Case Study: What are the Common Values that Unite Progressive Christians? With Natasha Crain

welcome to the Elisa Childers podcast where we equip Christians to identify the core beliefs of historic Christianity discern its counterfeits and proclaim the gospel with Clarity kindness and Truth now we spend quite a bit of time on this podcast discussing the movement of progressive Christianity and how we can interact with it from a Biblical worldview from a perspective of wanting to live our lives under the authority of God's word so we've talked about it from a theological perspective but today we're going to discuss the common themes the common values that you're going to see expressed across a broad spectrum of different Progressive Christian thought leaders so I'm going to have my friend Natasha crane join me actually this episode that we recorded originally was for her podcast so it originally aired on the Natasha crane podcast really want to encourage you to go to the Natasha crane podcast subscribe Natasha is one of my favorite thinkers I think she's absolutely just sharp and wise in all of her cultural insights but she also knows quite a bit about Progressive Christianity as well so a while back we decided that we were going to pick a case study type book to read together and review and so we chose a book by a progressive pastor and author named John pavlovitz and the book is called if God Is Love Don't Be a Jerk finding a faith that makes us better humans and this is a book that came out I believe last year so it's kind of come and gone at this point but I wanted to bring this episode to you because the themes that we're discussing are very common that you're going to find in you know represented in virtually every Progressive Christian platform YouTube podcast blog post and book right these are the things that you need to be aware of in fact this is a question that I'm asked quite commonly when I'm speaking at events people will say well what are the sign lines we can look for what are some themes what are the main values that we can we can have our eyes open to be looking for and so um this episode today is really not so much a book review although we will be surrounding the discussion on this book but we're not largely doing this to go through the specific ideas of this one particular book but rather we're just going to view this kind of as a a case study so we're going to use quotes from the book and examples from the book of common things that you're going to find in Progressive circles and of course as Christians we want to look at these ideas and these values and these themes and we want to evaluate them based on what the Bible says so we want to see which ones of these ideas line up with the word of God and which ones don't and um so of course with with a book like this there there's really nothing in this book by John pavlovitz that is all that unusual as far as what you're going to find in Progressive Christian books in a sense he's kind of preaching to the choir and Natasha pointed this out on our podcast together also and that's that I mean we all do that that's not I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that that's what we do when we write apologetics books we're writing these books to Christians who want to line up their worldview with the Bible who want to believe uh what's true about God and the claims of Christianity so we kind of come into our content with that assumption and he's done the same he's writing this to Progressive Christians who are largely already accepting his premises and things like that so we're just going to take a look at it we want to have a Biblical worldview and hopefully we can identify some of these key ideas to help bring Clarity to the conversation and to help you when you see some of these ideas maybe coming down your social media news feed or maybe you hear somebody talking about these things in your small group at church you can just be more aware and more armed with wisdom and good biblical knowledge to be able to interact with the these ideas alright so I'm just going to bring you right into the conversation I had with Natasha again please don't forget go subscribe to the Natasha crane podcast wonderful content over there and I'll bring you into our conversation right here [Music] um Alisa can you introduce this a bit to John pavlovitz he's the author of this book that we're talking about he talks about his background in the book and so he gives us a little bit of a window into how he got to where he is right now in terms of being a progressive Christian um tell us a little bit about that so that we can have appreciation for where he's coming from sure he is a real key figure in the movement of progressive Christianity he's a pastor author he's possibly most well known up until recent years for his blog so he was really popular in the blogging aspect of progressive Christianity in fact when I give a more thorough definition of progressive Christianity I quote him quite a bit because he has very clearly defined it he has blog posts saying this is what Progressive Christianity is and so in my research into the movement of progressive Christianity um he's really just right smack in the middle representing what so many Progressive Christians believe and so it was interesting Natasha as I read this book I was thinking all these books I had to read to research for my book and other gospel that interacts with Progressive Christianity I could have just read this one and gotten everything I needed because it's literally just right in the bullseye of what I see the movement teaching believing advocating all of those ideas and so uh John pavlovitz he actually describes himself in this book as a theological mutt so he came from an obedient Catholic Altar boy situation so he was raised Catholic um sort of became disenchanted with that in his teen years even called himself a hopeful agnostic for a while moving into what he describes as defiant atheism and then there's the switch to where he emerges as this in his own words overconfident United Methodist mega church pastor so he went from defiant atheist and he doesn't talk a whole lot about what connect how he went from atheist to uh United Methodist pastor but basically he pops up as this pastor in the United Methodist mega church which I don't know exactly the theological background of the specific church that he pastored but as we know many United Methodist churches in America not so much in other parts of the world have gone very Progressive and there's just a major split happening there and so I don't know I get the feeling that maybe his was more moderate maybe more in the middle but but still still holding to some of these more Progressive views but then he says from there he went to deconstructing Progressive to humanist Christian to whatever and whoever and whatever I am today is how he describes himself so he sort of takes this journey from Catholic to atheist to United Methodist mega church pastor then he deconstructs that into Progressive Christianity and now I guess he's he's gone through another phase of what he would describe as humanist Christian and then essentially he looks like he's not really taking a label as of today yeah so I don't even know if he would does he label himself as a progressive Christian because it almost seems like he would rather just be the ideas obviously that he's talking about are very Progressive but I don't know that he actually identifies that way do you know well that's tough to pin down as of a couple years ago he did but now he's saying that's a that's a phase that's in his past and so now he's not taking a label but what's interesting is that in the book he's using tons of scripture he's referring to these as Christian ideas so I mean I'll leave that to our listeners to decide but um but that's very common by the way in in the in the deconstruction movement is to move out of taking a label at all and um I noticed here he's putting deconstructing in the present tense that's something that's like a continual process that he's describing is still happening with him so uh the hint there's that there's more he's got further to go on this journey and so he's not landed but I don't know if he ever will claim to land because as we're going to discuss the idea of certainty or landing on something like that is something that is sort of rejected outright as an assumption in the book right yeah now that that's really helpful and I think it's important to just reiterate what you said that you've read so many Progressive Christian authors with this being sort of your your specialty that you've worked on and that's this is very much representative of the broader ideas that you will hear in lots of books which is why we wanted to focus on this it's not to to beat up on a particular book or anything like that it's really just to look at it and say okay these are the ideas that are being put forth that you're going to commonly hear in Progressive circles and here's how they compare with the biblical worldview so with that in mind we have kind of gotten together and said well here are the big themes that we're seeing here and we're just gonna walk through them one by one and we've picked out some quotes that we thought were really representative of the idea so I don't want anyone to think that we're kind of crafting these themes of something that is not being said or reading into what's there these are the actual quotes from the book that can kind of serve as a representation of the thinking here so the first idea Is This Love love is all that matters so just from the title of the book you get that obviously this is the overarching claim that love is the only thing that matters it's the most important thing so here are a couple of quotes here's the first one he says if it doesn't substantially or partially compel you to be more compassionate more loving more aware of people's pain and more moved to alleviate it it's probably not made of God stuff and it's not going to matter to the vast majority of human beings you encounter who consider religion to be at best Superfluous and at worst toxic so so that's the first one where if if you're not being more compassionate in in his definition which we're going to get into and more loving then this is not made of God this is a really big claim so let's come back to that here's here's the second one he says in fact the single conclusion the single conclusion I've come to as a result of all my study and prayer and wrestling and preaching the soul fixed truth I can hold on to is that Faith shouldn't make you a jerk for me it means that your theology is only valid to the degree that your life is loving beyond that you're preaching and proselytizing are largely a waste of time to people especially if they don't have a religious affiliation or share your world view there's a lot there's a lot going on there we can do an entire podcast I think um just on the things that he's saying there but I I think that it's easy to