Chapter Five: Why They Call It ‘Progressive’
Start with the name itself, because the name is doing a lot of work.
The word progressive positions its users as people moving in the right direction — forward, developing, mature — while implying that those who hold traditional doctrine are stuck, fearful, and behind the times. That framing is built into the label before a single argument has been made. It’s a clever move.
It’s worth asking why advocates of this theological position chose progressive rather than liberal. The answer is revealing. The word liberal, despite its positive connotations of freedom and openness, carries historical baggage that progressive theologians would rather leave behind. J. Gresham Machen, writing in 1923, identified liberal theology as “an entirely different, and man-made, religion founded on a sentimental and superficial view of God.” More damaging still, liberal theology lost. Mainline Protestant denominations that embraced it in the twentieth century experienced catastrophic membership decline, not renewal. The word liberal carries the weight of that failure. So the movement rebranded.
Meanwhile, the word conservative has been strategically undermined by connecting it to political reactionism rather than theological faithfulness. When a traditional believer describes themselves as theologically conservative, a progressive critic will often respond: “What does conservative even mean? Aren’t all Christians selective about what they conserve?” It sounds reasonable. But notice what the move accomplishes: by emptying both conservative and liberal of meaning, the progressive framework positions itself as the only sensible option — the one that has somehow moved beyond labels. That’s a rhetorical sleight of hand, not a theological argument.
Here’s the deeper problem with the word progressive as applied to Christian theology: it assumes that newer is truer — that the present moment has unique insight into questions the past got wrong, and that the arc of history bends toward greater openness and inclusion. Those aren’t theological conclusions. They’re assumptions imported from secular Enlightenment philosophy and applied to Scripture from the outside. They aren’t derived from the Bible. They’re brought to the Bible.
Progressive Christianity is also defined, to a striking degree, by what it’s against. Its primary theological target is what it calls evangelicalism — with its emphasis on biblical authority, personal conversion, the cross as substitutionary sacrifice, and the exclusivity of salvation in Christ. Progressive theologians typically trace the Church’s failures to evangelical “rigidity” and “exclusivity.” But a movement defined more by what it’s departing from than by what it’s moving toward is worth examining carefully. When a theological position has to define itself primarily in contrast to its opponents, that’s a sign its positive content is thin.
The deepest problem with calling this movement progressive is the claim it makes about truth itself — that Christian teaching is subject to ongoing development in such a way that later generations can correct or supersede earlier ones. But this is the exact opposite of what the New Testament says about itself. Jude doesn’t urge his readers to develop the faith into something better. He urges them to defend it as something fixed and complete:
Jude 3 — Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people.
Once for all. Not “for us to keep developing.” Not “a starting point for future generations to improve.” Entrusted. Guarded. Passed on intact.
Chapter Six: Where Progressive Christianity Actually Came From
Progressive Christianity didn’t arrive out of nowhere. It has a long, traceable history. And if you want to understand why its ideas aren’t actually progressive — why they’re the same familiar theological mistakes in a new dress — you need to follow that history back to its source.
Friedrich Schleiermacher: Moving the Goalposts
The theological tradition that eventually produced Progressive Christianity begins with a German theologian named Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). Scholars call him the father of liberal theology, and that title is accurate.
Schleiermacher was facing a real problem: the Enlightenment had produced a generation of intellectuals who found Christianity’s specific truth claims hard to defend. His solution was bold — stop defending doctrine, and instead relocate the heart of Christianity to religious experience. If doctrine can be attacked, but experience can’t, put the weight on experience.
For Schleiermacher, the essence of religion wasn’t a set of specific beliefs about God revealed in Scripture. It was what he called a “feeling of absolute dependence” — a universal human sense of need, of reaching for something beyond yourself. In his framework, doctrine becomes humanity’s attempt to put language around that inner experience rather than God actually speaking to us from outside. The Bible becomes a record of Israel’s and the early Church’s religious experience rather than the inspired, authoritative Word of God. And theology shifts from “what has God revealed?” to “what do spiritual people feel?”
