Hello, Brandon Foster here from Foster A Vlog, today I want to discuss a video by none other than Brandon Robertson. He is a well-known progressive pastor and he is always talking about his views of progressive Christianity and just his theology in general. And today he’s specifically talking about his concerns with the way conservatives approach the Bible.

As someone who is more conservative, especially a conservative Christian, I want to react and discuss what he has to say. So let’s get this started.

“Can I share with you one of my major frustrations in discussing the difference between progressive views of the Bible and conservative views of the Bible?”

Well, yes, Brandon. You most certainly can.

“The conservative view of the Bible is so cut and dry, black and white, and simple. They say the Bible is the inherent word of God. There are no errors as you understand it is what it means, and you need to accept it as the absolute truth on all matters that it talks about.”

Now, there are two parts to this. First, no, Christians do not just believe that when you read scripture, you take the surface understanding and you. It’s not what conservative Christians believe. There are those who do believe that. I believe those who fall more under the fundamental camp actually believe that concept. They believe that what you read is what it is, and the literal interpretation of the Bible. That is exactly how you’re supposed to interpret that.

He’ll talk about this more later, but I’ll hint at it now. conservatives take the scripture and we dig. We pretend to be archeologists going through a literary dig site, and we try and uncover every small facet that we can, but we’ll talk more about that in a.

“This makes it really easy for a conservative Christian to pick up the Bible and say, I read a passage, it made me uncomfortable, or I disagreed with it, or I didn’t understand it, but I’ve gotta believe it because it’s the word of God and that settles it.”

Now, this I do agree with when you come to the Bible, whether you agree with it or not, if you believe that the Bible, as he said before, is God’s holy word and is one collection of a lot of other people’s writings, all coming through the Holy Spirit and writing something, then yeah, you have to walk away with going, I’m confused. I don’t fully agree, but I’m going to wrestle with this through the Holy Spirit until I come to where God is. We go to God. God does not come to us. God does not come down and go, you know. You. You can believe how you want and I’ll just have to deal with it. That’s not what God does. We have to wrestle with the scripture until we come to God’s understanding,

“but we literally look, but we literally look at no other book in the world like. Especially when it comes to ancient literature. When we study ancient literature, that’s not the Bible. We need to learn the culture, the context, language, the beliefs and backgrounds, and philosophies of the world from which that text comes from to begin understanding what the text is actually saying.”

Again, he’s not wrong when you come to scripture, just like any other book, you have to understand who was the author. You have to understand what was the culture. You have to understand what language it is. You have to go back to that language if you can, and see what the meanings of those words are. That’s what translators do.

They look at all those things and say, well, this word can mean A or B, but depending on the context, you can know what A and B are most of the time, there are still some sections that are a little ambiguous, and we do the best we can. We come at it humbly and again through the Holy Spirit. And we discuss what we think the word is, and that’s why we have different translations.

Translation A may take the word this way, translation B may take the word that way. Neither is wrong, but you. You need to understand where they’re coming from. That is very important. But again, it doesn’t fully matter what all those things say. It is very important, but you still have to look at it through the lens of God, through the lens of the holy spirit.

That is our foundation. We start with the Holy Spirit and then we move into literary criticism. Basically, it sounds like he switches it, he does literary criticism, and then he moves through the spirit.

“Of course, conservative theology doesn’t hold the Bible to those standards. And when progressives come in and say, well, actually, we need to look at each book of the Bible and each chapter of the Bible and ask, what is the context? Who is the author? Who is it being written to? What was the intention? What’s the purpose? What was the belief systems in that era of history? Conservatives say, look at you just twisting the Bible. Look at you doing all these gymnastics instead of just accepting what the Bible plainly says.”

This I do not agree with. He is saying again, conservative Christians do not have critical literary analysis of scripture. I don’t know where he’s getting that from. There are those who don’t. I am sure there are plenty of pastors out there who do not. I have heard the statement by some that, uh, if they were given the original documents in Greek or in Hebrew or Aramaic. that they would cling to their King James Bible or they would cling to their English version, whichever they use.

That is foolish. That is completely unbiblical thinking. We go to the sources, we go to the oldest manuscripts we have, and we translate it from that. We go to the sites, we go to Israel, we go to Babylon, we go to these places and. as much information as we can. The idea that conservative Christians in our analysis of scripture, kind of just flip through the Bible willy-nilly is completely ridiculous.

I don’t know who he’s talking to, but it’s wrong. It’s very wrong. I have books like this, which is a thick tome of just the book of Genesis. As you can see. Genesis, if you can read that and it goes through, the culture. It goes through the language, it goes through the customs. It explains things in a deeper way than someone can just get by glancing through the Bible.

I have read the Bible off and on cover to cover since I was 12. That’s when I was baptized. I’m 29. It’s been 17 years where I’ve read scripture and there are things reading this breaking down scripture verse by verse that I did not. And there are things that I kind of knew that became clearer. There are customs that did not make sense, or I didn’t even know I was missing until I read something like this.

