Responding To A Progressive Christian | Unapologetic Episode 12

[Music] welcome to unapologetic where we defend truth without compromise with dr bobby conway the one minute apologist i'm your host tim hall on today's episode we're going to be discussing some views of a progressive [Music] christian so bobby before we get too far into this we need to acknowledge that we're missing one person for our last few episodes so why don't you just tell tell our audience where is heather conway did she you know get fired from the episode from being unapologetic or what if anybody's gonna get fired my wife will be firing me right no she did not get fired uh one of the things uh you know when we started the radio show we weren't thinking about planting a church and so since the radio show got off the ground here we've moved from southern california back to north carolina and we're starting image church and my wife has been engaged in women's ministries and she's also helping out with children's ministries and so all that to say you know you're you're building a house our workload has increased greatly so she will be kind of a spot guess coming on uh but nevertheless tim what is nice and what is encouraging uh for our audience to know at one minute apologists you serve as the executive producer i fly out several times a year or i would flout several times a year when i was living in california to do work together so in some ways it was a real no-brainer that when heather was getting crunched and busy that hey you and tim go at this and heather's heart too tim as you know it's very much pastoral it's um she's wants to talk about more of the practical side of things and i i think at certain points she'd feel like oh my goodness i get a little bit nervous bobby if you start talking about some of these types of things so we'll bring her in and keep her on a heart level and then you can kind of challenge me on some of these more academic topics that i know that you love as well all right well let's do that so we're going to start we're going to review some clips from a youtube video of a conversation between a conservative christian and a progressive christian now this video has close to 200 000 views so far on youtube and many of the statements that the progressive christian makes i've heard many who put themselves in that camp make so i thought it'd be really good to address some of these clips some of these issues that he talks about but before we do that would you just be able to define uh what progressive christianity is and why we're talking about it today sure and as you know tim i haven't watched this whole youtube piece that you want to interact around and you've got it titled conservative christians and you have progressive christians and i don't know if by conservative we're really talking about fundamentalists being juxtaposed with this idea of progressive christianity like ultra fundamentalists right so all that to say i think as conservative christians i mean we do need to conserve things like doctrine and morality yeah in the way to heaven but there is such a hyper fundamentalism sometimes that turns people off that the box is so constricting of christianity that it's not an accurate representation of the heart of god now you come over to progressive christianity and this is kind of um a look at god that uh keeps god evolving through time so to speak god's not going to be trapped you know by one particular culture god worked through moses in the wilderness in one particular way yeah god worked through uh jesus in another way uh being the second person of the trinity obviously uh you know loosening things up like you know jesus would talk about for example the the law you know uh you know you've heard it said love your neighbor uh you know as yourself you know uh in in the old testament and then he would kind of up the enemy and say no i tell you love your neighbor as i have loved you right so he's kind of so there's you know the progressives looking at this going seems like things are morphing a little bit and when the apostles come on the scene like paul you know his view of of issues might look a little bit different as well and so they're thinking well you just fast forward that trajectory up and today into issues like homosexuality lgbtq you know multiple ways to salvation they'll say hey if paul was around today it seems like things would be evolved as well right but this poses lots of problems that we're going to get into on whether or not there's such a thing as absolute morality absolute truth and so on and so forth yeah that's great i really appreciate uh that insight into that and so as you the listener are checking this out if you're listening to us on the radio and you want to listen to this show again you can head on over to our youtube channel youtube.com oneminuteapologist and it will be there for you to check out and if you're watching this on youtube we would love for you to comment and let us know if you have had a conversation with somebody that you would categorize or that would categorize themselves as a progressive christianity so let them let us know that in the comments so let's move to this first clip here in this first clip the the progressive christian is addressing the question of inclusion of lgbtq identifying people in the church so let's just go ahead and play this clip i need to figure out if the bible really does teach this if god really does hold lgbtq people in a categorically different space than people who identify as straight because the church has a long tradition of getting issues significantly wrong that do a vast amount of damage to people and this has been one where the church has done a ton of damage for lgbtq people and i hit a point where i'm like if i'm going to continue to be a part of this christian tradition being in this work i need to figure out if i can continue holding on to this belief with any integrity so that began so then i began a research of the