Moral progressivism is a feature of the best and brightest of our culture. It’s the idea that, just like technology, which is progressing all the time and getting better, so our moral beliefs, values and sensibilities are improving over time. There’s a relentless forward march to the moral status of humanity such that many of the beliefs and values we hold today will be seen
as outdated and even irrelevant tomorrow.
Christians are often wary of moral progressives and moral progressivism, because it frequently wants to declare that the long-held moral beliefs or standards we get from the Bible are not only outdated, but positively harmful or evil. Yet on the other hand, many of the causes that moral progressives espouse do resonate with us as Christians. We do want the world to be a more just, more peaceable and more compassionate place.
So what is progressivism exactly? How do we come to be progressives in our modern culture? In addition, how should we think about this as Christians? Hear Tony Payne and Charles Cleworth consider these questions in this episode of the CCL podcast.
Links referred to:
- Next Priscilla & Aquila Centre evening seminar: A history of Complementarianism (Wed 13 Aug).
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- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 38:20 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:00] Tony Payne: It’s hard to be against progress. After all, it seems a lot better than regress. But what about progressivism? Well, that’s another thing altogether—especially the moral progressivism that’s such a feature of the best and brightest of our culture. It’s the idea that, just like technology, which is progressing all the time and getting better, so our moral beliefs and values and sensibilities are improving over time—that there’s a relentless forward march to the moral status of humanity such that many of the beliefs and values we hold today will be seen for what they are tomorrow when we realise that they’re outdated and that there’s a new and better set of values to be had. When it comes to morality, you want to be on the right side of history, as they say.
[00:00:46] Now, Christians are often wary of moral progressives and moral progressivism, because it frequently wants to declare that the long-held moral beliefs or standards that we get from the Bible are not only outdated, but positively harmful or evil. And yet on the other hand, many of the causes that moral progressives or the woke progressives, as we sometimes call them—many of the causes they espouse do resonate with us as Christians as well. We do want the world to be a more just, more peaceable, more compassionate place.
[00:01:18] So what is progressivism exactly? How do we come to be progressives in our modern culture? And how should we think about this as Christians? That’s our topic on today’s episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast.
[Music]
[00:01:47] Tony Payne: Well, hello again. I’m Tony Payne. Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast. It’s great to have you with us again. And today, I’m joined by Charles Cleworth. Hello, Charles!
[00:01:57] Charles Cleworth: Hello!
[00:01:58] Tony Payne: Nice to see you. Charles has been my colleague for the last six months here at Moore College, helping me teach moral theology. And it’s been great to team-teach with you, Charles. But you are leaving us in, what, three days time or something?
[00:02:10] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’m finishing up here on faculty, and my wife Ash and I and our kids, we are packing up and heading off to Aberdeen in Scotland. I’m going be doing a PhD at the University of Aberdeen in moral theology.
[00:02:26] Tony Payne: Oh, excellent, excellent. Now, look, you always ask a PhD student, “Give us your elevator pitch: tell us in 60 seconds what it is that you’re going to be studying for all this time.” Are you in a position to do that yet, or is it still too soon?
[00:02:37] Charles Cleworth: I think so. What difference does the cross make for evangelical ethics?
[00:02:43] Tony Payne: Ooh, okay. You would think it would make some considerable difference.
[00:02:47] Charles Cleworth: Yes. Yeah.
[00:02:48] Tony Payne: You’d like to think so.
[00:02:49] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, you would. Yeah. I’ll be thinking about that question in relation to a theologian called Oliver O’Donovan, whom we both love, and exploring the topic of the cross particularly in his thought.
[00:03:00] Tony Payne: Right, right, right. Okay. Because the cross—there’s so many aspects of the Christian gospel. It’s a multifaceted thing. There’s the person of Jesus Christ and his incarnation and his life and his teaching. There’s the death of Jesus for sin. There’s his glorious resurrection. There’s his ascension and current rule. And all these things you would like to think would have a real shape and influence on how we live—on what it means to live well and what it means to do what is good on morality.
