How ‘Progressive’ Can a Christian Get?
00:00:00.000 | Hi, my name is Rachel. I'm a wife and a mom of school-age kids from northern Indiana.
00:00:06.040 | I've been a Desiring God ministry partner for 14 years, and you are listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with Jon Typer.
00:00:14.360 | Rachel has an important story to share with us, and I want you to hear it.
00:00:22.920 | It's about the importance of Bible faithfulness. That in a moment. But on this theme of carefulness with God's Word,
00:00:28.760 | we have a question today from a listener named David about how progressive can a progressive Christian get?
00:00:33.640 | Here's what he asks.
00:00:35.480 | Dear Pastor John, thank you for this podcast. I have a colleague who would define himself as a progressive Christian.
00:00:40.440 | He believes homosexual practice is holy and people engaged in such acts are qualified to be leaders in the church.
00:00:46.400 | He also believes the Old Testament is completely metaphorical and cannot be trusted in any historical way.
00:00:51.900 | I believe both beliefs fly against what the Bible teaches and teaches about itself. My question is this,
00:00:57.880 | can you contradict the Bible at these levels and still be considered a Christian?
00:01:01.920 | I know it's impossible to have an infallible understanding of the whole Bible and that we will err in many ways.
00:01:08.280 | I'm sure I do. But also, isn't there a line that cannot and must not be crossed, Pastor John? How progressively
00:01:15.440 | Christian can a real Christian get?
00:01:18.920 | So let me think out loud with you for just a moment about a couple of the words
00:01:26.760 | used in this question, and then I'll get right to giving as clear and biblical an answer as I can.
00:01:34.400 | Let's take the word
00:01:36.680 | "progressive." The reason this word has come to refer to people and
00:01:41.880 | views that go beyond what has historically been considered true to the Bible is
00:01:49.680 | not because the idea of progress
00:01:53.680 | is bad in itself. All of us want to see progress
00:01:58.320 | toward truth and goodness and beauty. The reason the word
00:02:03.400 | "progressive" has taken on the meaning it has is
00:02:07.240 | because it has come to imply a progress away
00:02:12.160 | from the truth and toward error,
00:02:15.360 | progress away
00:02:18.320 | from biblical holiness toward
00:02:21.680 | morality. And here's a really interesting and, I think, significant thing,
00:02:27.720 | namely, that the idea of progressiveness
00:02:32.280 | is in the Bible. Even the word and
00:02:37.280 | the idea are in the Bible. I didn't know this until a few years ago when I was trying to do
00:02:42.920 | careful translation of 2 John. So here's 2 John 1 7-9. It goes like this,
00:02:49.560 | "Many deceivers have gone out into the world,
00:02:52.280 | those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the Antichrist.
00:03:00.280 | Watch yourselves,
00:03:03.040 | so that you may not lose what you have worked for, but may win a full reward." And here comes
00:03:08.600 | everyone who
00:03:11.040 | goes on ahead. Now the Greek there is "pro-ago," who progresses. So you could translate it
00:03:18.680 | "Everyone who progresses,"
00:03:20.680 | or you could say, to bring it right up to date, "Everyone who is progressive and
00:03:26.240 | does not abide in
00:03:29.560 | the teaching of Christ does not have God."
00:03:34.120 | So here is a use of the word "progress" or "going on ahead" in the sense of leaving
00:03:41.720 | true teaching behind. In other words, a person can forsake the Christian faith,
00:03:48.320 | not just by swerving
00:03:50.320 | to the right or to the left, but by going ahead, straight ahead, and leaving behind
00:03:57.640 | the truth and
00:04:00.560 | grasping for things that are coming, things that do not fit with
00:04:05.280 | the faith once for all delivered to the saints, though they may fit the spirit of the age.
00:04:11.240 | So we have a yellow flag
00:04:13.880 | waving—I suppose I should say red flag—
00:04:17.680 | waving in the Bible,
00:04:19.680 | "Beware! Beware of those who get frustrated with abiding,
00:04:23.840 | standing firm." You could stick in the word "conserving."
00:04:28.160 | You've got the political polls.
00:04:30.720 | Let's just stay with the Bible words. "Abiding, standing firm in the teaching of Christ,
00:04:38.880 | holding fast to old, sure truth, and who are restless."
00:04:46.320 | The alternative is that they get restless with the old and the firm and the true, and they want change and they want newness,
00:04:53.360 | especially change that fits the spirit of the times.
