“The Ten Commandments of Progressive Christianity” by Michael Kruger

Seminary president, professor, and theologian Michael Kruger doesn’t mince words when it comes to explaining the belief system of what traditional or conservative Christians call progressive Christianity. In the short work The Ten Commandments of Progressive Christianity, Kruger outlines what he sees as how faith can come to terms with a secular culture, essentially by compromising the very heart of what faith is about.

The fact is, he can’t mince words, because the stakes are so high. Protestantism and Catholicism are in freefall in the United States. Protestant mainline denominations have been embracing what they see as a more humane, loving, and giving understanding of Christianity for more than a century now, and their numbers continue to drop with no end on sight. The same is true for the Church of England and the Anglican Church of Canada. Even more conservative Protestant denominations, like the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod and the Southern Baptists, have been affected to a lesser degree. Evangelical churches seem to be holding their own.

Kruger identifies 10 characteristics of progressive Christianity – Jesus as role model rather than God to be worshipped; a de-emphasis on people’s brokenness and sin; an emphasis on reconciliation; gracious behavior being more important than right belief; questions being more important than answers; encouraging personal search over group uniformity; needs always being more important than institutions; a desire for peacemaking; caring more about love and less about sex; and the importance of life in this world rather than hope for the afterlife. 

Michael Kruger

He sees a half-truth in each of the ten, but it is that half-truth that tends to become the whole truth as taught and practiced. He stakes a strong claim early in the introduction. Quoting theologian and scholar J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) in his classic Christianity and Liberalism, Kruger says “simply put, liberal Christianity is not Christianity.” He goes on to say that Christians “must be able to distinguish the true faith from those things that masquerade as the true faith.”

As noted above, he doesn’t mince words. And while he’s focused here on progressive Christianity, there’s equal danger coming from the other side – like the proponents of the prosperity gospel.

Kruger is the President and the Samuel C. Patterson Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, N.C. and ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America. He has written or co-written numerous works, including The Early Text of the New Testament, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate, A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament: The Gospel Realized, Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church, The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity, and Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books. He blogs at Canon Fodder.

The Ten Commandments of Progressive Christianity is a short but vital work and a good summary of some of the issues tearing the church apart. 

The U.S.= Uganda? What?

In Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption, we’ve reached the chapter where Katie Davis is coming to understand that the United Stated States and Uganda represents two points on the continuum of her life, that as wildly different as the two countries, societies and cultures are, they exist on the same planet, and here may be “connectedness” than she has realized.

Oddly enough, I found this chapter the most encouraging so far in the book. Something is changing, and the something is primarily within Katie. The slightly condescending tone which had accompanied much of her attitude towards her home country (and, by extension, her family and friends) is disappearing. A maturing process is underway, and Katie is coming to understand her place, and her calling, within both societies.

We are all witnesses, and we are all missionaries, whether it’s an Ugandan village or a Fortune 500 company. The spiritual needs are the same. One is not a “holier” calling than the other; one is not “more sacred.” It is all God’s work, and wherever we are working, that’s our mission field.

This is the underlying idea for The High Calling, where I’m a contributing editor and part of the social media tweet (I’d like to have a bumper sticker that reads “I tweet for THC”). The “high calling” of the name is the high calling of our daily work, wherever and whatever that work is, because all work is a high calling. If we’re working in a hospital, a company, a government office, as an independent contractor or in a missionary outpost, God sees all of us as engaged in a high calling.

In other words, we don’t park our faith at the office door. It doesn’t mean we actively evangelize and pass our tracts; it does mean that we live our work so that people see Christ in us.

It’s no secret that many, perhaps most Christians see pastors and missionaries as doing work that is “higher” than what the rest of us do. Both of those callings requires sacrifices, and likely greater sacrifices than what most of us are familiar with. But that doesn’t mean they’re “higher.”

