Alisa Childers: "Progressive Christianity is Dangerous"

[Music] [Applause] well thank you ELISA for coming on to capturing Christianity it's great to have you here oh man it is great to be on here I love what you guys are doing it's fantastic appreciate that so let's take about 50 60 seconds and tell our audience a little about who you are why you're interested in apologetics and yeah just your your story your background yeah well my background is really unusual for apologetics because I come out of the music business I was what kind of music business what do you mean Christian pop music so I was in a in a Christian pop group called Zoe girl for about better planning and singing oh wow yeah so we toured all over the country and never had an intellectual approach to Christianity in my life in fact I never really experienced a lot of doubt I've been a Christian as long as I can remember I don't even remember a time when I wasn't aware of Jesus and so I've loved the Bible as early as I could read and write I began to read and study the Bible did you have experiences like that you would say what this was a religious experience that sort of grounded your faith and yeah that's a great question I think my faith it wasn't a blind faith it was informed but it was experientially informed so by a couple of things so I would go to church and I would do the music and worship and I'd feel the goosebumps yeah you know and I associated that with the presence of God that's what made it real to me but also I had parents who modeled a really genuine faith for me so we were not just Sunday Christians we did Bible studies together and prayed together my mom had us working soup lines in the inner city and reaching out to the poor in fact street ministry was a regular part of my life growing up going to the streets of New York in LA interesting so apologetics did that come up during those times of street grocery no not at all that's what's so interesting because we would be witnessing to people on the streets atheists and they give me all their best arguments and I would just preach the gospel I didn't know how to interact with the arguments but it never shook my faith because I just thought well they're atheists of course they don't believe in God they just need to meet Jesus and then they'll get it and and so it never caused me to doubt it never caused me to even research answers to their questions because I just thought just preach the gospel right and so it wasn't until I had a crisis of my own faith that I discovered apologetics well today we're talking about progressive Christianity and why it's dangerous for society or why it might even be heretical so tell me about your encounter your first encounter with progressive Christianity how did that come about well after the group I was in came off the road and we had all gotten married and I had how long ago is this so this was like seven give me a timeline we stopped touring in about 2007-2008 fairly recently this yeah this would have been when this all happened it would have been about two thousand nine or ten okay and so I had a new baby and I was doing some solo music so a local church invited me to come sing at the church and from the second we got there my husband and I just connected with the people like we really never had at a church together hmm we loved the sense of community we found there and particularly we loved the pastor's intellectual approach to the sermons because neither one of us had really ever been exposed to that kind of Bible teaching and so you know so Bible teaching in terms of what like it was very theological or like well he would open the scriptures and have these insights I'd never heard before hmm and he would dig down into the text in a way that I had never personally experienced and I found it very interesting and intellectually stimulating okay so like he would use like commentaries to kind of that kind of thing well his own commentaries give his own insights okay I think it was based on other I do yes now now I know what it was based on but I didn't then I just I just but he was very he was a masterful speaker and he knew how to say just enough to kind of for Christians who were raised in the church to not get their ears perked too much but but he was introducing new ideas okay and so that's kind of what attracted me and at the same time because I had toured all over the country at virtually every kind of church you could think of I had kind of experienced the seedy underbelly of the evangelical culture the what the seedy underbelly of the evangelical culture and what I mean by that is just I kind of saw Christians at their worst and the church at it worse sometimes not always but you know we had some bad experiences and there were things about evangelical culture that were bothering me you know just the the way that we would treat certain groups of people or the legalism that I would encounter and and things like that or the way we did altar calls all kinds of that stuff and so this church that we were at was kind of addressing those same concerns and it just felt so authentic and so we loved it and so in the context of going there the pastor invited me to be a part of a study group that was very small very exclusive and it was in the context of this group that he revealed that he was an agnostic and so this was different than what he was preaching on Sunday right but that that he just wasn't really sure it almost seems deceptive right it almost doesn't yeah looking back it's like I try not to assume people's motives but it it definitely it's hard to get around thinking that because yeah he was in fact he would even say what's the point of doing all this if you're just agnostic yeah well I think what was happening was that it was the first time he was really going through a time of deeply questioning his faith okay and he was processing that in a group of people and so so virtually everything I'd ever believed about God and Jesus and especially the Bible was sort of picked apart with all of these intellectual arguments and this was at this meeting you had right yeah this wasn't you were invited to a secret kind of thing yeah and it wasn't supposed to be a four-year class that he said it would be like training in seminary or something like that okay did he have any training himself not at the time he has since I think gotten his master's but like I don't think he had that's interesting and he was saying he's gonna give everybody a training