Progressive Christianity - An Interview with Alisa Childers - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 23

Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. On today's episode, I have with me Elisa Childers, and she's got a unique and very interesting story that we're going to talk about briefly, about her journey to progressive

Christianity, and then back, and the apologetics ministry that God has called us to. So Elisa, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks so much for having me on. So tell us a little bit about the journey that you've been on, how

God has directed your life up to this point, and also about your book, Another Gospel.

Yeah, well, you know, if anyone would have asked me about 10 years ago, if I'd be writing a book or have an apologetics ministry,

I probably would have looked at them cross -eyed, because it's just not your typical journey into apologetics.

But essentially, I grew up in a Christian home, going to church all my life. The Christians in my life were basically just really neat, wonderful people who loved

God, were committed to His Word, served other people. And I think because I had a generally good experience with Christianity, I didn't really have a lot of intellectual doubts about it growing up.

I didn't really have a reason to doubt what I believed, because it worked. And because of that,

I think that the intellectual side of my faith was a bit weak. So in high school, if somebody would have asked me, why do you think the

Bible is God's Word? I probably would have just said, well, because the Bible says so, or because, you know,

I just feel it inside. I just know that the Holy Spirit has revealed that to me. And so I would say that I didn't have a blind faith.

It was proven by a lot of different things, but it just was intellectually weak. It wasn't intellectually tested.

And that wouldn't happen until I was much older, until I was an adult. So I had spent about seven or eight years as a part of the contemporary

Christian music group, Zoe Girl. And when Zoe Girl came to a close, my husband and I started attending this church in the heart of Middle Tennessee, where we live.

And this was an evangelical, non -denominational church, and we really loved it. And so after about eight months, the pastor invited me to be a part of what he described as an inner circle type study and discussion group.

And in the context of this class, he revealed to us that he was actually an agnostic, and he was doubting basically everything he believed.

And so we can drill down into some of these details if you like, but essentially what happened was that everything

I'd ever believed about God and Jesus, and especially the Bible, was sort of intellectually picked apart and explained away.

And if we had a class on biblical reliability, it was all the skeptical information, why we shouldn't trust our

Bible, why we can't know who wrote these books, and if we even have what they originally wrote and things along those lines.

And so it sent me into a really dark night of the soul, and essentially God used apologetics to rebuild my faith.

And so I'm just so thrilled at just the faithfulness of God and His call to allow me to basically help other people who might be going through a similar thing.

And so where progressive Christianity fits into all of this is that the church that I was at where this all happened went on years later to identify itself as a progressive

Christian community. And that's when I thought, okay, that's what that was. And so I took a couple years and I read all the progressive books

I could. I wanted to listen to what they had to say, listen to their podcasts, and just try to analyze the movement.

So essentially that's the book. My book is my journey of going into this church that I didn't know was progressive at the time, basically almost losing my faith, and then

God rebuilding my faith. So the book tells that story, but it also interacts with progressive Christianity along the way and hopefully gives the reader a biblical answer and just an apologetic answer to this movement that's really infiltrating the church.

That's so interesting. Just down the road from our office, there is a church, and I think the name of the church is actually

Christ Community Church, but then they have a marquee outside. And some of the messages that they put out there, it's just like, what kind of church is this that would be saying those type of things?

And do a little more exploring, visit their website. And yeah, they're definitely a very progressive church.

So when you hear the term progressive Christianity, what does that bring to your mind, and what should our listeners recognize when they hear that term?

Yeah, and that's really the key question because we can't really answer something until we properly define it. We have to know what it is we're answering.

And this is where it gets difficult because progressive Christianity is sort of this broad umbrella term that covers a wide spectrum of beliefs.

So in progressive Christianity, you might have a progressive Christian who affirms the physical resurrection of Jesus.

You might have another who does not. They're okay to be in unity with each other because in progressive

Christianity, it's really not about what you believe. It's more about what you do, what causes you're advocating for.

Now, with that said, though, as I investigated their materials and read their books, there really does emerge this sort of dogma that many to most progressive

Christians would all affirm. And it's interesting that they're more united in what they deny, in my experience, than what they affirm.

So they're all pretty much, at least the major thought leaders that I've read, agreed.

