I’ve read quite a few Progressive Christian books. In fact, I read Progressive Christian books back when the movement was called the Emergent Church and led by authors and speakers such as Brian McLaren and Tony Jones. I haven’t cared especially for some elements of their belief, such as the author’s tendency to want to contort scripture to match their moral beliefs or their commitment to higher biblical criticism over lower criticism. But one thing that I did appreciate about Progressive Christianity is their desire to purge modern Christian belief from some of its modern trappings. For example, there is a common belief that the God of the Old Testament is not the same God of the New Testament or that they act in entirely different manners. There’s also the belief that the Bible subjugates women and condones slavery. There also appears an attitude in the Modern church that nature (or the Earth) is not to be conserved and shepherded and that the poor are not to be assisted in any ways possible.
A lot of these attitudes, unfortunately, come as a result of a 1990’s thrust to make the church more business-like and to provide the individual churches with purpose statements and such. And so, the Emergent Church, later to become Progressive Christianity, has railed against these attitudes and, in my opinion, thrown out the baby, the bath water and requested a new tub.
While there has been a plethora of books that criticize some of the less biblical aspects of the Progressive Church movement, there have been few that directly take their criticisms of the Bible seriously and address them directly. Unbeknownst to me, there was a book that already addressed a multitude of these and other issues in existence.
Written back in 2014 as a counter to some of the libelous insults about the Bible thrown about by the New Atheists (ie. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and group), there was “Seriously Dangerous Religion” written by Iain Provan. This book is especially relevant in a whole new way due to Christian leaders, such as Andy Stanley, who propose unhitching the Old Testament from evangelism, based on the perception that the ancient Hebrew text is a stumbling block for today’s un-Christian population and entirely unnecessary for current Christian thought. After all, the Old Testament does appear to support violence, a patriarchal attitude toward women and calls sinful some of the moral convictions brought to the forefront of today’s society. The only problem is that those who consider the Old Testament as outdated and out of touch with the New Testament’s focus on love for our neighbors and enemies is that those people are simply wrong and are basing their attitudes on slogans and memes instead of investigating for themselves.
People are a little taken aback when, after complaining that the Bible shares a certain colonialist approach to the environment, are told that back in 1970, Francis Schaeffer wrote a book about this very subject called “Pollution and the Death of Man”. He argues that God intended man to care not only for their neighbors but for the entirety of creation. Repeated and enforced with substance, Provan doubles down on this idea, arguing that the world was created by God and declared good and that as His creation, should hold a valuable spot in the heart of any who consider and love God.
In further chapters, Provan explores and argus that God is one, good, loving and faithful. But He is also angry, jealous and vengeful…and this isn’t a bad thing. It’s because we’ve subverted the concepts of anger, jealousy and vengeance, that we now consider these attitudes to not be worthy of a loving God. Provan, in later chapters, does an excellent job of illuminating the similarities between the God of the Old and New Testaments, puts to rest the misconception that they possess differing characteristics and enforces the idea that man wasn’t an afterthought, but the main thought. Delving into Hebraic intentionality, Provan also intellectually demonstrates that woman wasn’t intended to be subjugated under man but was created as one human before being split into two.
In the ninth chapter, Provan does an amiable job in countering the assumption that humans were all vegetarian up until the time of Noah. And the eleventh chapter is interesting because it questions and corrects the assumption that the creation was perfect then corrupted by original sin. If it were created in perfection, why the need for a new heaven and a new earth? All God would really need to do is get rid of sin. Provan explains that the creation and its fulfillment is an ongoing process for the Creator.
Now, to be honest, there were points where I disagreed with Provan on minutia, such as his assertion that creation and evolution can walk easily side by side or the use of “meta narrative” over worldview, but those are small points indeed. But, as they say, in “in essentials – unity, non-essentials – liberty and in all things charity.” I was mostly impressed by Provan’s apologist undertaking to rebut some of the detrimental ideas concerning the Old Testament which are patently false upon a closer inspection of the material. But, like everything else in life, we need to consider every possible idea, keep that which agrees with biblical truth and reject the rest.
This current attitude that “faith is at odds with reason is a fairly typical response of religious people of all kinds to facts, or alleged facts, that threaten their current grasp in their faith. Beyond this, it is a fairly typical human response to facts, or alleged facts, that threaten someone’s current meta narrative” (Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion, p. 351). And that’s really what we’re dealing with when we deal with someone’s response to the Old Testament. We are dealing with threats to people’s current worldviews and assumptions or, as Provan puts it, their individual “meta narrative.”
I would definitely encourage anyone who would like an honest and in-depth apologetic against those who seek to undermine the legitimacy of the Old Testament to read “Seriously Dangerous Religion.” I would also encourage those who believe that the Bible in general and the Old Testament in particular showcases a God of violence, apathy toward the plight of the poor and women and the encourages the raping of the environment to read this book. Your assumptions will be contested and countered. What you do with your assumptions after that will be entirely up to you.