The consequences were enormous. If Christianity’s essence is a feeling, and if doctrines are just the cultural clothes that feeling wears in a particular era, then doctrines become endlessly revisable. Every generation can reframe the essential experience in terms that feel authentic right now. The words stay — Christ, salvation, grace — but the content gets emptied out and refilled with whatever the current age prefers. Machen saw this clearly in 1923: liberal theology was “hidden by the duplicitous use of traditional terms.” The label stays. The contents change. That dynamic begins with Schleiermacher.
The Social Gospel: Trading Up for Down
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, liberal Protestantism had made a decisive turn away from individual salvation and toward social transformation. The most prominent theologian of this movement was Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), whose argument was straightforward: Jesus’ primary concern wasn’t the salvation of individual souls. It was the reform of unjust social structures.
For Rauschenbusch, sin wasn’t mainly a problem inside individual human hearts. It was located in unjust institutions — capitalism, racism, militarism. The Kingdom of God was to be built by reforming those structures, not by proclaiming personal conversion.
This isn’t a minor theological adjustment. It’s a fundamental reversal. Jesus did speak to social conditions. He did call his followers to care for the poor, the prisoner, the stranger, the sick. No serious Christian disputes that. But Jesus never treated social structures as the root problem or political transformation as the primary solution. His consistent call was to personal repentance, personal faith, and personal transformation by the Spirit of God. The Sermon on the Mount is addressed to individual human hearts — not to government programs.
The Social Gospel swapped the vertical relationship — God and the individual soul — for the horizontal — society and its structures. It looked like compassion. But it left millions of people, including the poor it claimed to serve, without the one thing that actually addresses the root of human suffering: reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ.
Postmodernism: The Final Solvent
The third major intellectual ingredient in Progressive Christianity is postmodernism — the philosophical conviction that there is no neutral standpoint from which truth can be known, that every claim to knowledge is shaped by the position of the person making it, and that claims to universal truth are really just claims to power dressed up in neutral-sounding language.
Applied to theology, postmodernism dissolves every doctrinal claim into a cultural preference and every statement about truth into a power move. Progressive Christianity absorbed these assumptions completely. Every text — including the biblical text — gets read with what scholars call a “hermeneutic of suspicion” (hermeneutic simply means an approach to reading and interpretation) — a default assumption that claims of authority are really claims of control, and that readings that liberate people from traditional structures are always to be preferred over traditional ones. Under this approach, the ancient creeds aren’t settled theological conclusions reached by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. They’re just one community’s power-shaped perspective, to be held loosely and revised in every generation.
The result, as one critic accurately put it, is a Christianity that amounts to “religion conforming to left-leaning political and social trends” rather than a community defined by the body of teaching the apostles handed down and accountable to the living God revealed in Scripture. It isn’t a developed, mature form of Christianity. It’s Christianity with its defining content progressively removed — until what remains is a form of spiritual sentiment divorced from the Gospel that gave the Church its reason to exist.
Chapter Seven: Five Things That Were Quietly Surrendered
The following comparison maps the five areas of most significant departure between historic Christianity and Progressive Christianity. These aren’t caricatures — they’re drawn from the actual published claims of progressive theologians set alongside the consistent teaching of the historic Church across denominational lines. The goal isn’t to score points. It’s diagnostic: name what has been abandoned clearly enough that it can be recovered.
1. Scripture. Historic Christianity has held that the Bible is the inspired, authoritative Word of God — the binding rule for faith and practice, applicable across every culture and every generation. Progressive Christianity treats Scripture as a culturally conditioned human document — a record of humanity’s evolving religious experience, valuable but always open to revision when it conflicts with current sensibilities. The first surrender is the standard against which everything else gets measured. Once that goes, nothing is fixed.
2. Christ. Historic Christianity confesses Jesus of Nazareth as the eternal Son of God, fully divine and fully human, the unique and irreplaceable Savior. Progressive Christianity presents Jesus as a profound moral teacher and inspiring example — perhaps the supreme example — but one option among others rather than the only path. The Council of Nicaea fought this exact battle in 325 AD and settled it. Progressive theology is, in effect, reopening it.
3. Sin. Historic Christianity identifies sin as personal rebellion against a holy God — a corruption of the human heart that requires repentance and forgiveness. Progressive Christianity locates sin primarily in unjust social structures and harmful systems. The shift sounds like a deepening of moral concern, but it relocates the problem from inside the human person to outside, where it can’t actually be solved by anything Scripture calls a remedy.