hear this and to say well that kind of sounds right I mean we we want to be loving right we want our lives to reflect the love of God but what he's saying is pick up that line your theology is only valid to the degree that your life is loving so there are two things that I want to hit on here the first one is that when you say that that's a major claim we can't just bypass that we can't just go on on buy and say that you're it's only valid to that degree because that's a theology too and and I think that a lot of people don't realize that you can't just claim it's only about one thing because that is still a claim about the nature of Theology and what we know about God but how does he know what he knows that's the big question here and I'm going to leave that one hanging a little bit because we're going to come back to that with another point that he makes but here's the big one I want to focus on for right now is how do you define love this is the million dollar question that is left hanging really in the book is how do you define love for Christians who have a Biblical worldview we want to Define love the way God defines love because he is our Authority he is the one who defines everything who tells us what is true about reality he is the authority on that but if you take away the authority of the inspired word of God and you say well this is not where I'm getting my my information about what's true about the world and what's true about reality where does that leave you how are you going to Define what love is and I thought it's fascinating Lisa that through reading this he never takes a moment to just specifically state or set off in some kind of box in the book like here's what love is but you can sort of come to a conclusion about how he sees the nature of love in his own definition um by by pulling the pieces together and I would say for him love means affirming whatever a person wants to do or believe as long as they're not feeling hurt by it you can't make someone or you can't allow someone to feel hurt because once you do once someone says I feel hurt I'm in this position then you are the problem you are the one who's not loving so that's that was kind of definition that I got but but what do you think how would you characterize based on everything he said here his definition of love yeah and that's really the question I would say I agree with yours but I would maybe add to it because there's an interesting Dynamic going on here in this quote that you read uh Faith shouldn't make you a jerk is what he said now for most and I'm going to try to be really charitable here because this is even something he acknowledges in his own book about himself but to the vast majority of let's say conservative Christians who hear who are familiar with his demeanor on Twitter familiar with his blog um they're scratching their heads over that statement because he's largely perceived to be extremely aggressive toward conservative Christians very um I want to be as charitable as I can here but aggressive is a good word very anti what we have to say and we'll really use a lot of Shame tactics to shame Christians for what they believe and so when he says your theology is only valid to the degree that your life is loving like that is a confusing statement for me coming from him if his definition of Love is only what you just said because I think that in a way it is unless what you believe contradicts what he considers to be good or socially right you know his social justice views and things like that because he's and he even acknowledges this that he'll get texts from people why are you so angry and he'll even acknowledges I am angry and here's why it's okay for me to talk this way and it's very confusing because if we have this subjective definition of Love which he seems to have he's catching that cultural definition that you described um which really bottoms out into massive intolerance because he's really not including in that definition people who might hold to a more historically Christian theology in fact he he continually through the book characterizes people who hold those views as fearful bullies I don't know if he uses the word bullies but um they're wanting to control people they're motivated out of trying to convince people through fear tactics that they're gonna you know be tortured in Hell forever and so there's this really interesting dynamic here with some of his phrases he obviously doesn't consider what he's doing to be in the category of being a jerk or being unloving but that's why I think it's so important that we have an objective standard by which we Define love so that we can judge well is is what he's doing loving or is what I'm doing loving because otherwise it's just his opinion versus mine and then that doesn't really help anyone because then we're not we're that's gonna that's gonna be very intolerant in the end whereas if we have an objective standard of love we can say okay here's what Love Actually is now as a Christian there can be somebody brand new in their faith that maybe has a massive anger problem and that's going to be a continual part of their sanctification process that's maybe not going to get fixed overnight right there's maybe they're still having outbursts but the holy spirit's working on them and maybe those become less and less over time maybe it's a really slow process but if we only judge um you know just based on this kind of subjective of fluid definition of love then really according to his logic then that guy has bad theology whereas I would say actually that guy has good theology because what he's trying to do is conform himself to the standard of what actually love is with the holy spirit's help it you know we're all on that process of sanctification but uh I I think that it's yeah I agree with you I think that is his definite I think that's what he thinks his definition is yeah but when it really plays out it's actually really unloving and really tolerant when we actually look at biblical definitions yeah that's such a good way of putting it that I think that you know that that is what he thinks it is because that's what he's putting forth and claiming in the book but at the same time he that's not actually playing out in all areas it is very one-sided like you're saying and there are a lot of mischaracterizations which we'll talk about later um that come back to people who disagree with him um but how how people understand because a lot of people are confused on this this topic of love and but we don't want people to feel hurt we don't want people to feel unloved so what do we do with that help people understand what the Bible's definition would be of love how does that differ from this kind of pavlovitz understanding right well and this is where we have to as bible-believing Christians take the whole counsel of scripture you know we can't just pluck one little verse like progressives love to take when Jesus said um you know the the greatest Commandments being love love the Lord your God love your neighbor as yourself and they'll just take that and say See Jesus is just saying it's all about love you don't have to worry about anything else which is you know when you really dig down into what Jesus is saying there he's actually affirming all of the Ten Commandments because if you love God you're not going to have Idols you're not going to put other gods before him if you love your neighbor you're not going to steal you're not going to commit adultery on your spouse you're not going to cheat on you know you're gonna cheat and do all this stuff so it's it's really I think really over simplistic to say oh well Jesus said the greatest commandment is love so we're just gonna do you know Define that however we want and go about our way we have to take the whole Council of scripture but a great passage to go to would be First Corinthians 13 where Paul goes through the what love looks like in action love is patient love is kind we all love that stuff like we love those definitions of love but it goes on to say love cannot rejoice in wrongdoing love rejoices in the truth so according to the the biblical definition if somebody is celebrating something that is not true the loving thing is to not affirm that thing the loving thing is to rejoice when truth is spoken but to not rejoice in wrongdoing and then of course we know from Ephesians we are to expose take no part of the the works of darkness but but expose those things all of that is tied in together with definitions of love but we love people we are going to want to take captive every lofty thought that raises itself against the knowledge of Christ but sadly we live in a culture where that is perceived as being unloving or intolerant and so it's it's just very difficult because it's sort of based on this movable shifting definition that's going to change constantly based on what culture thinks is good in the moment yeah and if you're not going to rejoice in wrongdoing you have to have an objective basis for understanding what is wrongdoing if you don't have an objective basis for defining right and wrong in the first place then you can't possibly avoid rejoicing in the wrongdoing and celebrating what's good and right so that's that's where it has to be rooted in a knowledge of God and I think and I wish I had this right in front of me right now but I think he actually says in the book that the greatest commandment is to love others that's that's actually not accurate and that's pretty much the source of all of the difference here between a Biblical worldview and a progressive one because Jesus explicitly says the greatest commandment when he's asked what is the greatest commandment is the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God and the second is like it to love others but there is an ordering there you can't love others and know what it means to love others unless you first know what it means to love God and when we miss that then then we are set off into a sea of relativism because like like you're pointing out from First Corinthians in that passage you you can't get around truth and identifying wrongdoing in in all of these things unless you know what is right and what is wrong and so I think that that's so telling to say the greatest commandment is to love others and I might be paraphrasing that I'd have to go no you're right in in well and I was looking for the quote here because one thing that stood out to me too is when he talks about loving your you know loving God and loving your neighbor he adds as if it's a Biblical command love yourself and that's not a part of that and he just adds that yeah it it is fascinating so really this point about love in and like I said earlier I think we could do a whole episode just on this first idea but I want I do want to go on to the other ones but the key point to take away is that love has to be defined we can't assume in today's culture that everyone agrees on what love means because for the Christian with the biblical worldview our