[00:03:27] But you’re particularly going focus on the cross, because that’s good. Because very often the New Testament does, of course, doesn’t it? It does draw moral freight and kind of import for our Christian lives from not only what Christ has achieved on the cross, but the very nature of the cross and what it says about the Christian life. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with there, Charles.
[00:03:46] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, I’m looking forward to going through the journey of thinking about it for a few years.
[00:03:51] Tony Payne: Yeah. Well, we’re sorry to see you go. And dear listener, I just decided I wanted to chat with Charles before he left the country, because we’ve had a great time teaching ethics—teaching moral theology together—these last few months at Moore College. And in particular, we’ve looked at different aspects of morality and of the foundations of Christian morality.
[00:04:08] And very often on these podcasts, we talk about a particular issue. We talk about something that’s current and that we want to get into and think about from a Christian perspective. But in today’s conversation, although we’re going start there—we’re going start with a particular presenting sort of question—we’re going be digging down into some of the quite deep foundations of why we think something is moral or good at all, and how our society tends to do that at present, and why, as Christians, we often don’t quite fit with it. We do, but we don’t. And we’ll come to that as we talk further.
Shock and surprise in a WhatsApp group
[00:04:39] Tony Payne: But to work our way into this topic, Charles, you were telling me about a WhatsApp group you’re a part of—a social WhatsApp group that kind of bats back and forth about different things—and the curious experience you had being part of that conversation when Trump was elected the second time.
[00:04:54] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, yeah. So I’m part of this WhatsApp group. Quite a number of people in it—a few Christians, mostly non-Christians. And I remember around the first election of Trump and then again on his second election, I remember this sense of shock and surprise.
[00:05:11] Now, regardless of what one thinks about Trump, and these particular people weren’t particularly thrilled, but it was the particular reaction of shock and surprise that this shouldn’t have happened. This was not what was meant to happen—almost as if there was a script that they were expecting to play out and then it didn’t, and they didn’t know how to make sense of what had, in their mind, gone wrong.
[00:05:37] Tony Payne: It wasn’t just that there was a different politician with—I got this sense from some people I spoke with as well. It’s not just that there was a politician. All politicians, you disagree about their policies, their character, whether you think they’ll do a good job, their vision for the country, et cetera. It wasn’t just, “Oh, a politician has gotten in that was on the side I don’t like, or I would’ve voted for the other side.” There was a kind of visceral sense of there being a tear in the fabric of time or something. There was “Some—some cataclysmic thing has happened. And how could this happen?” I mean, how could the USA, the greatest country in the world, in many respects—like the biggest economy in the world, they’ve been a democracy for 249 years now on July 4th just passed—an extraordinary place. And they—how could they elect this person? And it was a sense of historic kind of disjunction. Something has gone terribly wrong somewhere for this to have happened.
[00:06:26] Tony Payne: That—that’s what you’re reflecting in your kind of WhatsApp chat?
[00:06:29] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Almost they couldn’t make sense of it. It wasn’t just, “Oh, this is a shame that somebody I didn’t like got into power.” I mean, these are all Australians, so in some respect, quite separated from our Australian context. But still, it’s almost unintelligible how this happened. Yeah.
Progressivism and the “right side of history”
[00:06:48] Tony Payne: What do you think was behind it? What did it make you think about?
[00:06:50] Charles Cleworth: Yeah. Well, we’ve spoken about this—that there is perhaps this underlying expectation that actually, history itself has a script—that things are meant to be getting better, and things are meant to be going somewhere. And for many people, this seems in their mind to be a step backwards, not forwards. It’s that expectation that things are meant to be going forwards somewhere that I think is so interesting.
[00:07:20] Tony Payne: I guess we call that progressivism, do we?
[00:07:23] Charles Cleworth: Yeah.