bible on this topic and i came out the other side of that realizing oh no the bible doesn't teach what i've always been told that it says and that led me to then getting fired from my church once they figured out i was affirming in my theology and then that's how my wife and i kate started our church a couple years later but okay so there's several things that we could address in this clip but i think the two that i'd like to focus on right now is one is how the lgbt people have been treated by the church and the second one is how his church treated him so let's start with that first one what can we say about the way that historically people that have identified as lgbtq have been treated by the church well i mean there's no doubt that the church has dropped the ball uh at times as it relates to treating the lgbt community at the same token that is not a systemic statement because there are plenty of people in the church who have always been passionate about showing love to the lgbt community so i think when people talk like this gentleman's talking it's not as if every single christian is out there trying to beat up on the lgbt community just because they hold their own set of personal convictions see holding your own convictions and holding your own beliefs is not devaluing the lgbt community it's trying to be faithful to what you see in the scripture and so i think sometimes people think just because you don't agree with them that you're not valuing them but that's not the way it's to be understood now there are people that go out on the side of the roads and they're preaching hellfire and brimstone saying god hates and stuff like that which is horrific yeah and but the but the funny thing is about this most christians that i've ever known would completely agree with that most christians i've ever known would feel like we need to be loving to the lgbt community so i think in some ways uh we've created a little bit of a straw man here where we we've erected something that we've made bigger than it really is like i think the church has dropped the ball and i think we can always be more loving but i think people like this gentleman is dropping the ball and uh on what the truth says as well right right so let's maybe take a little bit of a shift here there has been a large movement a progression if you will in our culture over the last say 50 years where things i've heard you use this language before where things that were seen as sinful are now legal or legalized in our culture so maybe you can talk a little bit about just that shift and why that's so important well when you look at the moral trajectory that i would call it there are things in the culture um you're right that the church and the culture used to share as it relates to moral virtues but then things got tweaked right and so you went from this stage and the morals kind of go like this you reject something then you tolerate it then you accept it then you celebrate it and then you reject those who aren't in line with you yeah so take issues like divorce homosexuality lgbtq uh you know legalization of drugs at one time the culture would reject these things but then it began to tolerate it then it began to accept then it began to celebrate it like we have divorce celebration parties and then rejecting you if you don't fall in line right and so what ends up happening is inside the church progressive christianity where the culture has been growing further apart from the church right because the cultures legalize something just because something's legal doesn't mean it's moral right but the culture has legalized things like the government has right and so the culture and the church are growing further and fur they're apart and what some people do inside the church is they try to become progressive in their christianity so that they can stay in tune with the culture and what they often do is they look at what the culture is saying and then they go and they try to fit their biblical worldview into the culture and this is problematic so i call it going from one extreme to the other and the church is addicted of going from one extreme to the other and i don't think his approach is the right response to the the approach that he's challenging i do think that we have to think about um what's driving him and i see some deconstructionism stuff going on here i could see some post-modern philosophy at work uh i don't know this gentleman but i wouldn't be a bit surprised if the philosophy of deconstruction post-modernity has got a hold on him that's i would say that you're probably right watching the conversation several times there um so we've talked about the the mistreatment of lgbtq people in the church let's talk about his statement that he makes right at the end where he says as he kind of shifted as he moved into that position of of being lgt lgbtq affirming he lost his job at his church his church fired him so that raises this question about what are sort of the theological guiding principles that you might use as a pastor of uh image church to kind of judge whether or not a leader or a staff person is out of bounds yeah well i mean look i would imagine in his new church i wonder if he would have somebody like me on staff that's a good point you know uh so he might have felt like you know what i got let go because i was not uh because i'm lgbtq affirming well what if somebody's not lgbtq affirming i suspect his entire staff is lgbtq affirmative yeah so that's convenient right right so all that to say uh is it relates to uh you know how to handle this we do have to have some sort of guidelines i mean i recognize that for anybody i mean a muslim imam that's kind of overseeing a mosque has to have some of his guidelines in a you know and a buddhist priest is going to have some of his guidelines so i don't fault people for you know trying to have their own set of values to express what it is that they believe so i think that as a pastor yes i would expect that