understanding of love has to be rooted in who God is and the truth of who we are and the relationship between us and what he calls us to do and so we have to remember that the world is going to use the word love in some very different ways and you see that play out really throughout this book so let's go on to a second idea and this is this is very related but it takes on some other implications here's idea number two God pretty much only has one attribute and that is love and I'm not quoting him here this is a paraphrase of the ideas that we're finding in the book but what you see over and over is the claim that God is love which of course we agree with God is love there's no disagreement on there but the god that you read about in this book in in a lot of progressive writings is very one-dimensional and there are lots of attributes of God that are talked about in the Bible we never see things about God being holy or about God being just and caring about Sin and just the whole aspect of his Holiness and being set apart and what that would mean and what it means for us this is just sorely lacking I think in this discussion of God because if you only look at God from this one perspective of saying he's love you're going to miss so much else about him that matters and that really becomes a big problem as you look at things from a Biblical perspective so just as an example he has a chapter where he's talking about prayer and the nature of unanswered prayer and the problems he has with prayer now and he says I still can't bring myself to declare that any God who is worthy of being God would cause pain in order to reach Humanity or withhold recovery to teach them a lesson so so he's he's importing his own view of Love here because he's thinking that if you love someone they're not going to feel sad they're not going to feel hurt in some way so he's importing his own view of Love also with the single dimensionality of God here being only love and he's like I can't understand why a God would do this but when you look at the Fuller Bible and you look at all the attributes of God you realize that there are a lot of purposes of God that can be fulfilled through the suffering that we have not that we love suffering we we don't love to suffer no one does and we can acknowledge that but there are a lot of answers to this question of why we suffer and and why that can refine us and bring us closer to God in that relationship and this is also true when he talks about hell he can't conceive of why a good God would have a place like hell why would God create hell and I'm not gonna lie this is a tough question it is it is a hard one there's there's no denying that but it starts to make sense in the context of Understanding God's nature not just as being loving but also as being just in what that means in terms of our sin and that he can't just Overlook sin or he wouldn't be just but you won't get that if your God is only a god of love so Elisa in in reading all of these these Progressive books what attribute or at maybe attributes of God do you think are most often missing from the progressive characterization and talk a little bit about the implications that that has just on a personal level that if you start to see God as missing some of the key attributes as revealed in the Bible how does that affect your faith even personally this isn't just a theological discussion we're not just up in the clouds with us but this will affect how you see everything in life so can you talk a little bit about that yeah so what's kind of ironic about the progressive Christian Movement is that largely speaking it's very social justice oriented so they're always talking about justice justice the word justice is very important to them but when it comes to God God's attribute of Judge of justice is they don't like that and that's really kind of an interesting Paradox because they don't want God to be just at least how it's his Justice is defined they want to redefine that and do it in a different way but um they they don't want God to have judgment for sin they don't want him to punish sin they think that implicates his moral character and that's fascinating in some ways because they are so Justice focused and Justice oriented typically speaking but I'm going to read a quote here from pavlovitz's book because I think it illustrates this quite well he says it's almost impossible to love your neighbor as yourself if you believe that your neighbor is in some unrepentant sin that disqualifies them from proximity to a god you have intimacy with now what let's think about what he's actually saying here he's saying that if you preach the Christian Gospel you're not loving because that is the Christian Gospel that all of us are alienated from God because of our sin we have this opportunity to to place saving faith in Jesus to be reconciled into God but if we tell our neighbor that that's not giving them the good news that's actually withholding love from them so I think what that reveals is that there is this real pushback in the Progressive World against the idea of God God being a god of love and Justice and Wrath so wrath is one that is largely you know just rejected in the Progressive world and I think there's a couple of reasons I think we see this in Progressive Christianity no I wanna I wanna be very clear and say that a lot of the thought leaders in Progressive Christianity are very theologically um knowledgeable they're biblically literate these aren't just uh you know sometimes they get characterized as oh they just put on skinny jeans and and now they're just they just want to be cool and put a coffee shop in their Lobby um in my experience that's not the case a lot of thought leaders are very very thoughtful about what they think about these things so it's I so when I say what I'm about to say it's not that I think they don't know this intellectually it's just the way that they talk the ideas that they promote seem as if they're separating God into all these different parts uh you know where God God Has This Love part and then he's got this wrath part and like we don't know how to to balance the scales of these two radically different things things about God whereas theologically speaking God is fully love and fully Justice all at the same time like there's not an arbitrary standard of Justice or love outside of God that he has to live up to in order to be you know declared just or loving like okay God is loving because of this arbitrary standard his nature and character actually Define those words for us and they're not in contradiction to each other um so like to try people say how do you make a resolution between God's love and Justice like there is no real they're the same thing they're literally the same thing and so I think there's a there's a Croatian Theologian that makes this point very well marislav volvus's name I disagree with him on on some things but I think he really gets wrath right here and I think he can help us understand why God's love and wrath are essentially um they're they're the same I don't even want to say equal parts because they're not two different parts of God God is Not divided it's just this is where we get our words for these things and so here's a quote from his book he said I used to think that wrath was Unworthy of God isn't God love shouldn't Divine love be Beyond wrath God is love and God loves every person and every creature that's exactly why God is wrathful against some of them my last resistance to the idea of God's Wrath was a casualty of the war in former Yugoslavia the region I come from According to some estimates two hundred thousand people were killed and over 3 million were displaced my Villages and cities were destroyed my people shelled a day in and day out some of them brutalized Beyond imagination and I could not imagine God not being angry or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past Century where eight hundred thousand people were hacked to death in 100 days how did God react to the Carnage by doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion by refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead of firming the perpetrator's basic goodness wasn't God fiercely angry with them though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's Wrath I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil God isn't wrathful in spite of being love God is wrathful because of love and I think that that is probably the best way to explain what I'm trying to talk about yeah that that is so good I I love how you're pointing out it's not that we have 15 different attributes that we're like how do these all fit together it's just one God and this is his nature this is his very nature and they and and it it's hard for us to express in words what we're trying to say but that that is who God is and so that that's a really great quote I I love that you shared that it's a very good example of that and I think when just as individual Christians if our faith in God when we start to think of God it starts getting boiled down to just this one attribute and we leave off the other things we start trying to make sense of God in ways that all fall around this one attribute we start to make sense we start to decide what makes sense and what doesn't make sense according to this one part of God and again we don't use the part terminology but according to that one attribute and I think that's where we start going off the rails a bit and we can get really confused and saying well but this doesn't make sense to me because we're filtering what makes sense through our limited understanding of who God is and it's interesting to me not to belabor the point here but it's interesting to me that he talks a lot about in the book about how conservative Christians or evangelicals tend to put God into a little box that they're limiting God but really in in my view reading his book he's the one who's limiting God because he's limiting the attributes that he sees of God and and that's where you really get into problems because you're not seeing God for who he is in in his fullness and that has so many other implications um let's go on to the the next the next idea and this is maybe this one we should have even started with because it's kind of the foundation for so much of what we're talking about but here's on summarize the idea the Bible has some good stuff and lots of bad stuff we need to sift through it to determine what is good so I'm gonna I'm just gonna read this quote because I think this summarizes it so well he says I'm reminding people that to one degree or another all Christians create a personal redacted Bible well I'm showing them that we can't simply believe or not believe the totality of scripture it's intellectually dishonest we all have to sift through it and interpret it and try to apply it as best we can on a moment-by-moment basis given what we learn and what we experience ultimately I return to the question is this passage consistent with the character of a God who is