[00:07:23] Tony Payne: Being a progressive. As in “progress”. History is progressing. History is getting better. This generation has advanced on the previous one. It’s one of the commonplaces—one of the almost accepted maxims of our culture, isn’t it? That we’re going somewhere. It’s like that phrase: you want to be on “the right side of history”.
[00:07:41] And if you find yourself on the wrong side of history, that’s bad. You’ve got to get with where history’s going. It’s going somewhere. It’s progressing. It’s getting better. There’s moral improvement and progress. We’re treating women better. Our racial differences are better. Everything’s getting better. We’re getting somewhere. In a sense, that’s what progressivism is, isn’t it?
[00:07:57] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, and it’s really interesting: that language of “the right side of history” is so interesting, because it was Barack Obama was actually someone who spoke about these things. He spoke about actually drawing on Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice” and that history’s going somewhere and you want to be on the right side of history. And there was this expectation that history was going towards justice.
[00:08:23] And I think for a lot of people, Trump and Trumpism, it seems like, well, the arc of history just got a kink in it.
[00:08:30] Tony Payne: It just took a wrong turn.
[00:08:31] Charles Cleworth: Exactly!
Where the idea of progressivism comes from
[00:08:32] Tony Payne: And how could that happen if history is going somewhere good? And it raises this question, then, for us as Christians, for us as people, but is that the case? Is history going somewhere good and in the sort of contemporary world where, let’s face it, we’re in a secular world. We’re in a very post-Christian kind of world. There’s no Christian kind of narrative or story about where history’s going. Where do you get the idea that everything’s getting better?
[00:08:56] That’s kind of what I want to talk with you about today. You have a great lecture on this during this last term with our third years, and you don’t have to give it at the level of a third year ethics lecture. This is just a casual conversation. But I’d love to dig into the idea of how do we get this idea that’s really a commonplace of our contemporary culture—that the world is going somewhere good, that morality is progressing, that each generation is more enlightened, that the world has improved since the previous generation, morally speaking? That is we don’t have the outdated, primitive, backward attitudes of the 50s or even the 60s. We’ve come somewhere. Where do we get that idea? Where does it come from?
[00:09:31] Charles Cleworth: Yeah. What I think is actually important, and what I want to touch on, is that this idea of progress is intimately connected to Christianity. And so, if you go back before Christianity to ancient near-Eastern cultures, that kind of thing, they largely had a cyclical view of time and history. The world wasn’t going somewhere; it just went around and around.
[00:09:54] And I think in large part, this was connected to the cycle of the seasons—agrarian cultures. Winter came and then spring and summer and autumn, and you moved through the seasons in a cyclical way. And this was actually, I think, a way that they made sense of life itself—that actually life itself went around and around.
[00:10:15] But then with the birth of Christianity, the death and resurrection of Jesus, something unique and profound happened. It has its origins in the Old Testament.
[00:10:24] Tony Payne: Of course, right.
[00:10:25] Charles Cleworth: But particularly with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, was actually the idea that history isn’t just going around and around; history is actually going somewhere. That history itself—the world itself—has a beginning and it has an end, and it will end in the different place to where it began.
[00:10:47] And so the Bible, it speaks about, you know, we began in the garden and we had the introduction of sin and the Fall. But Jesus has actually come to bring about a resurrection that will, in the end, bring a transformation about for creation itself, and it will be different and it will be transformed and perfected and renewed. And so you have a fundamentally different idea about time and history.
[00:11:16] Tony Payne: Is this why as Christians, we sometimes resonate with the idea of progress and progressivism?
[00:11:23] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, yeah. I think so. There’s something in us that resonates with this idea that there is hope, that good will prevail. Actually, I got a little quote here.
[00:11:37] Tony Payne: Oh, let me guess. It’s from The Lord of the Rings.
[00:11:38] Charles Cleworth: Yeah.
[00:11:40] Tony Payne: Charles loves his Lord of the Rings quotes. And they’re good too.