00:04:57.040 | Now, of course,
00:04:59.040 | lots of non-essential things
00:05:01.620 | need change from age to age and culture to culture,
00:05:06.480 | and that's not an issue here. But lots of essential things
00:05:12.160 | do not need to change and must not change if we are to be faithful
00:05:17.360 | Christians. Now, the second word
00:05:20.480 | that I wanted to make a comment about is the word "considered"
00:05:24.420 | in his question. David asks,
00:05:27.040 | "Can you contradict the Bible
00:05:29.600 | at these levels that he
00:05:32.080 | itemized
00:05:34.240 | and still be
00:05:35.900 | considered a Christian?"
00:05:38.640 | That's a good way to ask the question. He didn't say, "Can you contradict the Bible at these levels and be a Christian?"
00:05:45.760 | Now, the answer to that question is more complicated,
00:05:49.780 | because the person might be on the brink of repenting from a temporarily
00:05:56.340 | destructive, unbiblical, heretical view, and we can't see it.
00:06:00.720 | He might have dipped into it, been gripped by it, be on the brink of repentance, come out of it, prove to be a long-term
00:06:07.760 | great Christian, and we can't see any of that. Only God can see things like that.
00:06:12.560 | Our job in the church is not
00:06:16.080 | to make final, decisive, infallible decisions about who is truly born again and who isn't.
00:06:24.480 | Our job
00:06:26.720 | is to decide who should be considered
00:06:29.140 | a Christian—that is, who should belong to the visible church
00:06:37.280 | and who should be disciplined or
00:06:39.440 | excommunicated from
00:06:42.380 | the visible church.
00:06:44.400 | And we make these decisions not because we're God,
00:06:48.080 | but because we are called to form judgments on the basis of what we can see
00:06:54.320 | and what we can hear and what we know in the Bible. God looks on the heart.
00:07:00.080 | We look on the fruit of the heart—namely, what a person believes
00:07:06.400 | and how a person acts.
00:07:08.400 | So with those two clarifications of progressive and considered,
00:07:13.380 | my answer to the question is this.
00:07:16.960 | Yes,
00:07:19.040 | there is a line
00:07:21.040 | which a person may cross which puts him in a position of rightly being
00:07:27.760 | considered
00:07:30.000 | a non-Christian,
00:07:32.000 | having once professed to be a Christian, because
00:07:36.000 | of some unrepentant behavior
00:07:38.100 | or some belief that the Bible itself shows to undermine salvation.
00:07:44.020 | Let's just take one of David's examples. He says that his colleague believes
00:07:49.680 | homosexual practice is holy
00:07:52.560 | and people engaged in such acts are qualified to be leaders
00:07:57.120 | in the church.
00:07:59.360 | So there are two questions here.
00:08:01.360 | One is whether
00:08:03.740 | practicing
00:08:05.100 | homosexual acts without repentance puts one in a position where he should be
00:08:10.060 | considered
00:08:12.020 | a non-Christian, and the other is
00:08:14.020 | whether a person who celebrates
00:08:17.220 | that homosexual practice as good and pleasing to God, who may not themselves practice,
00:08:24.100 | should be considered
00:08:26.420 | a Christian.
00:08:27.860 | Little anecdote. In June of
00:08:31.460 | 2002, the Synod of the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster in Vancouver, Canada
00:08:38.180 | authorized its bishop to produce a service
00:08:42.420 | for blessing
00:08:44.660 | same-sex unions.
00:08:46.660 | J.I. Packer,
00:08:49.060 | who has gone to be with the Lord now,
00:08:51.060 | a longtime member of that
00:08:53.940 | church, that denomination,
00:08:56.660 | walked out. He walked out. This is hard to imagine. This is
00:09:00.740 | "gentleman to the max," right? You spent a lot of time with Packer.
00:09:05.300 | Oh, totally. I don't know if it's easy for you.
00:09:07.700 | It's not easy for me to imagine J.I. Packer standing up and in
00:09:11.620 | rejection of something so serious that he would actually walk out.
00:09:16.100 | So here's what he wrote in January of 2003, and the title of the article in CT, you can go find it, is "Why I Walked."
00:09:24.740 | Why did I walk out with the others? Because this decision, taken in its context,
00:09:31.380 | 1) falsifies the gospel of Christ, 2) abandons the authority of Scripture, 3)
00:09:38.740 | jeopardizes the salvation
00:09:41.520 | of fellow human beings, and 4) betrays the church in its God-appointed role as the bastion of the bulwark of divine truth.
