Another Gospel?: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity

by Alisa Childers

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I’m more convinced than ever that Christianity is not based on a mystical revelation or self-inspired philosophy. It’s deeply rooted in history.

We can’t allow truth to be sacrificed on the altar of our feelings. We can’t allow our fear of offending others to prevent us from warning them that they’re about to step in front of a bus.

I wouldn’t hear the term progressive Christianity until years later. But it was clear that this group of people wanted to “progress” beyond the Christianity they had known. They were going through what would practically become a rite of passage in this new and flourishing movement: deconstruction. In the context of faith, deconstruction is the process of systematically dissecting and often rejecting the beliefs you grew up with. Sometimes the Christian will deconstruct all the way into atheism. Some remain there, but others experience a reconstruction. But the type of faith they end up embracing almost never resembles the Christianity they formerly knew.[4] Traditional understandings of the Cross, the Bible, and the gospel get taken out with the trash.

What did the earliest Christians believe? Let’s break it down. They believed that Jesus died for their sins. Within two or three years of Jesus’ death, Christians were affirming the Atonement. At the core, they believed Jesus had died to save them from their sins—that he died in their place. He wasn’t simply killed by an angry mob for speaking truth to power. Since the Atonement is one of the foundational beliefs of Christianity, we must think about what we mean when we say, “Jesus died for my sins.” To get this question wrong is to get Christianity wrong. We’ll dive deeper into this in chapter 11. They believed that Jesus was buried and raised from the dead. Without the resurrection of Jesus, you don’t have Christianity. It’s that simple. Paul says it plainly later in the same chapter, when he connects the Resurrection with the Atonement. He writes, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). In other words, if the Resurrection is not an actual event in history—if Jesus is still in the tomb—then it doesn’t matter whether he died for your sins. Christianity is false. Might as well pack it up and call it a day. And since Jesus predicted his resurrection, it would make him a liar if it didn’t happen, and not the sinless Messiah Christians have long believed in. They believed that Jesus’ atoning death, burial, and resurrection were inseparable from the Scriptures. Essential to early Christianity was a belief that...

In fact, Kruger and Köstenberger demonstrate that the core canon was established as Scripture among Christians by the end of the first century.[12] This is such a powerful point because these supposed “other” Gospels weren’t written until the second and third centuries.[13] How could the later books compete with the four Gospels if those other books didn’t even exist yet?

the New Testament documents were written by actual eyewitnesses (or careful historians who interviewed the eyewitnesses) who walked with Jesus, talked with Jesus, and were commissioned by Jesus to write Christian Scripture.

But as the saying goes, you can’t judge a belief system by its abuses.

Without most of us even realizing it, much of the current evangelical culture has become a cult of personality. As human beings, we tend to put people on pedestals . . . especially pastors. We love strength. We are drawn to power. We innately want to follow the guy who will stand up for the truth and say what needs to be said, no matter the cost. “He may be harsh, but he speaks the truth.” “He doesn’t mince words.” “He has some rough edges . . . but so did Peter.” These are all excuses people use to explain away the unbiblical and unethical behavior of some beloved church leaders. These rationalizations send wounded sheep into the arms of progressive Christianity, where they will be validated and accepted. But ultimately they will be left to bleed out,

Author and speaker Jen Hatmaker wrote that “when white, mostly male, straight married, able-bodied people with a certain threshold of money and power are at the center of the narrative, we will never correctly identify good fruit. . . . Privilege is a reliable enemy of discernment.”[14] Interestingly, Hatmaker is white, straight married, and able-bodied, and she has a certain threshold of money and power. So according to her logic, the “privilege” she enjoys should make her mistrust her own views. Why then is she so confident in her own assertions?

Other definitions of fundamentalism are similar to this one from Dictionary.com: “Strict adherence to any set of basic ideas and principles.” In this sense, everyone is a fundamentalist. Everyone has a set of principles they live by. In the progressive church, those principles might include tolerance (except toward conservative Christians) and inclusion (except for those who disagree with their interpretation of the Bible regarding sexuality). Ironically, this type of tolerance becomes its own legalistic fundamentalism.