[00:11:42] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I find an endless source of, uh, wisdom and reflection. I’ll read this little quote. Okay. Um, it’s from Samwise Gamgee. He’s speaking to Frodo, and they’re speaking in a moment of despair. And Sam says to Frodo, he says, “It’s like in the great stories, Mr Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?
[00:12:15] “But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines out, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. They meant something, even if you were too small to understand why.”
[00:12:37] And I find that so interesting. I think that resonates with us—that we do have this sense that actually, darkness will pass. The sun will shine out. A new day will come. And that resonates with us. It helps us to make sense of the world. And Christianity is where you find that truly and with a concrete hope in Jesus Christ.
A Christian view of history to a shadowy progressivism
[00:13:02] Tony Payne: And of course Western history—our history, the history we are talking about, we’re talking about the elections of people in the USA, and our morality and the sense of things here in Australia—and we’re talking about Western views of history—that, of course, springs out of Christianity in some way. We’re a culture that’s been deeply, deeply formed by Christianity in many of our deep substructures. Even though, now, that’s been largely evacuated with its content, certainly publicly, intellectually, culturally, how does that happen? How do we move from a point where you have a profoundly Christian understanding arising out of the promise of the Old Testament fulfilled in Christ, that the world is a certain kind of thing created by God, and that in God’s purposes, his world and his people are going somewhere to be gathered around his Son in a new creation, that there’s a direction to history and a fulfillment—how do we get from there to where we are now where we’ve kind of got this shadowy progressivism that is somehow insubstantial and unsatisfying?
[00:13:56] Charles Cleworth: Mm. Yeah. So something happened in and around what’s called the Enlightenment. And so the Enlightenment was kind of a movement that took hold in the 17th, 18th century. One way of explaining and making sense of the Enlightenment was actually an attempt to have a kind of Christianity without the Christ—without Jesus Christ.
[00:14:21] And so, many people will know that quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “God is dead”. What people often don’t realise is the broader context of that quote, ‘cause it’s very interesting. And so, it’s actually a story that that quote comes from. And Nietzsche’s telling this story about a man who ran into the town square crying out, “God is dead! God is dead! And we have killed him.”
[00:14:47] But what happens is the townspeople who come out to hear this man crying, they say, “We’re not ready for it yet. Go back.” And this story is Nietzsche’s way of saying that in the Enlightenment, people wanted to hang on to the values of Christianity. They wanted to hang on to a Christian worldview. But they just didn’t want the God, the Christ, of that Christian worldview.
[00:15:13] Tony Payne: ‘Cause Nietzsche is writing in the late 19th century, looking back on the Enlightenment and saying, “It didn’t really work, did it.” Like, it’s hard to have one without the other. But that’s the point of that quote, that very famous quote. He’s critiquing the Enlightenment from the other side of it, really.
[00:15:26] Charles Cleworth: He is. Now, Nietzsche himself—now, his critique was actually, “They’ve kept too much of Christianity.” And so he said, “Look, if you’re going be gone with God, better get rid of the whole lot. Get rid of all your Christian values that you’re trying to hang onto.” And he had his own worldview, which is problematic, but that was what he was saying.
[00:15:47] Tony Payne: So in the Enlightenment, you have an attempt to kind of have a super structure and ideals and morals of Christianity, and even a sense of history and the world as going somewhere. Is that what you mean? To have that sense that there is hope, that we’re going somewhere, that there is a future that we are progressing towards, just as we have in Christianity. Except there’s no God that’s taking history anywhere and there’s no creation. It’s not as if the world is created a certain kind of place. There’s just us. There’s humanity. But for some reason, and somehow, we’re still going somewhere. How does that work out? How do they try to explain that?
[00:16:21] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, so with this kind of Enlightenment thing, wanting to hang on to Christian ideals, Christian values, but without the Christ, I think that extends to this idea of progress—that people, because of Christianity, they knew or they wanted, they hoped that the world was really going somewhere, that things were going be better. That the darkness would pass. And the question was, “How is that going make sense without a Christ to bring about a resurrection from the dead?”
