What does an elder who is leaving a local evangelical church because—in part—he felt this church wasn’t taking social justice issues seriously have in common with another Christian who is forsaking Classical Theism for Open Theism? Further, what unites these with a third Christian whose journey of deconstruction equates to a refusal to accept the status quo, who questions every whiff of Christian dogmatism because he thinks it arises from the hegemony of church history?
First, these are three friends of mine who do—in one case, did—profess to be Christians. Second, these three are sojourners to a city built by human hands, a trek some call “deconstruction” and others Progressive Christianity.
Third, though their journeys look different, they share an assumption: that historic Christianity should be questioned, and more, overturned by the canons of postmodernism, namely, the removal of metanarratives (overarching stories or beliefs/dogmas).
Complicating this, Progressive Christianity doesn’t fully embrace the logical end of deconstruction—abject moral relativity commensurate with postmodernism’s “death of God.” Progressive Christianity treats truth as if it is knowable, though it does so arbitrarily. Ultimately, Progressive Christianity adopts a metamodern posture toward the knowability of truth, retaining a sort of placebo-like-faith in modernism’s optimism in the knowability of truth, while ultimately maintaining postmodernism’s rejection of absolutes.
Progressive Christianity seeks to have its cake and eat it too.
From Blue Jazz to Rainbow Flags
Progressive Christianity has left the Emerging church behind. Up-and-comers like Brandan Robertson (leader of Sunnyside Reformed Church), Tim Whitaker (The New Evangelicals), or sophisticated thought-leaders like Pete Enns (The Bible for Normal People) have replaced the Rob Bells and Donald Millers (Blue Like Jazz) of the previous era.
Progressive Christianity has moved (note the word) from mere postmodern deconstruction to principled-but-selective metamodern reconstruction of religious ethics and belief adopted as if true. Metamodernism gets its assumptions from postmodernism—an “as if” true proposition still only performed as true—but escapes nihilism by appeal to the moral codes most suitable to its appetite. Metamodernism lives in perpetual pendulum swing between denial of truth and embracing truth “as if” it could be so.
As Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker define it:
Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern.
This is why metamodernism has been likened to having your cake and eating it too. Robertson’s church, Sunnyside Reformed, is a good example of Progressive Christianity’s selective reconstruction of meaning. In scrubbing every page for a doctrinal statement, one finds only their Open and Affirming Covenant which gives primacy to inclusion and “all expressions of human diversity” in a homogenized and triumphant “unity of faith.” No creeds or confessions are referenced or affirmed.
What is clear is what Sunnyside church affirms above all: affirmation itself.
Nearly every page of the church’s website stresses the preeminent importance of inclusion. As Sunnyside’s church covenant expresses (adopted in October 2024), they consider themselves “one body with many members, embracing people of every race, ethnicity, creed, class, age, gender, marital status, physical or mental ability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.”
This radical inclusion leaves open the full scope of “the life and mission of our church.” Anyone, regardless even of beliefs, is invited to “participate fully in our worship, rites, and sacraments, and to take leadership roles within our congregation.”
Sunnyside may be “over easy” on doctrine, but what they value appears clear: the only rule is that there are none. Or—scarcely different—no rule is allowed which seems to hurt or exclude another person. This selective dogmatization of inclusion at the expense of clear exclusionary teachings in Scripture—such as Romans 1:24–27, where homosexual behavior is clearly condemned—evinces Sunnyside’s metamodern, arbitrary posture, which has become a hallmark of Progressive Christianity. Indeed, Robertson and his church aren’t an isolated case. The widely adopted Phoenix Affirmations—twelve affirmations written originally in 2006 by United Church of Christ minister Eric Elnes—first affirms “walking fully in the path of Jesus, without denying the legitimacy of other paths God may provide humanity.” Radical inclusion, and the exclusion of Christ’s exclusivity, is upheld in Progressive Christianity, done so at the expense of Scripture’s clear teaching of the illegitimacy of any other way to God but through the Son (i.e. John 14:6).
But by what criteria does Progressive Christianity select its rules/beliefs? And how does this selection criteria show its metamodern posture?
The Emotive Metamodern Ethics of Progressive Christianity
What constitutes a rule (or belief) as hurtful or exclusionary in Progressive Christianity is defined by the internal psychological world of the “modern self” that Carl Trueman has ably detailed. Trueman’s work is programmatic for conservative Christians engaging with the “social imaginary” of the current day. It is also helpful in elucidating categories for the discussion of how Progressive Christianity forms its virtues.
Trueman, reliant on Alasdair MacIntyre—chiefly in his work After Virtue—details the concept of emotivism, which Trueman defines as an ethical philosophy where morality is “nothing more than the language of personal preference based on nothing more rational or objective than sentiments or feelings.”