the staff would would be bible affirming now he said oh i came to see that this is not what the bible taught and i i can only imagine uh you know what his influences are on the bible and how he's seeing this progressive hermeneutic uh that is probably influenced him but i don't think it holds water i think yeah i think that he would get backed into a corner really quickly in fact i saw sean mcdowell great christian paul just a great friend of mine debate matthew vines and matthew vines was huge on this whole gay affirming project and uh sean mcdowell in a loving way absolutely dismantled vines it was a dismantling in a loving way in a loving way but it was a dismantling because the the hermeneutic that they're erecting uh it's it's very difficult it's very easy to show that you're being influenced by deconstructionism yeah uh postmodern and post-modern and modern d thinking yeah post-modern thinking yeah there we go we got it so yeah that's what i'd say to that yeah definitely okay well let's let's move to this next clip so bobby you've just finished up your second doctorate in the field of moral philosophy and this next clip he's going to make some claims about the nature of morality and so one of the things that he explains right before this clip is that he kind of takes this naturalistic evolutionary approach to um the origin to human origins uh so let's listen and then we'll get your response here on this well i'm struck by a couple words in in that in that phrase that i think are are worth pointing out before you know what we're talking about so god so the idea of god having a design if we if we accept the premise that god is a being that is up or out there that has i talked about it as like a set of divine documents that god keeps in like a file drawer that pulls out occasionally like this is this is sort of how i mapped out my idea for this thing um i i reject that as a um as a possibility for how things work like i don't think there is uh uh some sort of divine document out there that that lays out a being's preferred order of things i would then say i don't to just to go back to where i started i don't think that there is some uh being in the sky who's like and this now is how humans once they get once they show up on this thing it's been around for millions of years once they get here here's my expectations for how they move forward okay so this idea of god is a being that is out there with a filing cabinet full of morals is that how we should think about morality well a couple things you know first off i am sympathetic to anybody that wants to show great value to the lgbtq community i mean the truth is is they're people and we need to value everybody and god cares about everybody i mean the lord knows that i've got my issues and i want to be valued as a human being oh yeah and that might be valuing me for the positions that i hold on this uh right so i can understand um that i can feel that tear in my own heart emotionally where i want to reach out and say ah man that would be very difficult to want to be in a same-sex uh marriage and uh you know hear that christian's saying the bible says that you can't do that i can i can see the tension that i can see the pain and i would imagine his heart is just full of wide love in that way and i would want to share that i can feel that same tension but i'm also feeling the tension of this is uh i'm a christian and i see the bible and it's not up to me to treat it like going to tcby and sampling different flavors of the day and then discarding what i don't like and taking what i do like so it's it's my job not to be as concerned about what i think as much as what god thinks and aligning my thoughts to god's thoughts and so i think that's an important piece for me to say now to his point this moral filing cabinet so to speak well it is true that um through progressive revelation that you see some nuance right i mean there was a theocracy that was in place and there was all kinds of laws that were in place for god's people in the wilderness to distinguish him so you go well we're not obliged to you know comply by all those and i'd say yeah that's true uh because we're no longer under a theocracy yeah but all of the ten commandments except the uh the sabbath was repeated in the new testament again and paul on uh three different occasions in the new testament in romans one in its most uh withering critique of homosexuality is is right there it's it's reaffirmed again and so where this person's going is you you you're opening pandora's box so much you got the lgbtq but what about the polygamists uh right what about the polygamists what about the bisexual who says my love is so broad i can't be content if i can't have a husband and a wife right like why are you why are you making me make a choice between a wife or a husband i i'm capable of a broader love and it should be both well then what about the person who says i really feel like i can take care of four women really well right or you know what i have this relationship with this kid and all this stuff goes on and i'm like he's opening up pandora's box and in the bible uh when we see polygamous relationships taking place that was because god was meeting them in their culture where they were to bring them to where he was at with a monogamous relationship right so yeah so there's there's lots of of layers there i think the way that you laid it out was was fantastic let's move to kind of the second thing that he said there right at the end is it a problem for morality um if god used a guided evolutionary process to bring about humans now we don't necessarily have to say that we agree with a kind of a theistic evolutionary perspective or a young earth or old earth but just in general in principle that seemed to be one of the evidences that he gave as a reason to throw out the idea of god having a morality that he is expecting his creation to be able to follow is that a problem for for morality in general i i