Hey friends, Elisa Childers here. On today's podcast, I'm going to take some time to respond

to some criticism I received in regard to an article I wrote over at the Gospel Coalition

about a month ago. The name of the article was Three Beliefs, Progressive Christians and

Atheists Share. You can take a look at that on the Gospel Coalition site, and I also have

a link to it on my blog. This article was really the result of an observation I began to

make as I studied Progressive Christian Materials. As I read the books and listened to the lectures

and the podcasts, what began to emerge was what I would describe as an ideological connection

between Progressive Christianity and Atheism. For anyone who knows my story, I didn't discover

this in a vacuum. I actually came out of a Progressive Church. In fact, it was within this Progressive

Church that my historic Christian beliefs were challenged intellectually. As I began to search

for more information regarding some of these objections and claims, I discovered apologetics,

because it was the apologists that were interacting with the claims and objections of Atheists,

which I found to be very similar to the ones that came up in this Progressive Church. So I found

their work to be applicable to the journey I was on. The criticism I'm responding to today comes

from Pete Enns, who did a podcast recently analyzing the article I wrote and giving his thoughts

on his podcast called The Bible for Normal People. Pete's professor of Biblical studies at

Eastern University and previously he's taught at Westminster Theological Seminary. If you're not

familiar with his work, he's an influential scholar in the Progressive Christian world. In fact,

in Rachel Hald Evans's latest book, she credits him with inspiring and informing a lot of the

thinking behind her book and her approach to the Bible. So a while back, he wrote a book called

Inspiration and Incarnation, Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. I haven't read that

book for myself, so I wouldn't be able to comment on the content, but it caused quite a stir,

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