Progressive Christian theology

I have seen the value of His teachings in life. I experienced a NDE years ago and many spiritual experiences since. This led me to understand unconditional love in a new way. His teachings will lead to a successful, happy life that won't be understood until you follow them.

 

I might address the comment about a danger signal being :"Who cares what Paul said? I follow Jesus." Those express my sentiments exactly. Paul can be credited with putting Christianity on the map by tailoring it to the needs of a Gentile community attracted to Judaism but turned off by all the mitzvahs. If it hadn't been for Paul, Christianity might have reamained a marginal sect of Jews, rejected by the mainstream. However, Jesus is Lord, not Paul. Even Paul recognized that. I tend to agree with the Gnostics that Jesus came to enlighten us instead of die for our sins, although I reject the elaborate web of esoteric Gnostic doctrine which you can encounter on the New Age site.

 

The next problem Olsen addresses is revealing: elevation of inclusiveness to a virtue bar none--except for those who discriminate. So Olsen thinks being too inclusive is a bad thing, but gets a dig in against Progressive Christians for rejecting those who discriminate. Much like the folks who complain about discriminating against not tolerating the intolerant. I think that's bogus. Jesus hung out with the dregs of society--publicans, prostitutes, sinners of all stripes--and the Pharisees were aghast. Seems to me, certain "Christians" today who are quite vocal are essentially Latter Day Pharisees, making exactly the same kinds of comments and criticisms. I'm not necessarily saying that Evangelical Baptists are Pharisees, or that some of them aren't good people. I love them as brothers and sisters in Christ and pray for their salvation. Bart Ehrman tells us that one of the reasons Christianity was as successful as it was was that it was exclusionary. The pagan mystery religions would let in anybody and his dog, and a person could belong to as many of them as time permitted. Not so Christianity. It was One Way, theirs or the Highway. But now that it's established and successful, I think it might be time to open the doors to some diversity of opinion, and I think the best way to love bigots is to show them the error of their ways.

 

Next. Olsen complains that Progressives have abandoned the "language of Zion"--sin, repentence, salvation,return of Christ, and Judgment of God. Yes, there is some truth to that. It isn't only the Progressives. Nobody likes to be reminded that life is real and earnest and there are consequences--sometimes quite horrible ones--for attempting to flout the basic principles of natural law, morality and justice: revolutions, drought, famine, pestilence, warfare, forest fires, environmental degradation, murder hornets--the things we are seeing now before our eyes as a result of human denial. Must we dress them up as skeletons in armor or multi-headed beasts to take them seriously? We have a political party in this country preaching "alternative facts", giving blind allegiance to a demagogue with his upside down Bible, whom they compare with the Biblical David and erect golden statues in his image. Surely if they would hold their Bibles upright and read them they would realize what is in store if they persist. Check out Ezekiel 5:10. The Bible isn't to be read literally, but sometimes close enough.

Religious right types often refer to gays as "Sodomites". But Ezekiel 16:49 tells us “’Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy." Who again are the Sodomites?

The hour is late! Repent! How's that for using the language of Zion?

 

As John Pavlovitz said, bigots are certainly welcome at our table, but they must behave themselves, and not attack the other guests. We're not going to sacrifice their scapegoat du jour for the pleasure of their company.

Shabbat Dinner Helped Turn Around This Ex-White Supremacist

 

Now we come to hell. Olsen tells us that Progressives are into "universalism--a complete abandonment of any mention of hell."(Actually, universalism is simply a belief in universal reconciliation--the notion that all human beings will ultimately be saved and restored to a right relationship with God. Olsen may have caught wind of my posts where I define hell as a bad attitude I think of hell as an ideal-typical metaphorical condition in which the determined sinner has so walled himself/herself off from any possible sense of personal responsibility and opportunity for God in his/her life that there's nothing that can be done for him/her. Dante illustrates this vividly in Inferno, where even Satan himself is trapped--in a block of ice, in the middle of an Inferno. The ice is generated by the flapping of his giant wings in a desperate attempt to escape God. But there is no escape. As the old hymn goes: "So high you can't get over it, so low you can't get under it, so wide your can't get around it, you must come in through the door."

The idea of hell was alien to pre-exilic Judaism, and the Sadducees who controlled the Temple priesthood never accepted it. They spoke instead of Sheol, which was a kind of warehouse for the shades of the dead regardless of their goodness or badness in life. Hell seems to have originally been a Zoroastrian concept, brought in when during the two centuries after the exile when Judea was part of a Persian satrapy. Two sects, in particular, accepted it: the Pharisees and the Essenes, who I think may have made up a part of the early Christian community. Mark talks about the place "where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched." But it is Matthew who provides the most vivid descriptions of the "furnace of fire" ( in Jesus' parable of the weeds) where there is "weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Mat. 13: 42). He also has Jesus say that anyone who calls his brother a fool will be subject to the fires of Gehenna.(5:22) The Jesus Seminarians put the statement about calling one's brother a fool into the gray area, but are convinced that Jesus said nothing about the "furnace of fire".

The idea of hell where bad people are tortured for all eternity is distinctively Christian. Their concept of the place outdid the Zoroastrians from whom they probably got it and outdid the Muslims who got it from them. There is disagreement about whether or not jahannam, the Muslim hell, is eternal. Eternal hell is the most horrific threat one can imagine, and may help to account for why Christianity is so widespread. A study by Shariff & Rhemtulla,(2012)presented evidence that crime rates are lower in countries where belief in hell is as firm as belief in heaven, because the fear of punishment is more powerful than the promise of reward https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0039048--but their methodolgy has been questioned. They cite the earlier study (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2011) which found that students who believed in a forgiving God were more likely to to cheat than those who didn't. But the respondents who didn't believe in God at all were no more likely to cheat than believers. And whaddabout Scandanavia (compared to the more religious U.S.?

