Author: Jay Forrest

A Christian is a person who accepts and seeks to follow the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. That means that Catholics, Orthodox, Protestant, Latter-day Saints, Christian Science, and Jehovah Witnesses are Christians.

Now members of these very broad groups do not believe the same things. Many would not consider members of the other groups to be “true” Christians. But each would consider themselves to be real Christians.

Are They Saved

A second question, is what does it mean to be saved. This is more complicated, because it requires us to interpret Scriptures and list criteria. I can only answer that from my own belief system.

Salvation

A person is saved if and only if they have turned from a self-centered life to a God-centered life through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, Savior, and God. Let me unpack that.

Conversion, in my view, is turning from a self-centered life to a God-centered life. This is also the core idea of repentance, a change of mind. The change is from loving self first to loving God first.

Faith is trust. You must place your trust in the person of Jesus and accept what he did for you on the cross. He died for your sins so that God can forgive you and give you citizenship in his kingdom. And unless Jesus is somehow God in the flesh, none of this makes sense.

Now how all this is possible is part of the Christian Community’s struggle to understand the gospel and apply that to our lives. It is when we reach a collective consensus that a creed becomes authoritive or a canon gets closed. I am simplifying this a lot.

True Christians

Now back to our question. Now if we mean by true Christian one who is also saved, then members in each one of these groups will have Christians who are saved and Christians who are not saved. This is exactly what Jesys taught:

“Let both of them (saved and unsaved) grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn” (Matt. 13:30).

Osmosis, as I am using it here, means “the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, etc.”(Oxford English Dictionary).

I’m using osmosis instead of assimilation, because I want to emphasize the unconscious nature of that assimilation. The ancient authors lived and breathe in a cultural background. They were not aware of its influence on them. It is only later in the modern and postmodern period that we have become more self-critical.

Unconscious Assimilation

By cultural osmosis I’m talking about the early Christians unconscious assimilation of ideas, values and perspectives of the culture in which they lived. The obvious example is patriarchy.

In the process of trying to understand the Bible, we need to separate cultural contamination from genuine revelation. This is not always clear.

The Law of Love

In ethical issues, I would argue the best way to discern what is a cultural contamination and what is a general revelation, is to go back to the principle behind the ethics of Christianity. Christianity. That is, love.

If we truly understand. Love, then we will truly understand what ethics derive from that. Love does no harm (Rom..13:10). Therefore, if an action harms somebody, it is most likely wrong. It is not just a cultural construct, but a universal application of the moral law of love.

Modern Cultural Osmosis

But equally true, we need to be careful of our own cultural osmosis. It is very easy to unconsciously accept the modern and postmodern ideas. We must carefully discern what is truth and what is cultural assimilation.

How we do discern what is the cultural assimilation? It is by following the evidence. First, we have to realize our tendency to be biased. Second, we need to understand confirmation bias. And third, we need to honestly evaluate the evidence for and against a position.

Personally, I find it most helpful to try to prove the opposite point of view. Instead of trying to confirm what I already believe, I try to confirm what I don’t believe. That way I’m more honest with the evidence.

Many people mistakenly think that Progressive Christianity is liberal Christianity. And to many people, this may be true. But not to me.

The Middle Way

Progressive Christianity is the middle path between conservative Christianity and liberal Christianity. It recognizes that truth is not conservative or liberal. The truth is the truth.

The conservative aspect of progressive Christianity, as I understand it, is that we ought to hold to the traditional faith until evidence forces us to reconsider.

At the point of reconsidering a traditional doctrine, you must be careful to conserve the truth of the doctrine while contemporizing its expression.

Translate and Transform

This goes back to the old adage of translating the faith versus transforming the faith. It also goes back to try to discern the essential aspects of the faith from the non-essential aspects of the faith.

We must translate when we can, and transform when we must. But we should not abandon the essentials of the traditional faith. Which means we have to carefully discern what are the actual essentials of the faith, and what is an artifact of the cultural context in which it was declared.

Not Easy

This is not an easy process. But it is a process that must be done if we want to be honest with the facts of science, history, and modern scholarship.

The liberal aspect of progressive Christianity, is that we translate and even transform the faith based upon the best available evidence. Ultimately we are in the pursuit of Truth, because all truth is God’s truth.

The Buddha Discovered God

“There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If, monks there were not that unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, you could not know an escape here from the born, become, made, and conditioned. But because there is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, therefore you do know an escape from the born, become, made, and conditioned.” (Udana 8.3 Ānandajoti Bhikkhu).

I studied Buddhism in depth for over a decade. I can tell you that the Buddha discovered God. Not as a supreme being, but as the unconditioned Ground of Being.

I believe that the reason the Buddha did not identify this Ground of Being as God, is because in his culture gods were supreme beings, limited in their ability, and situated in heaven. None of the gods he knew from his culture fit the reality that he discovered.

Now compare his understanding of the ground of being with the best Christian definition of God by David Bentley Hart:

God “is the infinite fullness of being, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, from whom all things come and upon whom all things depend for every moment of their existence, without whom nothing at all could exist.”

See how well this matches the Buddhas definition of “an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned.” You can see from this the Buddha did in fact discover God.

We must understand that the Buddha did not have revelation. He discovered God through meditation. He therefore was limited in his understanding of God. He did not understand all that is revealed in Scripture, in Christ, and through the church.

In the words of Kwame Anthony Appiah:

“In sum, identities come first, with labels and ideas why and to whom they should be applied. Second, your identity shapes your thoughts about how you should behave; and, third, it affects the way other people treat you. Finally, all these dimensions of identity are contestable, always up for dispute: who’s in, what they’re like, how they should behave and be treated.”

Notice that “your identity shapes your thoughts about how you should behave.” Think of the times we are told, “Little girls don’t act that way.” Or “big boys don’t cry.”

Says Who?

Now ask the question nobody is supposed to ask, “Says who?” Who says boys can’t try and girls can’t play with trucks? Well, who decreed it?

The patriarchy sold it to society, and now it is a social construct. By patriarchy, I mean “a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it” (OED).

Yes, patriarchy is a real thing. And yes, patriarchy is bad. “For centuries,” writes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group.”

Do I really have to tell you that this is wrong? That is why I am a feminist. I believe women have equal rights with men and should be allowed to do whatever men do, with the same rate of pay.

Women and LGBTQ+

Identity also “affects the way other people treat you.” I was happy that 2021 saw Kamala Harris sworn in as the 49th vice president of the United States.

It took so long because, until recently, women were not considered capable of leading. But the role of women is slowly changing. Unfortunately, under the Trump administration, we’re taking steps backwards.

But the LGBTQ+ people are still struggling to improve “the way other people treat” them. And of these people, the trans community is the least accepted. They are the most persecuted group in the United States today, and they’re some of the most loving people.

This ongoing and unslowing epidemic of violence committed against transgender and gender non-conforming people continues to climb and claim the lives of too many each year in the United States and across the globe (GLAAD).