infinite love and I rest in the conclusion I come to so this this is a fascinating quote I think because you know my new book Faithfully different ultimately is so much about what your source of authority is your source of authority God through his inspired word or is your source of authority yourself and I make the case in chapter five of the book that ultimately Progressive Christians have a very secular view of the world because they do resort to the authority of the self yes they may have more appreciation for Jesus in some sense than people who are purely irreligious but it comes back to the authority of me the I'm the final Arbiter of Truth and I might use the Bible in some way but I'm the one who is going to pick and choose and I think that is so quite so telling this question he asked at the end you know I'm going to come back to you is this passage consistent with the character of a God who is infinite love and he comes to the conclusion he he rests in the conclusion that he comes to so it's not I want to come to what is actually being taught here I want to come to what is true about reality it is what am I concluding through the filter I've defined in the first place the Bible doesn't tell us to filter everything through one characteristic of God is this consistent with a God who has love the Bible is going to be consistent with a God who is loving and just and holy and all-knowing and all-powerful and all of these other things as well so he is the one who has set up his own filter for scripture consistent with the authority of the self he's pushing everything through that filter and then he's determining in making the conclusion now we all make conclusions from what we read so there's nothing overly shocking about that of course we all are but it starts with your view of the Bible and in talking today about the difference between having a Biblical world of view and having a more Progressive view it comes down so much to this what what is your starting point for what you believe the Bible to be and from that place if you believe the Bible to be the authoritative word of of God yes Christians are going to have some different interpretations on some parts and some different views we don't deny that but your starting point is so important and clearly his starting point is not that's what the Bible is in his world view that's definitely not what the Bible is and so now I'm going to pick the attribute of God that I think based on my own perspective and subjective definitions here and then I'm going to filter everything through it so Elisa this whole idea that he talks about with you can't just believe or not believe the totality of scripture we all have to sift through it because we're all coming to these different conclusions how would you respond to that how would you explain to someone listening who's thinking well yeah but we do kind of have to look and we all make interpretations of this or that how is that different than when he's saying you can't just believe or disbelieve the totality of scripture yeah that that's such a puzzling line to me when he even says that's intellectually dishonest to say that and I think my hunch is from Reading him what he means and and honestly I'm gonna even swing broader and take a look at the broader Progressive Christian Movement and even the deconstruction movement there is a a definite theme threaded throughout those movements which have lots of overlap um that scriptural is is morally dubious and they will post every verse they think is morally dubious on Twitter and on all these different social media platforms but here's the thing that's so bizarre about it Natasha they're the most wooden literalists when they read the Bible if they're wanting to disprove it uh in one's hand you know he's saying we have to hold these things lightly we have to recognize when there's figures of speech we have to recognize different things about it but when he wants to use it as a weapon it is literal and if we don't believe the literal interpretation if we don't believe uh this is an exaggeration but you know if we don't believe Jesus is in a physical door because he said I'm a door then you're not a literal it you know then then you just have to let it all go and it's just it's really kind of silly to me because I can easily end with total intellectual honesty say that I believe the totality of scripture but in saying that I'm not saying I fully understand the totality of scripture or that my interpretation of every verse in the totality of scripture is the correct one but my goal as a bible-believing Christian should be to keep working keep working um you know grammar hermeneutics to try to get to the author's intent to conform what I think to what the Bible is actually teaching now none of us are going to be perfect at that but I think it's intellectually dishonest frankly to say that you can't say you believe in the totality of scripture if you don't see it exactly how he does it's kind of what he's doing he's saying if you don't see scripture as I do then you're being intellectually dishonest to say you don't believe in its totality and I I just I call foul on that I think that's not I don't think it's fair I don't think it's true and um there's just this real simplistic I don't I mean I want to give him the benefit of the doubt I don't know if he really has this simplistic of a view but it's what he's putting forward in his book is that he has this very simplistic view of what Christians think the Bible is and it's a little bit puzzling because I mean you could pick up any just pick up Wayne Greta and pick up any conservative Systematic Theology and just go through the bibliology Section and it's not that controversial to say that yes we God is ineffable we can't fully comprehend him uh language we use about God is going to be analogous because we are limited with our vocabulary we're limited with our intelligence God is God and we are not we are fine with mystery where there's mystery the scripture leaves some things mysterious we're good we're cool with that but there are some things that are a lot more clear so why would we assign mystery to a part that's clear I mean it's just this is such basic stuff it's really hard to understand what he's doing here if I'm honest yeah and I think that it in we can't read into his motivations in it of course but I think that it at least isn't a it's an attempt perhaps to sound humble to say hey we're all doing this it you know even if we're saying hey this is a mischaracterization I think it sounds humble to people to say you know we we all have different interpretations of this and that and and people can hear that and say well yeah I guess that's true but it's it's disguised and this kind of um this claim that we're all doing the same thing of picking and choosing whereas the starting points are so different and and so I think I think that's the issue but then it also like we said before it also plays out so differently and when you actually read the book you say we all sift through and decide this so ultimately The Authority is each individual but if I have sifted through theoretically in his eyes if I've sifted through and I've looked at and I said well I think that Jesus claims to be God I think that he claims to be God himself in the flesh you died for our sins that he's actually the savior of the world that we should be going out and making disciples and that people need to be saved through Jesus if I've sifted through and that's the conclusion that I've come to well he's gonna have a lot of problems with that and he shows that he has a lot of problems with that in the book he thinks it's ludicrous if I believe in hell because that's what Jesus taught and I believe that there is this final judgment that we all need to be thinking about he doesn't like that and so what about me sifting through and finding that even though he has no objective basis for looking at it and saying this is right or wrong because we're all sifting through if you accept the parts of the Bible that he doesn't accept then he's going to look at you and say this is wrong so it is it is another sort of internal conflict I think in in what he's talking about um idea four the only thing and this is kind of like what we've been talking about a little bit but the only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty and in Progressive books that I have read this has come out just left and right it's it's always there in some way shape or form here's a sample quote he says that's why a working Theology of Love matters so much when we lead with gentleness it decreases the chances that we will bulldoze someone with self-righteousness because we honestly believe that we're no better than they are and no greater Authority on anything so there's some truth in here right we want to be gentle we want to be gracious in how we're presenting truth but when he's talking about a Theology of love love is so much deeper than just being gentle and he it's an equivocation here on these terms where he he's treating them as if they're the same because again in his own definition of love it means like no one's feeling bad about what you have to say and so he puts the terms together and it can it sounds good but it doesn't actually work and we don't want to be self-righteous we want to see righteousness based on God we want to see righteousness based on God's standards so what he gets to though at the very end of this is we don't want to ever come across as if we're a greater Authority on something than anyone else and I think that's this is really a common mischaracterization that if Christians are sharing something from the Bible and we're sharing it as something someone else needs to know then we think we're an authority but we don't we are the messenger of God's truth because we believe he's the authority we believe he is the one who has created the world that has given us life that has given us purpose we believe that he's the authority and we're sharing that but in this world view that he's talking about in his book when you're coming from that perspective that you don't have a Bible That's the word of God we have to keep remembering this I think he doesn't have a Bible he believes to be the authoritative word of God and so he is just having to come at this from kind of a best guess it's a best guess scenario so there's all this uncertainty we can be sure of that uncertainty but we can't know anything with confidence and so from his perspective it's really arrogant if you put forth something as objective truth that applies to all people because you have no way of knowing that but that just presupposes his own world view so as a Christian's the biblical worldview I think we have to just be clear that if we are treating the Bible as our authoritative source of knowledge about reality that we can be certain of a lot of things and it's not arrogant to think that within our own worldview because if God is who he said he is and this is his word then we're