[Oe List ...] 1/19/2023, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Roger Wolsey: All-Loving - a Better Doctrine; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Jan 19 08:04:17 PST 2023
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screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2364141215 #yiv2364141215templateBody .yiv2364141215mcnTextContent, #yiv2364141215 #yiv2364141215templateBody .yiv2364141215mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv2364141215 #yiv2364141215templateFooter .yiv2364141215mcnTextContent, #yiv2364141215 #yiv2364141215templateFooter .yiv2364141215mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}} By Rev. Roger Wolsey
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All-Loving - A Better Doctrine
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| Essay by Rev. Roger Wolsey
January 19, 2023“Good orthodoxy leads to good orthopraxy” is a common aphorism wielded among conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. It’s frequently worded in a more aggressive manner: “without proper orthodoxy, there can be no proper Christian discipleship.” These claims intend to convey that unless people believe certain doctrines and dogmas – and in a literal way – they are incapable of engaging in doing good in the world. Moreover, such declarations also seek to convey that if, for some freakish reason, some humans do happen to engage in good acts in the world without giving intellectual consent to a proscribed set of truth claims, those good acts are accidents and “don’t count” - they aren’t enough to be saved (get into heaven).
Examples of these truth-claims that conservatives claim must be agreed with include:
- Jesus is literally God – one and the same.
- Jesus’s mother was literally a virgin when she birthed him.
- Jesus literally walked on water, turned water into wine, and raised people from the dead.
- God is all-powerful and intercedes in the world, performing literal miracles which defy the laws of physics.
- Jesus was born to be killed as the requisite sacrifice needed to atone for human sins, and that the literal shedding of his blood was necessary to meet this need (any form of execution that didn’t involve him bleeding would not have been sufficient).
These beliefs require subscribing to the theologies of supernatural theism and the penal or substitutionary theory of the atonement.
Progressive Christianity rejects both supernatural theism and the substitutionary theory of the atonement. Such rejections are considered blasphemous and heretical to conservative Christians, as they have no form of Christianity that doesn’t embrace those theologies. Such Christians have lived sheltered lives, oblivious to the reality that the 66 books of the (Protestant Bible) – convey an even greater number of theologies. They are uninformed about the variety of Christianities which existed prior to the era of the creeds and doctrines that began when the Roman Emperor Constantine decriminalized Christianity (eventually co-opting it to give Divine sanction to Empire). They are unaware that no Church Council in Church history has ever ruled that any one theory of the atonement is the “one, right, true,” and/or “correct” one. And they are unaware that the moral influence/example theory of the atonement is fully supported by verses in the Bible.
Given that state of unaware dogmatic slumber, we progressive Christians who are unjustly rebuked and condemned by conservative Christians can take heart in recalling words attributed to Yeshua of Nazareth as he was dying on the cross – “forgive them for they know not what they do.”
I provided the following working definition of progressive Christianity in my book Kissing Fish.
“Progressive Christianity is an approach to the Christian faith that is influenced by post-liberalism and post-modernism and:
-proclaims Jesus of Nazareth as Christ, Savior, and Lord;
-emphasizes the Way and teachings of Jesus, not merely His person;
-emphasizes God's immanence not merely God's transcendence;
-leans toward panentheism rather than supernatural theism;
-emphasizes salvation here and now instead of primarily in heaven later;
-emphasizes being saved for robust, abundant/eternal life over being saved from punishing hell;
-emphasizes the social/communal aspects of salvation instead of merely the personal;
-stresses social justice as integral to Christian discipleship;
-takes the Bible seriously but not necessarily literally, embracing a more interpretive, metaphorical understanding;
-emphasizes orthopraxy more than orthodoxy (right actions over right beliefs);
-embraces reason as well as paradox and mystery — instead of blind allegiance to rigid doctrines -and dogmas;
-embraces the insights of contemporary science;
-doesn’t consider homosexuality to be sinful;
-and does not claim that Christianity is the only valid or viable way to connect to God (is nonexclusive).” p. 63
You’ll notice the mention of panentheism above. It’s a form of theism that has a long history within the Christian faith and is fully grounded in the Bible; e.g., the apostle Paul’s describing God as the one “in Whom we live, move, and have our being.” This theological perspective recognizes that the Divine is fully immanent within all Creation as well as being fully transcendent from it. As I shared in Kissing Fish:
“Panentheism doesn’t embrace traditional Christian understandings of the “Omni” qualities attributed to God by some of the early Christian theologians who were influenced by pagan[1] Greek philosophical ideals. God isn’t understood as omnipotent (all powerful). Rather, God is viewed as very powerful – as powerful as God can be and be in authentic relationship to us. It might be said that in creating humans God relinquished some of Her power to us to allow for the possibility of real and genuine relationship.
