Another Gospel?
Another Gospel?: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity
By: Alisa Childers
“In Progressive Christianity there is general unity surrounding three topics: The Bible, the Cross, and the gospel— everything else is built on this foundation… It’s an entirely different religion—with another Jesus—and another gospel.”
I read Alisa Childer’s book Live Your Truth (and Other Lies) and I’ve listened to her podcast quite a bit. Another Gospel? is her first book and tells the story of her crisis of faith.
Alisa Childers grew up in a Christian home and was part of the Christian music group ZOEGirl (2006-2010). But later in life she encountered a pastor that made her question everything she thought she knew about God and the Bible.
As the subtitle of the book notes, this pastor adhered to what is identified as ‘Progressive Christianity.’ Childers shows throughout her book the subtle changes that churches have made to their theology that are sometimes hard to detect but actually really change the gospel.
“Many Christians sit in pews every Sunday completely unaware that their church has adopted progressive theology.”
The cover of the book was designed well, showing the ‘Gospel’ being gradually watered down, which is the natural result of Progressive Christianity.
Perhaps ‘Progressive Christianity’ is a buzzword to you. I would encourage you to read this book and follow along on Alisa’s journey because she is naturally a skeptic. She wasn’t just going to let someone tell her what to believe, she was going to do her own research, to get to the source, to challenge the ideas and see if they held up to scrutiny.
The questions she asks in this book, the ideas she challenges, are not straw men. They are real questions and ideas that I see all over the place. I’ve seen people espouse them and defend them and they are central to the ‘Christianity’ that too many people hold to today.
“Like historic Christians, their beliefs are built around their responses to questions like- Why did Jesus die? What is the Bible? And What is the gospel?”
Her ‘Definition’
She does a careful job in her book of fleshing all of these out, but if you’re wondering about the big picture— what’s so different about Progressive Christianity?— we could boil it down to this:
Progressive Christians tend to…
deny the inerrancy of Scripture and its authority in their lives, believing that we can’t trust how the Bible was written or canonized or how early Christians interpreted it
“Dr. Walter Bauer had the theory that the New Testament is simply a compilation of books that were picked by the theological ‘winners.’”
deny Christ’s atonement for sin believing his death on the cross to just be an example of love and forgiveness because it would be cosmic child abuse for God to send his Son to die
“…Jesus was killed by an angry mob for speaking truth to power. God didn’t need his sacrifice, but in some way submitted to it in order to set an example of forgiveness for us all to follow. God didn’t require blood— humans did.”
champion critical theory ideology as morally superior to Christianity for its emphasis on lived experience and the oppressed, believing that sin is not ultimately what’s wrong with the world
“Progressives reject original sin and believe we were all born beautiful and good.”
deny that hell exists or that God would send people there, believing that eventually all people will go to heaven (universalism)
“they call the Christian image of God that would send anyone to hell as toxic and unworkable.”
Some of the names she brings up that are associated with these beliefs are: Peter Enns, Richard Rohr, Rob Bell, Rachel Held Evans, Brian McLaren, and Nadia Bolz-Weber.
I won’t go into it here because if you’re really questioning things yourselves or you realize you believe the things listed above but don’t see a problem with them, then you just need to read all the information for yourself.
As she points out in the book— none of these beliefs are new and none of these questions are groundbreaking. God, Jesus, the Bible, and the gospel have been challenged for hundreds and hundreds of years with these same arguments. And yet it has stood the test of time. There are answers and explanations for any challenge brought against historic Christianity.
Look up the Bible and you’ll find how we have thousands of original manuscripts and even atheist Bart Ehrman does not believe the differences detected in the manuscripts change the message or theology of the Bible. You’ll find that the canon councils were not to ‘decide’ which books got to be in the Bible but to affirm what was already viewed as the canon. You’ll also find that Jesus and the apostles believe in the trustworthiness, truthfulness, and authority of Scripture.
She goes through the problems of critical theory, the necessity for atonement for sins and how if Jesus didn’t die for our sins we don’t have a solution for our problem.
Same Wrapper, Different Candy
I thought it was really good when she laid it out this way:
“Jesus plus anything is a false gospel.”
She uses the example that was told to her concerning the pastor who had shaken her faith: he was just putting “a new wrapper” on the same candy. Same candy, just a different presentation. But this is an inaccurate comparison and Childers shows how it’s actually the same wrapper, but different candy. It’s called Christianity (same wrapper) but the core and the gospel is different (different candy).