[00:16:52] And so, this is where we can introduce another character. His name was George Hegel, and he tried to put out an attempt to give people this idea of progress, but without a Christ. And so, this is what people call “historicism”. And he said that actually, history itself, the world itself, is almost propelling itself towards progress. And so, he had a kind of complicated philosophy. But he largely said, you begin in one position, one state. He called this the “thesis”. And he said, at some point there’s going be a reaction—a response to that, called the “antithesis”. And so, you go from one state to the next state, and then there’ll be a “synthesis”, where these two different things come together to form a new thing.
[00:17:43] Tony Payne: Something will come out of the opposition of those two ideas—that in some way takes you a step forward. You bring the best of the two ideas, or somehow in the collision between them, something emerges that’s a positive synthesis, the positive new thing. So that new thing then becomes the next thesis, I guess.
[00:18:01] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And basically, history itself moves through a constant process of moving through these stages of point A to point B, producing point C, which itself becomes the new point A, and on and on we go. And it was this idea that actually, that’s how progress comes about—that things are going somewhere.
[Music]
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[00:20:00] Tony Payne: And now, let’s get back to our program.
Marxism and progress
[00:20:02] Tony Payne: One of Hegel’s most famous disciples, of course, was Karl Marx, or “disciple” is probably not quite the right word. But certainly, there’s a lot of that in Marx—in that for Marx, in terms of economics, he saw the world as going somewhere economically—that there was a necessary history of economics that was going to unfold by the clash between capital and the bourgeoisie, and labour, the proletariat. And the out of the struggle—out of the rebellion of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, in a sense, against capital—would arise something new—would arise a new world, a new kind of economic order that superseded both, and that was going to be the communist economic order.
[00:20:43] And so, Hegel’s philosophy is sometimes thought of as a dialectical approach that’s back and forth between these two things. Marxism is a dialectical materialism—that the material fortunes and nature of the world and how the world produces its goods, and how labour and capital and goods and production happens, this too is happening exactly this way.
[00:21:01] And so, the whole history of that has had such a huge influence on our century through the Soviet Revolution and the Communist Revolution in China as well. The whole movement of socialism, of Marxism economically, comes out of this idea of progress, that there’s going be progress by action and reaction through revolution producing a new world.
[00:21:20] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, ‘cause most people probably haven’t heard of Hegel and his ideas about history. But as you say, Marx, he took those ideas and he ran them through an economic paradigm, where he understood that we as humans are basically economic creatures. And so, that’s how he made sense of things and that’s how he wanted to bring about progress in the world.
[00:21:45] But perhaps his mistake was actually thinking that we were, at base, economic creatures, which is perhaps a contributing factor to why his ideas failed. But that’s not to say people haven’t taken similar ideas from Marx and tried them in a new way, which is where people will speak about cultural Marxism.
[00:22:06] And so, this is perhaps another milestone along the way: kind of associated with something called the Frankfurt School, where they said, “You know what, Marx, he was onto something. But we’re not fundamentally economic people. We’re fundamentally cultural people. And actually, fundamentally, it’s not my money that makes me who I am; it’s my identity, my relationships—
[00:22:30] Tony Payne: The groups that I’m part of.
[00:22:32] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, yeah. And so, then you began to get some of these ideas kind of transforming and developing a new language. And so, instead of having the language of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, it was similar language, but it changed. It became the “oppressed” and the “oppressors”—minorities and the powerful.
[00:22:53] And these began to be understood in terms of identity markers. And so, you could understand these along kind of ethnic lines. And so certain ethnicities were identified as those who are oppressed, and those identified as those who are the oppressors.
