When Tony Jones (“theologian-in-residence” at Solomon’s Porch) challenged his readers “to write one post about God,” the response was… bizarre.
Why was such a challenge for progressives even necessary? Jones explained:
…progressives have a God-talk problem. That is, progressives write lots of books and blog posts about social issues, the church, culture, and society. But we don’t write that much about God. That is, we don’t say substantive things about who God is, what God does, etc.
Apparently, the inclusion of the word “substantive” was necessary. But it didn’t help because Jones was forced to issue two follow-up clarifications. The first was entitled Progressive Talk about God: Lots of Throat Clearing (the second is HERE) in which Jones attempts to steer the conversation back toward something… substantive. He concludes:
Lots of progressives have responded to my challenge with lots of throat-clearing. By that I mean, they’ve loaded their posts with prolegomena about how we really can’t speak confidently about the character of God, about how we don’t want to be arrogant like the conservatives, and about how our God-talk needs to exude epistemic humility.
I get it. I wrote a dissertation. I know a lot about prolegomena. But here I’m going to shout again:
GET OVER IT!
It didn’t help. Jones conveniently aggregated the influx of “substantive” posts about God at A Progressive God at Storify. Here’s a brief snippet of the accumulated “wisdom.”
- If someone were to ask me what I believe about who God is, the first thing I would do is correct the question. The question is, what is God? God is not a “who”.
- As we seek, God’s character shows up in the realness, beauty, passion, frustration, intelligence, anger, complexity, sorrow, generosity and compassion we see in other human beings. God appears in the gifts and challenges we give and receive between one another. God becomes interconnected relationship. God becomes love.
- God is “genderful.” God Approves of Sexual Expression.
- ..the concept of God/Cosmic Consciousness has a primordial nature which is the ultimate plan for all of creation.
- …there are substantial changes between the God of the Old Testament and the New. In the Old, God is a mean, vindictive jerk. In the New, God is a loving parent that wants his children to come and rest. If God doesn’t change, which one is the real one?
- I like the dynamic nature of God, that God changes. And if God changes, then we too will need to change how we relate to God and how we think about God.
- God is not interested in the kind of apocalyptic glory that comes from violent domination of other people and their viewpoints.
Reading Jonathan Merritt’s interview with Matthew Paul Turner, author of the new book, Our Great Big American God, very much reminded me of the progressive’s “God problem.” While Turner’s essential thesis appears right on, that Americans have infused their own brand of culture and beliefs into their conception of God, Turner’s point of view also looks to be colored by his own perspective of God, one that is quite progressive.
Merritt’s conversation with Turner in “Have Christians Made God in Their Image?” at RNS took an interesting, but illuminating turn, when Merritt began exploring the subject of sexuality with the author:
RNS: Do you think American evangelicals have done a poor job articulating their position [on sexuality] in the past?
MPT: No, not at all. Evangelicals have articulated quite well exactly what they think about homosexuality. We’ve preached it, put it on billboards, theologized it. Evangelicalism’s rage against homosexuality is probably one of their more successful campaigns. I doubt you could find too many Americans who couldn’t recite word for word the slogans that Christians have boasted toward the LGBTQ communities. For fifty or more years, much of America’s Church has gone to great lengths to push an entire group of people out of the church, out of God’s story. We’ve communicated little more than “You do not belong.”
RNS: Do you think American Christians are homophobic or hateful?
MPT: Not as a rule, no. None of us are born homophobic, though many have likely met a few people who make us question that. But I don’t believe that it should be assumed that Christians are homophobic or hateful, not until those things are experienced. That said, there is seemingly something about the homosexual topic that makes many Jesus-loving people turn into angry, mean, insensitive people incapable of treating those with whom they disagree with respect and kindness.
Apart from the predictable characterization of evangelicals as “angry, mean, insensitive people incapable of treating those with whom they disagree with respect and kindness” but who “rage against homosexuality,” Turner’s position on the “American church’s” views on homosexuality says a lot about his own views on God.
And this is what I find ironic. Religious progressives do the exact same thing they accuse American evangelicals of doing: they make God in “their” image. The position expressed above by Matthew Paul Turner flows from his own conception of God and his own reading of Scripture. Which seems unusually “progressive.”
It’s also why the Progressive God looks like, well, progressives.
- The Progressive God doesn’t believe in hell.
- The Progressive God is Egalitarian.
- The Progressive God didn’t make a literal Adam.
- The Progressive God is pro gay marriage.
- The Progressive God changed between the Old and New Testaments.
- The Progressive God doesn’t get angry (except at religious conservatives).