“The progressive gospel is Jesus + social justice.” If sin is not our ultimate problem, and Jesus didn’t need to die for our sins and he is not our Savior, then the gospel is now about just following Jesus’ example of doing good works and forgiving others; social justice becomes the ultimate virtue. Many say that social justice is a gospel issue. But the gospel is good news about what has already been done. Social justice says what still needs to be done. Social justice flows from the gospel but it can’t be the gospel. Salvation is not ours only if we do enough social justice.
“The progressive gospel is Jesus + new knowledge.” Progressives believe that we have new and better ways of interpreting Scripture, that our view is more mature than the people in the Bible. They look at other sources to judge the Bible rather than the Bible being the authority. But just because our culture has united around an idea does not make it true. Plus, every person has a bias; truth has to exist outside of our own judgments. God didn’t preserve a wrong understanding of his Word for thousands of years only to decide that people in the 21st century are finally going to be the ones to ‘get it.’
“The progressive gospel is Jesus - judgment.” In this case, progressives have not added to the gospel, they’ve taken away God’s just judgment, believing they are morally superior to the God of the Bible and have to do some PR work to help his image— ‘God wouldn’t do that… he’s a loving God’. They believe that even though God’s wrath and judgment are all over Scripture, it’s antithetical to God’s love. But God doesn’t need us to polish his reputation. He is a holy God that has to deal with evil (an affront to his holiness) in an ultimate way. He doesn’t need us to protect him from people thinking he’s ‘mean.’ Who are we, created beings, to talk back to our Creator about what he can and can’t or should or shouldn’t do?
It was really interesting to read her recounting of the dialogue she had with the pastor and the others taking the classes that had derailed her faith. I think we can all recognize similar situations where we’ve been taught or told something but felt like something was off about it even though we couldn’t put our finger on it. Some might not know what to do with that niggling feeling and just ignore it, but let Alisa’s example be an encouragement to you to test the teachings you’ve been told and hold them up to Scripture.
It was perceptive of her to realize:
“For the pastor and my classmates, the questions mattered more than the answers. It didn’t really seem like anyone was interested in researching facts or reaching conclusions.”
If you find yourself surrounded by people challenging historic Christianity, listen to what they’re doing. Are the questions more important than the answers? Or they doing the work of looking for truth or are they just slowly aligning their beliefs to the accepted cultural norms of the day?
Alisa found that in her class “to say ‘I don’t know’ or to challenge the accepted opinion of most Christians, you would be regarded as open-minded and intelligent… if you affirmed or defended the historic view, you were dismissed as someone who was just living in fear or wasn’t willing to intellectually engage the hard questions of faith.”
Those are not the actual options.
Let Alisa give you courage that truth can be found and historic Christianity stands up to scrutiny when progressive beliefs cannot. Be vigilant of false teachers and hold every idea up to God’s Word. Most people who defend Christianity are not doing it blindly; we’ve asked the hard questions and we’ve found the answers (with a few exceptions that remain mysteries). Christianity is a reasonable faith.
She speaks of her crisis and what she went through emotionally and spiritually to get to where she is now and how she ‘limps a little.’
“But I’d rather walk with a limp on solid ground than run with strong legs on breaking ice.”
We should all care whether we’re on solid ground or precarious ice.
The Negative Reviews
I looked at some of the negative reviews of this book and noticed a theme of people taking issue with Childers’ definition, or lack of definition, of ‘progressive.’ Many identified themselves as progressive but then said they agreed with most of what she said. Others agree with some of what she said but differ in the extent to which they believe it. Some believe she’s making secondary issues into primary issues.
Definitions are important. So I googled ‘Progressive Christianity’ to see what the general consensus is. And it’s everything she said in her book. Then I looked at a Reddit thread asking the same question to see what the everyday person believes it means. That’s where the trouble lies. People take on labels for themselves that don’t necessarily match or encompass all their beliefs and then get upset when they’re lumped in with people that have differing beliefs.
If you agree with everything she’s saying, then maybe you aren’t as progressive as you think. *shrugs*
Many progressives take the label because they diverge from the biblical teachings of sexuality and God’s design for marriage. Many reviewers believed she made too much of LGBTQ topics in this book. I did not think those topics took up the most space in her book. I also think that what you believe about marriage is important because God created marriage as a representation of Christ and his bride, the church. That paired with the fact that differing opinions require interpretations of Scripture that undermine the authority of God’s Word makes it a top tier issue.