[00:23:11] And you can run it through the lens of gender as well—sex and gender. So women are often identified as the oppressed minorities and men as the oppressors. And just like Marx said that the oppressed need to rise up against those in power above them, so too there was this movement that actually the oppressed still need to rise up and bring about a kind of revolution, but not an economic revolution, but a cultural revolution. A revolution of identity.
[00:23:42] Tony Payne: And of morality—of how we live, of what we value, of how we relate to one another, of how we think about sexuality, of how we think about the use of goods and what we do with our material things and so on. How we think about the environment. How we think about everything really.
Activism and progress
[00:23:56] Tony Payne: One of the really fascinating aspects of this discussion for me, Charles, is how it kind of explains the rise of activism. It’s been an interesting feature of my life as I think about it, looking back over the decades that I’ve had beyond you, how much it’s become part of our culture that the way to bring change is to protest. The protest is an activism—is the form by which change happens. How do you get change to happens? We need to organise. We need to protest. And it’s the idea that if there’s an existing hegemon, there’s an existing way of being, there’s an existing kind of dominant culture. That’s the thesis, right? That’s the point A. I need to rise up in some sort of activist protesting rebellion. And by doing that, I’ll produce change. And that change will be for the better, just because it will be.
[00:24:41] You could almost say it’s more like culturalism Hegelianism than cultural Marxism, perhaps. Maybe that’s more accurate. But it certainly is that idea that somehow merely by opposing and by complaining and rising up and seeking to tear down what is there, I will succeed in building something new. Even though I can’t really explain what that new thing is going to be or how it will work, just the process of activism is what brings change.
[00:25:06] Charles Cleworth: Mm-hmm. And I think it’s that idea of those moves that Hegel talked about: you’re moving from the thesis to the antithesis to the synthesis. And as you say, it’s that moment of protest, of activism, of confrontation that brings about that change, which is why it’s such a big thing. And you’ve spoken about this: that protest only ever moves in one direction.
[00:25:33] Tony Payne: It only ever moves forward. It must deny what is in the past for some future that we aren’t quite sure yet what exactly it will be—how we’ll manage to provide for everybody and make society work once we’ve torn down the current structures. But we know that that’s where the better future is.
A Christian critique
[00:25:49] Tony Payne: How do we critique this as Christians? Because at one level, we kind of identify with it. As you said before, it sort of resonates with us in that we too are looking for progress. We’re looking for the end of history and for Christ. But not in a Hegelian back and forward kind of way, and also not in such a way that inevitably, whatever happens in history next is an improvement. Isn’t that the implication of this kind of historicist way of thinking about things—that the future equals the good?
[00:26:17] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, and that’s one of the curious things about this idea of progress—that the very idea of progress itself means that whenever something moves from being in the future or the present to being in the past, it actually becomes evil. Bad. Something to be moved on from.
[00:26:37] And so, all the things we’re fighting for in our culture will inevitably become the things that future generations will think are repressive and backwards and need to be protested against. And so, it actually includes this self-defeating critique that in a sense, it can never say anything is good—
[00:27:03] Tony Payne: In itself.
[00:27:04] Charles Cleworth: —in itself, because it will become bad. People will look back on it and think, “Oh, how backwards!” in the constant search for progress.
[00:27:16] Tony Payne: You’ve got to get on the right side of history where we are and see that this next thing is actually where we’ve all been heading.
[00:27:20] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, that’s an interesting phrase, because there is a “wrong” side of history.
[00:27:25] Tony Payne: Which, by definition, is the past.
[00:27:27] Charles Cleworth: Yeah. And the right side will inevitably become the wrong side.
[00:27:31] Tony Payne: Just given time.
[00:27:32] Charles Cleworth: Yes. Which is such a curious thing: that the things we’re fighting for now will be the things fought against.