accepting what he says is true about the universe he created that's a pretty big deal there's no arrogance involved in that so it's interesting because then he also goes on in the book past saying you know no one's a greater Authority on anything but then he also says things like this he's talking about Christianity he says I can no longer be Tethered to this thing that's so toxic and so painful to so many I can't Wade through any more bad Theology and predatory behavior from Pulpit pounding pastors who seem solely burdened to exclude and to wound and to do harm of course we don't support predatory behavior either but he's lumping that into what he calls bad theology how can anyone have bad theology if you have no objective basis for good theology in the first place you can't and so there's just this recurring theme of we can't be certain of anything given his own presuppositions about the Bible but at the same time he's very certain so this one is baffling you you said that a little while ago that something else was baffling to you and this one is really baffling to me because I think if I were to decide tomorrow I no longer believe that the Bible is God's word I think I want to think that I would draw that to The Logical conclusions that we're talking about here and just say you know what there's not much we can know about reality I think I can look at General Revelation and know that there was a Creator and and a life designer and that there's some basic moral law but there's not much we can know about reality so I wouldn't call any theology bad or good because we just don't know there's no objective basis for this knowledge I would like to think that that is the conclusion I would come to if that were to happen to me tomorrow but that doesn't seem to ever be the conclusion in anything I have seen from Progressive Christians when they walk away from the historic Christian faith it's always moving toward a certainty about what God is and what God isn't and what he wants from us and what he doesn't but there's never an acknowledgment hey we don't have any objective basis for knowing can you enlighten me here why do you think that is where does that come from and why don't you see more of just people acknowledging The Logical implications if you don't have an objective basis for your knowledge right and this is something that your audience probably should be aware of because I agree with you that we are The Messengers right it's like when people say well why are you so against this or this is I'm I'm just telling you what God says right I'm just taking the word of God and telling you what it says but what your audience needs to be aware of is that there is a strong push there are books being written right now there is strong messaging on social media to convince Christians that even the idea of biblical inerrancy biblical Authority um the the what we what I might call the historic interpretations of really core issues of the Gospel these are being painted now as the result of white supremacy and misogyny for example the inerrancy debate as we know the word inerrancy isn't in the Bible of course neither is the word Trinity but the word inerrancy in the word Trinity are words that people came up with to describe things that are taught in the Bible um to to to describe doctrines that Christians have historically believed you can go all the way back into the earliest Church fathers even Jesus himself and understand nobody thought the Bible had errors in it but often they'll say even this this debate over inerrancy there are people making claims right now to say even that idea that was a bunch of white guys that got together to try to keep women oppressed in the church the doctrine of inerrancy so what we have to understand is that when we say things like I'm just giving you the message they're saying no no no you're just giving me the message of Oppression you're giving me the interpretations that have been put forth to keep women and minorities down and so we need to deconstruct all of that and so their objective standard is going to be things like sociology and history and who has emerged as the most oppressed as a result of some belief so this is why right now Natasha there's a huge push for egalitarianism now personally I think complementarianism egalitarianism is not a primary core salvation issue I was actually raised in an egalitarian church I'm a complementarian now but I know egalitarian Christians who would be like we're not on board with what people are saying right now and and the messaging is that complementarianism as a view is inherently up impressive to women so it's not just like we can disagree like oh you know I think this is right and I think this is why complementarianism is false it's complementarianism is oppressive that's why we have to dismantle it and deconstruct it so that's what people have to understand when we say oh well here's what Paul says about a woman's role in church it doesn't matter that you think that in their view you're just reading that through this lens of patriarchy and white supremacy and that's why you think that's what it says and so this is and I know like right now people are probably listening going I give up I just whatever I give up like what do I even do with that um you know and I don't know I it's very difficult to try to talk when we're just in in an episode we did together on my podcast we talked about these reality tunnels from this uh YouTube video with a couple atheists and a Christian it's like we're in different reality tunnels we're not even deriving what we think about the nature of true truth from the same place and so it's almost impossible to have conversations at this point because we are deriving what we know about the world from completely different planets yeah and it's so interesting because people don't stop to think well where am I deriving this entire view because if you're going to say something's oppressive again if you don't have an objective standard for defining oppression in the first place you should theoretically understand and recognize that that's still subjective in how you're defining you might say that I you know this is what I believe to be true but in the same breath you should be able to say but I recognize that we don't have any objective basis for defining this so I understand that your opinion is equally valid but that's not what we hear today right and I can't talk about this quite a bit in Faithfully different about this whole idea that what's consistent with secularism is to be able to acknowledge that everyone's views it would be equally valid but that's not what we see instead we see people say that no no this is inherently problematic like you're saying that this is inherently we all know we don't have to talk about philosophy we want to talk about objective bases for things we want to talk about anything we all know that this is inherently bad so it's interesting because it's just it's sort of an appeal to we all know what's inherently good or bad but no one is stopping to think about what's my objective basis for that doesn't exist and do I know what it is no one stops to do this and so you're right it is so difficult to have these conversations because we are in such different tunnels and not everyone's tunnels are even logically consistent within themselves that makes it hard and I just will pop in with one little thing here just to piggyback on what you're saying here and why why objective truth and objective morality is so important to comprehend because like they even take like take the example of complementarianism if um if if we don't have a objective standard for what oppression actually is then I can see why they would say oh just complementary women don't have the equal status or they don't get to do all the same things men do so therefore that's unequal and that's oppressive but if we know how the how God defines oppression then what we can actually do is say well the teaching itself is not abusive it's not oppressive it can be used for oppression and has been used for oppression certainly it has like we can have that discussion we can look at case studies where hey this person claimed complementarianism and used that uh in an abusive way to oppress women certainly we can acknowledge that and still but still say the teaching itself is biblical or you know whatever the whatever the teaching that's just a test case but it's if we don't have an unmoving standard then it's just like you said it's going to be whoever the whatever the most people are saying and also just how it makes people feel well these women kind of felt like they were offended that they were told they couldn't be lead pastors so they're interpreting that as oppression and so we have to get rid of it and that's just a terrible way to think because if we just go by people's feelings all the time I mean say I think about my kids they want all kinds of stuff that's not good for them all the time and I'm sure they feel really oppressed sometimes by my rules and and my disciplines but um I mean we're adults like this is we gotta we got to be thinking better than this I think yeah it doesn't make it any easier a lot of people are listening going so how do you cut through that there's not an easy answer we have no Solutions here on the podcast it's not it we're figuring it out too we don't know but what it does require is that when you understand that these are the issues I think that it requires us to think more deeply about what we believe and why we believe it and so we can better resist ideas that don't line up with the Bible and again I just want to reiterate this is an in-house discussion for Christians who want to have a Biblical worldview we having an apologetic about why we believe the Bible's God's word that's a whole other conversation but we're coming at this saying if you take the Bible to be God's word this is what's consistent with it and so that that's what we're trying to clarify here let's look at another idea that comes up really frequently in this I know from our conversations at least that you've said that this is really prevalent amongst aggressive but the measuring stick of religion is if it's helpful rather than if it's true this is this is fascinating to me so he recounts the core tenets of the biblical storyline and then here's what he says about it he says it's been my story since I can remember but I'm less convinced than ever that it's helpful in producing better human beings he's talking about Christianity or making the planet more loving so the the implication there is that it's all about whether or not something is helpful whether or not you should you should throw that out and I have to admit that this is really hard for me to understand this is another one that leaves me scratching my head because I don't want to believe anything or live according to any idea that actually doesn't correspond with reality things that are true helpful is such a subjective term to use as a measuring stick I