Socially Progressive Bible Quotes

Against Nothing (The Sonnet) I am not against consumerism, I am not against corporations. I am not against politics and policy, I am not against politicians. I am not against fame and fortune, I am not against celebrity. I am not against entrepreneurship, I am not against technology. I am not against bureaucrats, I am not against red tape. I am not against bibles and comics, I am not against prayers and faith. I ain't against anything that serves human welfare. The moment they go astray, I'll be their nightmare.

Linear Models The Six Ages of Man: this is Augustine’s model that plots human history from the Biblical Genesis to the Apocalypse. The first five ages comprise the events of the Bible, while the expansive sixth age, which includes the present time, stretches from the first coming of Jesus Christ until the last judgement and gets older and more decayed over time. In this view of history, things will only get worse until the second coming. The progressive vision of history: this is the notion that humans, through reason and knowledge, and their mastery of science and their environment, can harness an unlimited perfectibility—materially, morally, and socially.

Harmony is not a luxury, it is an existential necessity of the species. And to achieve it, if a hundred Bibles have to be sacrificed, then be it. But for no Bible, Quran or Gita, can harmony be compromised.

The merchants of racial despair easily peddle their wares in a marketplace riddled by white panic and fear. Black despair piles up with each body that gets snuffed on video and streamed on social media. We have, in the span of a few years, elected the nation’s first black president and placed in the Oval Office the scariest racial demagogue in a generation. The two may not be unrelated. The remarkable progress we seemed to make with the former has brought out the peril of the latter. What, then, can we do? We must return to the moral and spiritual foundations of our country and grapple with the consequences of our original sin. To do that we need not share the same religion, worship the same God, or, truly, even be believers at all. For better and worse, our national moral landscape has been shaped by the dynamics of a Christianity that has from the start been deeply intertwined with religious mythology and cultural symbolism. The Founding Fathers did not for the most part believe what evangelical Christians believe now. Most believers today certainly do not share Thomas Jefferson’s view of the Bible. In his redacted version of the New Testament, Jefferson purged the miracles, Jesus’ divinity, and the Resurrection. But all of us, from agreeable agnostics to fire-and-brimstone Protestants, from devout Catholics to observant Jews, from devoted Muslims to those who claim no god at all, share a language of moral repair.

I don't remember what class I was in with this girl, but she was just going on and on about raised minimum wage and socialized medicine and the entire time I was just wondering where in the Bible Jesus said to go to your neighbor at gunpoint to take his wages and to give it to someone else. I call it the "Gospel of Violent Jesus" . because this is the Jesus Christ radicalized by both radical conservatives and progressives, in which everything Jesus said is used to justify state sponsored violence and coercion, This govermment tied gospel is used to advocate for socialized medicine, like what Republican John Kasich tried to pull when he labeled himself a "compassionate conservative" and said Medicaid expansion was biblical. The progressive left is hateful towards Christians but yells and screams and brings up the Bible selectively to advocate for open borders and socialized everything.

Page 429: The identifying characteristics of Marxist biology are numerous. Salient among these is the rejection of Malthusian doctrine. As Margaret Sanger admitted, "A remarkable feature of Marxian propaganda has been the almost complete unanimity with which the implications of the Malthusian doctrines have been derided, denounced, and repudiated. Any defense of the so-called 'Law of Population' was enough to stamp one, in the eyes of the orthodox Marxians, as a 'tool of the capitalistic class,' seeking to dampen the ardor of those who expressed the belief that men might create a better world for themselves. Malthus, they claimed, was actuated by selfish motives. He was not merely a hidebound aristocrat, but a pessimist who was trying to kill all hope of human progress. By Marx, Engels, Bebel, Kautsky and the celebrated leaders and interpreters of Marx's great 'Bible of the Working Class' ... birth control has been looked upon as a subtle Machiavelian sophistry created for the purpose of placing the blame for human misery elsewhere than at the door of the capitalistic class. Upon this point the orthodox Marxian mind has been universally and sternly uncompromising.

Additionally, a “progressive Christian is one who draws upon a variety of rich sources (Christian teachings and tradition, science, experience, social sciences, philosophy, and teachings from other wisdom traditions) to better understand society’s problems so that we can work in collaboration with others to help our society, our world, and the church to move toward God’s vision of a new earth.” (Peters, p. xiv)

Scientific, political, and social progress all threaten religion, which is why the bible demands blind obedience...first to its god, and then to the state. God, even as only an idea, is a millstone around the neck of society, not an engine of progress.

Numerous other examples could be given of the Christian church across two millennia progressively realizing and working out the meaning and implications of the once-delivered gospel in ways that were not explicitly elaborated in the New Testament. These might include, for example, the centrality of mutual personal love in marriage relationships, the full humanity and dignity of women, and the inestimable worth of every human person culminating in the modern notion of universal human rights. All of these were revolutionary insights, viewed historically, that were prompted not primarily by natural human reason but by the power of the gospel working its way out over time in social life and relations.[280]

If we as progressives are going to reject violence and instead focus on mercy and social justice, then we need to have a developed hermeneutical rationale for our reading which can stand its ground against a conservative reading that seeks to legitimize violence in God’s name. What we need is an approach that can honestly face and confront violence in the Bible, and do so from the perspective of faith, and as the necessary outgrowth of a developed moral conscience.

Ps 72 Woven together throughout Ps 72 are the themes of justice, peace and domestic prosperity. In the prologue to the Code of Hammurapi, and especially in the epilogue, the king boasts that his just rule also brings peace and prosperity to the cities of his realm. Immediately following the prayer for justice in “Ashurbanipal’s Coronation Hymn,” the priest asks that the king’s dominion might also be characterized by prosperity (abundance of grain; cf. v. 16) and “peace” (Assyrian salimu is akin to the Hebrew salom in v. 3 [NIV “prosperity”]). Injustice resulted in social chaos (see note on 94:20). In Egyptian thought, the execution of justice by the king expels chaos from creation, bringing harmony and order to the land. Thus, in both Mesopotamia and Egypt, people set their hope on the king for justice and prosperity. In Egypt, this revolved around a pharaoh who participated in the company of the gods and mediated divine blessing to humanity, but this hope never focused beyond the currently living king, except very late in Egyptian history (c. 300 BC), when expectations arose among some that a king would arise to restore the former glory of Egypt. Similarly, Mesopotamians did not conceive of a future king who would usher in an ideal age. People considered only their contemporary king as the agent of the gods who ideally maintained a prosperous social order. In contrast, in the OT one finds a progressively developing theme of hope for a future, worldwide kingdom ruled by a Davidic king on behalf of Yahweh. 72:4 defend the afflicted. Care for the weak members of society is the practical test of a just and good government throughout the ancient Near East, as claimed by Hammurapi (see note on Ps 72; see also the article “Coronation Hymns in the Ancient Near East”). In the Ugaritic Kirta epic, King Kirta is rebuked for failure to “pursue the widow’s case,” “take up the wretched’s claim,” “expel the poor’s oppressor” and “feed the orphan.” In the Egyptian “Teaching for Merikare,” the king is exhorted, “Do justice, then you endure on earth; / Calm the weeper, don’t oppress the widow.