Breakout Session 10:45 AM - ONLINE ONLY

Mike D’Virgilio - Uninvented: The Jewish Nature of Jesus’ World, Progressive Christianity, and How the Bible Could Not Be Made Up

Liberal Christianity, what we know today as progressive Christianity, started with a German pastor, philosopher, and theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). He has been called the father of liberal theology because he sought to take Enlightenment, non-supernatural assumptions and merge them with Christianity. He ended up destroying it, like all who came before and after trying to do the same thing.

By 1923, Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen wrote a book called Christianity and Liberalism in which he argued that liberal Christianity is a different religion altogether. We’ll see why Machen was right then, and why he’s right about progressive Christianity in our day. To understand why, we must examine the assumptions leading progressives to reject the divine nature of Scripture.

Progressive Christians, like all liberals that came before, have something else in common that follows from their basic assumptions: the Bible is made up, in whole or in part, merely a human invention. If these Enlightenment assumptions are true, then the Bible must be made up, primarily the miracle parts. One reason it can’t be is the Jewish nature of Jesus’ world, something ignored by biblical critics until the 1970s. In this session, we will learn:

• Why it is easier to believe biblical stories are true than to believe they are made up, and that it takes more faith to believe the latter than the former. 

• How this helps Christians effectively challenge skeptics and critics of the Bible and put the burden of proof on them. 

• Why the anti-supernatural bias of the Bible’s critics is arbitrary and causes them to dismiss the textual evidence for the Bible’s veracity. 

• Why Christians can have every confidence the Bible is exactly what it claims to be, trustworthy eyewitness accounts of historical events.