Quotes & Sayings About Progressive Christianity

The "moderate", "progressive", "liberal Christians", "concerned with social justice and the protection of the environment", who see the Gospel simply as a 'Handbook' for 'Moral Guidance', and the divinity of Christ as a cause of embarrassment, an unnecessary occasion of disagreement with atheists and people of other faiths, have reduced the Church to a campaigning force for social justice, indistinguishable from secular organisations, de facto annulling the social, cultural and political relevance of Christianity. It's — Giorgio Roversi

Those evangelicals who have been raised and shaped by forms of Christianity that are roughly "fundamentalist" will either: a. become taken with the modern moral order and thus sort of replay the excarnational development of modernity, just now a few centuries later, sort of catching up with the wider culture; so under the guise of the "emerging church" or "progressive" evangelicalism, we'll be set on a path to something like Protestant liberalism, a new deism; or b. recognize the disenchantment and excarnation of evangelical Protestantism, and also reject the Christianized subtraction stories of liberal Christianity, and feel the pull of more incarnational spiritualities, and thus move toward more "Catholic" expressions of faith - and these expressions of faith will actually exert more pull on those who have doubts about their "closed" take on the immanent frame. — James K.A. Smith

The tension between autonomy and expertise had been, at a basic level, fundamental to the Protestant experience itself from the Reformation forward, as the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, increasing literacy, and vernacular translations of the Bible undermined the clerical caste's monopoly on spiritual authority. In the twentieth-century United States, professional specialization, the Progressive emphasis on technical expertise, and simply the ever more complex nature of modern urban life pulled readers toward greater reliance on literary guidance, while the logic of consumerism, rooted in the all-powerful choice to buy or not to buy, further reinforced the notion of reader autonomy. — Matthew Hedstrom

The Christian versions of the household codes were clearly progressive for their time, but does that mean they have the last word, that Christians in changing places and times cannot progress further? — Rachel Held Evans

The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, 'All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions. — Frank Zappa

In the conventional Christian narrative, Christianity is a radical rewriting of the covenant between God and Israel in which Christianity supplants Judaism as God's "light to the nations."4 Progressive churches tend to wriggle uncomfortably with the unavoidable implication that Christianity is an improvement on Judaism designed to replace the original, a sort of Judaism 2.0. Many of us know instinctively that something is wrong with this conclusion. How do we proclaim a bold gospel that doesn't disparage our spiritual parent, the tradition of Judaism? Brigitte — Elizabeth M. Edman

Until self-effacing men return again to spiritual leadership, we may expect a progressive deterioration in the quality of popular Christianity year after year till we reach the point where the grieved Holy Spirit withdraws - like the Shekinah from the temple. — Aiden Wilson Tozer