and like a seminary training with yeah training so yeah so we so I went to the class and lasted I stayed about four months and it was actually after my husband and I left the church we didn't want to stay there we had our daughter there and we just don't want to raise our kids there we definitely felt like this was not truthful this wasn't the right thing to believe but I had never heard any of these arguments before and so after we what arguments well I mean just kind of typical arguments that atheists bring up okay challenges to the reliability of the Bible that that was a big one you know the one for him like a big source of doubt for him I think so yeah I think so it's just you know the authorship contradictions and all of those kinds of arguments and even historicity of Jesus as a person historicity of the Old Testament and so it what happened was after we left all of this was in my mind and it caused me to go into a dark night of the soul that I realize now looking back was my own process of what is called deconstruction and and it's where you start picking apart all your beliefs and in the progressive church this is kind of a big thing that happens is they pick apart their beliefs until they're almost sometimes they'll go all the way into atheism sometimes stay there sometimes come back but I was I was deconstructing not on purpose I wasn't trying to but everything I believed had just been thrown out and for me because it had to do with the Bible when I spoke to atheists on the streets it was like oh but that they just don't believe the Bible but when someone was able to knock the legs out from under the Bible at least at the time it caused me to doubt it right it it knocked the legs out of my whole world view from another interview I heard you you were saying that this is actually that topic - like the reliability of the Gospels is like that's what you nerd out on basically yeah like textual criticism yeah and that's it is that because when it was first raised you were like wait a second to see yeah yeah because for me if if the Bible wasn't true I don't think I would ever become a progressive Christian I think that if I thought that Christianity was false I wouldn't become a progressive person I would just probably become some kind of agnostic and that raises interesting questions so do you think that progressive Christians think that Christianity is ballz I I think they've redefined it in a way that if they if they gave you the definition of it you would say well then you're just saying that it's false and so this is why guys like Bart airman no I'm sorry not Bart Ehrman Bart Campolo who is Tony Campolo son Tony is a famous or technically still considered evangelical I think but he's very progressive but his son went through this type of deconstruction but went into secular humanism and his point is that's really the more honest position because what is secular humanism yes if you're gonna start it's interesting how like honesty is always the best if you agree with me oh yeah right baby only honestly use my view right right but but his point is is that if you start getting rid of things like the Bible and the resurrection and the virgin birth and and the atonement of Jesus if you get rid of that stuff it's really not Christianity anymore and you might as well just call it what it is yeah we'll talk about that you also make a distinction between progressive Christianity and historic Christianity so why don't we talk about that a little sure well I I tried to find a word that would describe the opposite of progressive Christianity so maybe we can define progressive Christianity and then I'll kind of give you why I chose the word historic it's not perfect there's no perfect word to use but so progressive Christianity is the idea that Christianity itself is progressing so what I mean by that he is of course we want progress right as Christians we want to progress in our faith like a good thing seems like a good thing we want it we want to grow in our relationship with God it will be mature we don't want to be invincible yeah we want to progress but there's a difference between us progressing in our understanding of the eternal truths of God and those truths themselves evolving and changing and progressing right so in the progressive view what Moses wrote well they probably wouldn't even think Moses wrote it but what the Old Testament prophets wrote about God speaking wasn't really God speaking that was them speaking what they believed about God in their time in place and and so Peter and Paul they don't really like Paul very much they were writing their best understanding this was Christianity in its infancy this was the best they could do to understand God in their times and places and so now we're we're evolving into a higher and wiser view of God in fact that's the phrase that one of the fathers of the movement Brian McLaren uses a higher and wiser view of God we can look at what the old writers wrote with the new testament writers wrote and we can analyze that and go I think they got this right don't think they got that right I think that was influenced by pagan culture and then we can understand God better now and so that's what progressive Christianity actually means this is why you can have two progressive Christians that might completely disagree on the resurrection one might affirm it one might not but they're perfectly fine to be in unity with each other because it's really not about the specifics of what you believe it's about growing together and discovering what Christianity is gonna mean now in today's world okay so going back to the definition of life so that's progressive Christianity what is historic Christianity according to you so I knocked around a lot of different ways to describe this I I thought about traditional Christianity but I don't like that because that carries baggage for people in their specific traditions yeah conservative seems outdated it seems outdated conservative has like a political field cuz it's not about politics and so I I went with historic because when I was at my darkest time what I realized was that in the class I was in a lot of the people were leaving the type of Christianity they grew up with and I thought well if I'm going through all this doubt about if what I believe is even true I don't want to just reject what I was raised with I want to make sure if I reject it I'm rejecting the real thing and so I went on a quest to find out what the real historic