Book Review:
What Does a Progressive Christian Believe?--A Guide for the Searching, the Open and the Curious, by Delwin Brown

By the Rev. Anne Howard

This is the book we’ve been waiting for.

We’ve been waiting, I say, because far too often, I’ve heard someone say “I’m a Christian, but not 'that' kind of Christian.” They can say that they are not biblical literalists, they don’t believe that God is a punishing distant monarch, they know there’s more to Jesus than Mel Gibson’s movie. In short, they don’t identify with the Christianity that dominates the public conversation.

There’s a problem here: they can say what they are not, but the question remains: So what kind of Christian are you?

One new book, Del Brown’s “What Does a Progressive Christian Believe?—A guide for the Searching, the Open and the Curious,” gives us a solution to the problem with some pithy, lucid answers.

Dean Emeritus of Pacific School of Religion and formerly the Harvey H. Potthoff Professor of Christian Theology at Iliff School of Theology, Brown writes with clarity and conviction out of his own passion that “progressive Christians join with their liberal and conservative Christian friends in rejecting the agenda of the religious right as a poisonous departure from any credible interpretation of the gospel.” It is high time, he writes, to name this poison for what it is: “a repressive political ideology disguised in Christian trappings.”

And while he is unabashed in his sense of urgency for the articulation of “the profoundly healing voice of Christianity,” he is careful not to offer the definitive script for that voice. This is one man’s version of what he calls the “family of perspectives that vigorously rejects the religious right as a distortion of the Christian faith” and he is able to articulate his own passion with remarkable humility and grace. This is indeed a healing and generous expression of Christianity.

Beginning with a brief historical overview of two strains of Christianity that progressive Christianity is not, i.e. liberal or conservative, Brown gives us a pithy seven-point answer of what it is. It’s those seven points that are stunning, because they are the solid pillars of basic systematic theology: Bible, Christ, God, Humanity, Sin, Salvation, Church.

In this systematic, Brown offers a Christianity that “charts a different course” than liberal or conservative Christianity, a course that embraces the rich diversity of the biblical narrative and the public witness of the church.

In his seven points, he retrieves the value of the bible, affirms the presence of God entwined in all of creation, and breathes life into the creeds (imagine that!) He grounds a view of humanity in the Genesis story of co-creation and the twin commandments to love God and others as ourselves.

Love is the key to his treatment of sin, and he give us a refreshing correctives on centuries of bad preaching. Sin he rightly portrays as a failure to love “loving too much or too little any part of the interconnected web of life”; and sin’s clever strategy of deception, subtle self-deception gives rise to the structures that plague our world: racism, consumerism, militarism, etc.

But there is good news: salvation. And salvation, of course, is not located on the other side of pearly gates, but available here and now in our world where God is “working through all the processes of the creation to bring it to the fullness and health made possible by love.” And we are part of the process, as the church, “the community of those who seek to serve God’s healing work in the world.”

One succinct way to express the value of this book is to point to a phrase that prefaces several positions descriptive of progressive Christianity: “There is a Christian reason for…” What follows is just that, the explicit Christian reason for, say, respecting diversity or working for economic justice or caring for the planet or making peace valuing the common good or or being open to other faith traditions.

Brown gives us reasons by taking us into the biblical record and the early church’s rendering of that narrative to offer compelling reasons that comprise a sound theology. This is what takes this book beyond one more expression of liberal ideals or a philosophical theology that would ignore the particularity of Christianity’s biblical heritage.

All of this leads to his final chapter, “Rightly Mixing Religion with Politics.” We know too much about the wrong way to do this. With six rules for bringing religion into the public square, Brown gives us a recipe for the right way, the generous way, the humble way, recognizing that “in our differences we are, together, ordering and reordering the world.”

This book will help us with the task. Don't miss it!