METAPHOR WARNING!!!] Progressive Christianity is a loving, affable and amiable nascent tradition, but I think that it’s fundamentally air-headed. People who subscribe to it are almost invariably – and somewhat oddly – un-air-headed, in fact, admirably clear-headed, so this isn’t a statement about them. And of course, Progressive Christianity isn’t a person. Even if it were, loving, affable, amiable, air-headed people are to be treasured and themselves loved – because people are to be loved, full stop, but in their case, they are both loving and lovable. They’re easy to love. Air-headedness is easy to love. And Progressive Christianity is easy to love.
It’s an oversimplification to say that Progressive Christianity is an emergent tradition ‘within Protestantism’, but…
Now, I subscribe to the Centre for Action and Contemplation newsletter, and visit their website often. Richard Rohr, its founder, is a deeply congenial and more than that inspirational figure and writer for Progressive Christians (as he is for me!) – but Rohr is grounded in Roman Catholic spirituality and doctrine. He wears it very lightly, but it exists as a hinterland, a territory, a soil, you might say, in which he is grounded; rooted – except that ‘rooted’ is too static a metaphor. Rohr invites us on a journey, and has clearly himself been on a long journey which continues, and ‘rooted’ as an adjectival metaphor doesn’t really work for him, and it isn’t what he invites us to. Better to see, I think, Rohr’s Catholic hinterland as co-extensive with the world, indeed the universe. Because of that, he lives simultaneously in both, without acknowledging a boundary between the two.
I think that Progressive Christianity tries to do that, wants to do that, and to a not inconsiderable extent manages to do that. As Rohr and the Centre for Action and Contemplation emphasize, before anything else – and despite what fifteen, eighteen, to some extent even nineteen centuries of the story of the Church has taught us incrementally – Christianity is a lifestyle, a radical living-out of my, and our, discipleship of Jesus in daily life and all its human interactions.
That’s the nub of it – before all else.
And before all else, the Church is the community of those who believe. Even when it isn’t. Loving trumps the liabilities of air-headedness every time. ubi caritas, ibi Deus est. “
“It has been testified somewhere…” (Hebrews 2:8 and every preacher since who wanted to quote something they couldn’t source) that “The Gospel of the Love of God loses something in the telling when it’s put across by the Spanish Inquisition” (unattributable, but I wanted to quote it anyway). Doctrinal pernicketiness, let alone doctrine-inspired judgmentalism, is the enemy of love and the parent of persecution.
Theology, though, not so much. Good theology, never. And it seems to me that Progressive Christianity as a movement is somewhat theology-averse.
Now: you can speak of God as love, and you can preach that God is love, and you can remind everyone in church and try to persuade people outside the Church that God is love – and you have the heart of it. You can say, with Paul, that “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” And that is the heart of it.
But…
And I hear you say, “How can you possibly follow up a paragraph like the one above with “But…”? Bear with me. This ‘but’ is a good one…
But how do you speak of Jesus as the self-expression of God, as the embodiment, the articulation, the “existential manifestation of the Ground of our Being” (and Paul Tillich, whose formulation that is, has become more and more important to me over the decades) – how, above all, can you speak of Jesus Christ as the embodiment of God’s love, without having recourse to a Latinized version of ‘embodiment’ like, oh, I don’t know, how about ‘incarnation’? How can you articulate in distinctively Christian ways the involvement of the Loving God with the world we live in, unless you have something to say about how the Divine robes itself in the molecules of human flesh, and how it vests itself with human compassion, human indignation, human frustration and human – let’s say it – limitation…?
Most Progressive Christian critiques of ‘traditional’ (unintended dismissal, right there) theology understand the ‘traditional’ view of Jesus as 50% human and 50% divine – which does indeed look like (and I strongly suspect is) the ‘understanding’, if you can call it that, of most conservative Protestants, and their preachers.
Of course – but you have to deploy theological categories and techniques to be able to articulate this – that’s an historic heresy. It’s called Apollinarianism – the understanding that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity came down to inhabit and animate a human body. “God in a meat suit” is one rather trenchant way of describing this. It’s a late heresy, too, from the last stage of hammering out the final position of historic Christianity. It denies that Jesus Christ had/has a human soul.
The Chalcedonian formulation of the ‘two natures’ rejects that rejection. In one being is full humanity, and the full presence, commitment and nature of God. Everything that God is, is there in the defiant love, the frustration and anger, the confusion, fear, despair, the tears of grief for Lazarus, the tears and ‘sweat like great drops of blood’ of the terrified man who doesn’t want to die, the articulation – yes, it’s the fourth time I use this word here, but it’s the one that says what I want to say – of abandonment by God on the cross; all that’s God.
“God at the furthest point of remove from God.” “Godforsaken God”.
The utter identification of God with a godless world, that crucifies people in their millions, in myriad ways that don’t require a physical, wooden instrument of execution.
How can you say all that, as it needs to be said, if Divine Love isn’t allowed to illuminate a theology? How can you explore all that discipleship of Jesus means, if the implications of discipleship aren’t thought through radically?
How can you say with Herbert McCabe, the somewhat renegade and certainly radical Dominican theologian of the sixties and seventies, that when the fulness of the Love of God comes into the world without reserve, without any holding-back, crucifixion is inevitable, in a world like this, without something approaching theology?
In other words, how can you love first – and love always comes first – without following up on the insights that Love gives into the way the world is?
It seems to me that that’s what Progressive Christianity tends to do, It’s a fundamentally liberal, and therefore not radical movement. It’s in perpetual danger of setting love over against solidarity, compassion over against identification, charity (which in twenty-first century usage is not the same as caritas). It’s hard to imagine a thoroughgoing Liberation Theology rooted in Progressive Christianity.
Progressive Christianity is a movement of thought and life that I admire profoundly and deeply. It influences and challenges me in profound ways. But I can’t identify myself with it completely. I don’t think you can identify Richard Rohr completely with Progressive Christianity, because of that rootedness in Roman Catholic spirituality and doctrine, that he doesn’t have to articulate, because it’s just there, and he has other, progressive things to say, about love and its demands, and discipleship and its demands.
I’m a Protestant, God help me, and there’s much about my hinterland that’s deeply problematic for me. But it’s a tradition of theologizing, of reflecting on God, that I can wrestle with, dissent from, and turn to. It’s what enables me to [try to] be radical, something I learned fifty years ago at university. And in among the God-awful* assemblages of unloving, ungracious, God-distorting detritus of a tradition that too often depicts God as a psychotic and narcissistic monster, who can only ‘forgive’ everyone else by killing someone in their place, there is a radical strand forged by resistance to, and denunciation of, all of that.
I’ve pondered what my self-description as a Christian should be. Once upon a time it would have been “a catholic chassis; Protestant engine; Celtic-Christian bodywork; science-loving tyres for a good grip of the road; radical headlights to help me see as far as possible; a superb sound-system, because music brings me to God; and furry dice for whimsy.”
I’d stick by all of that, but it’s too complicated. I’m a simple catholic Christian, who believes what Christians have always believed, everywhere, and a radically-inclined, doctrinally-oriented and irascible theologian who’s deeply irritated by the compromises of liberal Christianity as much as the lovelessness of conservative theology. That’s why I admire Progressive Christianity, and love and respect Progressive Christians – but I could never be one. Ironically, it’s all a bit too liberal and conservative for me…
Dark-adapted I 