version of Christianity is now what I don't mean by historic is that it's every iteration of Christianity since its inception is included in that obviously Christianity has gone off course mm-hmm at times you know that's why we had the Reformation but when I'm talking about her historic Christianity I'm talking about starting with what it looked like in its earliest forms what did Christians believe the earliest Christians so here I'm thinking of like the ippolit that the what is it the Apostles Creed Nicene Creed is that what you're kind of referencing there no I'm at well I mean I affirm those but I'm going early er I in fact I start with the early what's arguably the earliest Creed in in the Christian history which is we find it in first Corinthians 15 which was written years later but virtually all scholars from secular to atheist to conservative all agree that this Creed was written between three and seven years of Jesus resurrection it's the Creed we that Paul records for us in 1st Corinthians 15 I know some people even date it to within like a couple months yeah in fact some what's funny about that is some of the Jesus Seminar guys who are even like the fringe liberals will date it really really early and so we know even Bart airman these skeptical scholars will say this was this was the belief of the early Christians like Paul didn't make this up he recorded this and so what you find in that Creed is that Jesus died for our sins I mean it seems so simple for some of us but but that's there that Jesus died for our sins and that's connected according to the scriptures that he was buried and resurrected according to the scriptures and then Paul says before he puts the Creed down he says this is the most important thing this is of utmost importance so to me right there that says that there are distinctions between essentials and non essentials this is the most important thing and so in that Creed what United the earliest Christians you have the the atonement of Jesus you have the resurrection of Jesus and it mentions according to the scriptures twice so their beliefs were inextricably linked to the authority of the scriptures and so that's how I would define the earliest version of Christianity now you can extrapolate from there right well what does it mean Jesus died for our sins and for that we we go to the earliest Christians writing about it we go to the New Testament writers we go to what Jesus thought he was doing we go to the early church fathers and you know there's all these different theories of atonement and there were different theories that were more emphasized throughout church history than others of course but but you have that concept of Jesus dying for my sins in a substitutionary sense from the earliest iteration of Christianity which is largely something that the progressive church denies so let's take a step back and talk a little more about deconstruction in the role that plays in the progressive movement the way you've defined the progressive is it's it's really a rite of passage in a way if you're going to consider yourself a progressive Christian you're probably either already gone through a process of deconstruction or you're beginning your process or you're somewhere in your process so do they call it deconstruction yes okay there's an podcasts that invite people on to talk about their deconstruction process and it's hard to me is it yeah it's a little weird yeah well I think it because but this is why though I think in fact I was talking about this with someone the other day I don't personally know anyone and I haven't come across anyone in my research or in all of my reading of progressive books and listening to podcasts who converted into progressive Christianity from another world view or from atheism almost all the converts well all the ones I can think of better that are embracing this progressive Christianity are coming out of the evangelical church they grew up largely in the evangelical church and so I think that they're reacting against maybe some of the wacky things they grew up with but but that's why the deconstruction happens because all the sudden they go I've always believed this because my parents and my Sunday School teachers told me to believe it and I don't really know why and so they start picking it all apart [Music] so let's so we've defined progressive Christianity historic Christianity now let's talk about some of the reasons why you think it's dangerous for I think it's dangerous because first of all it's really infiltrating the church it's something that on the lay level is so massively influential right now I people may remember the emergent church do you remember when people were talking about the emergent Church in the early 2000s actually don't okay no well this is kind of the time when guys like Brian McLaren were emerging this is kind of when Rob Bell was writing Love Wins and and people like John Piper were tweeting farewell Rob Bell and they kind of pushed all of that out but what ended up happening is the emergent church didn't go away it just kind of was forced underground in fact Brian McLaren again a major player in that movement wrote in a blog post in 2012 the emergent church is not gone we just don't call it that anymore and he says you know we might use the word progressive or missional but it's this new way of looking at Christianity and so in in my observation of no recent history I've seen the emergent church kind of go away and that nobody's talking about it anymore but it's really never but it's calling itself progressive Christianity now and and so it's it's dangerous first of all because of how influential it is it's dangerous also because of the beliefs that the movement is bringing into the church and so I can give a quick flyover basically of the progressive views of the gospel and the cross and the Bible yeah let's do that so we'll start with the Bible so I kind of mentioned before progressive Christians read the Bible not really in an authoritative sense as the authoritative Word of God mm-hmm right and and again if we look at historic Christianity yes Christians have argued about like tons of things since the beginning of our history about interpretations or things like that but generally speaking if you look through church history and back to the earliest versions Christians and early Jews I mean more ancient Jews they believed that the Bible was God's Word it's God's words to us they believed that it was inspired by