Chapter Sixteen: What Historic Christianity Actually Offers
It would be a serious mistake to close this paper without being clear about what historic Christian faith actually offers — because the whole point of defending it is not to win an argument. It’s to protect something genuinely good.
Historic Christianity offers what no watered-down version of religion can offer: genuine good news. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not primarily a call to be a better person. It’s not primarily a social justice platform. It’s not primarily an inclusive community where everyone is affirmed. It is the announcement that God himself, in the person of his eternal Son, entered human history, took on human flesh, lived the life we were supposed to live, died the death we deserved to die — absorbing in his own body the full weight of divine judgment against human sin — and rose from the dead. So that everyone who trusts in him receives, as a free gift, the complete forgiveness of sin, the righteousness of Christ credited to their account, the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, and the certain hope of resurrection.
That is news. Not advice. Not a framework for social improvement. Not an invitation to spiritual exploration. News — something that happened, in real history, with a specific person, on a specific cross, in a specific tomb, on a specific morning. And news, by definition, can only be either true or false. It cannot be culturally adjusted or experientially reinterpreted without ceasing to be what it claims to be.
The Church Fathers understood this with complete clarity. Athanasius did not endure five exiles for a perspective. He endured them for the truth that only a fully divine Christ could actually save — and that a half-saving was no saving at all. Irenaeus did not write his massive refutation of the heresies of his day to protect institutional power. He wrote it because he had received from those who knew the apostles a Gospel that was specific, particular, and non-negotiable, and he understood that if it was diluted it would lose the only thing that gave it power.
What historic Christianity offers the broken person — the person struggling with addiction, sexual confusion, shame, grief, anger, despair — is not a community that agrees that their condition is fine. It is a Savior who died for people in exactly that condition, who calls them by name, who does not lie to them about the severity of their problem, and who offers actual transformation — not merely a reframing of their situation.
That is the difference between a mirror and a window. Progressive Christianity holds up a mirror and says: look, you are beautiful as you are. Historic Christianity opens a window and says: look, there is Someone here who loves you enough to tell you the truth, and powerful enough to actually change you.
What this looks like in real pastoral life is worth being concrete about, because abstractions don’t reach people in pain. Historic Christianity offers a man who has spent twenty years in addiction not the message that his addiction is a personality trait to be reframed, but a Savior who entered death itself to break the power of every chain — and a community that will walk with him through years of hard, honest, costly recovery while reminding him every step of the way that his identity is not what he has done but who Christ has made him. It offers a teenager confused about her body and her future not the message that whatever she feels is sacred, but a Father who knows her before she was knit together in her mother’s womb, who has good plans for her that don’t depend on her getting everything right at fifteen, and a church family that will love her through every awkward season of becoming. It offers a family devastated by infidelity not the message that the marriage was simply not authentic enough to last, but a God who hates divorce because He knows what it costs, and a Spirit who specializes in resurrection — including the resurrection of marriages thought dead.
None of that is what progressive Christianity is offering. And nothing less than that is what the broken people in your congregation actually need. The Gospel is not gentler than progressive theology. It is, in many respects, more honest about how serious the problem is. But it carries within itself the only adequate solution — and that adequacy is not located in a framework or a community or a movement. It is located in a Person who is actually able to do what no framework, community, or movement could ever accomplish on its own.
That Person has not been replaced. He has not retired. He has not delegated. He is still the One who calls dead men out of tombs, still the One who multiplies loaves, still the One who weeps at gravesides before raising the dead, still the One who said “come to me, all you who are weary” and meant it then and means it now. To offer the people in your care anything less than him is to short them on the only thing they cannot get from any other source.
2 Corinthians 5:17 — Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
Hebrews 13:8 — Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.
Chapter Seventeen: Engaging Progressivism in Pastoral Conversations
For church leaders navigating these questions pastorally — including with family members, congregation members, and colleagues who have drifted in this direction — several practical principles are worth naming.
1. Focus on the Gospel, Not the Labels
Because the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have been successfully turned into conversation-enders, leading with those labels generates more heat than light. A more productive approach: ask the question that goes beneath the labels. What do you believe the Gospel actually is? What problem does Jesus solve, and how? These questions cut through the rhetorical fog and get to actual theological content.
