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In this episode, Trent sits down with Protestant theologian Randal Rauser to discuss his book, “Progressive Christians Love Jesus Too,” and his response to fellow Protestant Alisa Childer’s criticism of progressive Christianity.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Do progressive Christians love Jesus or do they merely say that, and progressive Christianity is another gospel, a false religion? Is it the bonafide truth, a false religion or are there many shades in between?
Joining me today to help me discuss this issue is Randal Rauser. He’s a Protestant theologian. He’s been on the podcast before. We’ve had some really good dialogues, and I think we’ll have a really good dialogue today, including things, many things actually, that we might agree on and probably a few things that we disagree on as well, but I’m excited for Randal to talk to us about his new book because for Catholics, this is an interesting window into disputes that happen a lot among Protestants and evangelicals, though a few Catholic names do show up there as well. Randal, welcome to the Council of Trent.
Randal Rauser:
It’s always good to be with you, Trent, especially because we’re recording on St. Patrick’s Day. So I’ve got my green shirt on and this is the best way I can think to spend it. So it’s good to be with you.
Trent Horn:
Oh, it’s good to be with you as well. I didn’t wear my green, so I would get pinched if this was elementary school. I have my green fern behind me representing. That’s the closest that I have. So this is the book that you wrote. Let me hold it up here for people to see, Progressive Christians Love Jesus Too: A Response to Alisa Childers and the Heresy Hunters. So why don’t you give us a little bit of background here because a lot of my, not all my audience, but a lot of my audience is Catholic and may not be as familiar with the work of Alisa Childers, and the work that she does, I agree with some of it and I disagree with some of it. So I’m interested to get your perspective on that, but for a lot of my audience who may not be as familiar with this, what she is doing, what you call heresy hunting, could you give us a little background on that and what motivated you to write the book?
Randal Rauser:
Sure. So Alisa Childers was a pop singer in a Christian group called ZOEgirl in the early 2000s, and then she left that career and started a family, and she and her husband, I think in the late 2000s were going to a church with a pastor that she would later identify as progressive. He invited her into a weekly or biweekly course that was some congregants were a part of where they were going to explore some hard questions of faith. They ended up leaving the church after about four months, and she was convinced that this pastor, eventually, that he was malevolent and that he wanted to undermine the faith of Christians and that he-
Trent Horn:
So not just that he’s mistaken, but that she attributes that he’s like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He has nefarious motives.
Randal Rauser:
Yes, exactly, which is, frankly, one of the concerning aspects of Alisa Childers’ approach to these issues is to impugn not only the beliefs of a person as incorrect, but also their intentions. So then, I don’t know, in the late 2010s, she was podcasting. She didn’t really get onto my radar until this book came out. By then, she’d already amassed a decent audience online on the YouTube podcast that she had. I think it’s called The Alisa Childers Podcast. This book came out in 2020, and it is a sustained critique, I would say attack, on progressive Christians.
Trent Horn:
Her book?
Randal Rauser:
Her book, yes. So her book, Another Gospel, that’s the title, the central thesis of it, actually, she shares it explicitly on page 76, is that progressive Christianity is another gospel and indeed another religion. It’s an entirely distinct religion from Christianity, which is quite an extraordinary claim, frankly, to say not simply that progressive Christians have some hetero docs, beliefs or some even heretical beliefs, but that this has become now an entirely distinct religion just like saying Hinduism is a different religion from Christianity, and thus when progressive Christians refer to Jesus or the atonement or resurrection, they’re not actually referring to Christian doctrines at all, but to doctrines of a distinct religion centered on the distinct Jesus. It’s just an extraordinary thesis, frankly, but what’s really striking about it is the book has taken off. It has more than 3,000 Amazon reviews to this point.
Trent Horn:
What’s the name of the book again? Another Gospel?
Randal Rauser:
Another Gospel, yeah, and I forget the subtitle, but you’ll certainly find it just with the title. It’s Christian Confronts Progressive Christianity or something to that effect, but others have defended her in this. So Lee Strobel, which is as mainstream an evangelical apologist as you can get, he wrote the forward for the book. Sean McDowell has been an enthusiastic proponent of the book. He’s also defended the claim that progressive Christianity is another religion, and there’s a long list.
Trent Horn:
I’ll put the Childers book right here in the front for people to see, I’ll superimposed this here, Another Gospel: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity. Now I see why you did the cover the way you did because it mirrors the cover of her book.
So this is interesting because I mean, when I’m dialoguing with Protestants, even when I’m dialoguing with other Catholics, I get accused of theological error. I mean, when you study theology, these accusations will come up, but it is a pretty heavy accusation to say, “By holding this belief, you are no longer Christian,” because at least with Catholics, we probably put out a taxonomy in this way that at the bottom would be apostacy. The sin of apostacy is the total repudiation of the Christian faith. So if you say, “Look, God does not exist, there is no God,” I would say that’s apostacy. That can no longer be Christianity.
Next would be heresy where you deny something that has been divinely revealed, that has been infallibly taught to have been divinely revealed like the divinity of Christ, for example, or specifically Catholic doctrines like Christ’s presence, real presence in the Eucharist. Then you’d have theological error, so things that the church teaches like, “This is what the church teaches, and if you disagree, you’re in theological error,” but the church doesn’t infallibly teach, it’s divinely revealed.
Then finally, there would be areas of theological speculation like where Thomists and Molinists disagree about divine foreknowledge, where the church doesn’t have a position on that. Do you think that shoulders in her book and her accusation that progressive Christians are another gospel, that she fails to have a nuanced approach to how wrong you can be on things?