God and that it's authoritative so you know we might debate over the nuances of an errand see and things like this but generally speaking the church has always viewed the Bible as authoritative as inspired and the Word of God and in the progressive paradigm challenges all three of those so when you look and see what the prophets said in the Old Testament and say well that wasn't really God speaking well then that's really challenging that the Bible is God's Word and when you think about how that in you know the implications that has for inspiration you're kind of in the same pickle there because if God didn't really inspire them to to say those things then how could they be how could it be inspired and then how do you figure out which parts are inspired or not and then of course it can't be authoritative because if it's not inspired by God and it's not his word of course it's not going to be authoritative and so that's kind of the view of the Bible and then the cross have you heard the phrase cosmic child abuse I have yeah yeah so that's really big in the progressive church is to view the atonement as cosmic child abuse and so there's largely a rejection of substitutionary atonement now some progressive thought leaders will say no I still believe that what Jesus did was substitutionary but when they start to parse it out it really loses all sense of meaning as far as Jesus actually you know paying the price for our sin or taking our place in any meaningful kind of way and so that's kind of the progressive view of the cross is that God didn't require the sacrifice of Jesus but that Jesus submitted to our blood lust and basically let us crucify him to show us how to forgive people and so if there's there's not really a strong sense of substitution in their view of the cross so how do they what's their view on the atonement they're like what what do they think happens what was the point of it well different thought leaders will say different things the thing they're united on generally speaking is that God did not require that but you know some people kind of go to a broader Christus Victor kind of view that Jesus came to overcome the powers of sin and death but not in any kind of a substitutionary sense but Brian McLaren again I've mentioned him we'll talk about God encounter during suffering like that you know Jesus encountering suffering like that to stand in solidarity with us and our suffering in our oppression but ultimately to bring the kingdom here which in their view means more like making life better into here and now it's really not about the afterlife it's about now and they will critique the typical evangelical paradigm of oh I just want to give my heart to Jesus so I can go to heaven and I and I think you and I would both say well yeah that's way oversimplified and and that's not that's not the gospel I would preach either but there's almost no sense though of what's going to happen in the afterlife it's it's all about here and now and political reform and economic reform and green energy reform and this becomes the gospel these good works almost become the gospel so in essence it's a very work space gospel and so that's the the Bible to cross and then well that kind of covers the gospel too because their gospel is largely a work space gospel bringing the kingdom here now it was working a couple of responses cities so the the viewer that they have the Bible do they believe that it's both uninspired and also errant do they believe both of those things they would say no I guess it depends on the person but you know largely generally speaking I think it's fair to characterize it in this way to say that most of them would say oh no it's inspired like and some might mean it's firing or that God inspired them in the same way he's inspiring us right now to have this conversation or the way he inspired CS Lewis to write The Chronicles of Narnia so so there's in a sense a lowered view of inspiration but they wouldn't have the classic understanding of the inspiration of Scripture well go and walk us through the classic understanding well the classic understanding is that the the scriptures were breathed out by God in fact the Greek word that's used for inspiration literally means breathed out by God and then there's a scene where Jesus is talking about David where David says that the Messiah is going to be greater than he is and so when Jesus quotes that verse he says David speaking by the spirit and so essentially this is where we get our definition inspirations from Jesus he's saying David was speaking by the spirit spirit was speaking through David and so there's this sense that the Word of God the scripture is God's words now they weren't human typewriters they weren't dictating it God used their personalities and and their their abilities to yeah and Paul would like give greetings yes but but we viewed all of the words of scripture as inspired by God and all of them are God's words us yeah so let's talk about the atonement then because they reject the substitutionary atonement view so maybe we'll spell that out just a little bit more and then give some your reasons why you think that the substitutionary atonement is the right view of yeah I think that the this the view of subsidary substitutionary atonement is so repugnant to them because when they parse it out like this you've got this angry deity mm-hmm that hates you who that that just thinks you're scum right but then Jesus comes along and he's gonna take all the anger from that wrathful angry deity on himself but then when they think of it that way they're going we'll wait that's a father if Jesus is God's Son that that's divine child abuse like God's just abusing he has to abuse his own son like some kind of medieval whipping boy and so I think there's some misunderstandings that happen and I think the first one is a misunderstanding of what we mean when we talk about God's wrath so that's hard for us modern people to hear God's wrath mm-hm and for us to understand what that means I've met several people that have a very difficult time with the wrath of God because they had wrathful fathers well and so they're conflating the human sinful petty impatient wrath of their own fathers and they're putting that on to God but that's not the biblical definition of God's wrath God's wrath isn't petty or unjust or flippant or impatient he doesn't just fly into a fit of rage that's not what we mean by God's wrath in fact scripture uses a metaphor of a cup