“By it’s very nature, progressive Christianity resists having a systematic theology,” progressivechristianity.org regular Jim Burklo allows, “but Del Brown has written the nearest thing to it.” Two years after Seabury Books released What Does a Progressive Christian Believe?, and a year after Brown’s death, progressivechristianity.org in 2010 posted a piece that the author had penned in which he explained why he’d written the book:
“There will not be an effective progressive Christianity until there is…a compelling progressive Christianity theology. …its absence, I am sure, will guarantee our continued impotence….” He reckoned, “Progressive ideas may be intrinsically credible, but they are actually believed only when they are effectively stated and lived, and embedded in alliances of people who act together with informed intentionality.” In the book itself, he argues that “a theology that can endure must be…deliberate…in its intellectual awareness and articulation.”
Dean and vice-president for academic affairs at California’s Pacific School of Religion until his retirement in 2006, Brown, a United Methodist Church lay theologian, “helped shape an innovative new curriculum for the school’s master of divinity program, and a strategic plan that placed progressive Christianity leadership development at its centre,” the San Francisco Chronicle’s obituary states.
What Does a Progressive Christian Believe? A Guide for the Searching, the Open, and the Curious
By Delwin Brown
Seabury Books, 2008