Randal Rauser:
I think that’s pretty clear in my estimation that that is true. I think one of the central problems here is that she will talk about historic Christianity, but what she’s actually often referring to or assuming is her conservative Protestant evangelical understanding of Christianity, and she’s failed to distinguish that from the broader Christian tradition. A couple key examples, when she talks about atonement, it’s pretty clear that what she’s assuming is a penal substitutionary theory of atonement, such that by implication, if you reject this theory, which is a theory held by some Protestants but certainly has never been definitional for Christian identity to accept that account of God’s reconciling work in Christ, if you deny that, you are de facto rejecting a central identifying hallmark of Christianity and you’re no longer Christian.
Same thing in the book. She explicitly targets universalism, says that universalists are heretics. She doesn’t address annihilationism in terms of posthumous judgment, but her only framework for talking about posthumous judgment in the book is eternal conscious torment. So by implication, the assumption here seems to be that you have to accept an eternal conscious torment account of posthumous judgment-
Trent Horn:
Of hell, you mean?
Randal Rauser:
… in order to qualify as a Christian of hell, yes.
Trent Horn:
Let’s focus on penal substitution because I find that really interesting because there are some things Alisa Childers has said, some of her criticism she’s offered of some people I don’t fully agree, but I can see the point she’s making like with Father Richard Rohr and other points. I can see that. So I see how Catholics could come across her channel and say, “Oh, yeah, this is really good.” She’s calling out ambiguities, problems with progressive Christianity, but then she’ll turn around and do this and say, “Yeah, if you don’t accept penal substitutionary theory of the atonement, then you’re not really Christian.”
For our audience who aren’t as familiar, all Christians basically agree that Christ’s death on the cross did something to reconcile us with God. The question is, how did it do that? There have been different theories throughout the church’s history. One of them that became prominent, especially after the Protestant Reformation, is the idea that Christ was punished by the Father for our sins and that Christ took on our punishment, and the sense that he was literally punished, he literally received the punishment that we should have received. Some people have cached it out to even say that God’s wrath was poured out upon the sun.
So it’s interesting when Childers says, “Oh, well, if you don’t believe this and you’re not Christian, well, the problem is for Catholics,” paragraph 603 of the catechism says, “Jesus did not experience reprobation as if he himself had sinned, but in the redeeming love that always united him to the Father, he assumed us in the state of our waywardness of sin to the point where he could say in our name from the cross, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ Having established solidarity with sinners, God did not spare his own son, but gave them up for us all so that we might be reconciled to God by the death of his son.”
So from a Catholic view, there is no definitive Catholic teaching on atonement theory. There are different theories and models, but it’s definitely said the church teaches, I mean, not infallibly, but it teaches that you can’t accept the penal substitution view. So I agree with you. It just seems odd that she would latch onto this as a central point that many other major Christian churches and bodies reject.
Randal Rauser:
Well, the thing is I grew up in a conservative dispensational Protestant household, and within that context in the church I grew up in, I grew thinking that to accept the Jesus was going to return again, you had to accept a pre-millennial secret rapture of Jesus. I had conflated those two concepts because that’s all I had known, and I hadn’t traveled, frankly, outside of that tradition.
So when people said they rejected the secret rapture and even the secret rapture at the beginning of a seven-year tribulation but they still accepted the return of Christ, I didn’t have categories for that because I thought, “Well, no, that’s just the same thing.” I think that this is similar to what’s happening with Alisa Childers is she was raised in a conservative evangelical protestant subculture in which the one way that she was taught to think about atonement was through penal substitutionary categories, and nobody told her different apparently. So when she wrote the book and when she raises these criticisms of progressive Christians, that’s a deal breaker for her.
So this, of course, is one of the reasons that people do identify as progressive Christian because for the most part, that term in my observation is used by people who grew up in a conservative evangelical context and then have come to critique aspects of their theological upbringing, the grid that they received growing up, including questioning penal substitution as an adequate or sufficient account of God’s reconciling work in Christ. So when they critique it, she thinks that they’re just critiquing the atonement itself when, of course, they’re critiquing one historically conditioned and limited model or theory of atonement.
Trent Horn:
Right. Well, let’s talk then a little bit about what you mean by progressive Christianity or Childers means because I think that not even half the battle, I feel like 80% to 90% of this disagreement is going to come down to definitional terms because I think that there are people that you and I would maybe agree or disagree are in orthodoxy or out of orthodoxy, some people who call themselves progressive Christians that are so far beyond the norm. You and I both agree, yeah, they might say they’re Christian, but they’re not.
I think there is a little bit of a challenge in defining what it is. It almost sounds like it’s defined by what it’s not. I remember, so John Pavlovitz is an example in Childers’ book, and you also talk about him a little bit. He’s an interesting figure. If you’re ever on Catholic or Christian Twitter, his slots come up and are shared a lot. He grew up Catholic and then I think he became an atheist, and then a Methodist pastor, and now he’s deconstructing, but I remember reading his and talking about what is progressive Christianity. I think one of the first thing he says is, “Well, we believe God is eternal. He’s not bound to a 6,000-year book. He’s not this, it’s not that.” I guess help me walk through, I know this will be difficult, but what is progressive Christianity given how elastic it can be, how people define it?