mean what you know going off of what you said like my kids they would find it really helpful if I would clean their room for them I would do and if I would do their laundry that would be incredibly helpful to them but that doesn't necessarily reflect what is best um or you know what is true about the way the world Works any of those things and so when we're are looking at okay what is the world view that I want to live my life around the question has to be what is true I don't want to live according to a worldview that I might personally find helpful because I could be totally wrong I could find something that's totally actually unhelpful to be helpful depending on my experience and my background and where I'm coming from I want to know what's true about reality so help me understand this one too this is another please enlighten me Elisa moment why do you think that helpful in particular that word is so much the measuring stick for religion when it comes to progresses as opposed to just what is true like what if the Bible's true then what yeah I think it's sort of that impetus or that instinct in people that it's it's like what your book is all about to move from the authority of God in the Bible to the authority of self because if you look at other religions and in belief systems there's a lot of steps that are very practical it's very pragmatic in a lot of ways like look at Buddhism it's very pragmatic um it's like the path to Enlightenment it's it's to make your life better and more um peaceful and have that inner peace it's like the um you know the therapeutic moralistic deism or is it moralistic therapeutic deism I think it is where like God is this giant therapist in this guy that just wants you to be happy and nice and he's not gonna like bother he's not gonna tell you who you can sleep with but if you need something he'll be there but otherwise you're just going to kind of let you live your life and it's all about being happy and finding things that are helpful finding uh that's why it's so fascinating in Progressive Christianity and in the deconstruction movement there there's so many therapies they'll turn turn to like I remember there was a time and maybe it still is but when I was listening to a lot of progressive podcasts lots of progressives were doing the sensory deprivation tanks they were and I'm not saying you know there's inherently I don't know much about that I'm not saying there's something wrong with doing that but it's like they're they're looking for anything but Jesus to try to find that pragmatic answer like what's going to help me in my life there's lots of talk right now about magic mushrooms and hallucinogenics and finding Enlightenment and healing and even um for your mental health through uh psychedelics I mean this is like we already did all this in the 60s and we saw the end game of that but it's like there's there's this this real pragmatic approach like I I have this problem in my emotional realm or in my psychology that I need to fix and so I'm going to find something to fix that and it's really that impetus to move away from the really uniquely Christian idea that we are all sinners in need of a savior and the people when people don't like that message it is going to become about what's helpful or what's going to help make me the most happy in this life or what's going to give me the most amount of peace or um you know my definition of Love or my definition of what it means to do justice in the world if you divorce yourself from the idea that you are actually broken you yes you're made in the image of God absolutely um but we've all distorted that image in one way or another and and that's really what the problem is the problem isn't that you're unhappy or that you're not being helped Enough by certain things the problem is that you're a sinner and once you can realize that the solution for that is the gospel placing saving faith in Jesus being reconciled to God your maker who designed you for a purpose then your impetus is going to be toward finding things that are just gonna sort of put a Band-Aid on things make things feel better and be more helpful that example you used with your kids is perfect and my daughter and and I my tendency is to do it like it's just easier if I just do stuff for her it's so much easier like we're both happy what's wrong with that well everything's wrong with that I'm not helping her at all when I do everything for her even though I'm like I can do it better and faster so I'm just going to do it I mean that's not good and so we have I think that it's just it's just that impetus to deny that sin and Redemption Narrative of the Christian gospel that that is such a good answer it's actually so closely related to the the next one it's like you answered it just perfectly to lead us to the sixth idea because the sixth idea that you really pick up in this book is that people are fundamentally good so you see that what exactly your answer you see that worked out in his book so that's a really interesting kind of piece that you're putting together there I love that so in chapter 16 for example he talks about how he wants to start a church called The Church of not being horrible and he says we would gather every week to celebrate the inherent goodness of people there you go and and so right there that's you know that is that is such a different view than what the Bible gives us in terms of who people are and what our very nature is and it's interesting because I I had pulled the same quote that you pulled out earlier so I'm just gonna read it again because it falls in this category so well and he said it's almost impossible to love your neighbor as yourself if you believe that your neighbor is in some unrepentant sin that disqualifies them from proximity to a god you have intimacy with now of course this is a mischaracterization too we we're not you know disqualifying anyone from being close to God we want them to be close to God we want them to receive the Gospel yeah exactly it's the sin that's separating them from God so there's there's this great irony here but you can see this whole idea that if you're coming from the assumption that people are fundamentally good then you're going to feel like you're doing something wrong if you're coming along and telling them that anything about them is not good then you're bringing them down you're bringing them down from a position of goodness but if you presuppose based on your world view that people are actually inherently sinful that you're talking about you're bringing them up by telling them the truth about their sin such that they can be reconciled to God so this is this is just really interesting because if you're going to sift through the Bible using his own words if you're gonna sift through the Bible and you're going to sift out the parts about how we are sinful and you're going to just hang on to some kind of idea which you actually don't even get out of the Bible this is just an untethered idea I think that people are fundamentally and you can't even get that from the Bible but if you're in human history or from a just a cursory observation of human history things you're absolutely right you somehow there's this idea that we are fundamentally good but you end up with all kinds of different implications there and so that's yeah that that's a really interesting dichotomy that leads to you so much but I kind of just said it but can you just I don't know is there something you would add to that in terms of what does the Bible say about our human nature other than you know we're sinful but what are what are maybe a couple of examples of how the Bible talks about this that would show that God has not said we are fundamentally good yeah no I mean it's it's it's if we go through all through scripture we're told that our hearts are inherently sick we we are insanity is in our hearts throughout our lives the Bible says Jesus said that out of the heart flows all manner of of sinful uh inclinations and he just lists out a bunch of things uh we we know from the Psalms and from uh just all throughout scripture we that's where we get this doctrine of original sin and this sin nature that gets passed down is that we there is something deeply inherently broken about us and I think the one thing I would add to what you said because I probably couldn't say it better than that is that we have to we can't miss the idea though of the starting point which is that when men and women are made in the image and likeness of God and that's something that there's a bit of a straw man I think in his book like he'll he said at one point and this is a paraphrase because I don't have it in front of me but he said oh you've probably been taught that only certain people are made in the image and likeness of God but the implication there is that because somebody wants to take maybe a sin struggle and make it an identity then we're saying because because we're saying their identity they're not made in the image of like no every person who's ever been born has been made in the image and likeness of God and because of that that's why we know racism is wrong that's why we know abortion is wrong and murder is wrong and hurting other people is wrong we know this because of that doctrine of the Imago day but and I mentioned this earlier but but we have to realize though part of the Christian story is that we've all distorted that image with sin there's an Old Testament scholar Jay scler that describes sin as an acid that Mars and deforms everything it touches so the image of God is not lost in people who have particular sin struggles or might be even an unrepentant sin um that's a huge foundational doctrine of Christianity um but there but that's the Cure is the gospel The Cure is repent put your trust in Jesus and let him work that sanctification process in you um but it's there it's just if we tell people oh you're inherently good I mean I just you know we can take an extreme example um when I was a little girl there you know we always lived in fear of the Night Stalker there's this serial killer in the San Fernando Valley and I just remember oh what if he comes to my house and like what's the answer for The Night Stalker just to say well just embrace the inherent goodness inside of yourself what that's such an adolescent answer to me and then but we always want to think well I'm nice I'm better than him well I hope you're better than him but there's somebody better than you and there's somebody better than that person and there's somebody better than that person and so now you're getting lower and lower on the on the scale here but even the best person you could think of fall short of the glory of God they have they have broken that stand that standard of God's holy Perfection and needs to be reconciled to God and so um I think for people who know their Sinners this is a beautiful message because we're giving a cure but if they want to deny the disease then a tough cure or what is perceived as a tough cure is and is going