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Choice that Matters - letter from Revd Steve Everist

The future direction of our church is being shaped by a broad conversation that drifts inevitably between two competing options (competing because they are at heart antithetical and cannot be embraced in a workable plurality). For the sake of clarity and brevity I will define one as Biblical Christianity, a belief system which has at its heart the authority of scripture (There is much more than this to be said but for the purpose of analysis this is sufficient) and Progressive Christianity (a hopeful relabelling of liberal Christianity), a belief system which has at its centre the spiritual self.

What I hope to show in this brief excursion into these important murky waters is that while I feel the pull and attractiveness of the progressive world view it is demonstrably the wrong choice.

The attractiveness of Progressive Christianity is that it is comfortably congruent with the dominant secular individualistic culture. The difficulty with Biblical Christianity is that it is essentially at odds with the dominant culture.

The attractiveness of Progressive Christianity is that it seeks to be therapeutically self –affirming and promises a degree of safety and comfort in community which by any standard is a very good thing to desire. The difficulty of biblical Christianity is that it uncomfortably challenges the self. However, the greater historical difficulty is that the authority claimed by scripture has too often been coopted by systems and individuals as a justification for unhealthy pathological behaviours. This has manifested from time to time in the abuse of power and control within church communities using biblical authority as a tyrannical system of justification.

In the face of such things it is understandable why people would seek to remove biblical authority from the equation for something safer and warmer. However the analysis is wrong and hence the solution is also wrong. Biblical Christianity does not become abusive because the authoritative centre of bible can be demonstrated to cause abusive behaviour. It becomes abusive when that centre is coopted by unhealthy psycho-social pathologies.

For a church struggling with these issues the best outcome is not to replace biblical authority with something else but a more radical application of biblical authority which clearly has established within its own corpus the necessary requirements for healthy exercise of authority and the development of loving relationships with grace that has justice at its heart. This solution has the advantage of dealing with unhealthy pathologies while maintaining the integrity of scripture, an essential historically verifiable element in the life of churches that are vibrant and growing. (See NCLS et al) 

For those who claim to choose Progressive Christianity because perceived textual difficulties have robbed the individual of the texts sense of authority it is generally true that too little attention has been payed to the contextual and methodological processes which have led to that perception. This is to say that the culture in which we live and the secular rationalisms by which we ask the questions will inevitably and naturally nudge people towards an outcome that transposes bible and self as the centre of belief.

All philosophers worth their salt understand that anything can be doubted given the right conditions, our question is should biblical authority be doubted in the light of a systematic understanding of the relationship between text, faith and community. This concerns the question of outcomes if we choose Progressive Christianity as our modus operandi.  My answer is an emphatic no! I believe this negatively because a belief system which has at its heart the multiple possibilities of multiple self’s, will inevitably loose coherence.  I believe this positively because the cause of Christ, our personal and corporate relationship with God and the integrity of Christian faith are demonstrably reliant on the centrality of scripture being the authoritative light by which we steer.

In conclusion, while I acknowledge the attractive pull of Progressive Christianity and love to bits many Christians who lay claim to that epitaph, it is clear to me that Progressive Christianity as a movement can have no other outcome than to render the church impotent to the cause of Christ and is in fact doing so through out the western world. This can be seen as one examines the contrasting causal relationship between belief and outcome as they operate within these two competing faith-views in western protestant Christianity.

Steve Everist, Pittwater, NSW