One of my most valuable conversation partners on the Internet is a conservative Calvinist campus minister named Derek Rishmawy. In some ways, we are the opposite, since I’m a progressive Wesleyan campus minister, but I think we both recognize in each other a genuine zeal for God’s truth. I have a lot of respect for Derek, and when we do actually agree on something, I usually do a happy dance because I feel like I’m on very solid ground. In any case, just as I speculate about the hidden underlying sacred cows of conservative evangelicalism, Derek did the same about progressive evangelicalism in a recent post. I didn’t so much want to do a point-by-point rebuttal as to offer a more contextualized account of where I’m coming from as a progressive evangelical.
Derek’s basic claim in his post is that there is an “orthodoxy” within progressive evangelicalism as much as we might like to think that we are open-minded boundary-smashers. I think it’s inevitable that any ideological group which synergizes together is going to have a limited range of perspectives that are tolerated within the group. Derek identifies seven issue positions which he identifies with progressive evangelicals: pacifism, gender egalitarianism, Arminianism and/or open theism, anti-inerrancy, interpretive pluralism, anti-penal substitutionary atonement, and marriage revisionism. He then suggests that there are three characteristics to the progressive evangelical ethos that cause us to take the positions we take: an ethic of empathy, a mistrust of power, and the sovereignty of the individual.
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