And the idea that conservative Christians don’t do that is preposterous. Of course, we do. We just do it differently than you do. And again, we come through all of those areas. We come through the critical analysis of s. through the Holy Spirit. And I’m assuming Brandon Robertson doesn’t. He reads scripture and then he walks off with all the critical theory and then he’s like, well, I’m just gonna stop there. I don’t want to go further. And whether that’s a conscious or unconscious thing, I have no idea. , he just walks off of what he wants to think. And it is ridiculous to think that conservative Christians do not apply critical theory to the study of the Bible we have had for centuries. Now, again, as I’ve talked about in other videos, it wasn’t really popular to do it before rationalism, the age of reason wasn’t really a thing. They did a little. But it wasn’t very popular. It is now popular to do so. So Christians have done it for multiple centuries. Let’s finish what he has to say. and in a conversation or a debate, the conservative way seems superior because it’s so clear.

“Anybody can understand the conservative argument that you should be able to believe everything in the Bible. Pick it up, whatever it says, just take it as you understand it, and that’s the truth. But that isn’t true. That’s not what the Bible is. For starters, the Bible’s not one book, but a library of books written by dozens of people over thousands of years in different places around the world, in different languages with different philosophies and political situations. And so when we look at the Bible, we need to ask each individual book and even each individual chapter, when was this written? Who’s writing this? To whom is it being written to? What is the purpose? What genre is this text? And as you do those things, as you ask those questions, you begin to unpack layers of meaning in the text that are not obvious if you’re just reading it from your modern perspective with a surface level.”

Again, I agree to a point, the Bible is complex. It is written by 40 authors, give or take a few, over 1500 years in multiple different languages, multiple geographical locations under multiple regimes, and lots of different life events. Some are written by kings, some are written by peasants, and some are written by women.

And while that does add complexity to the Bible and he is correct, the Bible is a very complex book. No conservative Christian would argue otherwise. But what we argue is that though it is a complex book written by so many people, there is an undeniable theme throughout the entire book just to take the.

Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1, connect in a way that is just mind-boggling. When John talks about, “in the beginning was the word” and Genesis talks about “in the beginning was God,” there are parallels, and that was on purpose. He wrote it to have those parallels. And again, when you read through scripture, and you understand the cultural and linguistic context like I was talking about a second ago.

Suddenly those parallels become so numerous that you cannot come out without thinking that there is a hand guiding all of it, and that is what conservatives believe. We believe that independent people wrote all these books in their moments. They were obviously talking about things in the. , but there was a hand guiding the Holy Spirit was guiding them in their own words to the destination that God wanted.

It works on so many different levels. It is so complex and that is something that we can all agree on. Conservative Christians are not saying otherwise, but it’s the outcome that we disagree with. He’s talking about how he reads it all and it’s so complex and so this or so. that you can’t ask the question, what does something mean?

“You can’t ask why is it a certain way. All you can do is just kind of go bit by bit piece by piece. When you engage the Bible from that historical-critical perspective, you unlock so much that’s not there on a basic simple surface-level reading of the text. The problem is, again, that the progressive way of interacting with scripture is complex. It’s not black and white, and so when somebody asks. So question like, well then what do you actually believe in the Bible or about the Bible? It’s impossible to simply answer that question because I need to know what text you’re talking about and what topic the text is on, and who wrote the text and what the purpose of that text was. The Bible is a complex library, and our engagement with it should be nuanced and complex. I believe the Bible is an incredible book. It is one of the foundations of my faith. I love studying it. I love teaching it, but I don’t just take every word as literally true because that’s not what the authors. and there’s his problem.”

That is the main issue with what he is saying. He does not take the Bible as his ground level, his foundational document for his faith. It’s one of them, but it’s not the foundation, and that is the difference between conservative and progressive Conservatives. Take the Bible as our founding. , and yes, there are parts of the Bible that are not literary.

You have poetic sections of the Bible. Psalms and proverbs are poems. Of course, we don’t take those, literally, they’re poems. But what we do take literally are the histories, are the gospels are the epistles. We take the letters theologically, literally. We don’t take them figurative. . That’s ridiculous. If we take taking the Constitution and going, eh, it’s just some, you know, letter to the people, it doesn’t matter much.

That’s how we take it. And so the idea that we don’t take everything in the Bible literally is kind of a duh. But that is our foundation. That’s our starting point, and that is our ending point. We take what the gospels and what the Bible says, honestly and. , and that is what the difference between a conservative and a progressive Christian is.

He takes things that we would take literally very clear one, same sex attractions, and Brandon Roberton is a same sex attractive person, and the scriptures that talk about it, they will navigate around until he gets what he wants out of it or what he believes. The ambiguous writing is. . Conservative Christians don’t do that.

When something is commanded, whether we like it or not, we have to suck it up and come to what God wants. We have to understand what God desires. And that is the big difference between conservatives and uh, progressives. And in many cases, that’s like one degree of difference. It is such a minute difference, but it has such a powerful.

impact on the way we live, live our lives, and that is what makes progressive Christianity so dangerous. They just tweak things just a little bit and suddenly they are an entirely different continent theologically than conservatives.