Hey friends, Elisa Childers here. Do progressive Christians have doctrinal alignment on certain issues? What unites them? Today my guests and I are going to talk about the 10 commandments of progressive Christianity. Stay tuned!

My guest today is Dr. Michael Krueger, president and Samuel C. Patterson, professor of New Testament and early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary there at the Charlotte campus. He's the past president of the Evangelical Theological Society. And it's a real honor to have him on the show today because his areas of research are so relevant to the work that I'm trying to do in identifying historic Christianity and also his work played a big role

in answering a lot of the doubts I had when I was in a crisis of faith. So he specializes in the development of the New Testament canon, which this is a question I get so commonly through the website is how do we know that the books of the New Testament we have are the right ones? How did we get those books? And so if that's your question, definitely check out Dr. Krueger's work on that topic. He also specializes in the gospels in Christian origins, development of early Christianity particularly in the second century.

And again, he's just written a great book on that. I read it a few months ago. It's phenomenal. He researches the apocryphal gospels and the transmission of the Jesus tradition. And so in addition to writing several books on these topics, he blogs regularly at Michaelj Krueger.com. But his latest book is called The 10 Commandments of Progressive Christianity, which is out now. So Dr. Krueger, thanks so much for being on the podcast today.

Absolutely. Happy to be with you and look forward to our conversation.

Well, I especially appreciate the work you've done with answering progressive Christianity because before I had even heard that phrase before I even knew that it was a thing, your books on the canon and on early Christianity in particular played a huge role in the reconstruction of my faith after I'd gone through a time of pretty profound doubt and even deconstruction, although I didn't know that it was called the book of the New Testament.

So that it was called that at the time. And so, yeah, and so the context that that all happened in was a church that would later go on to identify itself as a progressive Christian community. And so I watched so many of my friends go down this path and essentially de convert from historic Christianity.

So a couple of years ago, you wrote an article that got quite a bit of traction and it was called Gen Hat Maker and the power of de conversion stories. It was a powerful article that I think really helped connect the dots for a lot of people.

It really hit home for me. I think people, other people who are watching their friends go down this path and kind of getting swept up in this movement, it gave them language, it gave them points to look at and say, oh, this is what's happening.

So in a moment, we're going to go through your new book. We're going to talk about the Ten Commandments of Progressive Christianity, but to lay the foundation for that, I'd like to talk about this article.

I'm going to read a quote from it because this is so powerful. You said this. It's also due to the fact that many of those who de convert have realized a newfound calling to share their testimony with as many people as possible, rather than just quietly leaving their old beliefs and moving on to new ones, something that would have been more common in prior generations.

The new guard seems to have made it their life's ambition to evangelize the found. That is such a profound point. This is a very evangelistic movement. They're not just satisfied to de convert themselves. They really want to get converts from the evangelical church into their new way of thinking, which really isn't so new as you point out in your book and in your articles.

In the article, you identify a playbook and essentially that's the playbook of how to de convert. So I'd love to talk a little bit about the article. First of all, you sort of centered it around Jen Hatmaker and her shift on same sex marriage and same sex relationships.

So what was it about that that sort of just got you in the place where you're like, I need to write about this.

Yeah, well, I think as the quote indicated there, Jen Hatmaker is just one of many people that have sort of followed this path.

And I've been observing this happening over the last months and even years in our culture.

And there really is, I think, a shift that's taken place. And the shift is not, by the way, people de converting. That's always been true in history of Christianity.

There's people that you think are Christians, that they may think they're Christians and they leave the faith either entirely or for another version of it.

And that's a little bit of what's happening here. But that's not what's new. What's new is the newfound opportunity in our modern world to reach out to as many people as possible with your de conversion story. And that's that's unprecedented.

I think there's a couple of reasons it's changing. What is technology? I mean, obviously now you can have your own blog and tell your own story and reach your own masses. However you want to do it in prior generations that just wasn't available.

But the other thing is a newfound confidence. This is the thing I think that's most interesting is that now, you know, years gone by someone would be convert.

They feel maybe a little sheepish about it and just kind of want to move on with their lives and wouldn't really make a big fuss.

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