I spent two hours watching an interview with self-proclaimed progressive pastor, Josh Scott, last night. His church, GracePointe in Nashville, Tennessee, put out an infographic saying what God’s Word isn’t and is; you can imagine what they said. I’ll give you their very first “isn’t”: 1. The Bible isn’t the Word of God, according to Josh Scott and his church, GracePointe. It seems that after that there isn’t much left to engage with. The moment a “Christian church” says, as part of their confession, that Holy Scripture is neither Holy nor God’s Word to and for humanity, there isn’t even a candle’s wick left to con-versate with. But I want to review, a bit, of what Scott thinks. If you want to watch the 2 hour plus interview, you can do that here.

Sketch

Scott’s story is the standard progressive testimony. He grew up in Eastern Kentucky, part of the Freewill Baptist denomination and Southern Baptist Convention, respectively. His grandpa was a Freewill Baptist pastor, but he tragically died when Scott was 11 years old. Scott says this event had a traumatic effect upon him. The circumstances are rather tragic. Scott says his grandpa was holding a church business meeting, and it was a meeting under duress. Apparently someone at the meeting shouted at Scott’s grandpa: ‘we don’t want you here, just leave!’ His grandpa literally had a heart attack and died right there. For Scott, as a young boy, this left an indelible mark on his psyche. He says that he associated that with the sort of God that the Bible referred to for many years following; a God of wrath and anger. This also started young Josh on a quest that has pushed him to become what he has today. As he got older, as early as his late teens, he began preaching on the Freewill/SBC circuit. He would travel around in his area and do pulpit supply for a variety of churches, weekly. As he continued to age, still young in his early to mid-twenties, he really started to have doubts and questions about the God he had been exposed to in his circles. He got his hands on the writings of Max Lucado; Scott says, ironically, that Lucado was the first to plant the seed in his head that it was okay to read more than just the Bible. Apparently in Scott’s primitivist circles it was the Bible (solo Scriptura) only; no other books were allowed to be read when considering who God is.

Once Josh Scott was given the permission to do so, indirectly by Lucado, Scott began reading NT Wright, which led to, unfortunately him reading some founding Jesus Seminar fellows such as Marcus Borg and John Dominick Crossan. When you hear Scott describe his understanding of God, and with particular reference to Jesus and the New Testament, what he describes, on both the higher critical and spiritual side, sounds like a cabling together of Borg’s Gnostic spirituality, and Crossan’s revolutionary Jesus. Later, as Scott describes it, he got his hands on Richard Rhor’s work; which as Scott explains, injected a levity of mysticism into his spirituality that he needed. Beyond this, Scott says he was an English major in college, which also informs the way he approaches Scripture. He claims to take a literary approach to Scripture, but then betrays that by saying that most of the Bible is metaphor; inclusive of the Trinity. In regard to his doctrine of God, when you put all of these informing voices together, and I’m sure many more that he didn’t share, he says that he is a panentheist (although his version of panentheism doesn’t sound very closely related to an “orthodox panentheism,” meaning I don’t think most panentheists proper, like Jürgen Moltmann, would recognize it). When we get into his understanding of salvation theory he says that he is a pluralist. The way he describes things, in this vein, sound quite close to John Hick’s theological pluralism. Here is a concise sketch of Hick’s understanding:

In the late 1960s, Hick had another set of experiences that dramatically affected his life and work. While working on civil rights issues in Birmingham, he found himself working and worshiping alongside people of other faiths. During this time he began to believe that sincere adherents of other faiths experience the Transcendent just as Christians do, though with variances due to cultural, historical, and doctrinal factors. These experiences led him to develop his pluralistic hypothesis, which, relying heavily on Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal distinction, states that adherents of the major religious faiths experience the ineffable Real through their varying culturally shaped lenses. Hick’s pluralistic considerations then led him to adjust his theological positions, and he subsequently developed interpretations of Christian doctrines, such as the incarnation, atonement, and trinity, not as metaphysical claims but as metaphorical or mythological ones. However, despite Hick’s changes theologically, many of his underlying philosophical positions remained largely intact over the course of his long career.[1]