to be I don't want that that's harmful to me I don't want that in my life right now right yeah no that that is that is so well said I love that we're we're sort of running out of time here so I want to end with just hitting maybe briefly uh three mischaracterizations of Evangelical Christians in the book and we talked a little bit before recording about what we even mean by Evangelical so maybe this is a time to quickly just say what do we mean by that when we're talking about Elisa when we say Evangelical Christian what what are we saying yeah words right words are tough to find this for us I want to Define it though because um I want to be clear like even when I'm when I'm talking about Progressive Christianity I'm not my position is not to defend evangelicals right I'm trying to defend historic Christianity going back to Jesus the apostles tracing authentic Christianity through history um so movements will come and go uh I do identify as an Evangelical um I don't think that everyone has to identify as an Evangelical in order to be a Christian like I want to make some of these caveats here the reason I am an Evangelical is the classic understanding evangelicalism arose really as a way to preserve historic Christianity from some of the liberal scholarship that was coming out of Germany so it's characterized by things like a strong emphasis on biblical Authority the atonement of Jesus evangelism you can all go back and look at that but I want to make that clarification because a lot of people in fact I did a podcast with Neil shenvey on this the definitions of what people think Evangelical is are so sporadic even people who identify themselves as evangelicals the definitions are all over the place and so when I say it I'm talking about Evangelical beliefs like those core things of blood atonement biblical Authority I'm not talking about like a political alignments that we're seeing or conflation with uh you know America or anything like that when we're saying Evangelical we're talking about vote going back to the historic and classical understanding the reason I don't want to let that go because of maybe some of these other things is because if we in America abandon the term Evangelical then we're kind of abandoning our brothers and sisters all over the world who hold that that word but it doesn't mean to a lot of people what it means here so like I'd rather try to redeem the word Evangelical than abandon it because of our brothers and sisters all over the world but it is a problematic word for sure yeah and so that's a helpful clarification because I think some people are you know they're they're not clear on exactly what we're saying with that so I just wanted to make that clear up front because well the things that we've been talking about so far we've been talking about how the progressive view is very different than a Biblical view so that we can understand for those of us who do want to have a Biblical worldview how how that differs and we need to keep that Clarity but there are quite a few things in his book that bleed over that aren't just about presenting his own view but that we would say mischaracterize the Evangelical view as Elisa just defined evangelicalism so I just want to hit on these briefly because I know we're running out of time but I do think it's really important because these are common mischaracterizations I see this all the time and it really is frustrating I want to think that I am trying to understand people within their own worldview box and understand where they're coming from at the same time I I so often see people who are mischaracterizing what we believe as evangelicals so the first one is that there's this really strong current and he starts the book off really this way of suggesting that Evangelical beliefs are to be outgrown from or matured out of and and this is really interesting he he says for example if you've evolved or matured or progressed in some fundamental way you know that there's a grieving in that growing and outgrowing and losing some of the old Story the security of that story the sense of self that story gave you sometimes even the characters of that story so it's it's sort of condescending I feel like it is condescending because theoretically you could speak in terms of well here's what I believe before here's what I currently believe and just objectively compare those belief systems and say this it's a before and after but instead you so often see this this idea that there it's not just inferior in some way but that it's more childish that it's it's more something that you grow from and and that's interesting to me because you also see this from atheists the Like Richard Dawkins for example he had a book that came out recently in the last couple of years I think I have to look at the actual date but it's called outgrowing God a beginner's guide so atheists see it this way that we have these childish beliefs and actually talk a little bit about that and Faithfully different but also progressives have that sense why do you think that is why not just an objective comparison of here's what I believe now here's what I believe before why is it more about maturity and growth yeah I I don't know if it's a way of justifying these kind of radically different new beliefs but I see this all the time especially in the deconstruction movement so I've shared my story of deconstruction in my book and other gospel but there are several people I've seen who will call me out and say you know you didn't really deconstruct or she didn't really deconstruct and the reason they have for that is not because my journey of unraveling was really any different from them but it was my reconstruction because I reconstructed back to what they would consider to be these archaic childish beliefs uh you got to go back to the drawing board you didn't really deconstruct because you wouldn't still hold these beliefs if you did and so I saw a tweet recently where a guy said that because I hold what he perceives to be and what he defines to be oppressive views about sexuality I didn't really I don't understand deconstruction and it's just fascinating to me because it there's this assumption that if you don't change to their actual morality then you are less mature which you're right is a very condescending position to be in and again just to remind people we're not I'm not asking anybody to conform to my morality I've do my best to conform to what I read in the Bible I hope others will as well because I believe it's truth and so it I think there's a really different thing going on there but um but we do see I don't know what what we're going to do about it we just have to get a thick skin and realize that you know if you're gonna hold that view then every martyr who was burned alive or tortured or endured incredible imprisonment and suffering for these childish beliefs was just silly and immature and I think that's a really I I mean I want to be so careful not to all assume motive but I don't know how we could look at that and not call it arrogance yeah no I would agree I I think that it's very difficult because I think that what you're saying is just so spot on that this goes back to our earlier conversation about they're assuming that there is an inherent knowledge that what we believe is wrong that we should all be able to see that that becomes self-evident and I guess you know if you're coming from a place of childish thinking you don't see things for what they are so if there if you just come to their side and you see what they think is inherently right or wrong then now you're on the more mature side of things because you've really thought through it all which is um it is a sort of arrogance it's it's really interesting to see how that plays out but I I think what I would want to leave listeners with also is that you're not growing out of beliefs or Christianity or evangelicalism it's not about I let me back up on that I I think that a lot of the times the reason that they say that also is that we just need the comfort and security of a tight box of beliefs that we were afraid we're fearful if we disagree with them exactly that it's out of fear and we just like the certainty well it's not I I'll admit I do like certainty about things I do like having knowledge about things sure but that's not why I'm a Christian it's be it what comes first is my belief based on looking at the evidence that the Bible actually is the word of God and if it's the word of God then I'm I'm not just trying to put things into a box this is the Box God's given so I'm gonna in that box and I like certainty and I like knowledge but that's not why I'm looking to the Bible as my source of knowledge and so I think that sometimes they take sort of these childhood traits or at least what they think of as terms of like black and white thinking you see that criticized a lot um in in just any kind of desire for certainty and they're saying oh well that must must be why you believe in the Bible if you walk away from that you don't treasure that so much then now you're going to come along with your beliefs but people need to really understand that you're you're not immature or childish for thinking that God has revealed some specific answers and some are black and white there's a lot of mysteries but there are black and white answers in the Bible too about who God is and who we are in in all of these things so while those attributes are sometimes attributed to people as being childish that's just simply not the case the question is is the Bible the god of word or what evidence is there for it not how people feel about that being the case or not the case um another mischaracterization the second one you just brought up actually that evangelicals defend their beliefs because they're fearful and he says Christians are worried about other religious Traditions having a voice lest there one true God be offended by people worshiping in different ways this is just you know this is the kind of one that you read and you just say but that's not what we're saying we're not asking other people yeah we're the ones saying we shouldn't have a council culture in the sense that we see it today we this is not about suppressing voices in fact we're the ones actually advocating for Religious Freedom for other religions exactly there's no suppression of voices here just because we're claiming that objective truth exists and is knowable and that's what they're really responding to the fact that we believe that there is this objective truth we're not suppressing your voice by claiming objective truth exists we're inviting everyone to come along and say well what's what's the evidence for this and yes State your view but also State the evidence for your view let's be truth Seekers right so just because you say that someone is wrong because you believe that that is objectively the case doesn't mean that you're suppressing anyone's voice and I think this ties back a lot to critical theory and some of the social justice issues that