A cautionary look at ten dangerously appealing half-truths.
In 1923, J.
Benjamin Franklin was right when he quipped, Half the truth is often a great lie.
In th.
It is a master class in half-truths that sound appealing on the surface until you dig down deeper and really explore their foundations and implications.
Indeed, that is what makes this list, and Progressive Christianity as a whole, so challenging.
But take note: each of these Commandments is partially true.
They are less about God revealing his desires and more about man expressing his own--less Moses, more Oprah.
They are, in effect, a Ten Commandments for Progressive Christianity.
Indeed, these ten sound like they were gathered not so much on the mountaintop as in the university classroom.
In that devotional series, ironically titled Returning to Essentials, Rohr sets forth the ten principles as a kind of confessional statement of modern liberalism (while at the same time pretending to deplore confessional statements).
These ten principles are actually drawn from Philip Gulley\'s book, If the Church Were Christian: Rediscovering the Values of Jesus.
It may have new names (e.g., emerging or Progressive Christianity), but it is simply a rehash of the same well-worn system that has been around for generations.
The abiding presence of liberal Christianity struck me not long ago when I came across a daily devotional from Richard Rohr that listed ten principles he thinks modern Christianity needs to embody.
For this reason alone the book should be required reading, certainly for all seminary students, pastors, and Christian leaders.
Although its modern advocates present liberal Christianity as something new and revolutionary, it is nothing of the sort.
His description of liberal Christianity--a moralistic, therapeutic version of the faith that values questions over answers and being good over being right--is still around today in basically the same form.
Put simply, liberal Christianity is not Christianity.
What is remarkable about Machen\'s book is how prescient it was.
Machen argued that the liberal understanding of Christianity was, in fact, not just a variant version of the faith, nor did it represent simply a different denominational perspective, but was an entirely different religion.
The book was a response to the rise of liberalism in the mainline denominations of his own day.
Gresham Machen, then a professor at Princeton Seminary, wrote his classic text, Christianity and Liberalism.
A cautionary look at ten dangerously appealing half-truths.
In 1923, J