They're all agreed that to view the atonement of Jesus on the cross as some sort of a sacrifice, as Jesus taking our place as our substitute to provide reconciliation to God, that is largely denied in the progressive church.

In fact, the idea that God the Father would require the blood sacrifice of his only son, this is viewed as cosmic child abuse.

And what we have to understand is that a lot of Christians think, oh, progressive Christianity, is that like a political thing?

Or is this just a group of Christians who are changing their minds on some social issues or maybe embracing the messiness of life a little more?

It's really not. Progressive Christianity is a different religion. This is a religion that has denied core key essential gospel essentials that have defined

Christianity for 2 ,000 years. And so essentially what you have in progressive Christianity is a different gospel.

That's why I titled my book, Another Gospel, with a question mark. We're going to investigate, is this actually another gospel?

And I argue in my book that it is, because at the very foundational level, there's denials across the board of things like original sin, humans having a sin nature, our sin separating us from God.

Of course, the denial of the atonement, very often a denial of the resurrection of Jesus. And so as you construct the gospel that is affirmed in progressive

Christianity, it's just not the historic Christian gospel. Yeah. I like what you said earlier about how progressive

Christianity is more about what you do than actually what you believe. And some of the really popular causes out there where it's like digging water wells in Africa, fighting human trafficking, fighting in this country, fighting racism, all good causes that Christians should be totally behind.

But I see organization after organization, church after church who are supporting these causes where the gospel is completely absent.

It's fantastic that you dig a well in the small village in Africa to supply people with water.

But if you're not actually sharing the gospel, not sharing Jesus who is the living water, who can truly satisfy the inner longings, then ultimately, is that Christian?

Is that the gospel if we're only the hands and feet of Jesus without being its mouth? So to me, both have to go hand in hand, that we need to be doing these wonderful things, these missionary outreaches.

Yeah. Historically speaking, and of course, even in reading through the New Testament, we see that if someone is truly a

Christian, their life is going to bear fruit of obedience to Christ. There's going to be good works that flow out of their salvation.

But in progressive Christianity, it gets flipped upside down where the works themselves become the gospel.

And then, of course, with all of these denials as far as sin separating humans from a holy

God and that sort of thing, you're right. It's like the gospel is just absent. And so the good works are there, which in many cases are good, although because in progressive

Christianity, they're going to define good and moral goodness along the lines of how culture defines it.

There's also going to be a lot of advocacy for things like LGBT inclusion in the church, same -sex marriage and relationships.

So often, those types of causes are going to run with culture and can very often be anti -biblical in what they're advocating for.

But like you said, things like fighting racism, digging wells, all of this, these are things Christians have been doing for 2 ,000 years as a fruit of our belief in God and to bring the gospel to these places as well.

But in progressive Christianity, it's more about what systems of oppression you're tearing down, what causes you're advocating to get same -sex affirmation into the church.

And so very often, those things run counter to biblical principles. Yeah, for sure.

It's powerful. A lot of people go back to the quote of St. Francis of Assisi, where share the gospel in how you live and if necessary, use words.

And you can't communicate the gospel without words. That's right. And he actually did not say that.

It's often attributed to him, but I actually have a blog post on my website because so many people,

I would hear that so often. And as I investigated, I can't remember who the guy was that did a bunch of research on this.

And he went through all the writings. And Francis never said anything. He said something sort of similar, but he was not known for being very quiet either.

So it's something that kind of gets attributed to him, but he didn't actually say it.

Yeah. If anyone, if you study St. Francis, he definitely used words.

Like we're talking about here, he ministered to people, he served people, he sought to help the unfortunate, but he always pointed people to Christ through the gospel and through the way he lived his life.

So a good example that we can follow. So I'm curious. So back in your journey, when you were struggling with these things and didn't really have the strong intellectual basis of your faith, what were maybe a couple of the issues that for you were pretty big hangups?

And then how did God bring you through those? Well, I would say the two big ones for me was biblical reliability.

That was the biggest one because all my life, and this is what's kind of unique about my story too, is that growing up,

I didn't grow up in a Christian bubble in the sense that I wasn't exposed to people of other worldviews.

My parents had us out doing a lot of homeless ministry on the streets of Los Angeles.

We would do street evangelism on Hollywood Boulevard. And when you're doing street evangelism on Hollywood Boulevard, you're going to meet a lot of people from different worldviews.