See what I mean?
Making God in ones’ image is not a uniquely American problem. It’s a human problem. As much as Matthew Paul Turner wants to appear objective in his critique of the American Church, he imports his own beliefs about God, Scripture, human sexuality, and religion into the mix. Leaving me to ask, Who’s making God in their image?
Just a point on this one:
“The Progressive God changed between the Old and New Testaments.”
Something changed…rather ended (the Mosaic covenant)…but not God, but I can see where progressives might think that. It’s more accurate to say God changed after one becomes a 20th/21st century white American liberal.
Full disclosure: I’m neither a dispensationalist nor a conservative.
God/Cosmic Consciousness? Oh wow, so, this is just New Age pretending to be Christian.
Hey Mike,
Thanks for your perspective man. Just to clarify, the book focuses on how Americans have changed God into their own image. While I do focus on the more popular and mainstream ideas throughout history, I don’t deny that evangelicals and Christians of varying points of view are both guilty of this. The point is that the “God” that most of us follow today is not the same as the “God” that believers here followed 400 years ago. My book offers the narrative as to how our perceptions of the deity changed.
But certainly we all do it.
Thanks for commenting, MPT. Your books, as well as your blog, seem to specifically focus on Evangelical / Fundamentalist extremes and their critique through satire. This, from my POV, is one of the defining features of contemporary religious progressives. So would you agree with my point here that religious progressives do the exact same thing they accuse American evangelicals of doing: they make God in “their” image? If so, how do you think your image of God might potentially taint your characterization of Evangelicals? Once again, thanks for commenting!
It’s not even their own image, but that of the social mores of the secular educated knowledge-worker class. I think that’s why they have so many issues talking about God or actually getting people to become Christians; they are just expressing the social values of their class in a mildly religious form.
There’s no real core to it. Nothing to convert to. Just a bunch of upper-middle class people being upper-middle class people. I think the saddest/funniest example was one blogger I read at Patheos making a Christian case for polyamory. I literally was willing to concede gay marriage as a point of argument if they just would say that yes, polyamory is wrong and unbiblical. But they couldn’t do that. That’s how much the social values of the progressive left shape and define their sense of God. We are all good progressives, so we support alternative modes of sexuality based on consent and harm, and the Bible gets twisted to buttress that.
If you’re not a member of that class or are fiercely critical of it, it seems like a big joke. First church of Obama with starbucks and edward snowden following.
Sounds like a “discussion” I had with a Christian friend yesterday on FB, David. He just could not bring himself to admit homosexuality was abnormal, deviant, contrary to God’s design, sinful. Yet he argued that the church should be a place of healing. Healing from what? Anyway, the discussion ended, predictably, with me discovering that the thing I’d been chasing was my own tail.
Yeah, it’s almost like it’s two different faiths at times. Not just differences with the same Jesus behind them, but radical differences of what Christianity means.
It’s going to be rough as that faith gets more and more predominant.
I’m worried about “witch hunting” for progressives.
I think people who think about God in philosophical ways have been blacklisted often enough before. But the Bible gives us good reason to think of God in abstract ways as well as more personal and concrete ways — He is the Word that defines creation; His name is practically the “to be” verb. I’m profoundly influenced by a book I found in my community college’s library by neo-orthodox theologian Nels Ferre who once refers to God as “that which always is.” As long as we don’t put the ignorant word merely in front of the abstraction, I think abstractions can strengthen draw us to reverence and love God more profoundly.
Some of us naturally think in abstract terms, and maybe the abstractions help us relate to God better. I’m such an abstract thinker that I can’t answer people when they ask me how I’m doing. (I don’t even know how to describe why I can’t answer that question other than to say that it’s incredibly vast, and I don’t know how it can be answered both honestly and objectively.)
I don’t have time to read the Progressive Christian blogs in order to pinpoint where I agree and where I disagree with them, so no comment on their purported views about God.
bainespal, when someone asks how you are doing they are not asking you to commit to some official statement of your nature or well-being. It’s just a conversation primer. The person asking is inviting the respondent to unburden themselves. The answer, “fine,” just means that you don’t have anything good or bad that you want to discuss.
I say this just to note that there is nothing wrong with thinking of God in abstract terms (how else are you supposed to think of the infinite?), but that does not mean that this infinite God is not also inviting you to converse; in the same way as the person asking you how you are doing. And that the conversation won’t tell you a certain amount of concrete information about this infinite being.
The issue here seems to be whether or not the “progressives” are writing off as abstract even those things that have been revealed in concrete terms.