Many progressive Christians I meet grew up in impossibly strict sects of the faith that believed anyone outside their particular group was at best a nominal Christian and at worst a heretic. Because their faith communities had failed to teach them the difference between essential and nonessential beliefs, their entire foundation was rocked the first time they met a Christian who believed differently about the Rapture or the age of the earth.

When I began to describe the discomfort I had been experiencing with the books, teachings, and discussions being facilitated by the pastor, she grabbed two fun-size Mars bars from the candy bowl on her desk. She laid them side by side and asked me to imagine her opening one of them and putting a different wrapper around it. That piece would still be a Mars bar . . . just in another wrapper. She told me that was what the pastor was doing—giving me the same candy with a different label. My inner monologue quipped, She has it backwards. “It seems to me that he’s putting the same wrapper on two entirely different kinds of candy,” I replied. “It looks the same on the outside, but the core of it is very different.” Wheat among tares.

The circumcision party was trying to add something to what Jesus accomplished. As I’ve heard my current pastor repeat on many occasions, the easiest way to spot heresy is to remember this: Jesus + anything = a false gospel.

The problem with McLaren’s position is that there is nothing but our own personal sense of right and wrong (which will most often be informed by our cultural assumptions) to judge what is “right and wrong” in the Bible. This is something C. S. Lewis referred to as “chronological snobbery.” He described it as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”[11] He encourages good thinkers to ask questions like “Why did this idea go out of date?” and “Was it ever refuted or did it simply become unfashionable?” and “If so, who refuted it? How? Why?” It’s about having the humility and intellectual honestly to admit that the time we now live in is also a period in the history of the world. We, like all the people who have gone before us, are influenced by our cultural paradigms, societal norms, and collective intellectual assumptions. Just because our culture has come to a consensus on something does not make it true or right. Remember . . . there was a time in history when the cultural influencers pretty much agreed that slavery was just fine. And many of them even twisted the Bible to justify that belief, which is why good hermeneutics is so important.

the famously skeptical New Testament scholar Dr. Bart Ehrman, the author of the quote that opened this chapter. He is a former evangelical Christian who became an agnostic and atheist[7] after discovering what he believed to be factual errors in the biblical accounts. He regularly debates evangelical Christian scholars and has appeared on CNN, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He lost his faith, and he’s on a mission to explain why we should question our beliefs as well. But even he agrees that the bulk of these variants are essentially meaningless. He writes, The vast majority of these hundreds of thousands of differences are completely and utterly unimportant and insignificant and don’t matter at all. By far the most common differences simply show us that scribes in the ancient world could spell no better than most people can today (and the scribes didn’t have spell-check!). If we really want to know what the apostle Paul had to say about the importance of Jesus’ death and resurrection, does it matter to us how he spelled the word “resurrection”? Probably not. Moreover, lots of other kinds of differences in our manuscripts—as we will see—are easy to explain and don’t affect the meaning of the writings in the least.[8]

Thousands of copies from different time periods, theological traditions, and parts of the world all basically say the same thing. This is tremendously strong evidence that the New Testament was not, in fact, significantly changed . . . but was copied accurately.

The earliest Christians had no possible motivation for making the whole thing up. In fact, they would have had every reason to recant under threat of death and torture. But they didn’t. Because it was all true.

My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled 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 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred 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 affirming the perpetrators’ 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 God is love.

according to the New Testament, the essentials one must believe (at least implicitly) in order to be saved today are human depravity (I am a sinner); God’s unity (There is one God); the necessity of grace (I am saved by grace); Christ’s deity (Christ is God); Christ’s humanity (Christ is man); Christ’s atoning death (Christ died for my sins); Christ’s bodily resurrection (Christ rose from the dead); and the necessity of faith (I must believe).