Listen to anyone talking about progressive Christianity, and it won’t take more than three minutes to hear them specialize in compassion. The so-called “new evangelicals” preach how they care for people who have been “marginalized and disenfranchised by the American evangelical church,” progressive Christian apologist Randal Rauser says good deeds – kindness actions – take priority over good beliefs.
ProgressiveChristianity.org says“We oppose any exclusionary dogma that limits the search for truth” and “We promote an understanding of Christian practice and teaching that leads to greater concern for how people treat one another than for the way they express their beliefs. , acceptance of all and respect for other religious traditions.
There’s a lot missing in there, and what’s strange is how much it reminds me of the new atheists who emerged after 9/11. Atheists presented themselves by preaching “reason” as their identity – reason as opposed to the superstitions of faith, of course. Atheist author Sam Harris co-directed “Project Reason.” A huge atheist gathering in 2012 was called the “Reason Rally.” All of their organizations cited “reason” as a core value. Peel off the veneer, as my co-authors and I did in The real reason: confronting the irrationality of the new atheism, and you discover how bad they were at practicing reasoning.
Fall one way, fall the other
The “compassion” of progressive Christianity is almost exactly opposite, but eerily similar. The new atheists were all for the cold hard truth, and if that meant dehumanize every person on the planetwell, tough. Progressive Christianity goes the other way: it’s all about caring for people and never letting questions of truth get in the way.
So they complement each other perfectly: you can choose the truth that causes humanity to fall on one side of a high bridge, or the heart that causes truth to fall on the other side. There is only one route that will keep you on the highway. The path of Jesus Christ. The real Jesus, of course. Not the progressive “Jesus”.
Jesus came full of grace and truth (John 1:14 and 17). You will see it in everything he taught, everything he did. It wasn’t about being half grace and half truth. His truth was entirely gracious, his grace was entirely engaged in the truth, each side filling the other and setting its limits equally. Progressives say they follow him too, but who is their “Jesus”? Nobody you’ve ever seen in the Bible.
Grace without truth in action
Kevin Young is a great example, a progressive pastor that we have met before in these pages. Someone on Xwitter (X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it) asked him, “Can you define grace?” He I tweeted this for his response:
To sit at the table with these condemned people of Christianity… and do nothing but enjoy good food, good drinks, good laughs and tell good stories.
No hate.
No evangelism.
No loving truth.
No conviction.
No agenda.Just radical hospitality.
That’s great salesmanship, and that’s what I’m saying: to love is to never worry about a conflict of opinions. And yet, it seems that love also means stuffing your beliefs so that you don’t have to impose on someone else what you are and what you think. How is it grace, I wonder, to get along while hiding our differences?
What is this Grace?
I also had to wonder how he adapted this to Jesus as we know him from the gospels. SO I asked him,
Did Jesus ever have dinner with sinners where sin and repentance were not part of the context or conversation? When he brought it up, as was the case almost every time, was it because he wasn’t as nice as you?
He answered, ““Almost Every Time” does a lot of heavy lifting here. » I would call that dodging the question.
Maybe he thought he knew what he was talking about. I don’t know. So I invited him to show me his list of exceptions, and so far he has ignored it. I can’t help but wonder if he did some research and figured the safest course would be to pretend he wasn’t listening. Because, clearly, Dr. Young’s example of “grace” is nothing like Jesus’.
The grace and truth of Jesus
The gospels speak of four times Jesus ate meals in homes. At each of them, he reprimanded this or that religious leader. This is what progressives like to emphasize. They are right about that, no one would disagree with that, and every leader needs to listen carefully to what Jesus is saying here.
However, don’t listen to what progressives tell you to do. They only teach half of Jesus. The rest they throw off the bridge. The truth is that Jesus had words of faith and repentance for everyone at these meals:
- He dinner at home of the newly repentant tax collector Levi, also called Matthew, meaning repentance is in the air to begin with. And when He calls certain people “sinners,” He is not talking about the Pharisees.
- HAS another meal a woman bursts in to show her grateful love for Jesus, and he says his sins were “many.” I cannot imagine Dr. Young allowing such language under his “radical hospitality.” Certainly, Jesus does not preach repentance or faith to him, but why would he? She was already there.
- At the outcast tax collector Zacchaeus’ house (Luke 19:1-10) the whole message is about repentance and forgiveness, and nothing but repentance and forgiveness.
- With the pair at Emmaushe taught the Word – not without calling them “stupid and slow to believe”.
And that’s all for the meals that Jesus ate in the houses. Does this sound like Dr. Young’s “grace” to you? Even outside of homes, it is difficult to find a meal he has eaten without calling people to repent and follow him. There is no recorded preaching at the meal of the 5,000, but the next day He used it as a difficult object lesson with many of the same people.
More merciful than Jesus, more pious than God?
This is the example of Jesus. You might think our progressive pastor, Dr. Young, would consider it a good thing. But you might be wrong about that. he is I’m not sure even God is good enough:
No good theology says that MORE MERCY is a bad thing.
Does God care if we try to surpass Him? Is God so insecure??
If progressive theology strives for radical levels of mercy, then it is in good company with Micah 6:8 and the Beatitudes.
The Progressive Party’s “compassion” looks nice as a veneer, but the reality behind it is pure idolatry, the blasphemous evil of trying to outdo God, God himself.
Let’s rephrase that: Does God care if we try to surpass Him as God? Don’t get distracted by his meaningless and misdirected emotional word “insecurity.” The reason God doesn’t want us to try to surpass Him as God is because it’s a damn lie, and yes, God still cares about the truth, even if progressives don’t like Him for it. And it’s also because He knows how horribly evil we become when we try to be God.
How little they understand
Either way, he didn’t ask the right question. It is not a question of whether more mercy is a bad thing, but whether less truth is, and whether true mercy can even exist if separated from the truth. There is no mercy in looking the other way, pretending everything is okay while people jump to eternal death.
It’s not a pity to rewrite John 1:14 and 17 to remake Jesus into a half “Jesus”, indifferent to the truth, “full of grace, grace, more grace, and don’t you dare mention sin and repentance!”
The Progressive Party’s “compassion” looks nice as a veneer, but the reality behind it is pure idolatry, the blasphemous evil of trying to outdo God, God himself.
I’m not saying that we evangelicals always get grace and truth. What I’m saying is that when a so-called Christian jumps off the bridge to the side of grace without truth, he falls off the bridge. When they push people away, they fall too. There is no soft landing there, unless Jesus saves them by His own true grace.
True compassion doesn’t push people off bridges.
Tom Gilson (@TomGilsonAuthor) is editor-in-chief at The flow and author or editor of six books, including the highly acclaimed Too Good to Be Fake: How Jesus’ Incomparable Character Reveals His Reality.
