Why I Am a Progressive Christian<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Patheos is doing a series asking us to explain "Why I am a..." in 200 words or less. I just wasted some of my word limit telling you that, so I'll\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2013\/04\/why-am-i-a-progressive-christian.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why I Am a Progressive Christian\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Patheos is doing a series asking us to explain "Why I am a..." in 200 words or less. 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{"id":13843,"date":"2013-04-03T07:50:07","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T11:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=13843"},"modified":"2013-04-03T07:50:07","modified_gmt":"2013-04-03T11:50:07","slug":"why-am-i-a-progressive-christian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2013\/04\/why-am-i-a-progressive-christian.html","title":{"rendered":"Why I Am a Progressive Christian"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Patheos is doing a series<\/a> asking us to explain \u201cWhy I am a\u2026\u201d in 200 words or less.<\/p>\n

I just wasted some of my word limit telling you that, so I'll get on with it.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ Before I was a progressive Christian I was a conservative Evangelical Christian, and before I was a conservative Evangelical Christian I was a fairly nominal Catholic. So the answer is multifaceted.<\/p>\n

I am a Christian partly because I was raised in a particular Christian context, and a broader one in which various forms of Christianity predominate.<\/p>\n

I am a Christian today primarily because I had a life-changing born again experience in a Pentecostal<\/a> Christian context.<\/p>\n

I am a progressive Christian because my born-again fervor led me to study the Bible, theology, and related topics at university. Study led me to change my views. I am a progressive Christian because my study of the Bible, theology, and history, my use of reason, and the powerful religious experience I had, have led me here.<\/p>\n

I must also add that I am an American Baptist for a number of reasons, one of which is that I can be all of the above quite naturally in that context.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"