it does cribes wrath as a cup that Jesus drank for us and in fact when Jesus in the garden made this cup pass from me you know he's not just talking about getting whipped with with cords he's talking about the wrath of God that that that's so painful to take but when we think about God's justice and his love he's wrathful for sin because he is loving because he is love he has wrath for sin because if he doesn't have wrath for sin then groups like Isis and the Nazis they just get away with it there's nothing that happens to bring justice for those crimes if you know someone who's been through horrific abuse there's going to be no justice for that there's going to be no punishment for that and so essentially if God doesn't have wrath for sin then heaven will be full of hell because you're going to just have all of this this sin brought right into heaven just like it is here and so really what God's wrath accomplishes is that eternally those who have put their faith in their trust in Jesus will be quarantined away from all evil forever so I see it like this many people have a problem with their being evil in the world and suffering in all of this how could a good God allow that well if you look at all the other worldviews and religions and the ant they have answers for it you know you've got the Buddhist sense of detachment they give you maybe rituals to do or practices but in Christianity we have a God that literally became the answer for the problem of evil himself by putting on human flesh walking on earth and then paying the price himself and I think that is another misunderstanding with cosmic child abuse that happens because Jesus isn't some hapless victim waiting on the sidelines being tortured by his mean dad Jesus is God God incarnate took the punishment himself and paid the price so that we could be quarantined away from evil forever and so for those of us who know that were sinners that's a beautiful story to us but but for many in the progressive church I don't know if there's really a sense of personal sin so I don't know if that if that message really brings them hope they just see the father pouring out the wrath on the son and so it's it's an obstacle to come across for sure [Music] switch gears a little bit before we started the interview we were talking about apologetics and how the progressive Christianity the movement whatever it is however you want to characterize it they their view of apologetics is a very low one right so let's talk about that a little well it's just interesting because in my in my experience of listening to their podcast and reading their blog posts and even reading their books there really is a kind of a view of apologetics that it's just this this list of excuses like if you're kind of doubting your faith you go to an apologetics class and they'll they'll fix you up you'll be fine and they'll give you a bunch of kind of dumb reasons to believe what you do and go on your way and you don't have to doubt anymore but but there's this sense in which if you go into the progressive church this is where you go when you're really thinking for yourself this is where you go when you're going to go into the real deeper deeper things of your faith and and part of that is that deconstruction process questioning everything and and so I think I think ultimately what it is and and why apologetics played such a big role in my reconstruction because you know not a lot of people reconstruct back to what I would call any kind of anything resembling historic Christianity but I think the reason apologetics helped me is because what I learned early on is that apology everybody does apologetics they're doing apologetics anytime you give a reason for what you think about something you're doing apologetics and I'm a truth person when I was deconstructing I wanted truth and I thought a lot about even doubt so I think we categorized out in all these different ways there's moral doubt and there's intellectual doubt and there's this kind of doubt but I actually think there's really only two kinds and everything else is a subcategory so you've got honest doubt seeking real answers and then you have doubt that essentially is seeking justification for unbelief and so I think in the progressive church people might start with honest doubts but then they create this culture of doubt where if you actually land on an answer you're kind of viewed as like you just if they even call it the sin of certainty so if you if you like certainty there's a book by P dents called the sin of certainty so two plus two equals four I'm pretty certain about that I'd be sinful in their eyes well they would agree with you on things like that but when it comes to religion when it comes to what we believe about God and can't be too certain yeah and in fact in this class that I was in I remember the the pastor asking once how many of you are certain about what you believe and it was just me and one other girl that raised our hands and I I'll just never forget the looks we got and kind of done all bless their hearts they just haven't really thought about this very much you know but then the the children's pastor was in the room and and the children's pastor said I just I don't know and the pastor just praised praised her and praised her and said this you know this is so good this is humility they interpret that as humility mm-hmm but it's how is truth person I needed answers I wanted answers and so this is something I I kind of think about too because they would talk about conservative Christians or evangelical Christians or whatever you want to call it and they would say what's why are they so certain what's going on and they would say well it's fear it's this or it's that but but ultimately I wanted answers and so they'd say why are they still afraid to ask questions and after I kind of came out of it and and found my answers I started pushing back on that a little bit like why are you so afraid of answers and I think that that's a valid question to ask and I wonder I mean again I don't like to assume motive but if someone is so afraid to land on an answer or so resistant to land on an answer maybe there's some other reason something else that is maybe it's it's problems with biblical morality or something along those lines that's keeping them from wanting to land on the truthfulness of Christianity yeah you said you don't want to like speculate too much about their motives but why do you think that evangelicals are so drawn