I remember talking with Satanists and Wiccans and atheists and agnostics and people from the gay community.

I mean, just growing up talking with lots of different people. And when an atheist would say, well, the

Bible's been corrupted or you can't trust your Bible, it was really easy to push that aside and say, well, they're just an atheist.

Of course, an atheist isn't going to believe the Bible is the Word of God. But when it was a Christian pastor that I actually respected and had come to trust that was making some of these claims, it sort of knocked the legs out from underneath my worldview because I had so based my view of the world on the

Bible. And so when he was able to convince me intellectually, because I didn't know any different, that actually what you're reading isn't even what they wrote.

Well, now I had a huge problem. That's when this kind of bit of deconstruction started. And so the

Bible was a big one. And so I dove really deep into the science of textual criticism.

I audited online courses on textual criticism. I read books, which if anyone is listening and you're unfamiliar, it's basically the science of reconstructing the original wording of ancient documents when we don't have the originals anymore.

And so if you've ever read the Gettysburg Address or if you've ever read Shakespeare, then you're benefiting from the science of textual criticism.

And it's the same with the Bible. And what I learned was that, and I would watch debates from skeptical scholars and more conservative scholars, even reading people like Bart Ehrman and a skeptical scholar to try to figure out what they all agreed about.

And I found that there was actually quite a bit of agreement on how many manuscripts we have, how early those are, where the disagreement seemed to happen is what that all means.

And so I was just sort of wading through all of that to try to figure out, first of all, do I even have a reliable Bible?

Because if the Bible is God's word, but we don't have the wording, then how can

I trust it? And so that was a huge journey for me, and probably the first and most major journey

I went on. And the second one would be the atonement. When the atonement was being referred to as cosmic child abuse,

I just remember thinking, if Jesus didn't die for my sins, I knew I was a sinner.

Nobody had to tell me that. I knew that. And I just knew that if this gospel message of the atoning work of Jesus on the cross was not true,

I just knew that I was doomed and life was meaningless. There's no meaning in life if the gospel is not true.

If God doesn't exist, if Christianity isn't true, then we're just kind of waiting around on this rock for it all to end.

And so it was like I was fighting this almost nihilistic type of mentality with this because it was like, man,

I just knew that I was doomed if the cross didn't happen and if the atonement didn't happen. And so I think those are probably the two major ones for me.

But it was many years of studying, of reading books, listening to lectures.

I audited a lot of seminary classes. I was just really trying to get to the bottom of why I have believed this my whole life and is what

I believe true. And so again, God just was so faithful to take me on that journey. So that's one of the things

I find so interesting about your story is that I've heard, I mean, the fact that you had faith, that faith was challenged and rather than just giving up on it, you decided to dig into it even deeper and then found truths that reinforced your belief in the reliability of scriptures and understanding how the atonement of Christ works and how it's not cosmic child abuse.

But you hear people from the other perspective, people who go to seminary and start studying all the textual criticism and sort of like a

Bart Ehrman who at one point seemed to be a solid evangelical believer, but then fell away from his faith.

For you, what about doing all of that research reinforced your faith rather than caused you to doubt it even more?

Because there's a lot of really challenging things you can come across, stuff that unless you really understand and really dig in can almost seem to be evidence against what we're advocating here today.

Yeah, and that's a great question. So I think for me it was, I really wanted to know the truth.

I really wanted to figure out what was true about reality, about the Bible, about history in reference to Christianity.

And as I went on this journey, I think part of the reason it was so convincing and persuasive to me is because number one,

I didn't know that people had answers to these things. So when the pastor was coming up with this stuff in this small class that I was a part of, honestly,

I write in the book like, bless my naive little heart. I thought he came up with all these questions.

So I was, you know, in the beginning I was like thinking, can anybody answer? Is there any evidence that would contradict what he's saying?

Because the thing I'm really thankful for is I grew up with parents who regularly, we would drive home from church and I would hear them even disagreeing with each other as they discussed the sermon they just heard, saying, well,

I don't know if the Bible supports that point. Well, I think it does because of this. And so there was always this discussion. I was never under the impression that we're supposed to just blindly believe people, what they say, like we have to measure this against reality, measure it against scripture.

And so one of the cracks in the armor of this pastor was that, you know, again, I hadn't studied the intellectual side of my faith.

