‘If the church were Christian’ – intro
In his 2010 book, If the Church Were Christian: Rediscovering the Values of Jesus, Quaker pastor Philip Gulley offers a recipe for, well, making the Church Christian. Richard Rohr thinks that the recipe is ‘superb’, and restates it in the following words:-
- Jesus is a model for living more than an object of worship.
- Affirming people’s potential is more important than reminding them of their brokenness.
- The work of reconciliation should be valued over making judgments.
- Gracious behavior is more important than right belief.
- Inviting questions is more valuable than supplying answers.
- Encouraging the personal search is more important than group uniformity.
- Meeting actual needs is more important than maintaining institutions.
- Peacemaking is more important than power.
- We should care more about love and less about sex.
- Life in this world is more important than the afterlife (eternity is God’s work anyway).
My reaction to this set of ‘Ten Commandments’ is rather similar to that of Michael Kruger, who wrote a series of blog posts on this subject (with Gulley’s book very much in mind) and has now published these in book form:
The Ten Commandments of Progressive Christianity, Cruciform Press, 2019.
Briefly, I think that:-
- This list is full of half-truths, and all the more deceptive and dangerous for that.
- The repeated use of ‘more than’ is misleading in this context, because it could be understood as meaning either ‘as well as’, or ‘rather than’; and the difference is rather profound.
- As Kruger remarks, there is nothing particularly ‘progressive’ about these ten points: they represent old-fashioned liberalism, with a sprinkling of post-modernism.
- If Rohr can call this ‘returning to essentials’, then those of us who think differently will need to work a little harder to define and teach what we think the ‘essentials’ of Christianity really are.
Gulley himself has written this introductory article.