In practice this looks like resisting the temptation to win the framing battle and instead listening for the underlying theological claim. When a family member explains their progressive shift by saying their old church was “judgmental” or “exclusive,” the wrong move is to argue about whether that characterization is fair. The right move is the gentle, persistent question: tell me what Jesus did on the cross, and why it matters. The answer to that question reveals more in five minutes than an hour of arguing about labels ever will.
2. Take the Creeds Seriously
The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed are not Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox documents. They are the distilled theological convictions of the universal Church, arrived at through generations of careful, costly, Spirit-guided deliberation. Inviting a person with progressive Christian commitments to sit slowly with the Nicene Creed — to read it word by word and articulate honestly what they believe about each affirmation — is often more revealing than any amount of direct argument.
A specific suggestion: print the Nicene Creed and ask the person to underline anything they affirm without reservation, circle anything they would qualify, and cross out anything they cannot say at all. Then sit with what the page shows. The exercise is more pastoral than confrontational, because the person is doing the work themselves — and what they discover about the gap between their stated faith and the Church’s historic confession is something no argument from the outside could have shown them.
3. Distinguish Compassion from Capitulation
Historic Christianity has nothing to apologize for in its pastoral care of broken and struggling people. The Church Fathers cared for the sick, the orphaned, the outcast, and the morally compromised with a generosity that was historically unprecedented. What distinguished their care was that it was accompanied by the offer of genuine transformation — not merely acceptance. Compassion that withholds the truth of the Gospel is not more compassionate than compassion that offers it. It is less.
A useful test for your own pastoral practice: when you sit with someone in real struggle, do they leave knowing that you love them and knowing what God has actually said about their situation? If they leave only knowing one of those things, the work is incomplete. Affirmation without truth is sentimental. Truth without affirmation is harsh. The Christ of the Gospels did both at the same time, in the same conversation, with the same person — and so must any pastor who claims his name.
4. Read Machen
J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, published in 1923, remains one of the most important books written on this subject. It is short, clear, intellectually rigorous, and — most importantly — fair. Machen goes out of his way to represent liberal theology accurately before critiquing it. He does not attack straw men. He attacks the actual arguments. Every pastor facing these questions should have read this book.
Read alongside Machen, two contemporary works are worth the time: Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which traces the cultural and philosophical roots of the framework progressive theology has imported wholesale, and Michael Kruger’s The Heresy of Orthodoxy, which dismantles the popular claim that early Christianity was theologically diverse until the Nicene Council imposed uniformity. Together with Machen, these three books equip a pastor to engage progressive arguments at their strongest, not their weakest.
5. Remember What Is at Stake
This is not ultimately a debate about academic theology. It is a debate about whether the people in your congregation — the people who are actually broken, actually struggling, actually dying — are going to be offered the real Gospel or a substitute. That is what gives this discussion its pastoral urgency. Not institutional survival. Not denominational pride. The souls of the people entrusted to your care.
Hold one specific image in mind as you do this work. Picture a person in your congregation — or your family — who is genuinely lost, genuinely searching, genuinely hungry for something real. Now picture two churches across town from each other. One offers them affirmation, community, a comfortable framework, and a Christ-shaped vocabulary with the saving content quietly removed. The other offers them an honest diagnosis, a costly invitation, real transformation, and the actual Christ of Scripture. The first will feel gentler. The second will save their life. Which one do you want to be? And which one do you want to send your people to when you fail? The answer to those two questions, taken together, is the entire pastoral burden of this paper.
A final word for the pastor who has read this far and is feeling the weight of it. The five principles above are not a checklist for winning arguments. They are a posture for walking with people. The Christian who has drifted into progressive theology is not your enemy. They are, in most cases, someone Christ loves who has been offered a counterfeit and mistaken it for the real thing. Your job is not to crush them with the truth. Your job is to be a steady, patient, prayerful witness to the actual Christ — over months and years, in conversations and meals and difficult Christmases — until the Spirit of God does the work that only the Spirit of God can do. Hold the line on doctrine. But hold the person tighter than the line.
PART FIVE
The University as Identity Factory — A Pastoral Warning