And so there was a lot of information he was bringing that I didn't know how to answer, but I did know the

Bible. I had read and studied the Bible my whole life. Now, I had never been taught systematic theology.

I didn't know good hermeneutics. So I had some probably wonky interpretations, but I knew what it said.

And so when he would take it radically out of context or even misquote it, that's when

I went, okay, well, if he's doing that with the Bible, then maybe he's doing that with all of this other stuff that I don't know anything about.

So I really started to dig into some of the claims he was making about church history and things like that.

And I began to discover chinks in the armor where you can see, okay, he exaggerated that.

He drew a false conclusion based on that. And then I started to think, well, okay, everything he knows, somebody else knows, but they've come to a different conclusion.

And I want to find out what that person has to say so that I can measure that against what he's saying. And so when

I did that, I literally just was overwhelmed with all of the evidence to disprove so many of the things that he was saying.

Now, that's not to say that there weren't points of tension. Like you mentioned, there's going to be things you learn. I wrestled this one textual variant for about a year.

The story of the woman caught in the act of adultery, which is very well known at this point as being a textual variant.

And it was a year of processing. What do I make of this? Even these really conservative scholars and the skeptical scholars agree that this was not original to John's gospel.

What do I do with that, Lord? For a year. And it was very rattling. It was definitely not a quick process, and it definitely wasn't just overnight, like, oh,

I found that answer and it's good. I mean, I'm talking years of wrestling with some of this stuff. But overall, the evidence for the truthfulness of the gospel, the truthfulness of Christianity was so overwhelming that the snags that I ran into really were just more like, how does this make sense within the context of me trusting

God? And so that was probably one of the ways I waded through it. So GotQuestions .org

is a ministry where we answer people's questions. And it is amazing to me still how we will receive a question.

It's like, so I'm really struggling with whatever issue, whether it's personal or doctrinal, and I'm sure no one's ever asked you this, but you're the 50th person this month to ask us this question.

And so my encouragement, I think, to a certain degree, yours is when you hear people attacking aspects of the

Christian faith, whether it's the atonement, whether it's the word of God, whether it's anything else, don't just assume that one, that person has pure motives for what they're saying, or two, that they're describing it accurately.

And three, even if they are, don't just assume there's no answers to this, because Christian faiths have been around for 2 ,000 years, and most of the stuff we're hearing today is just rehashes of stuff that's been leveled against Christianity centuries ago.

So there have been and there are answers to every attack on the Christian faith. Not that all of them are perfect, not that we can always understand perfectly why

God allowed certain things to happen, but there are good, solid answers. So anytime that you hear your faith attacked or asked a question you don't know the answer to, research it, dig into it, and find answers.

There's this amazing thing called Google, where you can search and you can find articles pro and con.

Trust me, virtually everything you can hear anyone espouse, there's going to be articles pro and con online.

And not just at GotQuestions, there's lots of other great Christian websites, lots of authors, speakers who are talking about these things and addressing them from an honest perspective.

And so do what Elisa did, and don't just accept what other people are telling you.

Go out there and dig into it and research and ask questions, and hopefully

God will use that like He did in her life to draw you back to the faith. So Elisa, just kind of in closing here, what would you say to someone who's maybe at now where you were at several years ago and being exposed to some of these attacks and starting to question their faith?

I mean, what would your encouragement to them be? Okay, so my encouragement, first of all,

I think that's really good advice that you just gave there. You've really got to dig in. You know, it's so easy just to hear a skeptical claim and just start going down that road and not really people always say, well, have you read the skeptical stuff?

But sometimes I want to ask the skeptics, have you read the stuff that's really answering what you're saying? Because I think that we can fall into that on both sides.

And so the thing that I would probably say more than anything is if you're questioning your faith, if you're going through any kind of doubt or even deconstruction, do some diagnosis first.

Figure out, you know, because I think there's a difference between honest doubt, like, oh man, this claim was brought against what

I believe. I really want to get to the bottom of this. I want to know what's true so that I can affirm what's true about God and about reality and about the gospel.

You know, is it that or have you been hurt? Have you been wounded and you're looking for a way out?

Because I think that happens a lot where people have had a really bad experience with church. Maybe they've encountered legitimate spiritual abuse or other types of abuse from church leaders or Christians in their lives.

