WHY PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANS
DON’T LIKE APOLOGETICS
WHAT IS PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY?
It can be hard to define progressive Christianity because it’s
an umbrella term for a lot of different beliefs. But I think my
friend and fellow blogger, Alisa Childers (who was once part
of a progressive Christian church), hit the nail on the head
when she summarized it this way in a recent post:
• A lowered view of the Bible
• Feelings are emphasized over facts
• Essential Christian doctrines are open for reinter-
pretation
• Historical terms are redefined
• The heart of the gospel message shifts from sin and
redemption to social justice
Here’s the danger: to the untrained ear, the progressive
Christian message can sound a lot like biblical Christianity.
There’s talk of God, Jesus, the Bible, love, and compassion.
If a child has never learned to think more deeply about
theology and what the Bible actually teaches, he can easily
mistake progressive Christianity for biblical Christianity.
And progressive Christianity often teaches an incomplete or
false gospel.
Exhibit A: There’s a blog called Unfundamentalist Parent-
ing that promotes parenting according to progressive
Christian views. One Easter, the blog featured a guest post
by a children’s pastor at a progressive Christian church. In
her post, The Trouble with Easter: How To (and not to) Talk
to Kids about Easter, the author expressed how difficult
Easter is because she doesn’t want to teach the kids in her
spiritual care that:
• Jesus died for you/your sins (this is “psychologically
damaging”)
• God intended for Jesus to die (this is “confusing and
jarring”)
• Jesus died to save them from God’s judgment (“an
atonement theology of inborn corruption in need of
redemption has no place in a conversation with kids
about Easter”)
The whole article literally made my heart hurt. Views like
these are thorny, foreign invaders in the church.
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The Unfundamentalist Parenting blog recently featured
another post that caught my eye: Why Your Children Do
NOT Need Apologetics. (If you’re not familiar with the term,
apologetics is the study of why there’s good reason to believe
Christianity is true.) The post is filled with misunderstand-
ings, but my purpose here is not to rebut it. Instead, I want
to highlight why progressive Christians don’t like apologet-
ics and why that shows just how important the study of apol-
ogetics actually is.
The author bemoans the fact that apologetics “confines
faith as doctrine,” explaining: “Our faith is a dynamic expe-
rience that shifts and evolves for us and especially for a child
growing leaps and bounds in their development. We cannot
capture that experience and box it into a set of propositions to
memorize and defend—that limits and denies the realities of
the human experience.”
This statement says so much. The author is confused
between the objective, unchanging truth of God and the
subjective, changing experiences we have as we relate to God
throughout our lives.
God and the truth He has revealed do not shift and
evolve. Our experiences shift and evolve, but that has
nothing to do with what is true.
Teaching kids apologetics isn’t about putting their
experiences in a “box.” To the contrary, apologetics is
about stepping outside personal experience and exam-
ining what reason there is to believe Christianity is true
regardless of our feelings.
If kids are only developing a faith based on “shifting and
evolving” experiences, they have no way of knowing if their
faith is well placed. I could have faith that a mouse will fly
out of a tree right now, but that would be a bad thing to
have faith in.
Faith, in and of itself, is no virtue. It’s only as solid as
the object of the faith. The question is, how can we be
confident that Jesus, as the object of Christian faith, is
solid? Apologetics.
Progressive Christians don’t like apologetics because it
challenges them to think of biblical teachings in a category
of objective truth—something we’re not free to change just
because we happen to “experience” it in varied ways.