The Progress of Christian History

I stirred up a fair bit of interesting conversation on Bluesky the past couple days with a couple threads (first, second) about whether it makes any sense to use the term "progressive" as a slur to dismiss ideas that we disagree with. The impetus of the conversation was a podcast put out by Allie Beth Stuckey in which she argued that "progressive Christianity" is a contradiction in terms because Christianity is not progressive, but static. Christianity cannot progress, or else it would no longer be Christianity, in her view.

This is an extremely common viewpoint to hold among Evangelicals, so it's understandable that she thinks it, but it is nonsensical when you press on it. Christian doctrine can and does progress because everything in this entire world can and does progress. I am writing English, and Beowolf was also written in English, and yet I cannot read it because it was written a thousand years ago. How can it be that we can call modern English "English" and old English "English" if they're for all intents and purposes unintelligible to each other?

Christianity itself is a progression of the Hebrew faith, one which believes that a) the long-awaited Messiah came in the person of Jesus and offered himself as a savior to all, b) that the mystery of the gospel is that the inheritors of Abraham are no longer defined ethnically, and c) that therefore ethnic identity markers such as circumcision and a kosher diet are no longer required.¹ So in a very real sense, you could describe Christianity as a progressive Jewish sect. And yet this does not tell the whole story, because Christianity has clearly changed and shifted a whole lot since the first century. Catholics didn't get the concept of the Papacy from Judaism. Jews don't have the five solas that mean so much to Protestants. The Eastern Orthodox concept of In Persona Ecclesiae is a natively Christian phenomenon not inherited from Judaism.

The concept of progress in doctrine is offputting to Protestants who always envision themselves as having gone back to the sources, bypassing 1500 years of Christian history, and living out a "primitive" Christianity that hews closely to the text. And yet still, our rock-concert worship services with fog machines and lights and electric guitars suggest that we might be deceiving ourselves—that our praxis isn't quite as "static" as we tell ourselves it is. Or if you're of a different variety, your vaulted church buildings with stained glass and a service oriented around a sermon is definitely not a portrait of the churches of the New Testament.

Somehow it's the case that everything I believe is orthodox, static, and "what the church has always taught," but the person who is slightly to the left of me in their doctrine is a "progressive." We tell ourselves that our young earth creationism, our pre-tribulational premillennialism, our Complementarianism, our Calvinism, or even something as old as our Trinitarianism are simply static representations of what the church has always taught. But nobody was teaching Calvinism before Calvin. Nobody was teaching Complementarianism per se before 1988. Nobody was teaching "the Trinity" before Tertullian coined the term around 213. All of these doctrines that are considered "conservative" and "orthodox" in various circles are objectively progressive in a historical sense. I personally think some of these progressions are good, faithful extensions of the faith! I think others of them are not.

When we get outside the realm of "doctrine" and into the realm of what we might call ethics or social issues, progress is also inescapable there. Paul didn't express an opinion on the use of abortifacient drugs in deadly situations like an ectopic pregnancy or whether individuals with Klinefelter's Syndrome (XXY chromosome) could serve as elders in a Complementarian church. James didn't write down his opinion on what he thinks of billionaire CEOs of multinational corporations who pay their workers as little as they can legally get away with. John didn't tell us what we should think of the germ theory of disease, even though he warned of "pestilence" in the book of Revelation. We can of course infer what we think they would have said, and we can do so in a way that others would judge to be a faithful representation of what they would have said. Or we could do so in a way that others would deem to be unfaithful. But we delude ourselves if we think that such inferential work is somehow static or that it is definitely what they would have said. It simply is not.

We should own up to the fact that we are making our own theological and ethical judgments every day, and we should also own up to the fact that we do so on the shoulders of a great cloud of witness who did the same. I think Martin Luther got some things right and other things wrong, but I am indebted to his attentiveness to the word "righteousness" in Romans. It is functionally impossible for me to do theology after him without interacting with him, even when I want to go in a different direction than he did with the text.

So why are we scared of owning up to the evident progress in our own life and doctrine? Because to do so would be to relinquish a convenient rhetorical shortcut. It's way easier to dismiss an opponent with an ad hominem attack than it is to dismantle their arguments thoughtfully and intelligently. It's way easier to call someone a "progressive Christian" (and therefore, someone I don't need to pay any attention to) than to interact with the substance of their doctrinal statement that I take issue with.

Conversely, why do we want to call our own doctrine "static"? It's a kind of trump card. It allows us to signal, "I'm over here holding fast to the faith while you're over there veering away." But if Scripture is a map, the world an ocean, and the faith a ship, we're deceiving ourselves if we think we're "statically" staying put. No, we're sailing. You might be staying put in relation to the ship, but the ship has gone a great distance in the past 2000 years. Use the map to wisely steer the ship when it's your turn at the rudder, but don't pretend like you aren't moving and discovering new shores and new straits that you have to figure out how to navigate.