And it's just all tied together in this big knot and they're just, you know, just throwing the whole thing out.

And I would say, you know, all of us, we need to watch our biases. You know, I know that I was biased toward wanting it to be true.

So that's why I forced myself to read the skeptical materials. I forced myself to read Bart Ehrman and say, okay,

I need to face this. You know, I like it.

I'm going to face it. And I think that's something that all of us need to kind of push against that idea of confirmation bias.

And if you're on the skeptical side and you're kind of wanting to toss it all because you want to, you know, for whatever reason, maybe diagnose that bias and say, okay, well maybe

I need to read some, you know, Andreas Kastenberger or some, you know, some Peter Williams or something to get the other perspective.

And so I would say that would be the number one thing, but also don't give up because sometimes, like I said, I wrestled with that one variant.

It was one variant for like a year. If it matters, wrestle, you know, don't just toss it aside at the first skeptical claim you hear.

Because it's that proverb that says, you know, someone's argument sounds right until someone brings a counter argument.

That's my paraphrase. But it's really true. It's like the first time you hear it, it can sound really good. But as you, then you learn the counter argument and then the counter argument to that.

And so just don't give up, dig deep because if you're hungry, you will, you'll dig really deep.

And I've just found consistently that when I've had a question about something in the

Bible, it always turns out that I'm the one who was mistaken and not the Bible. And so because of that, if I still have a couple of unresolved things, it's enough for me to trust and say, okay, you know,

I may not have resolved this yet, but in the past, it's always been me that was mistaken.

So that's enough for me to trust for now. And I'll keep working on it and I'll keep wrestling through it. But that would be my main advice.

Excellent. So I really like how you explained it, like with Bart Ehrman, how he will present something like, oh, so did you know that the ending of the gospel of Mark or the account of the woman caught in adultery in John, that those probably weren't originally in the

Bible. And some people are just like, if they've never been exposed to that, it can be shocking, but it's like, okay, that's been known since about the second century

AD. So it's been known and people have been talking about it for 1800 years. So don't allow an attack like that to, if it catches you off guard, don't allow that surprise to cause you to question your faith.

No. Yeah. Allow it to motivate you to, okay, let's see what.

What does this mean? What's that all about? What does it mean? Yeah. So Lisa, you have a book coming out next year.

So tell us a little about that. Yeah. Well, I'm really excited about this next book.

So it's going to be called live your truth and other lies, how popular deceptions are making us anxious, self -obsessed and exhausted.

And so essentially it's going to be addressing some of the slogans we see in culture, things like, you're perfect just as you are follow your heart.

You're in control of your own destiny. It's kind of this, this all about you kind of mentality that we see in culture.

So I'm going to be taking each chapter to address one of these deceptions and say what, see what the

Bible has to say about, about those things and what, who we are, who we are in Christ. And so I'm really excited about that.

It'll be out fall 2022. But as you mentioned, another gospel is out now and that's available.

And another gospel is a fantastic book. I definitely recommend our listeners to check it out. And just so you know that we talked about several different resources and we'll include links to how you can learn more about Elisa and her ministry and her book and et cetera, both in the description field on our

YouTube channel, but also at podcast .gotquestions .org. So you can learn more and follow her to your heart's content.

So Elisa, thank you so much for being on the show. I love how you explain these things.

It's powerful just to hear your testimony. And I just want to say too, I'm so thankful for GotQuestions because there have been many times where I've put a question into the

GotQuestions search bar there, and that has springboarded me into a journey of study.

And so I'm really thankful for your website and for the ministry that you all do, because that was extremely helpful to me, continues to be extremely helpful to me to this day.

If I want to, one of the first places I'll start when I'm looking into a new topic is to put it into the

GotQuestions search bar and kind of start from there and then start looking at some of the resources and read more about it.

And so I'm really thankful for what you all do as well. Well, thank you for the encouragement. It's cool to see how

God's working and God's using the internet just to provide open doors to so much information.

And there's so many great sites and ministries out there. So again, if your faith is being challenged, if you're hearing an attack or argument that you're not familiar with, don't just accept it blindly.

Do the research, dig in. There are answers out there. Trust us on that.

So Elisa, again, thank you for being on the show. It's been great to have you. So this has been the GotQuestions podcast.