John’s Gospel and 1 Corinthians 15, where the claims this movement sets aside are stated most plainly.