Randal Rauser:
So sometimes an analogy I like to use is I’m a seminary professor, and as a seminary professor at a Protestant evangelical seminary, in order to take classes there, you don’t have to sign a doctrine of faith in order to take classes, and as a result, I’ve had students all over the map in terms of their theology. Now, most students are broadly evangelical Protestant of one or another type, but I’ve had students that denied the historical resurrection of Jesus. I’ve had students that were Oneness Pentecostals, and so they denied the historic doctrine of the Trinity and so on. So you get theological deviations.
The reality is the nature of the classroom as a community is defined not by adherence to a common creedal set of beliefs. It’s rather of its nature defined by the space of safe theological open inquiry, where people that generally have some significant overlap in terms of theological perspectives can explore, but without any definitional creedal identification marks, and progressive Christianity should be thought like that.
So what it is in its essence, I would say again, is people who are deconstructing particular theological grids or frameworks and exploring new theological understanding. So attempting to move from deconstruction to reconstruction, some of them end up on the bottom of your scale in terms of apostacy. They end up walking away from Christianity altogether. Others end up moving from a penal substitutionary theory of atonement to a Girardian theory of atonement or warfare model of atonement or something else. So they’re continuing to develop in their theology.
Some of the major areas where this happens, we’ve already mentioned atonement, judgment in the afterlife, of course, probably the biggest and most incendiary one is people rethinking how the church should respond to sexual minorities, like people who are non-cisgender or non-heteronormative, so gay people, transgender people, so you get those conversations, and then other areas like evolution and biblical and errancy and so on. So there’s a whole list of areas, but there’s no unifying creed.
Now, the one thing to keep in mind is that’s true of evangelicalism too, right? Evangelicalism, there’s no unifying creed that you say, “If I believe this, I’m an evangelical.” You can get statements like the Lausanne World Covenant Statement or something, or the National Association of Evangelicals. They have statements, but not everybody signs on to those statements. So you can have people who are recognized as evangelicals who actually are heretics. I would say arguably Kenneth Copeland is an example. He’s an evangelical. I think he’s also a heretic, and I think he’s also a scammer, to be honest.
Trent Horn:
So those who aren’t familiar, I have an episode of this. If I find it, I’ll link to it in the description below, but he is a prosperity preacher. He is someone who preaches that health and wealth are signs of God’s favor to you, and that if you manifest enough faith, God will, will definitely reward that with good health and good wealth. The best way to manifest that is to send a check to Copeland. Wow. That’s very, very convenient for him to do that.
I would say also that he’s heretical in other ways that he is affirmed, I mean, I’ve seen this cited in secondary sources, I want to get the primary source, but I’m pretty sure it’s there, has affirmed that God the Father is embodied. He talks about how this earth is a copy of the mother planet that we have come from. So I’m going to put that out there with a caution. I’ve only seen that in secondary literature on him. I haven’t found the primary source on that, but you’re right.
Let me bring this up to you then in looking at the two because I think that’s a good point you raised with evangelicals like, “Well, do they have a unified list of beliefs?” At the end of your book in chapter 10, you go on the question, “Salvation is not a list of beliefs. What do I have to believe to be saved?” You quote Childers who herself says, “Okay. Well, what do you have to believe?” If progressive Christianity is not Christian, then there’s got to be like, “This is what Christianity is, and if you fall away from that bedrock, you’re not there.” She basically cites Norm Geisler and he gives I think eight things that humans are sinners, there’s one God, you’re saved by grace, Jesus is fully God and fully man, Christ died for us, he rose from the dead, and I have to believe.
Though you raised a really good point here in this section is that he doesn’t mention the trinity or baptism or other things that other evangelicals would consider essential. So it’s like if progressives Christians don’t have this unifying thing and evangelicals are critical of that, it seems like they have a similar problem.
Randal Rauser:
I think you run into a lot of problems there. I would say interestingly in terms of the sacraments or as I would traditionally call them ordinances coming from a Baptistic tradition, you do get outliers like the Salvation Army or the Quakers who don’t practice regular sacraments in the way the wider church does. I would still consider them Christian, but they fall into this gray area. Anyway, but then you get Oneness Pentecostals, who have a heretical view of the trinity. They have a modulus view.
So the thing is, I think one thing we want to keep in mind here is the distinction between the category of soteriology or salvation and ecclesiology or the church, and it’s actually one thing to be reconciled to God in Christ. It’s another thing to be part of the visible community of God’s people. Those are not the same thing. They’re different just as Jesus talked about the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. So we always need to be clear when we’re talking about boundary markers or what do you need to do to be X. We have to be distinguishing between what do you have to do to be a Christian versus to be reconciled to God in Christ.
Trent Horn:
Well, the way I look at it though, would this be a fair comparison that a difference between progressive Christians and evangelical Christians and even more conservative Christians, Catholics though because we have a hierarchy and because we have a magisterium with an official set of teachings, it becomes a little bit different? Let’s just say evangelical Christians and more progressive Protestant Christians, it seems like to me the difference might be more one of degree than kind in that evangelical Christians will say that the beliefs you must have to be a Christian are these, but you can only question these certain things and no more than that, but for progressive Christians, it’s larger. There are more things that can be questioned and you’re still either Christian or you’re even orthodox. You’re still within the good bounds here like the issues of sexual morality, issues of eschatology, even issues of theology, but even progressive Christian, I think you would agree, it can’t all be up for grabs.
Here’s an interesting quote from John Pavlovitz that you quote in the book, maybe we can talk about it, that he says, “There are no sacred cows. Only the relentless sacred search for truth. Tradition, dogma, and doctrine are all fair game because all passed through the hands of flawed humanity, and as such are all equally vulnerable to the prejudices, fears, and biases of those it touch.”
