First, I send thanks over to Tripp Fuller for sending me a copy of this book. It appears that being a HBC Deacon has its benefits. The funny thing is that, when I found it in my old TA mailbox (I was turning in my office key, having moved out), I had no idea why I'd received it. It was only after I'd read the first couple pages that I noticed the great inscription that Tripp had written on the inside cover. Again, Tripp, I genuinely appreciate the book. Thank you.
Now on with the review.
I like to listen to pairs of podcasts on my morning and evening commutes. I listen both to Middlebrow from Scriptorium Daily and Entitled Opinions from Stanford. In politics I listen to Left, Right, and Center (which is three Democrats talking with a Republican) and the McLaughlin Group (which is usually three Republicans talking with a Democrat). And with regards to theology I listen to Christ the Center (which is a very conservative Orthodox Presbyterian podcast) and Homebrewed Christianity (Tripp's and Chad Crawford's podcast, which tends to lean progressive). I like to listen to and read folks from all over the spectrum, so to speak, so I welcomed this little primer on progressive Christianity.
Delwin Brown's little book is definitely geared towards a non-specialist audience, generally avoiding theological and historical jargon and explaining (to some extent) some of the commonplaces of seminary conversation for folks who aren't privy to those concepts already. The first chapter and the epilogue address the phenomenon that Americans call "the Religious Right," noting that progressive Christianity has become almost an oxymoron over the last few decades and the rise and prominence of Ronald Reagan and his successors.
Electoral politics, of course, aren't the whole story of late-twentieth-century Evangelicalism. Brown spends the middle chapters of the book addressing ways that conservative Evangelicals answer questions about the Bible, about God, about Jesus, about the Church, and other such central Christian questions. A consistent pattern emerges over the course of the book, namely that Brown's descriptions of evangelical theology are for the most part accurate, and he does well pointing out some of the problems with those elements of theology. But when he sets to offering a distinctively Progressive alternative, he falls rather short of the good work he does negating conservative theology.
To offer one example, Brown does a good job pointing out the logical and theological problems with the "Bible as instruction book" model that many conservative preachers espouse (and which Lutherans as well as Progressives rightly oppose). But when he finishes with his analysis, he offers little as an alternative, his rather vague pointers to Jesus in the synoptics finishing with this pair of short sentences: "Authority is formative, not normative. Authority is empowerment" (22). The rhyme is cute enough, but there's little discussion of what it might mean for the Biblical text to form anything or what sort of power comes to whom when somebody (I'm not sure who) reads the Bible. Later in the book the pattern continues when Brown, attempting to deal with the scandal of particularity, double-crosses himself in the span of only two sentences:
We may say with John's gospel that no one comes to God except through Christ, but "Christ" is the Christian name for the logos of God of all creation, including all religions. We do not have a privileged religious perspective, and we do not need one in order to embrace and proclaim our faith. (38)
The philosphical/theological problems are obvious: in order to say that "we do not have a privileged religious perspective" one must have a privileged perspective whence one can see the lines-of-vision that all other traditions enjoy. To say that no one comes to God except through Christ is to assume that statement is true, and it is to assume a privileged place of observation over Judaism among other traditions. And to say that "Christ" is an abstraction rather than a human being might be some sort of theology, but it's not Christian theology.
The problems are not merely speculative and dogmatic; the book presents other problems, ethical problems, that I find just as troubling. I won't spend too much time on the sheer audacity of decrying the sin of homophobia using the first chapter of Romans as one's prooftext (this move starts on page 75 and has one of the most daring ellipses that I've seen in a theology book); I actually got a good laugh out of that bit of exegetical daring. The ethical problems I have in mind have to do with divine Providence and the picture of Providence that the book sets up:
[The God of Progressive Christianity] will not be a God who makes worlds on command, determines evolution in advance, stops bullets in their flight, topples tyrants from their thrones, or works other magical interventions. It will be a patiently working God. One who inspires the new, undergirds the good, and heals the broken by being present in and with the whole creation. (48)
On its face, this seems like a hermeneutical rather than an ethical problem: the accounts of creation, Pharaoh's fall, and other accounts in the Bible seem to be at stake. But the ethical force of those stories also falls under jeopardy: as John Howard Yoder points out, when the faithful stop believing in a God who can and might redeem the order of things with decisive and perhaps violent action, those same faithful are never slow to pick up weapons to effect the ineffectual God's will in the world. Scientific materialism dispels faeries and dragons, but it also brings along the totalitarian state and the total war.
My other objections are the standard ones about progressive Christianity, in most cases having to do with its dismissing the particular and the distasteful for no other reason than that they're particular and distasteful. The book as a whole gives me about the impression of Progressive Christianity that I had before, namely that its negations are sorely needed but that its syntheses of what comes after don't seem adequate to Christian revelation. I should say, before I close, that I love Tripp's and Chad's podcast, and I'm not by any means renouncing my HBC Diakonate. I truly enjoy conversations with my progressive bretheren and sosteren because they help me steer away from things that need negated; I just tend to look elsewhere (usually in Anabaptist and Thomist directions) when I want to take that next step.