Many progressives take the label because they have a passion for social justice that they think separates them from conservatives. We would need to go into definitions of ‘social justice’ but conservatives are pro-social justice. There are, indeed, differing opinions on what doing social justice should look like. There is no better book that I’ve read to think about this than Thaddeus J. Williams’ book Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth. He goes through twelve questions we should ask of our social justice that really drills down into what biblical social justice is and is not.
Personally, I’m not sure if a strict definition of progressive is necessarily needed to appreciate the book. She is not trying to attack a label. Let’s not argue about the wrong things here. She clearly identifies problematic beliefs, however you choose to label them. She’s not trying to evaluate a group of people who call themselves ‘progressive’, she’s trying to evaluate the ideas that are most associated with the term ‘progressive.’
People identifying themselves by all kinds of different labels without really knowing what they mean is what causes the convolution in terms of definitions, but based on other things I’ve read and what Google puts out there, I don’t think she got off track here.
There also appears to be some disgruntled people challenging her handling of the atonement and penal substitution and I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I fully understand the different facets of that doctrine and what different denominations hold. I’m also not sure if that’s really what she was trying to get into.
The way I understood her point is that if you don’t believe Jesus died to pay the price for our sins, voluntarily out of love becoming the sacrificial lamb in our place, then that’s the problem because it changes the answer to two core worldview questions: What is the problem with the world? What is the solution to that problem?
Since I didn’t understand other reviewers’ positions I did a little more research which helped me see what the different views might be. I found these articles that may be helpful if you want to dig deeper into this central doctrine: 3 Reasons I Changed My Mind About Penal Substitution or In My Place Condemned He Stood: Penal Substitutionary Atonement or Penal Substitution is the Heart of the Gospel and THIS ONE that specifically looks at what N.T. Wright believes about this doctrine.
Some may take issue with her writing style or her confidence, finding her book more polarizing than engaging the other side. Personally, I have always appreciated the way she handles tough subjects. Yes, she speaks with boldness and is not afraid to say what is truth even if it offends someone, but I would also never associate her with arrogance or lack of grace and love. If you listen to her podcast you will see that her writing comes from a place of urgent love to help people find the path of truth.
I think trying to write a book like this where every reader feels warm and fuzzy and completely understood and engaged intellectually and emotionally in a fair but gentle but also real way is just not realistic.
I respect this book. I appreciated her sharing her story. I think there are a lot of people that are going to find this book super helpful and hopeful and life-altering.
And truly, I don’t really see how this is just so far off a ‘correct’ definition of ‘progressive’ that justifies taking away all the stars.
Recommendation
I definitely recommend her books and her podcast. She has done a careful job of digging into hard questions and really seeking what God’s Word says.
Of course there will be push back of this book or reviewers who attack what she brings up because they disagree with what progressive means or disagree that progressive Christianity diverges from what the Bible teaches.
However, I believe Childers is rightfully exposing the hidden lies of false teachers that undermine who God is, how authoritative his Word is, and the atoning work of his son Jesus. These are not small matters and I hope you are a reader who is willing to read this book and others to see why historic Christianity is true.
“We don’t get to completely redefine who God us and how he works in the world and call it Christian. We don’t get to make the rules and do what is right in our own eyes and yet claim to be followers of Jesus. Our only option is to do it his way or not at all. He is love. His name is truth. His gospel is bloody. His way is beautiful. For God so loved the world.”
She has a section at the end of her book for additional resources for further reading. I’ll add links to the books she suggests that I’ve also read and reviewed:
The Reason for God by Timothy Keller
Tactics by Greg Koukl
Surviving Religion 101 by Michael Kruger (she actually lists other books by this author, but I’ve read this one by him and touches on the same information that can be found in his other books including the canonization of the Bible)
Knowing God by J.I. Packer
Critical Dilemma by Neil Shenvi; also he wrote Why Believe? (she lists a different book by Shenvi on Critical Theory but this is his most recent one that also addresses the subject)
Is God Anti-Gay? by Sam Allberry
Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age by Rosaria Butterfield (she lists a different one by Rosaria but this book is her latest and is very relevant to this discussion)
A Change of Affection: A Gay Man’s Incredible Story of Redemption by Beckett Cook
What Does the Bible Really Teach About Homosexuality? by Kevin DeYoung
These links will take you to other books I’ve read on Apologetics and Cultural Issues.
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