Do you think though there’s a danger if we say that because in Catholicism we have things that are infallibly defined? You could apply, I was thinking before the interview, the MC Hammer rule, “You can’t touch this.” No, this is settled. The word defined comes from the Latin define, which means to bring to an end. So do you think even among progressive Christians there do need to be some doctrines we consider are definitive, they are sacred cows we can’t touch or that there might be a danger if we don’t have that or maybe it’s okay? What do you think about coming from here?
Randal Rauser:
So I think there’s two different issues I want to address here. The first issue is to come back briefly to the relationship between the evangelical and progressive. You’re touching on this in terms of it being continuum, and I think that’s exactly right that we’re not dealing here with two binary distinct groups of two different religions as Alisa Childers claims. We have a continuum here. So you have people who are very conservative on different issues and, of course, they can be conservative on some issues in progressive or liberal and others, but you have people more at that end of the continuum. Then the closer you move, you get to more of a progressive or liberal space. You might be to what was once commonly called the evangelical left. So you have people like Tony Campolo or Shane Claiborne or Ron Sider, these are evangelical Protestants who are also recognized to be more left wing, Jim Wallace, another one.
Then at that point, you’re getting into the space of progressive Christianity. So then you might hear the label at that point, progressive evangelical, which is a label I’ve often used of myself. Then you get into the further out onto the progressive spectrum and then you get into someone like John Pavlovitz, and then maybe the people that they become sexual libertines and they don’t really believe God exists, but they still use the words for various functional purposes and they call themselves progressives. You have a huge continuum here. So the whole point of we have to be careful about binary categories that treat this as just another religion, no, reality is much more complex than that.
Now, in terms of your question, are there certain things that you can’t question? I think that the problem with the question itself as it’s framed is we deal with the reality of people who are questioning and doubting, and to tell people who doubt, let’s say something so fundamental as God’s existence as we know Mother Teresa did in her journals, it’s hard to come out with something more basic than that. Do we say to her, “You’re not allowed to doubt that because that’s something the church has fixed for all time that God exists,” or do we say, “Your doubts are reality and so let’s talk about them and let’s have a safe and open space where we can have a conversation about your doubts and what we do with them”? I think progressive Christianity is much more concerned with that latter approach for the most part, not promoting doubts just as an end in themselves, but recognizing the reality of doubt and questioning as part of a living vibrant Christian faith and community.
Trent Horn:
I agree with that. I think I would just use a different vocabulary. So when I would use the word doubt, I think that it is okay to have doubts if by a doubt you mean a difficulty, you want to believe something, but you’re experiencing difficulty, you don’t see how to logically arrive at it or maybe answer certain objections. So Mother Teresa, well, St. Teresa of Calcutta, but I think she’ll always be Mother Teresa to people, you’re right when she says this, but I think the attitude that she embraces towards it is what should be emulated.
I think she said once, “When the night becomes very thick and it seems to me as if I will end up in hell, that I simply offer myself to Jesus.” Now the catechism of the Catholic church says something interesting in paragraph 157. It says that, “Faith is certain, it is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie. To be sure, revealed truths can seem obscure to human reason and experience, but the certainty that the divine light gives is greater than that which the light of natural reason gives.” Then it quotes Cardinal John Henry Newman who says, “10,000 difficulties do not make one doubt.”
So I think for me that when people say, “Is it okay to doubt?” I would say, “Yeah, it’s fine, even Mother Teresa had difficulties that you wrestle with and you trust in God as you wrestle with them.” More what my concern is that you can have a difficulty, but you should always see this guardrail that, “If I reject this belief, I will be rejecting Christianity,” the most fundamental one being, the existence of God.
I think in your book you referenced this, and I remember reading the story a while ago of that one Canadian minister. I think her name was Greta Vosper, I think, who said that she is a minister, but she also firmly rejects. She’s an atheist who rejects the existence of God. To me, that seems if someone holds that view, they couldn’t possibly be a Christian. Do you see that would be one clear example where someone claims to be a Christian but they just aren’t?
Randal Rauser:
Sure. I mean, I cite that as an example in the book that I so fundamentally disagree with Greta Vosper, but you know what? In terms of the Mother Teresa’s response as you put or St. Teresa’s response to doubt and so on, I actually think there’s something really interesting here when it comes to Childers’ approach. So Lee Strobel, when he wrote the forward to her book, he says in forward, “In Christianity, the anchor is sound biblical doctrine.”
Now, to my mind, he’s not describing Christianity there, he’s describing an evangelical way of thinking about Christianity, which centers Christianity in a very cognitive way on propositional ascent to doctrinal claims. That’s what is the foundation. I think that’s mistaken. I think that the foundation of Christianity is Jesus Christ and our relationship to Jesus, and in those times when you doubt, those are the moments when you, as Eugene Peterson famously put it, you maintain that long obedience in the same direction.
Understanding in parallel that when a married couple marries, they’re going to have moments when they question those original vows, the propositional ascents to claims, but their faithfulness and their genuineness in their marriage is maintained when they continue in the faith through the dark night of the soul so that it’s centered on the relationship rather than simply a cognitive propositional ascent, which I think is very vulnerable.
So this is one of the ironies of evangelicalism often is it tries to present a great strength in terms of its cognitive ascent to doctrines, but I think that often makes it very vulnerable because it’s a lot for people to carry, especially when they do have doubts.