to this oh I think there are a lot of reasons I in fact in a book I'm writing on progressive Christianity I lay out six reasons and the first reason is growing up in a Christian bubble right so people who grew up in some kind of sect Christianity they were never exposed to any other worldviews they were never exposed to other religions and what other people of other religions believe and so when the boom of the internet happened and all of this information was all of a sudden that everyone's fingertips maybe everything they'd ever heard about Muslims was negative and terrible and then they meet a Muslim family well they're really nice people think they won't and then they kind of throw the baby out with the bath water because progressive Christianity is very pluralistic in the sense that they're not going to be exclusive that you have to believe Christianity to be in right relationship with God to just hang on that for a second there's a TV show that just came out called the boys and one of the episodes that protagonists like the main character is you you can obviously tell us use a pluralist and that was like sort of the the view that was being pushed in the film and so it's it's even like seeping into like the TV culture now yeah TVs and TV shows and so how would you how do you respond to that they're like the question of pluralism like how how can we condemn someone who is you know our friends for instance a Muslim if you have a good Muslim friend how can we condemn them or say that they're going to hell when there are great people you know so what's your response to that well for me it's not about condemning them it's about figuring out what's true cuz that for me I just want to know it's true and plurally you don't have to not love that person know exactly in order to say well hey look this is the truth and we're commanded to love them and love tell us the truth we know strengthens love tells the truth but for me it was about truth so when I looked okay so take Islam and Christianity they can't both be true yeah because Islam says Jesus didn't die on the cross well Christianity is based on the resurrection of Jesus so if Jesus didn't die then Christian Christianity is false so if Islam is true Christianity as a entire religion is false and so they can't both be right somebody's right and somebody's wrong or we both could be wrong logically speaking but we can't both be right yeah and the idea I think is that it's loving to let them believe something that's false or at least I don't see a way out of that and but that just completely strikes me as of it strikes me as absurd well you if you're gonna love them then you're one you're going to want to give them the truth if you think that you have the truth I agree and it kind of think of it like if you have cancer and you go to a hospital and the hospital says oh we're so glad you're here welcome in we love you we want you to stay here here's a nice warm bed and a blanket just just be comfortable and and we're just gonna be here and love you but they're not giving you the cure they're not giving you the thing that's actually going to heal the cancer and and they're not giving you chemo but if they give you the chemo it's not going to be comfortable you're gonna it's gonna hurt it's you know there's all kinds of side effects that people describe that it's just an awful thing to go through but but they're giving you ya the loving thing to do is to make them uncomfortable yeah in that sense yeah so that was your first reason so what's the next one growing up in a Christian bubble legalism is the second so they grew up in some kind of sect of Christianity that was so legalistic they viewed all other denominations as heretics and so same saying internet boom they meet a bunch of people they would not have normally met before like in the you know in the 50s you only knew the people that were around you but now you can know everybody in the whole world basically what they believe in what they think and how they are and so you know the the Southern Baptist meets the the Anglican and they realize oh wow we love Jesus they're nice people you know and and they and they just throw the baby out with the bathwater because they think that Christianity is that legalistic cept they grew up in and so that's why it was so important to me in the beginning to make sure that if I reject Christianity I'm rejecting the real thing which is why I made course corrections along the way there were things I grew up with it I go yeah I don't think that was biblical and I put that aside and rather than throwing the whole thing out because my parents gave me the real gospel the third is abuse we've all seen these scandals coming out there's been a lot of sexual abuse exposed in the church there's abuses of power narcissistic kind of systems and pastors that's a huge reason people who have been through legitimate experiences of abuse in the church we'll go to the progressive church but again you're going to a hospital it's just going to give you a bed in a blanket they're not going to give you the cure mm-hmm and so but but I think the church needs to acknowledge that these types of abuses do exist and we have a lot of very hurting people that need love that need grace but ultimately need to retain the gospel because the gospel is the cure always so abuse trouble with the Bible a huge writer in the progressive world who recently passed away Rachel held Evans wrote a book about the Bible and she describes reading the Bible as a little girl and it was a magic book she said it was like sea monsters and voyages and princes and all of these adventurous things and then she got a little older she started reading the Noah's Ark story and she saw oh this isn't just a floating zoo with happy animals this is like the destruction of the entire world at the hands of Yahweh and she reads about the the Israelites being commanded to go in and wipe out the Canaanites and all the sudden the god that was always the hero in the story in her mind is now becoming the villain and so without a suitable answer to those things she she had trouble with the Bible and that's was one of the things that led her into the progressive movement so another one would be oh let me think about this so I said get the bubble the bubble legalism abuse trouble with the Bible the moral demands of historic Christianity we're seeing these debates happen all over over biblical sexuality and what the church has affirmed for 2,000 years