This separation into sacred and secular is actually a product of modernism – the same impulse and thought that became “separation of church and state” (which a lot of people really define as “elimination of any possible influence of the church in society.” The difference for us is that this belief in sacred and secular separates our very selves. We have a sacred self (the Christian, church-going, mission-minded part) and we have a secular self (work, school, culture, and anything “non-church”). It’s a false dichotomy, more akin to Greek philosophy and some of the famous heresies that stalked and almost destroyed the early church.

Katie is learning an important lesson: we are to do what we are called by God to do wherever he plants us. And if He plants you in an Ugandan village, it may mean that economic and basic health needs are greater than the society you left behind, but the spiritual needs are the same.

Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter have been leading us in a discussion of Kisses from Katie. To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact.

Belonging to an age

It comes from a Latin word that means “of a generation” or “belonging to an age.” And if there ever were a word that belonged to our age, it is the word “secular.”

It is a word about which we could fill volumes; one blog post will be insufficient to do much beyond raising a few questions.

For more than two centuries, secularism – however it’s defined, and it’s defined in numerous ways – has been in the ascendant, at least in the Western cultures of Europe and its descendants -- North America and Australia, for example. Some define it as a belief that government decisions should not be made on the basis of religious considerations; some as a theory of modernization; some as the rationale for no state church; some as a reasoning for the so-called separation of church and state; and others some combination of the above.

Despite all of our concerns about “secular humanism” being as much a religion as anything that comes out of a church, synagogue or mosque,” the fact is that it is not a religion, and trying to argue with “secular humanists” that it is indeed a religion is a lost cause. But secularism is most certainly a worldview, a particular way of looking at the world, an insistence that religion be confined to its proper sphere, which does not include government in all its forms.

The twentieth century, fertilized by its predecessors, gave birth to two of the most extreme, vicious and murderous forms of secularism ever experienced: Nazism and communism. (One could argue, I suppose, that both were actually religions in that the leaders were treated – almost worshipped – as gods, but Hitler, Lenin and Stalin never claimed to be gods.) The Spanish Inquisition couldn’t hold a candle to the sheer scale of barbarity dreamed up by those three figures. And before we start pointing out the obvious about the Crusades, let us also point out that before the Crusades there were the jihads that conquered the Christian Roman Empire in Africa, the East and Spain. The Crusades were about “winning back” what had been lost.

Europe by far is the most secular of societies and regions, but Europe and its ruling elites are encountering something that no amount of understanding and accommodation seems able to calm, and that is the growing presence of Islam, and specifically radical Islam. Others more knowledgeable than I am, including many secular thinkers like Bruce Bawer, see secularism, and secular governments, as ultimately incapable of dealing with radical Islam.

Secularism is a product of modernism, and modernism loves to specialize and compartmentalize. Modernism has had an enormous influence on the church, which for a very long time abandoned the work place and the public square of ideas as “secular” things that weren’t as important as “church” things. We bought that argument, and forgot that our faith applies to all things. This doesn’t mean that we have to run “Christian” candidates for public office or evangelize with tracts among the cubicles, but it does mean that we are called to live out our faith seven days a week.

I am a Christian living in the United States, ostensibly a secular nation shot through with Christian history and sensibilities, even if it tries to deny it. I practice my faith in perfect freedom. No one tells me to go to church on Sunday; no one prevents me from going to church on Sunday.

I had both of my children educated in Catholic and Christian schools, not because I was concerned about “godless secular humanism” in public schools but because three years of public schools for my oldest – grades four through six – proved that our local district schools were about things other than education – self-esteem being the leading goal at the time. Having a great sense of self-esteem wasn’t going to be worth much if my children couldn’t spell or write a simple declarative sentence.

And it is there, I think, that I’ve had my closest brush with secularism. I saw it, I saw its effects, and I realized that as a worldview it is ultimately both destructive and self-destructive.

It’s a One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock, and the word is “secular.” To see more posts, please visit Peter at Rediscovering the Church.