It’s not really that man. Not so much a believer who uses abstract or different ways of thinking, or even doubting God and working through it. I think at some point, as long as a believer honestly understands who Jesus is and the tenets of salvation, you have to let the other things go as between God and them. They have to “work out their own salvation in fear and trembling,” to use the verse.
The problem though is that the type of progressives i seem to run across (barring notleia) on the net don’t even get the basics enough to be troubled by or doubt them. I’m not a Calvinist, but I’d say they aren’t God-touched. Like you can’t even connect with them on the basics of the resurrection and the cross; if they use it, it means something far different and it never seems to affect them in the same way. Sometimes it feels almost like an intangible marker or something. You can’t connect. They wouldn’t even understand what you just mentioned.
*Note: I stumbled onto this site while researching a book and thought I might add a little to the ideas I’m seeing on Biblical worldviews. I’m truly sorry if this is nothing more than an unwanted intrusion.*
D.M., I don’t think you realize just how right you are. Concepts are defined by worldviews. For instance, since much of church history is colored by the worldview of Roman Paganism, and since paganism is defined by the idea that actions taken in the physical world manipulate changes in the spiritual world, centuries were spent where the majority of the Christian world turned the Bible into a book of spells and incantations, muttering the words without any real knowledge of what those words meant. A total perversion of the Biblical worldview itself.
We now live in a humanist world. A world where man is not simply defining God in his image, but is actually replacing God with themselves in every possible way.
We now define right and wrong as we see fit. Concept words like “love” have lost their Biblical meaning and been replaced with a humanist concept ( in this case to a subjective feeling rather than the Biblical idea of a conviction to sacrifice of one’s self).
One of those commenters up there stripped God of his personhood. That does not sound progressive to me.
We call the ancient Greek version of this “stoicism”. I guess ‘person-who-pulls-out-a-tired-justification-for the umpteenth time’ doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the way ‘progressive’ does. 😉
One of the more poignant ironies from my perspective is that so many of these modern “Christians” focus on the New Testament, specifically the more “love”-oriented books like the Gospel of John. The irony being that the book of John is a point by point refutation of the stoic belief in God, starting with a counter to the Jewish stoic, Philo’s, version of God as the Logos (a view of God as a sort of impersonal mathematical code) before focusing on the 10 “signs” that Jesus performed — each one a miracle where Jesus was moved by the needs of people around Him — then showing the conflict between Jesus’ conviction that He must die on the cross versus Pilate’s stoic ideas (“What is truth”), before finishing with the death and resurrection.
Almost 2,000 years later and John still stands not only as one of the greatest masterworks literature, but as a powerful apologetic for the personhood of God.
Mike, you say “Leaving me to ask, Who’s making God in their image?”
The answer is “Everyone has!” The evidence that any god exists has always been very weak, and so this opens the door to different persons formulating God in their own ideal image. And so, the consensus on the image of God has changed through history. It has changed from the OT times to the NT times to the Middle Ages to now. For some progressives, God is now being viewed as a nonperson.
I agree…when has Christianity (or any religion for that matter) not made God in its image?
“Everyone has…” and “It has changed from the OT times to the NT times to the Middle Ages to now.”
The first statement is demonstrably false. The second is true only to the extent that we are speaking of society as a whole, rather than individuals.
No, Not everyone remakes God in their own image (humanism) or even reshapes Him according to their own desires (mostly paganism). Prior to the Greek idea of gods that looked and acted like Greeks most cultures worshipped deities that incorporated nature elements (plants, animals, forces of nature) or monsters like something out of a Godzilla movie. Hardly made in their own image. It took the Industrial Age for man to truly become comfortable taking over the offices of God.
Even in our humanist age there are plenty of individuals who believe in a deity outside of their own creation. Orthodox Jews worship God in a fashion nearly identical to what we find after the second Diaspora. And you can take any number of early church writers, scratch off the names, update the writing style a bit, and no one would know that you that you were plagiarizing someone like Augustine.
The fact — and we see this everywhere — is that while MOST people adopt the cultural assumptions of their surroundings there are always SOME who do not. From this it should be clear that it is not a case of people being imprinted by their cultures like so many machines. It is a case of people actively engaging their surroundings and making conscious decisions as to how they will interact with the metaphysical world.
In regards to our ideas of God, is seems to be less a question of what we know and more a question of what we are willing to accept.
What is lacking is a ‘universal’ interpreting method of the Bible so that everyone arrives at the same understanding. If God becomes the interpreter only then can there be unity. Otherwise it will always be like it is here, one Christian segment bashing another.