The way Scott describes his theory of salvation sounds almost word-for-word with Hick’s pluralism. Since Scott rejects the Bible as God’s Word, ultimately, his modus operandi works from an absolute turn-to-the-subjectivism. His understanding of the theological and spiritual all depends on the experiencer’s sense of God and reality. There is nothing or no One extra nos (outside of us), no mind-independent extramental reality known as God, per se, for Scott’s theology proper. At this point, if you’re aware, Scott’s spirituality and theology sounds akin to the Enlightenment rationalism and romanticism of someone like Friedrich Schleiermacher. Indeed, the way Scott thinks Jesus sounds almost exactly like the Ebionite understanding that Schleiermacher et al. (Crossan etc.) operated with; just not quite as sophisticated.

The Ethical Cash-out

The way all of the aforementioned cashes out in Scott’s ecclesial and pastoral polity is to defer to the broader culture in order to know what truth and reality actually entails. There is a level of scientism, and essentially a whole lot of normative relativism at play in the way Scott thinks about anthropological concerns vis-à-vis socio-political issues. The primary thing his church wants to stand for is the value and affirmation of each person’s unique human experience. In our culture that happens to reduce most readily to human sexuality. They want people to know that they not only love, but affirm the LBGTQ+ community without qualification. He believes the church has damaged her image, almost beyond repair, by the way the church has treated people who live as homosexual, or in that sphere. This takes us back to the sort of God Scott was exposed to as a child and teenager; it is this God he is attempting to deconstruct, going as far as asserting that Scripture is not God’s Word, and then reconstructing it in the broader culture’s self-projected collective image. Ultimately, Scott simply sounds like a secular progressive, but with an attempt of recasting that through a quasi-Christian imagination, linguistically.

Conclusion

Josh Scott represents a typical progressive Christian. His testimony mimics most anyone else’s who claims to be progressive Christian. Almost all of their stories share a common past in some iteration of what they would now call Fundamentalism (and many of them did grow up in genuinely Fundamentalist religions and subcultures). The thing is, is that they haven’t really moved past their past, they have simply re-iterated a neo-Fundamentalism. It’s just that their informing word comes from the progressive secular culture, rather than their maybe idiosyncratic subcultures they grew up within. They live in a negation of a negation now, and this is sad. They look back at what and who they thought God was, and then negate that through their progressively formed optics handed to them by the broader culture. In some cases, like Scott’s, they might get their hands on various ‘liberal’ thinkers within the mainline and higher Protestant traditions; typically ones who themselves have taken shape under the pressures provided for by Enlightenment premises. They will work this into their neo-Fundamentalist (or ‘progressive’) mode, and live as if they part of a brave new world in the Christian imagination. But the sad reality is that there is nothing historically Christian whatsoever about what progressive Christians claim to be. And the thing is, this is exactly how they like it.

Aside: This progressively Christian subculture is now making inroads into what were once conservative Bible Colleges, Seminaries, and churches. Just yesterday, professor at Calvin College (James KA Smith) tweeted, that he not only loves but affirms ALL of the LGBTQ+ students on campus. This is a growing trend whether we are reading a Christianity Today article, or attending The Gospel Coalition’s sponsorship of the Revoice Conferences. Pastors, theologians, and Christian teachers of all stripes seem to be buckling under the cultural pressure to faithfully proclaim the historic and orthodox witness of Holy Scripture as God’s Word in all matters. Scott and the progressive Christians are just more explicit about their self-understanding and identity within the ecclesial landscape. What makes things more deleterious though for the broader evangelical world, is that a version of progressivism has been seeping into their churches and schools, albeit in softer tones and without the flamboyant fanfare that the Scott’s of the Christian world present with.

This is a time to be vigilant, and for pastors, theologians and other Christian leaders to know their Christian stuff. Not so they can engage in a debate, per se, but so they can offer a thick and robust alternative Christian Dogmatic that has an intentional in-formation of their socio-political activism in the public square. What I mean is that if the genuine Christian is going to take a stand in our day and age, they need to know who God actually is and what God’s Word actually says with reference to the various culturisms we are being barraged with every single day. But it is time to stand up and be counted. Be a Bonhoeffer, or an Esther why don’t you!  

---

[1] David C. Cramer, “John Hick,” in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 03-11-2021.