Not That Kind of Progressive

Living on tiptoe for the resurrection

Baseball is always played with the future in mind. Opening Day is never the end — it’s just the beginning. Every pitch, every at-bat, every game points ahead to October. Even in the dog days of summer, the whole season leans toward something more. Players continue to show up because of where the game is headed. Fans continue to watch because the story isn’t over yet.

That’s the Christian posture. Paul puts it like this: “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13–14). To be a Christian is to be on the move — leaning forward, refusing to settle for the brokenness of the world as it stands today. Every Sunday we confess it in the Creed: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”

But here’s where language trips us up. The word “progressive” is loaded. In our cultural shorthand, it signals a political platform or a church camp. That’s not what I mean. Christians are progressive not because we trust in the inevitability of human progress, but because we belong to a God who refuses to leave the world as it is.