[00:27:39] Tony Payne: Protested against. There will be—progressive activists of the future will seek to overthrow them. And in that sense, it’s a kind of fruitless search, in many respects. I mean, one of the, I suppose, the critique from a Christian point of view is not only the logical critique you’ve just provided—that it always ends up denying itself eventually—but that practically and experientially, it’s the case as well. You can’t simply posit that when Hitler and the Wehrmacht emerged in Germany in 1930s, that that constituted progress, and that what therefore and thereby happened was progress. You end up having to deny any—well, because you’ve already denied any objective kind of standard or referent for what is good, you end up constantly having to change the goalpost as to what you judge is good.
[00:28:20] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, and I think the Christian worldview actually presents something. Although it does resonate with this idea of progress, it frames it in a different way.
[00:28:29] Tony Payne: How does it frame it?
[00:28:30] Charles Cleworth: When the Scriptures describe our world in its sinful state—I think particularly of Ecclesiastes—it presents a world that is marred by sin, that our world by itself will never find its way out of sin, but things still happen in history. And so, I think what the Bible describes is sinful humanity. This world will only ever bounce from one thing to another—not going somewhere, but just reacting.
[00:29:02] And GK Chesterton is wonderful thinker and writer. He says, “The world isn’t going anywhere by itself. It simply wobbles back and forward”, where you get, at one point in history, there’ll be some wins—some good things that people say, you know, “That was really valuable. That was good.” But mixed in with all those good things will be a whole bunch of problematic things that people will notice and they will react to. And they’ll say, “No, there are a whole bunch of problems there.” People will look at the 50s—1950s—and go, “You know, there were some good things there. But there are a whole bunch of problems as well.” And so, you get this big swing—this reaction.
[00:29:42] But in fighting against that, we actually just trade one set of problems for another. There are some wins, there are some good things, some valuable things. But mixed in are just a whole bunch of other problems, because left to ourselves, sinful, humanity will never be able to get rid of sin. It will always be mixed into our attempts to justify ourselves.
[00:30:07] But the gospel presents something quite different—something quite new—that actually when Jesus Christ rose from the dead, something new did happen—that there was actually a new creation, that there was perfection, there was wholeness, there was redemption, and that this occurred in Jesus and his resurrection—and that this will encompass the whole world. This will encompass the whole creation. But not yet.
[00:30:41] And while we wait for Jesus’ resurrection to, in a sense, become the resurrection of all things, it is only by participating in Christ through the Spirit that we can experience this hope, this newness, this new creation.
[00:30:58] Tony Payne: So the newness of that new creation and the ultimate progress, in a sense, that we’re all longing for and hoping for, it does become real and visible and actual in our world as people’s lives are changed, as people do become united with Christ, as their minds and hearts are transformed. And therefore, as their lives are transformed, what they do is transformed. We’d say, as their character is transformed. So that change does become real and visible and new. It’s just not in a way that you can trace in history—such that this age is better than that age, or that it’s all becoming better all the time.
[00:31:33] In terms of historical movements and cultures and societies, we’re wobbling back and forward, seeing progress in some areas and not so much in others. Or going backwards in others. But in the lives of people and in the lives of fellowships, in particular of churches and church communities, you see that new life and that hope made real and made substantial in the world.
[00:31:53] Charles Cleworth: Yeah. As you’re saying, there is a sense in which there is real progress in the life of the Christian, the person who is connected to the resurrected one by faith, which is what we call “sanctification”, theologically. We are transformed from one degree of glory to another, as Paul says.
[00:32:13] Tony Payne: And so, our communities can be, in that sense, transformed. And you have these outposts of the kingdom—these new communities where lives and relationships are still not perfect by any means, and where there’s dysfunction of all kinds. Just read the New Testament: there’s dysfunction of all kinds in those communities. But in which there is also real change and new life and, in that sense, progress.
[00:32:34] Charles Cleworth: Yeah, which is what the Scriptures call “the church”, the gathering of the people who are connected to the Christ.