Trent Horn:
I agree with you that Christianity is not primarily defined by propositional ascent, that it’s primarily defined by the life of grace and receiving God’s sanctifying grace and entering into communion with him and with his church, but I do think that having correct theological knowledge, it is incredibly important because if we do, let’s say, yeah, the basis of Christianity is having a relationship with Jesus Christ, it seems like part of having that relationship is at least not having a fundamentally incorrect view of who Jesus is. I guess to make an analogy off the top of my head, have you ever seen the MTV show Catfishing? Have you ever heard of that?
Randal Rauser:
I might have heard of it, but I haven’t seen it, for sure.
Trent Horn:
You’re a better man than I. So you read good theology books, I just end up watching trash TV when I’m staying in a hotel room for a speaking gig. There’s this term catfishing where people will do online dating and pretend to be someone that they’re not or is a famous football player who was caught up in that. You had people who think they have relationships with an attractive woman and it turns out to just be a middle-aged guy in somebody’s basement pulling the chains.
Part of you would say here, “Well, you didn’t really have a relationship with X because you had a fundamental misunderstanding of who X even was.” So it seems like to have that relationship with Jesus that’s fundamental to Christianity, you would need to, at the very minimum, accept things that Jesus is fully man, that he’s fully divine. So you agreed that, yeah, one thing is believing in God. That would definitely have to be something that is beyond the scope of rejecting as a Christian. It seems like you need to have these other things to have that Christian relationship with Jesus versus more of an ambiguous or an amorphous relationship with Jesus. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Randal Rauser:
Well, so first thing I would say is I love talking about these issues, but I will say we’re far off in the weeds relative to Childers and her project, but I’m fine with that. I’m a systematic theologian, a professor of theology, so I love talking about this stuff all day long. Doctrine certainly is important. I do think that you get into all sorts of complexities when we begin to say, “Well, in order to be …” and again, we have to keep in mind distinction between the questions. So in order to be part of the church, you have to believe this set of doctrines like the one that Childers tries to give at the end of her book or even in order to be saved, you have to believe these because then you get into all sorts of questions like, with what intensity do you need to believe these things?
Because it’s one thing to have a varying middling belief, it’s another thing to have a very strong belief. If your child is accused of murder and your child says to you, “Do you believe that I didn’t do it because I’m wrongfully accused?” and you say, “Yeah, I believe you,” that’s not going to be adequate for them. They want to hear with maximal strength that you believe they are innocent.
So the question is in terms of ascent to doctrine, what degree of conviction is required of us in order to have met that threshold? Can you doubt? How much can you doubt? Those are important questions? Drying up a definitive list of doctrines I think is very difficult. Now, with respect to these questions, I’m raising them with respect to soteriology or salvation. With respect to membership in ecclesial communities, the Catholic church has definitions as to what that looks like, my church has definitions as to what that looks like. We have a statement of belief you have to sign onto. Those are all clearly in place. So whenever you join a Christian community, there are certain definitional expectations as to what you should believe, but the salvation question is a much more complex one.
Trent Horn:
Well, let’s go back to Childers then, and I think your primary complaint, and I think this has a bit of an impact maybe on Protestantism in general because it seems like the complaint is Childers, who has a pretty large platform, will say, “In order to be Christian, these beliefs are required and these beliefs are forbidden.” It seems like one of your complaints is, well, by what authority do you have to say these are required and these are forbidden because you seem to be mistaken about requiring things like penal substitution or you may be mistaken about some of the ethical views that you forbid?
So I don’t know if that’s a nub of your criticism that she sets forth this criteria ostensibly based on her, and maybe this will get to the chapter we can discuss about biblical interpretation, it seems like her criteria is set on biblical interpretation, and yet other people might interpret the Bible differently to have a narrower or a broader criteria. Hopefully, I’m circling your complaint as best as I can.
Randal Rauser:
So I recently heard Rick Warren say, and I’m going to paraphrase it slightly, but he said the difference between Southern Baptist and a fundamentalist Baptist is a Southern Baptist believes in the inerrancy of scripture and a fundamentalist Baptist believes in the inerrancy of their interpretation of scripture. I think that there’s something certainly to that is you have to be very careful that you are not simply uncritically assuming that your particular interpretation of a passage is coterminous with the passage. It’s just the same thing so that you’ve lost the fact that you are in fact interpreting it and that other Christians and good conscience can interpret it differently. Childers talks about creation and evolution along these lines as very dismissive of God creating through evolutionary means, which, again, reflects the standard creationist frameworks of thinking in evangelicalism.
Trent Horn:
Does she think that believing in something like theistic evolution would put you within this progressive camp or not Christian or is she not very clear on that?
Randal Rauser:
Yeah, I wouldn’t want us to speak on that without looking-
Trent Horn:
She just seems dismissive.
Randal Rauser:
Yeah. I’m just looking at it now. Okay. So on page 78, she opposes Darwinian evolution with what she calls the biblical account of creation. So she doesn’t necessarily say that accepting of this unbiblical account would be sufficient. I’d have to go back and reread the passage itself, but she does oppose the two, and she assumes then that the biblical account of Genesis 1 and 2 is inconsistent with Neo-Darwinian evolution without conceding that she herself, by saying the biblical account, she’s assuming a particular interpretation of that text.
