04/05/2004: "Progressive Christianity: Oxymoron"

St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Houston has an interesting article on its Web site entitled "What we mean by Progressive Christianity." Here's what they mean:

By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who:

�Proclaim Jesus Christ as our Gate to the realm of God

�Recognize the faithfulness of other people who have other names for the gateway to God's realm

Translation: Progressive Christianity is pluralist, rejecting Scripture's teaching that the God of Israel alone is God of all the earth.

�Invite all sorts and conditions of people to join in our worship and in our common life as full partners, including (but not limited to):

�believers and agnostics
�conventional Christians and questioning skeptics
�homosexuals and heterosexuals
�females and males
�the despairing and the hopeful
�those of all classes and abilities
�those of all races and cultures

Without imposing on them the necessity of becoming like us

Translation: Progressive Christianity does not require that anyone have any sort of relationship with Jesus Christ, or paid any heed to God's call to holy living, since that would require that people be formed in the image of Christ, which would be impolite.

�Think that the way we treat one another and other people is more important than the way we express our beliefs

Translation: Progressive Christianity is of the opinion that beliefs do not influence actions, since people are essentially no different from lab rats responding to external stimuli.

�Find more grace in the search for meaning than in absolute certainty, in the questions than in the answers

Translation: Progressive Christianity does not believe that God has provided any answers to life's questions, so we have to make them up as we go along.

�See ourselves as a spiritual community in which we discover the resources required for our work in the world:

�striving for justice and peace among all people
�bringing hope to those Jesus called the least of his sisters and brothers

Translation: Progressive Christianity is defined primarily by politics of the left-wing sort.

Recognize that our faith entails costly discipleship, renunciation of privilege, and conscientious resistance to evil as has always been the tradition of the Church

Translation: Progressive Christianity is antinomian, does not place any ethical requirements on anyone, is largely a phenomena of the upper middle-class, and resists "evil" (defined in terms of conservative politics) through symbolic gestures that makes us feel good about ourselves.

Many thanks to St. Stephen's for helping us understand Progressive Christianity. For more about this irrelevant non-movement, see the Center for Progressive Christianity, headquartered in Unitarian Central (Cambridge, MA).