Similarly, in the panentheistic view God isn’t understood as being omniscient (all knowing) either, at least not how that’s been traditionally understood. If God has given us free will and agency, and genuine relationship with God, then God can’t know everything in the future. In other words, God knows all that is possible for Her to know given that She’s turned over some of Her power and agency to humanity. This is still an awful lot of knowledge. It is with this knowledge of the past, the present, and the likely and probable future that God seeks to influence us through the Holy Spirit toward the most ideal and beautiful options in each and every moment.
I can’t speak for all of progressive Christianity, but I would like to introduce a new “omni” quality for God, perhaps to override the “omnis” that have been displaced or reinterpreted – “omniamo” or “omniamore”) – all loving. If there is one essential and consistent theme throughout the whole of the Bible it is God’s love. We see that God loves us unconditionally like a protective parent, like a wooing lover, and like a committed lover. God loves us incarnationally, down to earth, and relationally. God loves us like a friend. In sum, God loves us like a God worthy of humans loving Her. We also see that God calls us to love in these same ways, to love ourselves and to love others, as God loves us. Indeed, one of the shortest verses in the Bible is one of the most profound: “God is love.” (1 John 4:8).
Progressive Christianity tends to endorse this form of theism because it corresponds better with the fullness of the biblical text, the writings of the earliest Christian theologians and mystics, the insights of contemporary science, and with many people’s lived experiences of God.”
Yes, orthodoxy does matter, yet our conservative friends don’t have a monopoly on it. Moreover, I suggest that what they hold as orthodox is often an adventure in missing the point, a missing the forest for the trees that leads to the bad fruit of a false orthopraxy of being judgmental, rigid, and inquisitional, – even to the point of the sin of sodomy – being unwelcoming, inhospitable, and exploitive – which is the last thing we need in the Church.
Many progressive Christians embrace the first Creation myth found in Genesis Chapter 1:26, where it says, “And God said, let us create humans in our image,… and God created them, male and female.” The Hebrew word for God here is Elohim which conveys the plurality within the Divine - including the masculine and feminine. We also celebrate how the Divine self-references with the expansive pronouns “us” and “our.” This, coupled with Jesus’ call to embrace non-gender conforming persons (Matthew 19:12); and Paul’s reminder that “in Christ there is no male or female,” helps us embrace and celebrate the full diversity of humanity – including all sexes and genders. Good orthopraxy.
The doctrine of the Trinity is paramount to conservative Christians and some of them claim that progressive Christians reject it. That may be true for those who are unitarians, yet many progressive Christians can and do believe Jesus was Divine (in the way that you and I are), and concur that he’s the 2nd person of the Trinity. Progressive Christians honor and celebrate Jesus as a unique and fully incarnate manifestation of God. We live and move and have our being in God, so did Jesus. Many of us view the Trinity as a beloved Christian poem of who God is – ultimate reality which is in dynamic, loving relationship. This view doesn’t see the Trinity as asserting literal ontological reality, but rather as deftly worded devotional poetry. Yet poems don’t literally define things. Like all art, and theology, they point to what is beyond them. Viewed in this way, we see the Trinity reminding us that we exist in relation to others – and that we are called to love ourselves and others dynamically and lovingly. Good orthopraxy.
Taking the Bible seriously is another tenet of conservative Christian orthodoxy. And, while progressive Christians don’t consider the Bible as inerrant, infallible, or dictated by Jesus or God, we do just that. We see Jesus’ repeated instructions (and actions that demonstrate them) to love – ourselves, our neighbors (especially those in great need), and even our enemies and those teachings lead us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and to prophetically speak truth to power and work to reduce the number of people who are hungry, naked, unhoused, or in prison. Good orthopraxy.