Trent Horn:
So the problem is that you would say that she is claiming, “Look, the Bible says that this is what Christianity is. Progressive Christians fall outside of that so it is another gospel,” and your retort is, “That’s not what the Bible says. That’s what Alisa Childers says of her interpretation of the Bible.” So the question here is-
Randal Rauser:
Well, and there’s that. The other piece is also even if you get something wrong that’s in the Bible, it doesn’t mean it is something that the thing that you’ve gotten is so wrong that it places you into another religion. So you and I differ as Baptist and Catholic on all sorts of issues. We both recognize that in our estimation, those differences are not sufficient to say one of us is in another religion or is in apostate. Rather, we believe that these are important differences, but they’re not definitional to the very essence of Christian identity.
Trent Horn:
Or take for example the differences between Calvinists and Armenians. Do you know if Childers’ is reformed or Calvinist? I don’t know if she’s ever come out on that or not.
Randal Rauser:
She’s done things with the gospel coalition and she seems to be quite friendly with the reform perspective, but I’m not sure.
Trent Horn:
Sure, but either cant that you’re in, whether you’re a Calvinist or a non-Calvinist on some of these issues. Well, take for example particular or unlimited atonement. Jesus either died for the sins of all only the elect or not only the elect. You’re either going to get it right or you’re going to get it wrong, but most people wouldn’t say that where you fall in that question, even if you got that question wrong, even many Calvinists wouldn’t say that your, I don’t know how some Calvinists would say that you’re not Christian. So I think you raised a good point here that there’s the question of, whose interpretation of scripture would carry authority on this?
Then the second question, I’m glad you brought this up is, how do we determine which errors in understanding scripture are fundamental errors, are ones that deny the faith or a central part of it or those that are just errors simpliciter, that deny some part of revelation but aren’t fundamental to it. It seems like there’s a lot of assumptions going on here.
Randal Rauser:
Yeah, there is, and that’s why you need to nuance these categories and why I was … I mean, I just think that her book is very harmful there because, again, when you get these simplistic binary in-group, out-group categories, frankly, they’re easy to create an enemy and then build your own ministry over against the enemy that you’ve created that you have to fight, but if you are building your ministry and identifying the enemy at the expense of all the nuance and complexity that exists in the world, then you’re really working at loggerheads with truth.
Trent Horn:
I think next week I’m going to be inviting on a Catholic scholar. We’re going to be talking about the Protestant doctrine of the perspicuity of scriptures because this actually would be a nice segue into that future interview that I’ll be doing because I think this is very interesting here that you do run into a problem of on the one hand, you don’t want to set things so narrow that you accuse someone of being non-Christian when they’re having a reasonable disagreement that Christians can have, and I think definitely Childers does that with penal substitution.
On the other hand, you don’t want to define Christianity so broadly that you include people as being Christian who certainly are not. I want to read a quote from Christopher Hitchens. This is really interesting. So when Hitchens did his book, God is Not Great, he gave an interview at a liberal church. I don’t know if it was Unitarian or not, but it was fairly liberal Christian church.
The woman asked him, she said, “The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement that Jesus died for our sins. Do you make a distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?”
Then this was Hitchen’s answer, “I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”
So we have the two narrow problem and the two broad problem, and then how we thread the needle, so to speak, to be able to do that if each person opens the Bible to try to figure that out, I think you referenced this in the book. I’m pretty sure you did. No, I’m going back in my head. The idea that, well, the things that God wants us to believe that are essential, they’ll be plain in scripture, the main things are the plain things, and Childers might just appeal while it’s plainly this in scripture, but do you think it’s as easy as that or that it’s more complicated?
Randal Rauser:
I don’t think I would’ve said quite that. So for example, I wouldn’t say the doctrine of the trinity is in scripture as such. I think the doctrine of the trinity was a post biblical development, a grid or framework for interpreting scripture, which was eventually codified in greater detail into the fourth century at the ecumenical councils at Nicaea, Constantinople. I think it provides a faithful understanding of what’s in scripture, but the trinity as such is not in scripture unless you use the Johannine Comma, 1 John 5:7, the expanded version that tries to have a trinitarian proof text, but it’s not in there in the original.
Trent Horn:
Well, I think it’s the part when you’re talking about Marcionism a little bit and understanding the Old Testament in that she would say, “Well, we just read what it says, and progressive Christians bring in all of these outside things.” I think you say are on page 111, “Childers also claims that progressive Christians are gnostics in that both claim sources of knowledge outside of the Bible that can and should judge scripture,” where it seems like she’s trying to argue for her position of excluding progressive Christians that if we just go to the Bible, it’s plain in what it teaches and what it requires, and she seems to chastise progressive Christians for, quote, unquote, “judging scripture with outside sources”, but I think you brought in a fair point that, “Well, everybody does that.” If I misunderstood you, feel free to correct me.
Randal Rauser:
No, I think this is a really important point. In terms of the theological method, I think that Alisa Childers assumes a, and I don’t mean to be pejorative here, but a naive biblicism, this assumption that you simply derive Christian doctrine by reading the Bible and you’re just drawing out biblical doctrine like mining diamonds from the ground or something like that. In fact, doctrine, the way that I like to describe the creation of Christian doctrine is I would say that that kind of understanding of the origin of Christian doctrine is like saying a potato sitting on the counter is poutine. Now, for those who don’t know what poutine is, it’s a Canadian, it’s dish, it involves cheese curds and-
Trent Horn:
It’s an acquired taste, Randal, and I have had it when I visited Niagara Falls, but-
Randal Rauser:
It’s not my thing. I mean, it takes 14 hours to digest. The key to recognize though is that so a potato, that’s like the Bible. What do you have to do? If you want to get doctrine, you have to read the Bible and interpret it. That means chopping up into fry-shaped bits and frying it up, cooking it, and then in order to finally get doctrine, you need to bring another sources as well. So in order to make poutine, you got to have the cheese curds, you got to have the bacon bits and the chives and so on. In order to get to doctrine, you also are bringing your reading of scripture informed inevitably by the tradition that you grant to some provisional authority, at least, if not ultimate authority. That provides you a grid for interpreting and reasoning through scripture.
