The Path of the Prodigal

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Adoption, Christianity, Father, God, Gospel, Grace, Liberalism, Progressive Christianity, Truth

In yesterday’s Briefing, Al Mohler was describing an excessively liberal church that had been featured in The New York Times, and among the interesting elements in that congregation’s worship was the removal of masculine names for God.  They still wish to call on God, but not to call Him Father.

This is not an isolated or surprising feature for a liberal church.  Masculine language for God is increasingly regarded by the left as an artifact of oppressive patriarchy.  For a more direct example, near the beginning of last year the Washington D.C. Episcopal diocese decided to remove such masculine references to God when they update their Book of Common Prayer.

There’s a lot that could be said about this move: the basic irreverence towards God, the self-reflective idolatry, the studied disregard for Scripture, and so on.  But I want to draw attention to the tragic way in which this undermines one of the most precious blessings of salvation–adoption as a child of God.

We have a strange capacity for regarding blessings as curses.  A comparatively trivial example is our ability to twist the gift of freedom and leisure into boredom.  But the present case is far more serious.  God’s Fatherhood is not a curse, a relic of oppression to be thrown off by those sufficiently enlightened through feminist theory.  Fatherhood is a facet of the divine identity, and it marks a relationship into which we are wondrously invited.

For Jesus Christ, the one and only son of the Father, has given Himself for us; united with Him by faith, we are offered adoption as children of God.  “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” (1 Jn. 3:1).  We may call on God as our Father, as Jesus instructed His disciples to do (Matt. 6:9).  God the Father becomes our Father.  We come to know His Fatherly love and care, we come to have that priceless privilege of adoptive sonship in the Son.

The desire to be free of the Fatherhood of God leads, like the way of the prodigal son (Lk. 15), into the far country of disappointment and loss.  Freedom from God is slavery to sin.  But the gospel remains; for those prodigals who wish to come home, the loving welcome of the heavenly Father waits.

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Roads Lead Places

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Christianity, Evangelicalism, Faith, Orthodoxy, Progressive Christianity, Truth

…which should be obvious to everyone, but apparently is not.

The other day I saw a post on the Patheos “Progressive Christianity” channel of blogs.  Patheos is a hub of religious blogs categorized in channels, and by the happy foreordination of the English language, the “Progressive Christianity” channel is listed right next to the “Pagan” channel.  This is simply an alphabetic necessity, but it is fortuitous nonetheless.

The unfortunate blog post in question was the tragic announcement of the blogger that she no longer considered herself any kind of Christian, and would soon be moving her blog elsewhere.  I do not know this blogger or her beliefs, but reading the post connected with my theory that departure from the faith is where so-called “progressive” Christianity leads.

After all, the very notion of progress suggests motion.  Progress is a word with positive connotations, and calls us to look towards the bright future we are supposedly moving towards.  But whenever you move towards something you are moving away from where you started; and the basis of “progressive Christianity” is a departure from Christianity as they knew it–traditional, confessional, evangelical (or, in what is I think the favorite derogatory label in that set, “fundamentalist”) Christianity.  It is usually a progression away from orthodoxy, though not necessarily at first.

Not necessarily at first–that is the key.  Embrace of “progressive” Christianity may begin simply as a distaste for certain features of evangelicalism.  Fair enough.  Evangelicalism has its share of house-cleaning to do.  But it almost always seems to involve, either immediately or very shortly, a move away from the truthfulness and authority of Scripture.  And, having derailed from the authority of divine revelation, it moves further and further from the contours of historic Christian faith.

If it’s moving away from God’s (written) Word, how long can it hold onto God’s (incarnate) Word?  If it’s “progressing” away from the revelation of the faith, what can it be “progressing” towards but denial of the faith?

That is why it is not surprising when someone who has identified themselves as a “progressive” Christian ceases to identify as a Christian at all.  That’s where the road of “progressive” Christianity leads.

I will gladly grant that not everyone who calls themselves a “progressive” Christian has departed from orthodoxy, and that most of them never outright denounce the faith.  By the grace of God, we often stop short of following a road to its end.  But why travel that road if the best thing that can be said about it is that it started someplace good and most people don’t follow it all the way to the end?