I’m over the rather continual progressive bashing of Evangelicals and Catholics. It is pointless, alienating, and risks becoming an exercise in self-righteousness. This is particularly so when the charge is that these groups are unloving without acknowledging that the meaning of the term “love” is part of the disagreement.
Catholics, traditional Evangelicals, and Orthodox Christians find in the Biblical narrative and the tradition of the church support for a particular understanding of the created order that is intellectually coherent and emotionally satisfying. It is hierarchical and binary in its physical form, gendered with regard to animals and humans, cyclical with regard to time, ordered by eternal laws, and embraced in its entirety by God; whose relationship with it gives it purpose and meaning.
The relationship of God to this created order is characterized by the word “love,” and thus the maintenance and restoration of this order is the essential act of love. The life of Christ, and particularly his death on the cross, is the ultimate act of Divine love to restore this order. When defined in this way, acts that discipline individuals into conformity with the created order are acts of love; human expressions of God’s relationship with Israel and then the Church over the millennia.
There is no contradiction in saying that the Catholic church loves LGBTQ persons and that it refuses to bless their marriages. From their perspective the refusal to bless is an act of love intended to bring into or keep them within the order of creation.
Of course there is a tension point, particularly among some Evangelical Christians: the ways in which they have already abandoned parts of the created order as found in the Bible under the pressure of social change. The justification for this has come by reading the Christ narrative as one not merely of restoration, but of progress.
Under the influence of modernity and its acceptance that social structures evolve and progress, these Evangelicals make a move that the older Orthodox and Catholic traditions found more difficult. They came to see Christ as not merely restoring, but revealing hidden aspects of the old created order. When egalitarian and democratic ideals took hold in popular society Evangelicals embraced them as Christian while Catholics and Orthodox remained politically reactionary for much longer. Recognizing gender equality and divorce and remarriage took longer, but under the pressure of changes in their own membership Evangelicals eventually decided that this type of “progress” was actually just a deeper understanding of what had been there all along in scripture.
But even so Evangelicals found ample New Testament evidence for an ordered creation, and love as the discipline that restores and maintains this order. The order wasn’t changing, it was just becoming clearer through the study of scripture under the influence of Christ’s Spirit. Discernment was the key, and up to now most Evangelicals haven't discerned Christ revealing a less binary and gendered social order.
Where progressive Christianity has finally broken from Catholic and Evangelical views is that it does not read the Biblical narrative as a description of God’s order for creation. Progressives can read Genesis 1 and 2 to be sure. But instead of finding an order we find a process of ordering, a process that is evolutionary and progressive and whose continuation is placed in the hands of humanity as its stewards. The scriptural narrative does not reveal an order. It reveals the principles God has put in place to guide the progress of creation.
Christ then comes to heal a creation and humanity whose ability to progress has been broken by sin. And through his death and resurrection Christ by his Spirit in the Church restores humanity to its task overseeing the continual progression of the created order toward the Reign of God as revealed in both Jewish Scripture and Christ’s own ministry.
And this reveals an understanding of God’s love and thus human love that breaks sharply from the traditional view of love. For progressives God’s love revealed in Christ aims to fulfill, rather than merely restore, creation. It accepts and embraces emerging forms of self-understanding and social relations so long as they move humanity and creation toward the ideals of God’s Reign. It is the love of a realizable eschatology, even if it awaits some further act on God’s part to be fully realized. It is love as acceptance of difference given that we still await the full revealing of the glory of the Children of God.
So ultimately there is little point in talking about who is or is not acting in “love.” Progressives, Catholics, and Evangelicals simply don’t have a shared understanding of what the word love means. Nor, when it comes to it, do we have a fully shared understanding of the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection. And this isn’t merely in terms of atonement theory, but in terms of what constitutes the meaning of “sin” and what is entailed in overcoming it by Christ.
We need to show solidarity with those who are being wounded because of their ongoing affiliation with groups that reject them, but at this point that means an invitation to leave a church that has no capacity to offer what we regard as love.
In my wife’s language there is a saying, “like chickens talking to ducks.” But really what is happening is chickens talking to chickens about ducks, and visa-versa. As if this is going to change anything. We might consider trying to find a common language. Or at least listening long enough to be heard.