It’s important to realize that none of the people described as experiencing salvation in the Gospels – and in the entirety of the New Testament – subscribed to any of the “required truth claims” our conservative friends insist upon. The orthodoxy that matters is an orthodoxy of the heart – not the head. It’s being open to the inner knowing of God’s omniamo all-loving presence in our lives – and living accordingly.~ Rev. Roger Wolsey
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. Roger Wolsey is a United Methodist pastor who resides in Grand Junction, CO. Roger is the author of Kissing Fish: Christianity for people who don’t like Christianity and blogs for Patheos as The Holy Kiss. Roger serves on the Board of Directors of ProgressiveChristianity.Org. Roger served as the Director of the Wesley Foundation campus ministry at the University of Colorado in Boulder for 14 years and has served as pastor of churches in Minnesota, Iowa, and Colorado. He currently serves as the pastor of Fruita United Methodist Church in Colorado and as the “CRM” (Congregational Resource Minister) for the Utah/Western Colorado District of the Mountain Sky Conference. His newest book, “Discovering Fire: Spiritual Practices that Transform Lives” https://www.rogerwolsey.com/author-writer will be out in March 2023.
[1] I refer to these as “pagan” Greek ideals with a bit of sheepish delight. I don’t normally use the word pagan as it’s usually judgmental conservative Christians who wield that term – and they use it in a dismissive manner. I appreciate the irony of pointing out a truth such persons aren’t aware of – that what has become “traditional” Christian theology is greatly borrowed from non-Jewish and non-Christian sources. During the Middle Ages, the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers were “discovered” by the Church – writings that had been kept preserved by Muslims. Much of what has come to be considered “Christian orthodoxy” is actually Platonism. See: Daniel W. Graham and James L. Siebach, “Philosophy and Early Christianity,” 210-212; Cook, “How Deep the Platonism,” 269-286 in Farms Review of Books, vol. 11, no. 2 (1999). |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Jessica
I'm tired of people making assumptions every time I say I'm a Christian. I feel like I have to say “not that kind of Christian” every time. Do you have another suggestion for what I could use or call myself?
A: By Rev. Dr. Mark SandlinDear Jessica,
This is a problem that I've been struggling with as well. I actually have been for quite some time. I can't say that I have THE answer, but I do have AN answer – at least for now.
In terms of the Christian liturgical calendar, we've just come out of the season of Epiphany. It is a time when we remember the story of the Magi. As I read through the story, as it is written in Matthew, there was this "thing" that kept standing out for me: everybody was looking for something. At some point, the thought struck me, "according to this story, Christians should be seekers." It's in our ancestral DNA.
Mary and Joseph are seeking a place to give birth to their first child. Sometime later, the magi would set out seeking a new “king” – one foretold by the stars in the night sky. Along the way, as they searched him out, as they followed the bright star in the sky, they would run into a different King who was also seeking – he was searching for this foretold king who would threaten his power. Sometime later, Jesus and his family will flee all that they know in search of a safe place to live.
The Jewish and Christian religious stories are stories underlined with the constant reality of seeking out something, searching for something. Adam and Eve seek out knowledge. Noah seeks shelter from the storm. Abraham and Sarah seek out the unknown land God sends them to. Joseph seeks to understand the king's dreams and bring his family back together. Moses seeks to bring his people to the promised land. David seeks to become the leader God clearly believes he is. The prophets seek to bring the people of God back to God's ways. Jesus seeks to show us what love looks like. Paul seeks to grow the church in the ways of God.
We are seekers. It is our story. We cannot escape it. We should not try. We Christians are seekers. Always have been. Always will be. It's in our ancestral DNA.
I can't help but wonder if that might be a worthy goal for many of us: to be seekers. Not believers. Not Christians. Not church-goers. Not Spiritual But Not Religious. Just: Seekers.
For now, that's going to be my answer when someone asks about my spirituality, “I'm a seeker.” As a matter of fact, always have been and, hopefully, always will be.
~ Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. Mark also serves as the President and Co-executive Director of ProgressiveChristianity.org. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press’ Award of Excellence in 2012. His Podcast The Moonshine Jesus Show is on Mondays at 4:30pm ET. Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin. |
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Did you make a New Year’s resolution this year? Have you already given up on yours? Are you sick and tired of making resolutions? One of the reasons that we often fall short on whatever resolution we make is that we are too ambitious and don’t have a plan for sustained action. Setting a concrete, realistic goal and determining appropriate steps that can be taken to achieve that goal are the keys to a successful resolution!
At ProgressiveChristianity.org, we have resolved to expand the influence of the Progressive Christian Movement. This isn’t something that we’ve decided haphazardly. We know that if we are going to combat the Christian Right and provide an authentic, inclusive movement, we must take things one step at a time and invest in quality programming and resources.