[00:32:41] Tony Payne: Charles, you just reminded me of all the reasons why I wish you weren’t going to Aberdeen. It’d be great to continue having—we’ll just have to have these conversations remotely. But we’re going miss you here at Moore College and here in Sydney. But it’s for a very good reason that you’re going away—to think about all these kinds of things more deeply and to come back a wiser, better read man.
Thinking Christianly about progress
[00:32:59] Tony Payne: As we round off, I guess I want to ask you one final question about us and Christians and progress. We’ve sort of sketched in a Christian way of thinking about being a Christian progressive, in one sense. When we’re interacting with our friends, with the world, often as Christians we’re, well, I’ll speak for myself, but I think I speak for quite a few Christians, we react against some of the kind of more extreme moral progressivism of the progressive left. And the kind of way we see that progressing makes us deeply uncomfortable, and we find ourselves opposed to many of those movements and many of those moral positions, which, because that’s the progressive left, it kind of makes us the conservative right sort of thing. And we kind almost reflexively go there. How as Christians can we notice the problems that we’ve been speaking about and understand the underlying—deep underlying—problems in that system of thinking without just reflexively jumping in the opposite direction and finding ourselves with a different set of problems? Wobbling to the other side and finding ourselves with a different set of problems?
[00:33:57] Charles Cleworth: Yeah. I think of Jesus before Pilate, and he says, “My kingdom is not of this world.” And I think we need to always be on guard that we don’t align ourselves with kingdoms of this world, whether it be on the left or whether it be on the right. And I think that means we need to have our eyes open to understand the world we’re living in, to be able to spot these kingdoms of the world, to be clear-minded, but always faithful to the Christ whose kingdom is not of this world.
[00:34:30] And so, we’ll see the left, you know, the progressive. Some people call it the “woke left”. And many people find it very concerning, and they’re worried about the left. But what we need to remember is we’re not on the conservative right. We are the people who belong to Jesus.
[00:34:49] And I do wonder if we have spent so much time and energy worrying about the left. There is a conservative turn happening around the world. There is this kind of turn toward the right, and I do wonder if it will sneak up on us as Christians. We won’t see it coming, and perhaps we might confuse ourselves with the right—that we’ve had the enemy of the left for so long that we’ve maybe—
[00:35:19] Tony Payne: The enemy of our enemy has become our friend. And so, we don’t tend to see the problems and dysfunctions in much the same sort of way. The philosophical and theological kind of vacuum that is there as well, as there is in much contemporary post- post- post-Enlightenment kind of thinking that we’re in now, where there might be some hankering for some commonsense morality or for a reaction against the nuttiness that we see at certain points on the other side, but without any real foundation or understanding of what’s happening and thereby just leading into other problems.
[00:35:52] And I think insofar as we go right back to where we started our conversation, many Christian friends I know in the US, for example have cheered the election of Trump, because it’s a poke in the eye for the woke left. He’s a brawling, bruising, unsophisticated, rude, kind of middle finger to that whole world, and they love that because they’re our enemies, right?
[00:36:11] But you’ve got to be careful: before too long, you find that the unspoken and un-Christian kind of morality of the Christless right, if I can put it like that, can be as damaging as that of the Christless left.
Conclusion
[00:36:23] Tony Payne: Much more for us to explore there, and we’ll do that in a future podcast. One of the projects for next year here at CCL is to talk more about politics and our understanding of left and right, and how as Christians, we find ourselves as kind of strangers in the political landscape, not really comfortable in either of these positions. But that’s something we’ll come back to and talk about more. And you’ve set the table well for that, Charles, for next time.
[00:36:44] But in the meantime, thanks for coming and talking with us today. Really appreciate it.
[00:36:48] Charles Cleworth: Thanks for having me.
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[00:37:03] Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website. That’s ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events and articles that we’ve published through the Centre. And while you’re there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make an tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.
[00:37:38] We’d also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources. And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions. Please get in touch: you can email us at [email protected] au.
[00:37:58] Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast; to James West for the music; and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week. Thank you for listening.
[00:38:13] I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