we were talking about earlier because there's just such this sense of you know don't marginalize people by not letting everyone have this platform to speak and it gets conflated with these issues about the existence of objective truth and the implications of that so you know why from your perspective why is there such this characterization that we're afraid in particular it's not it's not just that we don't want other voices to exist which I kind of just address but that we're actually afraid of them what is that about I think it stems from their idea of what we believe about hell I this sort of this I see this repeated in a lot of progressive books and it's in this one as well that we try to we're actually in their view doing our evangelism and doing our persuasion out of trying to convince people that they should just be terrified of hell and so the and you know listen there's maybe some validity to that throughout the church history where Christians have like in the 80s and 90s I think we saw this a lot in altar calls I read about this in my book based on mischaracterizations of hell where we think in some way you know there there were some fear tactics but to just expand it to every Christian if they believe in a literal hell it's just this it's this fear motivated thing that as long as we can just get everybody scared enough about hell then they'll become Christians but any really thoughtful Christian that I know like you said we wrestle with that too I don't want anyone to go to hell um it it's part of the it's part of the piece of the puzzle I have to keep in the puzzle because it's on the box top that God gave us in the Bible so I'm trying I'm doing my best to figure out how that all that works together myself and we all are and we wrestle through it but I I it's like it's like he's speaking foreign words I don't understand why he would say that about most Christians but what's interesting in the book and I I don't have the quote in front of me is that a couple of times when he talks about himself as a more conservative Pastor um that he said he did that and he said he did it intentionally he would weaponize those things to try to scare people into coming into faith and that was a really interesting admission that I was I mean I just remember I was out walking listening to it and I thought he he did that like like that's well no wonder you you would reject that you know because um yes it's a part of the puzzle but like that that he seemed to say like that's what he did on purpose so maybe he's assuming that's what all the other pastors are doing but it's definitely a an assumption when I was in the class at the Progressive Church that I wrote about in my book I remember one time the pastor saying hey you guys realize like 80 of Christians disagree with the things we're talking about in this class why do you think that is and the only answer they could come up with Was Fear they're just like it just has to be fear and so I just think that's just a go-to sort of motivation assignment because they can't understand why we don't agree with them on this stuff well and you see that also in the labels that we get you know homophobia or transphobia everything becomes a phobia that that we're scared of things I genu I genuinely have a phobia of elevators I am super claustrophobic I don't want to go in an elevator right that's a genuine phobia but we're not phobic of things that maybe we disagree with and so you see that that assigned motivation of fear in other areas too which is really interesting let's let's finish out on a third mischaracterization that we've touched on a couple of times here but just to close out on this evangelicals think they're in a place of Authority or moral High Ground over others when they call out sin this is another major mischaracterization and here's a here's a quote he says Christians armed with hate the sin as their declared impetus often rationalize their discrimination by comparing themselves to a parent giving a child tough love missing the Olympic level arrogance of suggesting that adult human beings whom they often have no relationship with or knowledge of require their oversight or discipline wow you know reading that I it really it does make you feel angry when you're mischaracterized in that way because it's not just an understand misunderstanding of a whole world view but it's really it's an accusation right it's really um it's really it really is accusing us of being having Olympic level arrogance as he says so I'd like to think again that if I weren't a Christian I would at least understand that this is not an accurate characterization of Christians I would like to think that I would look at and say well okay I don't believe the Bible but you know Christians they think that this is actually God's word and you know he he knows what's true about the world and they're saying that this is what they think is true even if I think that's you know ridiculous I'd like to think that I would be able to see it that way in the same way that you know I have Mormon friends and Mormons believe that you know I'm going to end up in a different place for eternity than they will I'm okay with that I'm not offended by that I don't think that they think they're morally Superior to me because they think that this is what they believe to be true about reality so this is another why why is this so often a misunderstanding that non-believers have and this isn't just Progressive this this is non-believers in general so often think that we think we're on our moral high horse when we share what we believe God has said why not understand that well this is our world view this is what we believe and be okay with being you know in disagreement about it why not just say that why does it become we think we're the authority well it's interesting I'll just point this out before I go into a quick answer on this but you know we kind of made a comment where we thought what he was saying um and just in a more General sense of kind of an arrogant View and then he's characterizing what he thinks we believe and is saying it's an arrogant view if you have no objective standard for morality for these kinds of definitions then it's just our opinions versus each other right but if if you root yourself of an objective truth knowing that Pride arrogance has an objective meaning then you know then that's what decides between us but I just wanted to point that out because if we don't have it then all day long we're just going to be like you're arrogant no you're arrogant well you're unloving no you're unloving that's why this matters but um the why because Natasha I truly believe I mean I don't know we I'm not going to speak for you this is my view but you know we've we've seen a lot of recent controversy over uh comments like that John Cooper made about deconstruction saying we're going to declare war on this Christian deconstruction movement defining it as a group of people that have left the faith and are actively trying to tear down the faith of Christians and trying to convert Christians away from Christianity and I agree with him I think that is the why here because you're right it's not just like well I don't believe this anymore but hey you know you do you I'll do me that's good I mean no they're writing books they have platforms there's YouTube channels podcasts actively trying to dismantle right now on Twitter I saw tweets from deconstructionists like a tweet storm of accusations against the Bible why well I think because there's an Evangelistic Zeal to the movement I think that um the it's it there is a end game there's an agenda there this is my opinion you know I'm not speaking for anybody else on this but I do think that there's an end game here this they have megaphones now they have the social media platforms um in my next book that's coming out I really compare the social media platform to the Tower of Babel like we are back at the Tower of Babel where where all everybody has you know there's everybody can communicate and it's it's just I think it's very Evangelistic and I think that's the why I think they are wanting to convert Christians away from Christianity maybe not too they don't care where you go like they don't care if you end up in Progressive Christianity or if you call yourself an atheist or a Wiccan or whatever they don't care but they just think Christianity is immoral and I wish that sometimes they were just there would be some admission of that you know like look I think this is really bad for the world and here's why I'm trying to tear it down but they'll say no we're not trying to tear it down but they are that's why I think we see so much of this language so I got strong on that you can edit it off if you want to but no I I I think it's great now it is so true and I've given you a lot of tough questions here because I keep asking you why questions and why questions are like I don't know I know it is and it they're always difficult because you're you're sort of trying to get insight into something that's you know outside of yourself into people's motivations and why things are the way they are so these are tough questions and we have to Grapple with them but I also know they're the questions that a lot of Christians ask you know I I get the why question all the time for people like to why do Progressive Christians even call themselves Christians still questions like that and of course when we answer those questions as just a caveat for this whole episode we're not saying that we have 100 the answer that is applying this to every individual out there who you know identifies as a progressive person or anybody else we're just talking about some of the general trends that we're seeing in culture in Progressive Christianity outside Progressive Christianity this this is a broad stroke so we don't anyone to listen to this and be like well that's not my reason here's my reason because they're going to be a lot of different stories out there right but I hope that this episode has been helpful to you in really just getting more clear on what people are saying who are coming from the progressive perspective and how that differs from a Biblical one and we also just want to make sure that you don't feel inferior in your beliefs when you hear these things about how we're arrogant and we think we're the moral Authority and our beliefs are childish all of these things I I really feel passionate about wanting to help Christians with a Biblical worldview understand that that's not the case and here's where it's coming from So Lisa we can talk for hours probably about all these topics but we will leave it there thank you so much for being my first guest you've been amazing loved having you on thank you for being here I loved it thanks so much for honoring me with getting to be your first guest it was really fun [Music]

Channel: Alisa Childers

Views: 26,305

Keywords: apologetics

Id: Is48yTRCXSM

Length: 86min 59sec (5219 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2022