don't think so at all i mean i i it just seems like he's read chris or sam harris's moral landscape uh you know on well-being i mean i'm just wondering what what he's reading it you know uh foucault darada these uh french post-modern uh thinkers uh and look i get it like i had my own attacks with doubt um but the reality is today that it's like so so is he a moral relativist and it seems like he's clearly you know leaning that direction yeah um so i i think that that becomes problematic when you when you open things up that much where morals are just constantly changing i think that we can see as i mentioned there are certain codes like you had the dietary law um you had the the moral law right you had um you had the civil law uh in a theocracy and you know you don't need the dietary law anymore because that was pointing toward a picture in the civil law like you're not under kind of the same uh setup and even paul could recognize like hey nero had his ways and so uh they could recognize that but the moral law that moral law is written on our heart according to romans 2 that we are built with an ability to detect what is right and what is wrong and we can't underestimate how much we are being influenced by our culture and how yes it's changing the way we think about things and it's changing the way we feel about things but then we're going and we're re stating what god has to say and i'm just not real comfortable putting words in god's mouth right right so just the idea of um evolution happening over a long period of time survival of the fittest does that mean that god couldn't say that murder is wrong or that um adultery in any form is morally wrong or some of those things like does that create some sort of problem it's like oh well um it seems relativistic because like at one point it's it's it's okay and now it's bad is that you know does that create doesn't even make sense i mean okay i think uh i understand that the late ravi has gone through a lot of uh public scrutiny uh but i think he was if i'm not mistaken a theistic evolutionist uh so one of his he would not have claimed to be a moral relativist timothy keller if i'm not mistaken i think is a theistic evolutionist i think benjamin warfield uh was a theistic evolutionist you've had several gifted thinkers uh the language of god right yeah i mean uh francis collins um theistic evolutionists uh he would believe in absolute morals so i'd say uh the statement that theistic evolution paves the way for moral relativity doesn't uh hold ground to me because in fact the ones that i know who are theistic evolutionists would be moral absolutists okay okay so this is a good point so so to kind of finish up and round out today's episode why don't we talk a little bit about guilt so guilt has one of those things that you have spent a lot of time looking at we've already talked about some of the elements that might bring on a feeling of guilt how does guilt point to there being this kind of absolute morality and thus the existence of god just in a few minutes here okay well i mean there is pseudo guilt and there's authentic guilt so i think there's a lot of people that feel guilt but they're not in fact guilty there's a lot of people who are guilty and they don't feel guilt so you know our friend david wood our friend david wood right a psychopath so but he can recognize his guilt rationally he just doesn't feel guilt for his actions a healthy response would be able to recognize uh that guilt is caused by a moral uh you know transgression and we would have guilt feelings accompanying it and so we're living in a culture today that yes guilt um like the goodness of guilt i mean like there's what is what could be the goodness of guilt well it's it's good that we recognize that we are broken and that there's a god who came to redeem us i mean here's the deal the cross jesus was dying for the things that we had broken absolutely he wasn't dying for a moral relativism on the cross if if morals were relative and they really didn't hold much weight then what was he doing hanging on a cross well he was dying for our absolute right and for our absolute wrongdoing so that we could have an absolute way to forgiveness through christ now that is a really really really great point and what a great way to end so on next week's episode we'll look at some more clips particularly we'll talk about kind of where we left off today we'll address how do we understand morals can we look at the bible as a moral code book so we touched on that today but we'll respond to it a bit more in next week's episode so if you are checking us out on the radio you can watch this episode again at our youtube channel youtube.com one minute apologist and we hope that you join us again next week as we continue to look at progressive christianity bobby thank you so much for your insight today i really appreciate it yeah thank you so much but glad we got a chance to talk about this topic all right sounds good we'll see you next time well i hope you enjoyed that episode of the unapologetic show where we seek to defend truth without compromise if you're interested in checking out more unapologetic shows you can do so by clicking the playlist here if you are interested in credible answers to curious questions one of the things that we do a lot here on this channel feel free to subscribe we have answered over a thousand questions hope to meet you next time on the unapologetic show

Channel: oneminuteapologist

Views: 16,020

Rating: 4.8534031 out of 5

Keywords: Bobby Conway, one minute apologist, apologetics, Christianity (Religion), Christian Apologetics (Literature Subject), Jesus Christ (Deity), oma, apologetics christian, questions about God, Faith in God, mental health, crash course, progressive Christianity, what do progressive christians believe, objective morality, is the bible true, LGBTQ in the church

Id: sE9PEcXELSU

Length: 24min 56sec (1496 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021