00:09:49.460 | Now, why did he say that blessing
00:09:54.640 | homosexual unions
00:09:56.640 | falsifies the gospel? That's probably the most serious of the four.
00:10:00.980 | Because of 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10. He explained, but I'll just put my own words here.
00:10:07.220 | The text says, "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?
00:10:12.900 | Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor the idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality,
00:10:22.100 | nor thieves, nor greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers,
00:10:26.600 | nor swindlers,
00:10:29.940 | will inherit the kingdom of God."
00:10:31.940 | That's 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10.
00:10:34.660 | Now, the gospel of Jesus, the death of Jesus for sinners,
00:10:40.500 | is meant to rescue people for the kingdom of God,
00:10:45.700 | not keep them out of the kingdom of God.
00:10:49.680 | Therefore, when you celebrate the very behaviors which keep a person out of the kingdom of God, you are
00:10:57.360 | anti-gospel.
00:10:59.840 | You are pointing people into the very sin that Jesus died to rescue the people from.
00:11:06.480 | This is a falsification of the gospel. It is saying,
00:11:11.600 | "Jesus did not die for this." It doesn't need to be died for. It's beautiful.
00:11:19.280 | It's not damning.
00:11:21.280 | So, my conclusion is
00:11:23.680 | that both the person who persistently and unrepentantly carries on with adultery,
00:11:30.660 | theft,
00:11:33.120 | greed,
00:11:34.460 | homosexual practice, etc.,
00:11:36.460 | and the person who celebrates
00:11:39.360 | that person's self-destructive course,
00:11:42.720 | should not be considered Christians.
00:11:46.880 | That is, they should be disciplined as a church. They should be excluded
00:11:51.620 | from the visible church in the hope that the seriousness of that act would bring them to their senses
00:11:58.580 | and restore them
00:12:01.120 | to Christ and to
00:12:03.120 | fellowship. So, one principle then I close with—one principle
00:12:08.180 | for decisions about which beliefs and which behaviors
00:12:15.040 | are in this category of seriousness—is
00:12:18.240 | whether there is biblical evidence
00:12:21.120 | that they actually undermine the gospel.
00:12:24.880 | The closer they get to jeopardizing souls
00:12:28.880 | in this way, the more fitting it is
00:12:32.240 | that their advocates should be considered non-Christian.
00:12:36.980 | What we do with the Bible matters infinitely. Thank you, Pastor John.
00:12:41.280 | And speaking of the importance of our faithfulness to the text of Scripture and why that matters,
00:12:45.600 | I want you to hear Rachel's story. She lives with her husband and kids in northern Indiana.
00:12:50.020 | You heard her voice earlier, and she shares this conviction with us. We don't play games with the Bible.
00:12:56.640 | We preach what it says, verse by verse, without shame.
00:13:00.240 | Rachel's on the phone with me now to share a little of her journey. Rachel,
00:13:04.800 | thanks for taking some time out of your schedule. I know your days are very full and busy with little ones.
00:13:10.000 | Share with us how you first learned of John Piper the preacher.
00:13:14.240 | I first heard of John Piper in 1999.
00:13:19.060 | I was a teenager headed off to college in a few weeks, and my grandma kind of
00:13:24.560 | convinced me or strong-armed me maybe into helping at a missionary conference in the kitchen.
00:13:30.720 | So it was August, and it was hot, and it was a kitchen.
00:13:35.360 | But there was a family at this missionary conference from the Twin Cities, and this guy was so excited to introduce his pastor to me.
00:13:42.320 | And so he popped in this cassette into his cassette player,
00:13:47.600 | and it was John Piper preaching
00:13:50.960 | somewhere in Romans.
00:13:53.580 | That was actually a pretty
00:13:55.580 | unremarkable event for me at the time, because I
00:13:58.720 | grew up with expository preaching. So
00:14:02.240 | he was preaching through Romans. My pastor back home had been preaching through Romans for several years,
00:14:07.360 | and
00:14:09.200 | I thought that that was what
00:14:11.200 | churches did.
00:14:13.900 | Pastors got up, and they took the next five verses of Scripture and talked about it.