We’ve been working on several items diligently over the past couple of years and are beginning to see the fruits of our effort. In addition to the resources that we have always provided, we are working on expanding our “Things that Matter” broadcast to address contemporary issues more frequently, we are creating videos on Progressive Christian theology that can be utilized by faith communities, we are distributing a full 3-year “A Joyful Path” children’s curriculum, we are lifting up more diverse voices of emerging thinkers within the Progressive Christian Movement, and we are in the midst of a massive move of our content to a new website that is much more user-friendly!
If we are going to continue this incredible work, though, we need your help. The reason that this organization is thriving is that you have been invested in the work that we are doing. Perhaps an achievable resolution you could make during 2023 is to support the work at ProgressiveChristianity.org on a regular basis. Could you make a recurring or one-time donation to help set the tone for the Progressive Christian Movement in 2023? We appreciate your support and generosity.
Happy New Year!
Caleb
The Rev. Dr. Caleb J. Lines
Co-Executive Director, ProgressiveChristianity.org |
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| Don't miss the next Episode of PC.org's Executive Directors Mark and Caleb on:
The Moonshine Jesus Show
- every Monday at 4:30pm Eastern Time – watch live on Facebook,, YouTube, Twitter, Podbean |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Need for the Christian to Journey Beyond Scripture, Creed and Church
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
August 22, 2013Theology is a rational, deeply human, attempt to explain our experience with God. Theology is, therefore, never primary; it is always secondary to experience. Theological explanations can thus never be eternal. All explanations not only will change, but must change when knowledge grows and by so doing will always invalidate previous conclusions. Theology can never be infallible, unchanging or ultimately real. This, however, is a reality that quite frequently cannot be embraced by religious institutions and religious leaders.This means that there never has been an “inerrant Bible” or an “infallible pope.” The books of the Bible are always human attempts to explain a primary life experience, while every church hierarchy, including the papacy, is engaged in the task of trying to determine ultimate truth in a subjective, culturally relativized world. All scriptures and all theological pronouncements are inevitably time-bound and time-warped. A couple of illustrations might help us to see that no human explanation of any experience can ever be inerrant or infallible.Since the dawn of self-conscious life, we human beings have had the experience of watching the sun rise in the east and set in the west That is a phenomenon well documented all over the world, an objective reality. Look, however, at the various ways that this experience has been explained throughout history. The explanations range from the ancient Egyptians, who interpreted this pattern of the sun to be caused by the Sun God riding a chariot across the sky each day surveying the world, all the way to the modern scientist, who asserts that the phenomenon of the sun’s rising and setting is the result of the planet earth turning on its axis every 24 hours, as it makes its elliptical journey around the sun. These explanations obviously vary widely, but note that the experience itself is identical.In a similar fashion an epileptic seizure is another human phenomenon that has been observed from the dawn of time. In the New Testament an epileptic seizure was explained as having been caused by an invisible, demonic spirit suddenly taking over its victim, shaking him or her violently, hurling the victim to the ground and forcing the victim into an unconscious, trembling state until the spirit finally departed as suddenly as it arrived. Modern medicine, however, explains this same experience as a malfunction of the brain, resulting in a cascade of misfiring electrical impulses, which jump the track, so to speak, and thus create the resulting sense of seizure. The explanations are widely divergent, but once again the experience is identical.It is the constant temptation and the regular pitfall of religious institutions and religious spokespersons to confuse their explanations with the experience itself. The gospels, we need to state clearly, are not the dictated word or words of God, but are rather the time-bound and time-warped explanations of the Jesus experience, couched in the language and understandings of the first century. At the time the New Testament was written, no one knew that women had an egg cell, so the story of Jesus’ birth to a virgin could be used to explain the experience, which was that in Jesus they believed they had encountered something, which human life by itself was not capable of producing. In that time, we need to understand that no one quite understood what happens to the body at death. They could, therefore, reasonably assume that the death process could be reversed, if the reversal occurred within three days, after which the decaying of the body became obvious. When the New Testament was written, no one knew about germs, viruses, tumors or cardiovascular disease and so sickness was interpreted as divine punishment for sins committed. That was why it made sense to treat sickness by offering prayers and sacrifices. If we assume, as fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics still seem to do, that the gospel narratives are in fact literal renditions of what actually happened in time or in history, then religion has become idolatrous. It has invested the perfection of God in something that is in fact a human creation. By literalizing the Bible, religious people have also unknowingly literalized the world view of the first century that assumed that anything that