How does progressivism affect theology?

Question 60041.

Theological progressivism is not a denomination and does not have a headquarters, which is part of what makes it difficult to discuss. It is better understood as a method, a way of handling Scripture and doctrine which assumes that the church is on a journey away from its past and towards a fuller understanding that the biblical writers themselves did not possess. Once that assumption is in place, everything else follows with a certain grim logic.

I want to describe it fairly before I criticise it, because caricature is a poor form of argument and because many people who have absorbed theological progressivism have never heard it described as a system at all. They simply believe that Christianity should be kind, and they have been told that kindness requires these particular conclusions.

What theological progressivism is

At its heart theological progressivism holds that revelation is developmental rather than deposited. Scripture, on this view, records a community’s evolving understanding of God rather than God’s own speech to that community. The text is therefore a witness to a conversation rather than the terms of a covenant, and its authority is the authority of a respected elder rather than of a King.

From that root everything grows. If Scripture is a record of development, then the direction of development matters more than the individual statements, and the church’s job is to continue the trajectory rather than to conserve the deposit. The apostolic writings become a stage rather than a standard. Doctrines that once looked settled are reclassified as the best that people could manage at the time.

You will notice that theological progressivism rarely announces itself by denying a doctrine outright. It reframes. The resurrection becomes a way of speaking about hope. Substitutionary atonement becomes an unfortunate metaphor drawn from a violent culture. Hell becomes a description of present suffering. The vocabulary survives; the referent has quietly gone.

How progressivism reshapes doctrine

Start with Scripture itself, because that is where the reshaping begins. Paul told Timothy that all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable, which you can read at 2 Timothy 3:16. The Greek term is theopneustos, God breathed, and it says something about the origin of the text rather than about its effect on the reader. Once that is denied, no other doctrine is safe, because every other doctrine is known only from this book.

Then watch the atonement. Theological progressivism finds penal substitution intolerable, usually on the grounds that it makes God appear violent. But the alternative offered, in which the cross demonstrates love without accomplishing anything, leaves us with a God who arranges a horrifying death as a piece of theatre. The traditional doctrine is not less loving; it is love that actually pays something.

And then anthropology. If human beings are basically good and shaped by systems, sin becomes primarily social and salvation becomes primarily political. That is where theological progressivism and the older social gospel meet, and I have written about that connection in the social gospel and the biblical gospel.

The trajectory argument and its problems

The strongest case theological progressivism makes is the trajectory argument. It points out that Scripture regulates slavery rather than abolishing it, and that the church later abolished it, and concludes that we are meant to read the direction of travel and keep walking. It is a clever argument and it deserves a proper answer rather than a sneer.

The answer is that the abolitionists did not extend a trajectory beyond Scripture. They applied Scripture. Paul told Philemon to receive Onesimus as a beloved brother, which detonates the institution from the inside, and the doctrine of every human being made in God’s image was already there in Genesis 1. The reformers of the eighteenth century were not going past the Bible. They were finally reading it.

The trajectory method has a fatal weakness in any case. Once you are extending a line beyond the text, only you can say where the line points, and different people will draw it in opposite directions. There is no way, inside the method, to distinguish a legitimate development from a fashionable one.

Where progressivism leads

History is not kind to this experiment. The mainline denominations that adopted theological progressivism most enthusiastically a century ago are not now overflowing. The pattern is remarkably consistent across countries and traditions. A movement that promised to make the faith credible to the modern world ended by producing churches with nothing distinctive to say to it.

That is not primarily an argument from statistics, and I am wary of measuring faithfulness by attendance. It is an argument about content. A church whose message is broadly what a thoughtful, kind, secular person already believes has no reason to exist, and eventually its members work that out.

The deeper cost is pastoral. When somebody is dying, or grieving, or facing the ruin of their own sin, they need a word from outside. Theological progressivism has taken away the only mechanism by which such a word could arrive.

Telling progressivism from genuine reform

It would be lazy to treat every proposed change as theological progressivism. The church has often been wrong and has often needed correcting, and the instrument of correction has always been Scripture read more carefully. The test is not whether a position is new to me, but whether it is being established from the text or in spite of it.

So ask three things of any proposal. Does it treat the Bible as authoritative or as advisory? Does it explain the passages that cut against it, or explain them away? And does it end up making the cross more central or less? Those questions cut through a great deal of fog. I have applied the same tests in how Scripture addresses the deconstruction movement.

The study notes on Philemon are worth reading on the slavery question in particular, since that letter is where so much of this argument is decided.

Loving people caught up in it

Most people I meet who hold progressive positions did not arrive there by studying liberal theology. They arrived because they loved somebody and could not square that love with what they had been taught, or because they were disgusted by hypocrisy they had seen. The doctrine came afterwards, as scaffolding for a decision already made in the heart.

That means the conversation has to reach the heart as well as the head. Show them a Christianity that is both immovable on the text and unmistakably kind, because most of them have never seen the two together, and the assumption that you must choose is what got them here.

The vocabulary problem

One of the reasons theological progressivism spreads so quietly is that it keeps the old words. A congregation can sit through a whole sermon series on the resurrection without once being told that the preacher means something psychological by it. Nobody lies. The words are all present and correct, and the members go home assuming that what they have always believed has just been confirmed.

This is why I press people to ask plain questions of their leaders, and to ask them without hostility. Did the tomb contain a body on Friday and not on Sunday? Did Jesus bear the punishment my sins deserved? Will there be a day of judgement with real consequences? Those are not gotcha questions. They are the questions any Christian is entitled to have answered clearly, and a faithful minister will be glad to answer them.

Where the answer comes back as a paragraph of atmosphere rather than a yes or a no, you have learned something. Vagueness at that level is not humility about a difficult text. It is a position being held quietly because it could not be held openly.

Why progressivism feels so compelling

None of this explains why intelligent, devout people find theological progressivism persuasive, and if we cannot explain that we shall keep losing the argument. Part of it is genuine embarrassment. There are passages in Scripture that are hard to preach in a modern room, and the offer of a method that dissolves the difficulty is enormously attractive to a tired minister on a Saturday night.

Part of it is love. Somebody in the congregation is in a situation that the Bible addresses uncomfortably, and the pastor who has watched them weep would give almost anything for the text to say something else. I do not despise that impulse. It is closer to the heart of God than the cold orthodoxy that feels nothing at all. It is simply not a warrant to change the message.

And part of it is fear of irrelevance. We watch the churches empty and conclude that the message must be the obstacle. Yet the churches that emptied fastest were precisely the ones that changed the message first, which ought to make us pause before reaching for that particular remedy.

So, now what?

If you are in a church where theological progressivism is taking hold, do not begin with a fight. Begin by asking questions in good faith and listening to the answers, because you may find the drift is further along, or less far along, than you feared. Then be clear with yourself about what you cannot give up: the authority of Scripture, the deity of Jesus, His bodily resurrection, and a cross that actually accomplished salvation.

And examine your own habits. The person most at risk from theological progressivism is not the one who has read its books but the one who has stopped reading the Bible for himself and is living on what he absorbed years ago. When did you last change your mind about something because of a text rather than because of a mood?

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

2 Timothy 3:16, ESV