Progressive Christians, intent on enforcing equality within the church, as an alternative sow division. In their desire for absolute equality they remake God as a cosmic Henry Ford who famously told his customers that they might have any color of Model T ‘so long as it’s black’. But God doesn’t go in for mass production: He is a craftsman and every one in every of us is exclusive.
Injustice based on skin color, sex, age or any of the opposite discriminations common in our day ought to be opposed, especially when it appears within the church. But Christians also needs to be clear on the grounds on which they oppose injustice.
Subordinating theology
In attempting to undo what they see as injustice, progressive Christians abandon theology and adopt secular woke hermeneutics, particularly Critical Race Theory (CRT). This is the route chosen by the Church of England, teaching it of their schools and preaching it from their pulpits. So entrenched is CRT that a social justice unit being arrange within the diocese of Birmingham announced that it might be hiring a ‘deconstructing whiteness’ officer. In attempting to create equality, they find yourself emphasising difference.
Recently the Ven Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, Archdeacon of Liverpool, called for ‘anti-whiteness’ within the church; she also wants Christians to ‘smash the patriarchy’. Giving the explanation for her views, Dr Threlfall-Holmes didn’t say they were the results of intensive study and reflection on Scripture; as an alternative she said she had attended a one-day conference on racial justice organised by the charity Reconciliation Initiatives. This resulted in her waking as much as the harmful whiteness of the Anglican church.
Far from helping Christians to understand the worth of loving our neighbours, a command Jesus considered of best importance, progressive Christianity begins by emphasising divisions between Christians on the idea of skin color. It encourages nearly all of Christians within the UK to view themselves morally flawed because of their inherited skin color.
Starting point
Critics of progressivism throughout the CofE point to its divisive and demoralising effects. Valid as these criticism are, they miss the predominant failure. Dr Threlfall-Holmes and the opposite progressive Christians make a fundamental error of their place to begin by adopting a secular ideology which subordinates the Bible. Where you begin influences where you find yourself. If you’re looking for racial harmony through CRT, ‘you may’t get there from here’.
Progressive Christians take human concepts, varnish them with biblical terminology and picture they’re being true to God’s will. It doesn’t matter how much of a coating you give these ideologies, they continue to be human and ignore the sovereignty of God. Nowhere in Scripture will we find the concept of ‘intersectionality’.
In the church the Word of God should be our place to begin and supreme rule in faith and life. In Scripture we discover a really different approach to reconciling people and helping us live together. The apostles, in a really unjust society, didn’t operate on a framework of oppressor and oppressed. The Romans who ruled Paul’s world actually oppressed the people they conquered and regarded themselves above all others, yet nowhere will we find Paul railing against ‘Roman privilege’.
If Paul had used progressive categories the early church would have fractured and died an early death. We find him doing something very different. Paul defends equality not by filling quotas and comparing percentages but by focussing on the person of Christ.
The same in Christ
Instead of demanding visible racial equality between Christians, Paul insists that outward differences are immaterial because of what Christ has done inside us. He tells us that in Christ, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there’s neither slave nor free, there isn’t a female and male, for you’re all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28). Our differences are recognised, but Paul ignores them because now we have something much better and more essential which binds us together. This is where true equality is found, in Christ and particularly after we come to His table.
We are taught that all of us, whatever our background, are in the identical condition, need the identical Saviour, receive His grace in the identical way and travel together to the identical end. Christians ‘have placed on the brand new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there will not be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all’ (Colossians 3:10,11).
No division throughout the gospel and its outworking was permitted. At the Lord’s Supper every believer got here to the identical table. Nationality, language, color, social class, these were all immaterial. In a hierarchical society based on difference and oppression, the gospel created a spot of real equality, the church. This scandalised the Romans and provoked opposition to Christians due to their dangerously radical ideas and practices which threatened to undermine their stratified society.
Follow the Gospel fully
The church has not at all times lived as much as its foundational principles: it consists of fallen individuals who screw things up. There are things within the church’s history of which we should always be proud and other things of which we should always be ashamed. But the things of which we’re ashamed should encourage us to redouble our efforts to follow the gospel more fully quite than abandon it for secular ideology.
There is barely one place where there’s true equality between people, in Christ. Resisting the encroachment of progressive ideology and particularly CRT within the church is far more than resisting a political stance: it is an important defence of the gospel.
Campbell Campbell-Jack is a retired Church of Scotland minister. He blogs at A Grain of Sand.