could not be understood by first century minds must be a miracle, explained only by an appeal to the presence of a supernatural power. So the presumably “inerrant” Bible of Protestant fundamentalism and the presumably “infallible” theological doctrines of Roman Catholicism, become nonsensical in the 21st century. A Christianity based on those outdated ideas can never be compelling to 21st century people unless they are willing and able to close their minds to modern knowledge. Biblical inerrancy is therefore not just ignorance, it is a distortion of both truth and humanity. To quote the Bible to oppose equality for women or justice and dignity for homosexual people is to confuse the cultural fears of yesterday with ultimate truth. It is also to be pathetically and profoundly uninformed.What then about the creeds? They are fourth century attempts to codify religious beliefs that had been drawn primarily from the Bible. To insist that creeds are unchanging truth or to make creedal faith the hallmark of Orthodoxy is to state something that is absurd. It is to pretend that a quite limited fourth century, Greek-oriented world view is the same as “the mind of God.” So, when we learn that there is no all-seeing God, who lives above the sky of a three-tiered universe, who is always looking down to record our deeds in the record book of life, by which our eternal destiny will be determined, is not to say that there is no God, but it is to say that truth is always relative. Heaven as a place of reward and hell as a place of punishment have become nonsensical dated ideas. So is a Bible that contains the story of the Tower of Babel, the raining of heavenly bread, called manna, from the sky to feed the starving Hebrew people and the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven. If the story of Jesus’ ascension literally means that he went up into the sky then we need to embrace the modern reality that Jesus did not get to heaven, he got into orbit or else he escaped the force of gravity and wandered into the infinity of space. Yet, on the basis of those limited, time bound fourth century creeds religious wars have been fought, religious persecution has been carried out, “heretics” have been burned at the stake and “witches” have been hanged to keep alive the myth that human words can capture, in some unchanging form, eternal truth. So often the business of religion has ceased to be the search for truth and has become the activity of mind control.Christians who claim inerrancy for the first century words of the gospels or infallibility for their doctrinal understanding of the fourth century words of the creeds are quite simply delusional people, and in the name of both God and truth, they need to be resisted mightily. Yet the facts of history reveal that Galileo was condemned by the church for suggesting that first century cosmology was inaccurate and Darwin is still being roundly criticized and politically resisted for suggesting that pre-modern biology is simply incorrect. I was both startled and amazed when I read recently a widely reported poll taken in Georgia, which revealed that 73% of the registered Republicans and 53% of registered Democrats in that state still believe literally the creation story in the Bible. This is not a commentary on faith, it is a commentary on how an uninformed faith can impede and distort the educational system of one of the states of this union. To think that an electorate this deeply uninformed can still choose political leaders, who will make laws for this entire nation is frightening!Yet, having now said all of these things, and quite clearly I hope, I still want to tell the world that there is a difference between an experience and the culturally bound explanation of that experience. I still plumb the meaning of the Bible on a daily basis. I still gather in my parish church every Sunday and recite the creed. I do these things joyfully and self-consciously. Am I simply schizophrenic, living simultaneously in two different worlds? Am I being delusional by intention and pretending to participate in rituals in which I do not really believe? No, neither is the case. I am rather a believer, not in a literal Bible, but in the experience to which the words of that Bible point. I am a believer, not in the literal creeds, but in the reality to which those creedal words point. I view the creeds as a love song that my ancestors in faith created to help them process their God experience. I do not mind joining in the singing of their love song. I recognize my kinship with them in the history of my faith’s development over the centuries. The creeds are not for me an imposed girdle into which I have to force my flabby faith. They are not a straitjacket designed to force me to live within the theological boundaries and understandings of fourth century people. They are the dated explanations of an experience that I still believe and acknowledge as real.Yes, let there be no mistake, I am convinced that there is a reality to the experience of God, but I do not interpret this reality as if God is a supernatural being who does miracles. I rather see this reality as a transcendent presence that is beyond human boundaries and that calls me and compels me not to allow those boundaries to bind my humanity into less than it is capable of being. I view God as the Source of life and love, and as the Ground of Being calling me to live, to love and to be. My Christian life is thus a journey for which there is no literal roadmap. I am convinced that if I walk this journey deeply enough and faithfully enough, I will be led beyond all religious forms – beyond scripture, creeds, doctrine and dogma and into the wordless wonder of the true meaning of worship. The Christian Church exists, I believe, to point all of us beyond the boundaries of our own humanity. It is a pity that institutional religion in all its forms does not understand its own message!~ John Shelby Spong |
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