Emotivism views good and bad as irrevocably dependent on the subject's perception of them as such. Emotivism unites the truth of a proposition and the subject’s perspective of that proposition. The two propositions “stealing is wrong” and “I disapprove of stealing” are, in emotivism, synonymous.
This is helpful for revealing how Progressive Christianity reformulates—via metamodernism—its morality after postmodern virtue-death. Deconstruction in Progressive Christianity becomes its own rule of faith, domesticating Scripture’s clear teaching to the rule of whatever is most agreeable to the community. It reformulates the community’s confessed ethics and doctrine along emotive lines, ethics and doctrine equated with what is most affirming of the other’s psychological feelings. This forms a veritable “canon within the canon,” Progressive Christianity adopting a red letter Christianity congruent with the community’s emotive sentiments. The community’s emotive sense of good and bad then become a magisterium in Progressive Christianity, having authoritative sway over what is acceptable or not. This emotive magisterium trumps Scripture, in the end making Scripture a handmaiden to it, rather than Scripture alone holding magisterial authority with its own retinue of subordinate handmaidens (i.e. Tradition, Philosophy, or any other non-inscripturated source of truth). This entailment of one of Progressive Christianity’s first principles—emotive affirmation—may not be a leap explicitly confessed by those who call themselves Progressive Christians, but it is a necessary entailment of Progressive Christianity as a theological system, and is a fruit tasted, even if not confessed, everywhere Progressive Christianity is found.
As the community’s emotive sentiments inform what is considered moral, this informs the community’s accepted doctrine. Progressive Christianity then dogmatizes what it wants to, or rather, what seems most acceptable to the widest number of people who consider themselves part of this community. This is why Progressive Christianity elevates the Golden Rule—do unto others what you want done to yourself—to the place of a central dogma. Only by “what you want done to yourself,” Progressive Christianity means: anything and everything the heart desires. Human desires (fallen) are then equated with morality, which is emotivism. This dogmatic misinterpretation of the Golden Rule is motivated by the key value of affirming the other in Progressive Christianity, leaving no room for Christianity’s exclusive claims.
It is no wonder that Progressive Christianity increasingly dogmatizes what it considers proper faith and practice based upon what pleases the most people. Anything goes—sexual or otherwise. It must be realized, though, that anything goes is a paraphrase for following the lusts of the flesh. Sadly, Progressive Christianity’s enshrinement of an “anything goes” ethic is merely a function of an emotive moral compass (Gal. 5:19–21; 1 John 2:16). Progressive Christianity, as a result, calls evil good (Isa. 5:20–21; cf., Gen. 3; Rom. 1:18–23).
Contrary to emotivism (and Progressive Christianity), Scripture presents facts that cut directly against the desires of fallen people. Who of their own accord, without Scripture’s testimony and the Spirit’s inward illumination, wants to admit there is a Hell? Who without God’s regenerating work wants to repent of dead works and cling to God in chastity and abstinence? Who wants to confess that a hard, narrow gate is the only way to finding God, a large swath of humanity missing it (Matt. 7:13–14)?
But it is precisely these truths which Scripture presents. It is also precisely these truths that the fallen person wants to avoid. Sadly, it is also precisely these truths that Progressive Christianity flattens, excises, or obscures by dogmatizing affirmation.
A Call to the Absolute Truth of the Cross
Back to my three friends. Each is a caring individual who—from my vantage—appears to desire nothing more than what they perceive is the best for society: their version of Christianity the solution. After all, God is a lover, not a fighter, wanting nothing else but to sweep the world into his arms, even—it seems—at the expense of his justice.
The problem is that such doctrinal conclusions are increasingly formulated along emotive, metamodern lines. Progressive Christianity dogmatizes—affirms—Jean Paul Sartre’s equating of freedom and existence: “Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence.” As a theological system, Progressive Christianity dwells in a space beyond good and evil clearly (biblically) defined. A place where “if we must have virtues, have those only which have come to agreement with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations, with our most ardent requirements[.]” Modifying a concept from Philip Rief, Progressive Christianity is a third world, forging what it wants from the sacred order of the Christian second world. Though each of my friends wouldn’t confess these sentiments expressly, the theology they wear on their sleeves in regular conversation shows this as the case.
Progressive Christianity in final analysis forms and then ascends a mountain of its own making, at the summit transfiguring the community’s internal inclinations into external dogma. Such idol-making is the only recourse for Progressive Christianity, dwelling in the shadow of nihilism, rubbing modernism and postmodernism together in bifurcated hopeful-despair for a flame to arise.
I invite these friends—and many more—back to the absolute reality of the Cross; to the firelight of God’s glory revealed in the face of Christ, revelation given a priori to our fallen doubts. I adjure them to receive the exhortation—and blessing—Jesus spoke to doubting Thomas about those who would doubt after him: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).