You’re drawing upon your own reasoning, drawing logical inferences as best you can. You’re drawing upon moral intuitions and moral reasoning, and you are informed by experiences. All of these things together collectively give you poutine at the end of the day or they give you your doctrine. It’s not just a matter of reading the Bible and getting your doctrine.
So progressive Christians tend to be more aware of that, and people like Alisa Childers, I think, take unfair and cheap shots when they would say, “Well, you’re just bringing in your experience or something else.” No, they’re about the fact that we all bring in our experience, including Alisa Childers, including she appeals to tradition even though she’s not aware necessarily that she’s been formed by this conservative evangelical tradition.
Trent Horn:
So it seems like everyone just needs to admit nobody, especially amongst Protestants who will be debating some of these issues, nobody is just reopening the Bible and saying, “Oh, well, it’s the Bible what is teaching,” very much like a Ken Ham approach, who was the younger earth creationist, “Well, I’m just reading what the Bible says. It says it right here. God said it.”
Everyone is going to add an interpretation, and you said a grid of interpretation based on a particular tradition, which I think Childers definitely does if she reaches penal substitutionary atonement when throughout a lot of church history most of the church fathers did not think of that. They would’ve thought maybe Christ was a ransom made to the devil or Christ is victor or Christ is a sacrifice that outweighs our deads, so many other traditions. Then it becomes, as you interpret scripture, “I have this data, and then which tradition do I pick? It seems convenient if it’s just the tradition that I happen to grow up in.”
Randal Rauser:
Yeah, and of course, this is where people like Childers, they will talk about the threat of postmodernism, and so they often align progressive Christianity with postmodernism and relativism and other things like that. I think this is often where people like Childers, and she definitely does this in her book, she makes a critical error that for the most part, what people that I’ve seen who are progressive Christians, and by this, the people she targets include people like fellows like Peter Enns and Brian Zahnd and the late Rachel Held Evans. Those were all recognized in those leaders broadly in this movement, as well as you’ve mentioned Richard Rohr.
For the most part, most of these individuals, what I see them doing with respect to these kinds of issues is raising concerns about epistemic humility, in other words, recognition of our own limitations that we always see from a particular perspective. We don’t have a God’s eye point of view. That’s not the same thing as endorsing relativism about truth, but she explicitly claims that progressive Christianity endorses relativism about truth.
She even gives this extraordinary example. She says, “I can’t make bacon healthy just by saying I want it to be healthy,” but she imputes to progressive Christians this idea that, “I can just make things true relative to my desire that they’d be true.” I can’t imagine, frankly, a bigger straw man of the nuance about our own epistemic humility that is actually endorsed by progressive Christians and then caricaturing it by this perspective of relativism.
Trent Horn:
Randal, I actually agree with that because in doing apologetics now for about 20 years, I feel like there’s a word that gets thrown around by apologists, especially at the youth minister level and the pop talk at the conference, and that would be the threat of relativism. I think there are very few, if any, true relativists out there in the world that rather, it’s people that have an alternative moral framework that they apply to different situations, whether it’s sexual ethics or other kinds of ethics or theology.
So I think that progressive Christianity, yeah, you’re right, I don’t know if relativism is the right word. It would seem more like if we have a board of possible doctrines or let’s say a board of prohibited moral conduct or obligatory moral conduct and more conservative Christians would have the board more filled out and maybe more progressive Christians, the board, it’s left empty or there’s a lot of question marks on a lot of these different things.
I do feel like, and I don’t mean to be testy or anything like that, although we’ve had a very cordial conversation so far, I think even progressive Christians would say there’s some doctrines, let’s say moral issues like sexual morality, more question marks will get raised than for conservative Christians, but then they’ll have other moral positions where they’ll be almost very dogmatic on.
I think John Pavlovitz would say, “Yeah, you could raise questions about homosexuality, but racism is clearly obviously wrong and no reasonable person could ever embrace it.” So I do think it’s a question of how many question marks are put out there versus that none are put out there, if that makes sense.
Randal Rauser:
The one thing I would just want to say generally in terms of a caution about thinking about progressive Christians as a group is we have to be careful. I’m not saying you do this at all, but we have to be careful about hasty generalization. So for example, we have someone, and I don’t know John Pavlovitz, but I’ve read his stuff. I think he has a lot of good things to say. I also think he can be often a strident voice, although frankly sometimes so can I, but he can be a strident voice and sound sometimes a little shrill.
The thing is, Rachel Held Evans, she was a very different kind of person. When she would write, she was, I think, much more pastoral and much more nuanced in her perspective. It’s the same thing when you get to evangelicals though. You mentioned reformed or Calvinist theology. I’ve known some Calvinist theologians that I would not want to be in an elevator for 20 seconds with, and I’ve known others that I would love to go on a cross country drive with them. So we have to be careful about characterizing any group with a particular voice, and yet I think sometimes that does happen, and so we always have to be careful about that.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Well, I think that this is really helpful to draw open really a larger question that if you are going to accuse other people of not being Christian, I mean, that is one of the most serious charges you can make amongst Christian theologians, not just being an error of, but failing to be, failing to even be Christian or to be Christian but who have embraced heretical teachings, then you should be able to put forward an objective means to be able to distinguish that. It seems like if you don’t have that objective means to settle these kind of disputes and you just assert, “Well, of course, the Bible is on my side,” it’s not as compelling when you do that, especially when there’s clear cases where you’re getting the Bible wrong.