4. Salvation. Historic Christianity teaches that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone — the unanimous conviction of the apostles, the Fathers, and every major Christian tradition in history. Progressive Christianity opens salvation broadly to all sincere seekers, regardless of whether they come specifically to Christ. This is the most consequential surrender, because it is the one that makes the cross of Christ unnecessary.
5. The Church. Historic Christianity defines the Church as the body called to proclaim the Gospel, administer the sacraments, disciple believers, and bear witness to Christ in the world. Progressive Christianity recasts the Church primarily as a social justice organization — a community organized around political and cultural advocacy. The vocabulary of mission is preserved. The mission itself has been quietly replaced.
The pattern that emerges is consistent. In every area, Progressive Christianity moves away from the particular and toward the general — away from specific acts of God in history and toward universal human experience — away from revelation and toward feeling. This isn’t Christian doctrine being developed and refined. It’s Christian doctrine being removed. What’s left behind is, as Machen described it, “that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene.”
The most consequential surrender is on salvation. When salvation becomes broadly available to sincere seekers in any tradition, the cross of Christ loses its logic entirely. Why would God become flesh, live a perfect life, suffer a brutal death, and rise from the dead — if sincere religious effort in any path would accomplish the same result? The progressive view of salvation doesn’t just change how salvation works. It makes the entire life, death, and resurrection of Jesus unnecessary. And a Christianity for which Christ’s death and resurrection are unnecessary is not, in any meaningful sense, Christianity.
Chapter Eight: The Same Words, Different Dictionary
One of the most disorienting — and pastorally dangerous — features of Progressive Christianity is that it keeps using the traditional vocabulary while quietly assigning those words completely different meanings. Machen identified this in 1923 with striking precision: liberal theology’s true nature was “hidden by the duplicitous use of traditional terms and categories by liberal clergy.” A hundred years later, the pattern hasn’t changed. Only the generation has.
Watch how the swap works. The word salvation is kept — but now refers to liberation from social oppression rather than rescue from the eternal consequences of sin. The word gospel is kept — but now refers to a message of radical inclusion and affirmation rather than the announcement of what God did through Christ’s death and resurrection. The word grace is kept — but now means unconditional acceptance rather than undeserved rescue from deserved judgment. And love — probably the most frequently invoked word in progressive theology — has been cut loose from holiness and redefined as pure acceptance, rather than the costly, honest commitment to another person’s genuine good that sometimes requires the courage to speak hard truth.
This creates real confusion in ordinary church members. A person sitting in a progressive congregation hears familiar words — grace, love, salvation, gospel — and reasonably assumes they mean what they’ve always meant. The change in content is gradual, incremental, and almost invisible to someone who hasn’t been taught to look for it. That’s precisely why the drift is so spiritually dangerous: people don’t know what they’ve lost, because the label was still on the bottle long after someone changed what was inside.
Pastors and church leaders need to develop a particular sensitivity to this — a kind of theological taste-testing. Just as a trained expert can detect what’s actually in a glass regardless of what the label says, a spiritually mature leader learns to ask what a theological system actually contains rather than just noting the vocabulary it uses. The question is never just “do they use the word salvation?” The questions are: Salvation from what? Accomplished how? Available to whom?
Paul saw this dynamic coming. He warned the Corinthian church about exactly this kind of teacher — someone who uses the language of Christian faith while substituting different content for the real thing:
2 Corinthians 11:3–4 — But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.
“A Jesus other than the Jesus we preached.” That is Paul’s precise description of what Progressive Christianity offers. The Jesus of progressive theology is real in name, compelling in presentation, and bears genuine resemblance to the Jesus of the New Testament. He is compassionate. He cares for the poor. He challenges the powerful. All of that is real. But he is not the Jesus who died as a substitute for sinners, who rose bodily from the dead, who will return as judge, and in whose name alone salvation is available to all who believe. That specific Jesus — the Jesus of the apostolic preaching — has been quietly replaced by a different one. And Paul warns that communities absorb this substitution “easily enough.” The replacement is smooth, gradual, and almost impossible to detect until it’s complete.
PART THREE
A Case Study — The Brethren Church and Ashland University