What is "progressive Christianity"?
The definition of progressive Christianity is clear enough if we emphasize its provenance in the Social Gospel. Here it would mean a religious outlook that stresses the social-ethical striving of the disciple. Christians are summoned not only to an inward spiritual destiny – the salvation of their souls by faith in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus – but to a moral discipleship that seeks the transformation of society towards justice and well-being of all.
This is an old internal debate amongst Christians: do we labour for the individual salvation of souls or the moral renewal of the economic and political structures of society?
For the theological conservatives, the characteristic biblical text was “Come Ye Out and Be Separate” (2 Corinthians 6:17). Leave the sinful world behind and seek the spiritual kingdom of God. This entailed eschewing social action in the fields of economics and politics to work instead for the salvation of individual souls for a heavenly destiny.
The liberals, in the meantime, who had inherited at least remnants of the social gospel, generally laboured in anti-war movements and campaigns for minimum wages, humane and safe working conditions, and universal medical care. Socialists along the line of Tommy Douglas came out of the social gospel cast. A vision of a Christian social order implied a commitment to a fair and equal society.
In recent times, however, the definitional basket of progressive Christianity got loaded with alternative theological content: a low Christology (stress, sometimes exclusive, on the humanity of Jesus); pantheism (God is a name for the cosmic whole); panentheism (all things are in God or God is in all things); biblical story of Israel as tribal formation rather than holy history, and so on. In other words, progressive Christianity became as doctrinal as the theism (belief in a personal, providential God) it sought to displace.
Now this is ironical inasmuch as the word “progressive” on one level conveys forward movement and novelty. In fact, however, it has come to stand for a fixed essence of beliefs pitched on the immanentist side of the theological debate. This means that a vision of a transcendent, providential deity is abandoned in favour of a God who is either identical with the natural and social world or, at the very least, is to be found pre-eminently in the space-time world and not in the Bible. In some cases, this culminates in undisguised atheism.
With acknowledgments to RIM (Research in Motion), a term like TIM (theology in motion) might more accurately represent the outlook of a critical Christian theology that simultaneously embodies a received revelation while committing itself to contemporaneous and contextual forms of insight and interpretation.