So I think this is really fascinating. I’d love to continue the discussion, and of course, there’s other areas we could have explored as well, but I want to give you just an opportunity to ring up or address any other issues maybe we didn’t get to or some other thoughts of the project that you are trying to do in addressing Childers and talking about this, what you would call progressive Christianity.
Randal Rauser:
So some years ago, Emo Philips, I think his name was, he was a comedian, and this joke he told was voted as the number one religion joke some years ago on a British website. So anyway, the joke goes like this. So this guy’s walking along and he sees someone’s about to jump off a bridge and he says, “Don’t jump,” and the guy says, “Why?” and he says, “Well, do you believe in God?” and the guy says, “Yes,” and he says, “Me too. Are you a Christian or a Jew?” and the guy says, “I’m a Christian,” and he says, “Me too,” and then he said, “What denomination or franchise?” and he says, “Well, I’m a Baptist,” and he says, “Me too.”
Then he says to the guy on the bridge, “Oh, are you a Northern Baptist or a Southern Baptist?” and he says, “A Northern Baptist,” and he says, “Me too. Are you a Northern Baptist Great Lakes Region or Northern Baptist Plains Region?” and he says, “Northern Baptist Great Lakes region,” and he says, “Me too.”
He says, “Are you Northern Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Baptist Great Lakes Region of 1912.” Then the first guy says, “Die, heretic,” and he pushed him off.”
What that joke captures is the intrinsic problem in the Protestant tradition that I’m sure you’re well-familiar with of sectarianism, of schism, of breaking off, of counting other people as not part of your tribe and starting your own church. What I see that is so concerning in this trend among people like Childers and Lee Strobel and Sean McDowell, Mike Winger, and others, Winger is a well-known blogger and YouTuber.
Trent Horn:
We’ve had our run-ins.
Randal Rauser:
Yes, I know. He’s gone after Catholics and all sorts of other people, but anyway, what concerns me is that this is showing to my mind a trajectory of these conservative evangelicals moving towards schism by promoting this idea that fellow Christians, even fellow Protestants and broadly evangelical Protestants who also identify as progressive are another religion altogether. That’s a very concerning trend to me.
So what I’ve been trying to do is to reach out to all of the people I’ve mentioned and invite them to dialogue or to have formal debates about these topics, and everybody has declined. I’ve only had two. Well, I’ve had three encounters in the last year. I’d want to acknowledge. I had a discussion with a sociologist named George Yancy on my YouTube channel, which was productive, but he’s not really in this category, I would say. I had one with Doug Groothuis, a well-known evangelical apologist, but he didn’t want to defend Childers’ thesis, so we just had a general conversation.
I had one a couple weeks ago with a fellow named David Walcott on YouTube, and he did defend the thesis, although in my estimation not successfully, but I do think at the very least, if people are going to defend this claim, this extraordinary claim, they need to be willing to defend it in public, and if evidence is shown, as I believe I’ve shown, that their claims are not sustainable, then if the offense is public, which it has been, then the reparations and the retraction needs to be very public as well.
So I do think people like Alisa Childers and Sean McDowell need to retract this thesis that progressive Christianity is another religion. Frankly, I think her book should be pulled off the market because it’s just flatly false and is disseminating false and harmful information, and then they need to seek to make amends with the people that they’ve hurt, which include people like me, Peter Enns, and Brian Zahnd, and others.
Trent Horn:
Well, very good, and I think, once again, it opens up, I’m glad you brought up this issue, especially amongst Protestants, that if the Bible is our sole authority, sole infallible authority, what do we do when others, the accusation that it’s being hijacked by other people to impugn or slander other Christians, how do we establish that kind of unity? I think, obviously for me, I have a nice little commercial for the magisterium in here, that’s a topic for another time, but I agree with you, Randal, that at the very least, whether you’re Catholic, Protestant or another religious tradition, one thing that can help to establish that unity is to talk to one another.
It doesn’t have to be a bill holds bar debate, but it could be a dialogue, it can be something where you can say, “Okay. Why do you have a problem with this? What is your argument?” and then being able to trade that back and forth to approach consensus where maybe we’ve misunderstood one another or maybe we could say, “Oh, yeah, this argument doesn’t actually work in this setting,” and so forth. So yeah, firmly agree with you. If you ever have one of those interactions in the future, let me know. Maybe we could even host something like that here on the podcast. So thank you so much for being on, and where can people go to learn more about your work?
Randal Rauser:
You can find me online, randalrauser.com, YouTube, Twitter. I’m around.
Trent Horn:
Then you’re still tweeting as Tentative Apologist.
Randal Rauser:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
I think you took a break for a bit, but that was just a tentative break and then you’re back, and all’s well.
Randal Rauser:
You got it. All true to the branding.
Trent Horn:
I love it. I love it. Well, great. Thank you so much. As for our listeners, we’ll be following up with this topic from a Catholic perspective next week because I’ll have a great guest on talking about the issue of scripture and its clarity. You’ll definitely want to check that out to get a little bit of a part two. So thank you guys so much, and yeah, I hope you all have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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