TL;DR Progressive scholarship, political strategy, and even preaching can turn Christianity into something usable—an inspiring story, a moral framework, a cultural tool.
Great article! May God bless your lenten practice and may you receive! ... i have been pondering that article by rb... and i feel like it's too neat to say christians are conservative and secular people are progressive... as helpful as those lines can be they also can not tell us the full story. Much like on days when people eat the most ice cream, the most people drown. There is a deeper root to the stats. I wonder if progressivism IS a church, so people don't need Christianity as well. And possibly this would explain the collapse of some of the most progressive church spaces. Much to keep pondering....
Excellent and well said. I am a YDS graduate in 71 and have lived through the various liberal/progressive presentations on the “real” Jesus. I think the bad news in these efforts is simply that the only historical Jesus we know is the one in the NT presented by the Apostolic witness.
All else is conjecture and end with the great criticism of Harnack. “He looked into the long well of history for the historical Jesus and saw the reflection of his own face in the water and concluded that Jesus was a 19th century German liberal.”
Excellent points. We know we want to be “taken by” the story. However, it’s impossible to not bring our own perspectives of what the story means when reading. We have to simultaneously “negotiate” its meaning, and be open to surprises that we might experience along the way.
Great article! May God bless your lenten practice and may you receive! ... i have been pondering that article by rb... and i feel like it's too neat to say christians are conservative and secular people are progressive... as helpful as those lines can be they also can not tell us the full story. Much like on days when people eat the most ice cream, the most people drown. There is a deeper root to the stats. I wonder if progressivism IS a church, so people don't need Christianity as well. And possibly this would explain the collapse of some of the most progressive church spaces. Much to keep pondering....
Excellent and well said. I am a YDS graduate in 71 and have lived through the various liberal/progressive presentations on the “real” Jesus. I think the bad news in these efforts is simply that the only historical Jesus we know is the one in the NT presented by the Apostolic witness.
All else is conjecture and end with the great criticism of Harnack. “He looked into the long well of history for the historical Jesus and saw the reflection of his own face in the water and concluded that Jesus was a 19th century German liberal.”
Excellent points. We know we want to be “taken by” the story. However, it’s impossible to not bring our own perspectives of what the story means when reading. We have to simultaneously “negotiate” its meaning, and be open to surprises that we might experience along the way.