00:14:18.480 | And then you came back, and you took the next five verses the next week. Well, then I went off to college,
00:14:23.540 | and I grew a lot in college. I learned that I heard John Piper's name again and
00:14:31.680 | picked up his book and read Desiring God, which was helpful in learning to frame a worldview,
00:14:37.600 | to think about what I believed and why I believed it and how it affected the way I actually lived.
00:14:42.240 | I got married, and we went off, you know, started our own
00:14:45.840 | married life together, and we were just going to find a good, solid, expositional,
00:14:50.500 | gimmick-free church, and that was not
00:14:53.520 | easy.
00:14:55.440 | We discovered that that was actually quite hard to find.
00:14:58.640 | So for 20 years, we kind of experienced
00:15:01.620 | church extremes.
00:15:04.400 | We experienced church
00:15:07.280 | where there was a great emphasis placed on fruit without tending the root of faith and love for Christ.
00:15:15.440 | We learned that you can
00:15:17.920 | actually be in a place where
00:15:20.160 | theology is
00:15:22.380 | loved more than Christ is, and
00:15:25.520 | that was difficult. And then we also experienced church which
00:15:29.440 | had great love for Christ and wonderful people, full of wonderful people who served our
00:15:35.040 | children and loved the Lord and
00:15:37.920 | had wonderful community,
00:15:40.800 | but
00:15:42.080 | we would struggle on Sunday mornings with sermons there, just because the sermons were kind of like a box of chocolates.
00:15:47.680 | You didn't know any given Sunday what you were going to get. So
00:15:51.280 | DG for us for 20 years was
00:15:55.280 | a constant resource of
00:15:57.360 | solid,
00:15:59.580 | consistent, biblical teaching—
00:16:01.680 | a place where we could go if we had specific questions on a certain issue, but
00:16:06.880 | also mainly just
00:16:09.920 | for consistent food
00:16:12.400 | to feed our souls when we weren't getting that somewhere else.
00:16:15.920 | Powerful. Thank you, Rachel.
00:16:18.480 | You're talking right now to several listeners of the podcast, some of who are struggling in the same way—hungry for a church that preaches
00:16:25.280 | the Bible expositionally
00:16:27.200 | and for a church that loves Christ with great affection. So
00:16:30.640 | speak to our listeners now who turn to Desiring God for Resources for faithful Bible teaching,
00:16:36.560 | but maybe have never thought it is important to also support the work that we do here. What would you say to them?
00:16:42.880 | I would actually echo something that I heard Randy Alcorn say
00:16:47.120 | a few years ago.
00:16:50.160 | He said something to the effect that if you believe the Word of God is true,
00:16:55.600 | and
00:16:56.640 | it's clear,
00:16:58.640 | you need to seek out ministries who believe that and support them, because there are getting to be fewer and fewer of them.
00:17:04.400 | And that struck a chord with me.
00:17:08.080 | That's why
00:17:10.960 | we began giving. It's why we're still giving.
00:17:14.560 | The fact that anybody all over the world can go to DG and get solid resources
00:17:22.480 | that are based on the Word of God
00:17:25.360 | for free, no registration. They don't even have to give an email. Any poor college student living on ramen can go get it.
00:17:32.800 | It is a blessing. It's been a blessing to us. It's been a blessing to many.
00:17:36.560 | I would encourage anyone to support Desiring God who has benefited from it.
00:17:42.960 | Wow. Well, 14 years of supporting Desiring God is a huge and strategic investment in our work, Rachel. Thank you. You're welcome.
00:17:51.680 | So many precious friends have come alongside us and said, "You know what?
00:17:54.880 | The Bible is true and the Bible is clear, and where the Bible is clear,
00:17:57.760 | we need to believe it and love it and proclaim it on Sunday mornings."
00:18:00.880 | And then we need to seek out ministries that believe it too and support them, because
00:18:05.200 | the pressure to compromise what the Bible makes clear, that pressure is all around us, as Pastor John talked about a moment ago.
00:18:11.280 | If you believe Desiring God is standing firm on the truths of Scripture,
00:18:15.060 | would you consider joining Rachel to become a monthly ministry partner with us?
00:18:19.600 | Much of our financial support comes from folks who give on average $30 a month.
00:18:24.240 | To set up monthly giving, go to give.desiringgod.org. That's give.desiringgod.org.
00:18:32.320 | Always appreciated. I'm your host Tony Rehnke, Pastor John and I return on Monday. We'll see you then.
00:18:39.540 | You
00:18:41.540 | You
00:18:43.540 | [BLANK_AUDIO]