Modern Worldviews and the Deity of Christ

By Robert M. Bowman Jr.

Progressive Christianity is a contemporary movement that accepts modern critical views about the Bible and Christianity, often similar to or aligned with the views of skeptics, while maintaining that Christianity can be reinterpreted to agree with those views. Their beliefs represent a current form of theological liberalism, which maintains that traditional Christianity went astray by taking biblical teachings and narratives “literally.” Instead, they argue, we need to progress beyond traditional Christian beliefs about God, miracles, Jesus, and salvation by seeking a mystical approach to religious or spiritual knowledge. In this approach, such knowledge is to be found within each person—and in all religions, properly understood—through personal experience that goes beyond objective fact or literal understanding.

Based on this thinking, progressive Christians hold to a worldview in which God is not a personal, transcendent Creator but is rather the spiritual or sacred presence or power in all things. (The term “progressive” is sometimes used in reference to certain other theological or political movements, but we are concerned here only with this mystical movement.) They typically accept either pantheism (God is all things) or, more commonly, panentheism (God is in all things, like the soul is in the body).

Marcus J. Borg (1942–2015), a New Testament scholar, and John Shelby Spong (1931–2021), an Episcopal bishop, were highly influential biblical scholars advocating a progressive Christian Christology.[1] In their view, Jesus was a mystic, an enlightened teacher who showed the way to spiritual union with the divine that is in all people and all things. Ironically, their view of Jesus is more like the Buddha than the New Testament Christ.[2] I will focus here on Borg, who was a leading figure in historical Jesus studies and who professed—rather surprisingly—to be an orthodox Christian.[3]

Typically, progressive Christians deny the virgin birth of Christ, the sacrificial significance of his death on the cross, and his bodily resurrection from the dead. Jesus is divine, but we all are divine in the sense that God is the spiritual reality underlying all things. Borg admits that Jesus was remarkable, but not unique.

The main problem here is that the progressive Christian view of Jesus is contrary to what Jesus himself said. Most basically, progressive Christianity is at odds with what Jesus said about God. If progressive Christians really believed that Jesus experienced “special intimacy with God,” as Borg allows,[4] then they would accept what Jesus said about God. Such is not the case. For example, Borg admits that he rejects the view of God as a “parent,”[5] and yet God as Father is a prominent characteristic of Jesus’ teaching. The Gospels present Jesus using the title Father for God in heaven some 185 times (Matthew, 44; Mark, 4; Luke, 16; John, 121). Notably, in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7)—which progressive Christians profess to hold in high regard—Jesus told his disciples to think of God as their heavenly Father, using the title there 17 times. Jesus even compared the heavenly Father’s desire to give good gifts to his children to that of an earthly father (Matt. 7:11). The Lord’s Prayer, at the center of the Sermon on the Mount, teaches people to address God as Father, to honor his name, to look forward to his kingdom, and to ask for his forgiveness (Matt. 6:9–13). Borg admits that this passage “speaks of God as a personlike being,” but he finds such a concept of God “misleading and inaccurate.”[6] Imagine professing to be an orthodox Christian while alleging that the Lord’s Prayer taught by Jesus expresses a misleading and inaccurate concept of God!