Faith and Culture

I participate in a monthly discussion group consisting of Christians of all stripes.  Our conversations focus on our commonalities and distinctions, the things that tend to unite us and the things that keep us separated.  In a recent discussion on the issue of marriage equality, a conservative Roman stated the opinion that people have turned their back on the teachings of the Church and of the Bible, just to follow a secular culture.  In response, a progressive Evangelical pointed out that, at the time of the Civil War, the Church and the Bible were both wrong on slavery, but the Spirit led the culture to the conviction that owning people had to stop.  The culture, this participant said, dragged the Church into compliance with new revelation through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  He maintained that the same kind of progressive revelation has led our modern culture to embrace justice for gay people based on the new scientific understanding of sexual orientation, yet church response is uneven.

Progressive revelation works against the idolatrous tendency to attribute infallibility to someone's reading of Scripture or to some body of religious teaching, or to a particular hierarch or Council, or to the Church generally.  In that way, religious faith can be kept fresh, faithful but relevant in every age.