Fundamentalist Christians say universalism ignores God's justice. However, it's arguable that Justice entails proportionality, and eternal torment way outweighs anything the wrongdoer could have done in a human lifetime.

 

If your behavior is based upon an expectation of some heavenly quid pro quo, that's not Christianity, that's a business transaction.

 

Yes you can learn about unconditional love without ever hearing of Jesus and have a successful, happy life. Others have taught it. Others have lived it. It is something you carry within you waiting to be discovered.

 

Not exactly. Progressive Christians view the Bible as an anthology of readings, many intended as metaphors. To treat a metaphor literally is ridiculous. What we need to do is to try to figure out what the text is saying and why, and then decide if we agree. As Borg says, "the Bible should be taken seriously but not literally." Any preconceived message is the one the gospel writers tell us was Jesus' message (Matthew 22: 36-40. I think the message is self-evident, and provides the hemeneutic by which the rest is judged. Seems rational enough to me. Or should we take the anthology as though it were a single work composed by a single author, despite the obvious contradictions? And are we to assume the author is God, who tied it up with a red ribbon and slipped it over Moses' transom?

 

I don't think Christ per se is, but I think the overall message is, whether it comes from Christ or Krishna.

Probably. We take our truths in whatever medium is available, in whatever place and era we happen to live. I have a fellowship group of atheists and agnostics who seem about as happy and loving as the Christians in my Sunday school. They seem to me to be on the same wavelength. As Justin Martyr put it: "those who live according to reason are Christians, even though they are accounted atheists."

 

I assume you're referring to the "preconceived message". The primary reason I'm a Christian is that I agree with the message and philosophy attributed to Jesus. Matthew tells us that Jesus considered the most important commandments to be love of God and Love of neighbor. (Mat 22: 36-40). This is consistent with the basic description of Jesus' life and teachings presented in the gospels. You cherry picked some statements that seem inconsistent with the message. What to do? I do what the scholars of the Jesus seminar did. Take another look and see if there's a way of resolving the contradiction, and if not, go with my best judgment base on what I consider to be he basic hermeneutic--i.e., what the main point is. Do you find that so mystifying?

 

It depends on who you talk to. Let's take Borg, for example, and me. Both of us came to Christianity as a result of conversion experiences. Borg says he believes that God exists just as he believes elephants exist. I wouldn't go that far, but the divine as I experience it is the felt presence of a Higher Power "in whom we live and move and have our being". This is not the same as the Dude in the Sky with the lightning bolts who knows when we are sleeping and knows when we're awake." I think of God as whatever is responsible for the laws of science and morality--the ground of being, ultimate meaning, the sum of human idealism and then some. Probably, most progressive Christians think of God the same way. Does this make them atheists? Probably most fundamentalist evangelicals would say yes or worse. The Romans said the same about all Christians. Borg is a Panentheist, who believes God is both an imminent and a transcendent being. I'd categorize myself as a panendeist, but pretty much the same thing. I believe that God is present in everything including my every thought and breath--closer to us, as the Qur'an says (50:16) than our jugular--i.e., closer to us than we are to ourselves. As the song goes (paraphrasing here): "I see (His) face in every flower His eyes in stars above. It's just the thought of (Him). The very thought of Him. My love." If I could say it without blasphemy, when someone is having intimate relations with a significant other, it seems rude to stop and ask whether or not that person exists. It breaks the mood. But if you must ask, God is somebody that I bet on, on the basis of my experience and intuition--to the extent that it's not contrary to reason and science.

In the earliest Christian community of Jerusalem, probably most Christians didn't believe Jesus was born divine. It would be difficult for a Jew to think such a thing without committing blasphemy, and possibly His brother James would have trouble having seen how Jesus kept his room They thought He became God's son by adoption, when he was baptized by John and the voice from the cloud said "This is my Son in whom I am well pleased." Others said it was at His Resurrection. The notion that it happened at birth comes later, in the eighties, with the Matthew and Luke gospels. And the idea that it was so from the beginning of time comes even later, with John's gospel. The Trinity was worked out by Tertulian and Athanasius and "settled" at the showdown at Nicaea.in the Fourth Century, Constantine presiding. And does that make it so? Not to my way of thinking. It was the product of Church politics, along with the virgin birth and the other unbelievable things Christians are supposed to believe--although traditional Christians would say the decision was guided by the Holy Spirit..
Jesus is Lord, in my opinion, and the source of what I regard as the meaning of my life. Good enough for me.

 

I think Jesus was a man, in no sense a supernatural being or god, who was the source of the basic truths on which I base my life. But as Albert Schweitzer put it, "the trouble with the historical Jesus is that He was too historical"--i.e., caught up in the apocalyptic eschatology of an era that has long since passed. "Son of God" was an honorific title given to King David and Israel's kings at their coronation. But when you add the word "begotten" I don't believe He was "begotten" by God. Begotten by Joseph, maybe. I think it's unfortunate that such superstitions have become embedded in our religion. I can't prove to you that it didn't happen, but I go by Hume's approach: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I recently read a book by Fr Raymond Brown The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus. He does a pretty good job of presenting and analyzing the evidence. Understandably, he comes to inconclusive conclusions on both points.