Hi this is Jonathan Thresher - we played League together once upon a time. I came across your posts on leaving Christianity. The timing is peculiar, I'm currently reading Starship Troopers, and in it there is a teacher who fought in a war, and he said to his students that nothing has solved more problems and disputes than the use of violence, and then I read how you love compromise and peaceful resolution.
Funny timing.
As a 'conservative evangelical' I see 'progressives' as heretics who have fallen into a heresy similar to that of Marcion, who taught that there are two old gods in the Bible, the mean old testament god and the loving new testament god. So called progressives hate Yahweh the Man of War who destroys his enemies and loves Jesus meek and mild. They don't want God destroying anyone, unless its 'the far right'. I've spent some time studying the 'progressives', they absolutely hate Noah's flood, the destruction of Jericho, the destruction of Sodom and other so called 'genocides', just like Marcion!
Regards 'progressives' and 'evangelicals' being so similar, that is how the heretic operates. He doesn't reject all orthodoxy, he just takes one or two points and twists them. Nobody denies God loves mankind. Nobody denies God loves sinners and really does want to save everyone (except in Calvinism...) Nobody denies God is long suffering. But they deny all those icky alpha male traits of God, his aggressiveness, his willingness to use brutal force, his total hatred of sin. So they accept a lot of the Christian religion, but reject a few parts of it, and so have gone wayward.
I do think that your picture of progressive Christianity would not pass the ITT. It's a very "external" view, where you see them as essentially kowtowing to society and then trying to fit Christianity into that. I think that doesn't fit, and suggests that progressive Christians are likely to just blindly follow their society's norms, which I don't think is true - I think they have some moral fiber!
So I think your list of fundamental disagreements is wrong. Those _are_ disagreements, but they're derived. For me, some fundamental disagreements are:
- Is the Bible mostly directly true, or is it a fallible document produced by humans that imperfectly conveys the Gospel?
- Does the New Testament completely invalidate the Old Testament?
Then I think the progressive reasoning goes:
- There are many contradictions and tensions in the Bible, e.g. between the NT portrayal of God as loving and accepting, and the condemnation of homosexuality.
- Given that the Bible was written by fallible humans in their social context, it seems plausible that the parts about homosexuality are human additions and not the Word of God.
- So we can disregard them.
Of course this gives a huge amount of license for interpretation, and leads to lots of disagreement. But there is a principled approach there: identify the "core message" (e.g. "Love your neighbour as yourself: this is the whole of the law"), and then reason from that, judiciously discarding parts of the Bible that contradict it.
Hi this is Jonathan Thresher - we played League together once upon a time. I came across your posts on leaving Christianity. The timing is peculiar, I'm currently reading Starship Troopers, and in it there is a teacher who fought in a war, and he said to his students that nothing has solved more problems and disputes than the use of violence, and then I read how you love compromise and peaceful resolution.
Funny timing.
As a 'conservative evangelical' I see 'progressives' as heretics who have fallen into a heresy similar to that of Marcion, who taught that there are two old gods in the Bible, the mean old testament god and the loving new testament god. So called progressives hate Yahweh the Man of War who destroys his enemies and loves Jesus meek and mild. They don't want God destroying anyone, unless its 'the far right'. I've spent some time studying the 'progressives', they absolutely hate Noah's flood, the destruction of Jericho, the destruction of Sodom and other so called 'genocides', just like Marcion!
Regards 'progressives' and 'evangelicals' being so similar, that is how the heretic operates. He doesn't reject all orthodoxy, he just takes one or two points and twists them. Nobody denies God loves mankind. Nobody denies God loves sinners and really does want to save everyone (except in Calvinism...) Nobody denies God is long suffering. But they deny all those icky alpha male traits of God, his aggressiveness, his willingness to use brutal force, his total hatred of sin. So they accept a lot of the Christian religion, but reject a few parts of it, and so have gone wayward.
Just my thoughts, hope you are doing ok!
Great post, I agree with a lot of it.
I do think that your picture of progressive Christianity would not pass the ITT. It's a very "external" view, where you see them as essentially kowtowing to society and then trying to fit Christianity into that. I think that doesn't fit, and suggests that progressive Christians are likely to just blindly follow their society's norms, which I don't think is true - I think they have some moral fiber!
So I think your list of fundamental disagreements is wrong. Those _are_ disagreements, but they're derived. For me, some fundamental disagreements are:
- Is the Bible mostly directly true, or is it a fallible document produced by humans that imperfectly conveys the Gospel?
- Does the New Testament completely invalidate the Old Testament?
Then I think the progressive reasoning goes:
- There are many contradictions and tensions in the Bible, e.g. between the NT portrayal of God as loving and accepting, and the condemnation of homosexuality.
- Given that the Bible was written by fallible humans in their social context, it seems plausible that the parts about homosexuality are human additions and not the Word of God.
- So we can disregard them.
Of course this gives a huge amount of license for interpretation, and leads to lots of disagreement. But there is a principled approach there: identify the "core message" (e.g. "Love your neighbour as yourself: this is the whole of the law"), and then reason from that, judiciously discarding parts of the Bible that contradict it.
Yeah I think you're right. Might make some edits to this.
This was great - looking forward to reading more of longform pieces!
Thanks, that genuinely means a lot