it's easier to not get into a debate and not to have to defend views that are difficult to defend and might make you look bad yeah it might you might even sometimes completely like destroy friendships and you know relationships that you have with people and so largely the progressive Church is marked by its affirmation of LGBTQ relationships same-sex relationships same-sex marriage and so that's a huge distinction between the progressive and historic church is is that there's an affirmation of same-sex marriage and same-sex relationships and so it's really viewed if you hold to a historic view on that you're really viewed as someone who doesn't understand the love of God and the progression of God in the world and and so a lot of times someone will have a gay friend and they'll go into the progressive church because they love their friend they don't want it it's almost kind of like the same situation that's happening with the the Muslim friend or the the Mormon friend or you know someone else it's very that's very true and so I I think they see the only viable option to be full affirmation rather than saying I can still love my friend and speak truth to my friend and so and so there's a mischaracterization I think and some of it's based on truth the church hasn't always done the best job in this area but there let me say this real quick so I think that some of the concerns are serviced somewhat legitimate okay because there's a there's a moral intuition here and moral intuitions can develop and they can change over time but that is still some kind of evidence that this person would have is that like if it really seems to you that this isn't wrong that is at least some evidence to think that maybe the Bible got it wrong or maybe that just that little passage is not necessarily the right way to view this this passage yeah so I think that there there is some legitimacy there there is some kind of evidence that's informing it how do you respond to that I'm trying to understand what you're saying entirely so you're saying there can you word that in a different way because I wasn't sure I totally understood you okay so I think that there it's not completely illegitimate to have this sort of conflicting views here so in in the one sense they think that and maybe I don't know I don't want to know I'm not going to pontificate on exactly the genesis of where this is coming from but I think that what's happening is that they have this moral intuition that you know LGBT all this stuff is completely okay it's completely fine there's nothing morally wrong about this and this is a moral intuition I think that they're having I think that's a real moral intuition so that would give them some some kind of evidence basically that we should view this passage in a different way or maybe even reject scripture altogether so I think that there there is something here that needs to be dealt with but there's a couple different ways to basically view that okay so I think I understand what you're saying and I think the response that I would give to that as I think it's a confusion of identity because what's right about what they're feeling is that this person's made in the image of God this is a beautiful person I love this person God loves this person and that's correct every person gay straight every race we've all been made in image of God now all of us have have kind of as Rosaria Butterfield says distorted that image in in one way or another and it looks different on all of us but I think that because of the culture soup we're swimming in is that the LGBT has become an identity for people so when you're saying you know when you're maybe condemning the behavior the it's read as you're condemning the person and so I think that Christopher yuan has written a great book called holy sexuality that kind of picks that apart a little bit and shows you that when the Bible is saying that you know putting restrictions on sex it's not saying this person is just because they experience these desires is God doesn't love them or God doesn't want them in the church but it's it's the confusion of identity so a person thinks well if I have these desires that I must be this this must be my identity and I think that's the error that culture has informed us into believing right now okay so how should we respond to progressive Christianity like what's your overall take on that how we can how can Christians and apologists yeah how can we be more proactive and sort of battling this head-on well I think what we just need to do first is learn more about it and learn to recognize it because the thing that I experience a lot is people will say I'll get emails and they'll say I read a blog post you wrote or I listened to a podcast and all of a sudden I realized that everything that was kind of I had these red flags going off at church or with this friend but you get now I know what it's called and so that helped them to kind of identify what they were already feeling a little bit uncomfortable with so we need to learn about it we need to to recognize that a if we hold historic Christian views at any given point in history whatever the cultural dominant view is the spirit of the age something in biblical and historic Christianity is going to go against that Christians all throughout history have gone against culture and so we just have to remember we're not alone that if we hold to the sexuality this is what our our ancestors have done for 2,000 years and going back to the Roman Empire where they couldn't put the pinch of incense in the bowl for Caesar and so you know this would authorize them from society in the first century and it was largely around similar things it abortion and infanticide and in the first century was a huge thing and it was about sexuality even back then and so I think that we need to be aware of what is going on in the movement and be strong be courageous to say in a loving way because we do it because we love people if we didn't if I didn't love people I would just affirm what everyone says and make everybody comfortable you know I like that would be easy but because I love people because I love God I feel compelled to speak out because the Bible tells us see and I don't think people would believe you when you're saying I don't think they would either right isn't that weird yeah you're saying okay you're saying I I love people and that's why I'm telling them the truth and people would still look at that and be like she doesn't love me she's trying to tell me the truth right be it's because of what culture is telling yeah if you're not if you really love me you're going to just let me believe whatever I want to believe that's because love has been redefined as acceptance which isn't the biblical definition of love I didn't mean it cut you off I know you're that's great okay okay so I think that's that's all that I had did you have anything else that you wanted to to add on the on the subject is a great conversation you know I just I love talking about this because I love people I would encourage people if they're if they're watching this that if you have progressive friends in your life remember the reasons that they probably left the church and you know show them love mm-hmm show interest in why in what went wrong and and you know maybe don't just drop the hammer with the dogmatic statements right away but really seek to understand where they're at first and that that's a good first step and and kind of I have parents email me know my child is listening to this podcast now and I think they're going progressive and I'll just end with this so when I was kind of going through my deconstruction process I had two people in my life one that reacted the total wrong way and one that reacted a really great way so the one that that act that reacted wrongly to me was very dogmatically you shouldn't believe that you know you shouldn't be questioning these things and all that did was push me away but then I had someone else in my life who didn't react with any fear but just said well I haven't heard about that well let's let's talk about it let's let's research it a little bit and that invited me in and then the Holy Spirit could do his job and and as I was seeking truth I found my answers but but just try to ask a lot of questions and understand seek to understand what's causing the doubt in the first place this really starts with doubt and I think we've all experienced that on one level or another so so I should have asked this question at the beginning and it just popped into my mind you were recently interviewed on the bad Christian podcast right yeah so tell me about that experience and some some takeaways that you took from it well you know I don't normally do debate style stuff because I'm not very skilled in debate and it wasn't really a debate but I knew it was going to be disagreement yeah contention when that's a confrontation yeah and and that's kind of a particular skill set but I I just really wanted to do it because I I listened to their podcast a little bit and I you know I felt like they were gonna give me a fair shake even though they didn't like my article and yeah and some of the stuff they were saying about you before there yeah yeah that's what you add on later yeah but what was interesting is that the hosts like one of the main guys that was like on after the guy that didn't interview you he was like I disagree with everything she says but he didn't give like one single reason why he disagrees I thought that was interesting if you give such adamant disagreement then you could at least give like a one sentence summary of some yeah well yeah my takeaway from that was I think it was very fruitful for the body of Christ I had a lot of emails of actually listeners of their podcast who said thank you so much like I don't usually hear that perspective but I agree with you and you you know and I think they appreciated that the the tone of the conversation was friendly and I got to give it to Joey who interviewed me he was very kind and very gracious to me and you know even in his communications with me before and after just got nothing but great things to say about about him and and just him giving me the opportunity to come on and actually defend what I had written in my article because not a lot of people are willing to do that I gotta say it was actually interesting to listen to the podcast because after a while it was like it was clear that what they were representing was what you described as progressive Christianity it was like they were painting you in the in a way that made you seem non progressive or conservative or you know traditional and it was it was definitely painted in a very bad negative way and so it seemed like it was actually really fitting contrast here between someone who identifies as progressive versus someone who is not so I thought it was it was really interesting to see that kind of play out oh and by the way if you guys want to watch her interview I've got it linked in the description of the video too so I don't think it's actually a video I think it's bad just yeah it's just audio yeah yeah but it was interesting because like at the beginning he kind of starts asking me questions and then I said you know let me just tell you a story first and then you can kind of see it's like yeah you know everybody's got a story and there's reasons people think the way they do and yeah and I think actually looking back on it I'd be I'd be interested to ask him what some of his beliefs are now because this was about a year ago and I think I'd have to go back and listen to the interview but I'm pretty sure he said he's still affirmed the resurrection at that point and I'd be curious to know if he still does because often in this progression people might begin holding onto that and then eventually just kind of either say like I don't know or maybe it's not that important so where can listeners Watchers go to see more your stuff and hear more about what you have to say about ELISA Childers calm and I've got a blog and a podcast on there I'm coming out with a book that'll be out in the fall of 2020 about progressive Christianity about my journey it's gonna be told through the lens of my story so yeah so hopefully maybe you can tweet that out when it's ready yeah yeah I'm taya well we can do an interview too and talk about that very thing too so but yeah if you guys want to learn more about her I've got links in the description of the video but at least I was it was great to have you on yeah so awesome we'll see you next time all right right [Music]

Channel: Capturing Christianity

Views: 405,372

Rating: 4.7021036 out of 5

Keywords: capturing christianity, cameron bertuzzi, apologetics, god, atheism, alisa childers, alisa childers progressive christianity, progressive christianity debunked, progressive christianity dangerous

Id: oQ6doQsSQLU

Length: 51min 50sec (3110 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2020