An unspoken part of the "progressive" argument is to privilege the words of Jesus himself over both more ancient revelations as well as later interpreters.
I understand that Christian doctrine highly discourages that. But From an outsider perspective it seems kind of sensible.
I don't know that Christian doctrine discourages that. The idea that God's revelation of Himself is "progressive" through history, culminating in Jesus who is THE Revelation of God is, last I checked, considered normative.
Though this can come down to the theological tradition/denomination of Christianity one is part of; as a Lutheran I would subscribe to the words of Dr. Luther when he says, "We believe the Scriptures for Christ's sake, we do not believe in Christ for the Scripture's sake". That is to say, the meaning and purpose of the Bible is Jesus, the point isn't the Bible for the Bible itself; but because the Bible is ultimately about Jesus and points us to Jesus. Or, going back to St. Augustine, "the Scriptures contain but a single Utterance", the single Utterance of Scripture being Jesus.
The historic Christian doctrinal claim is that Jesus is, Himself, the Divine Word of God. To dig fully into what that means would involve getting into layers of Greek and Jewish philosophical concepts as well as digging into the doctrine of the Trinity; but just on an immediate surface level meaning, to call Jesus the Divine Word made flesh, the Incarnate Logos as we would say, means that Jesus is God's way of making plain Himself.
So when we read Jesus saying things like, "If you have known Me you have known the Father" or where John the Evangelist writes, "No one has every seen God, but the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, has made Him known" or where the author of Hebrews writes, "At many times and in diverse ways God has spoken to our fathers through the prophets, but in these last days has spoken to us through His Son ... who is the radiance of His glory and the exact imprint of His Person" or where St. Paul says, "He is the visible image of the invisible God" it's all pointing to the fact that in Jesus we encounter God in the the clearest way possible. Jesus is how God tells us about Himself, and shows us Himself. To encounter to Jesus is to encounter God (not just in the sense that Jesus is, Himself, God by nature, which is true; but because Jesus as the Son shows us, reveals, and presents unambiguously, who His Father is). What is God like? Well God is like Jesus.
So taking these two things together: The point of the Bible is Jesus, and Jesus is the locus of Divine Revelation, God's own Self-Disclosure; then that means we don't get a full disclosure of God outside of and apart from Jesus--so if I read the Bible sans Christ, I am not going to get a clear image of God. I can only encounter who God really is in Scripture if I understand and read Scripture through a Christocentric lens--reading the Bible through Jesus.
This also means that it is not difficult nor controversial to say that God as He grants people encounter with Himself meets them not in fullness, but in part. Jesus, for example, says that Moses permitted divorce because of the hardness of the human heart--but that this isn't how it was supposed to be from the beginning. That is to say, there is a limited encounter or limited amount of revelation; at least in some sense. God encounters people in the context of their time and culture. Israelite religion looks Near-Eastern not because Near-Eastern culture is superior or itself of Divine origin; but because that is the culture of Israel's historic context at nexus of Egypt, Canaan, and Mesopotamia--and God gives Himself within the context of that culture.
Circumcision, for example, was not a unique invention of the Israelites, there was an already established precedent in some of the cultures of the ancient near east--but in the story of Abraham and in the giving of the Torah, in the establishment of Covenant, circumcision means something specific; it becomes a sign of Covenant, a remembrance of God's promise to Abraham, it cements an identity based on Divine promises. For Christians, we see those covenant promises, God's covenant faithfulness, fulfilled in Jesus; St. Paul sees circumcision as a shadow pointing to the solid reality of Jesus, in which what matters is not foreskin but a transformation of the heart wrought by grace, and the Christian Sacrament of Baptism conveys a crystallization of the encounter with grace--whereby one is made new in Christ, with a new heart, a new conscience, the birth of becoming a new kind of person that is no longer under the bondage of slavery through Adam, but freedom in the Messiah, who has become the New Adam. For Paul this means "circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing"--the foreskin doesn't matter; and even more importantly--whether one is Jewish or one is Gentile isn't what matters, what matters is faith in the Messiah, the transformation that happens by the power of God through Jesus, in which we are becoming partakers of the new creation, for Christ was risen as first-fruits of the resurrection, and when He returns there will be resurrection, and the longing of all creation for renewal and freedom from the futility of death shall come to pass--that's new creation. Early Christian theologians, from the beginning, spoke of the day Jesus rose from the dead as an "8th day of creation" and highlighted the fact that the Torah commands male babies be circumcised on the 8th day as pointing to this--what does an "8th day of creation" mean? That going back to Genesis chapter 1 the story of creation unfolds in 6 days, with the 7th day a day of Divine rest--an 8th day of creation means new creation. If, in Eden we see creation sold over to slavery and futility through Adam and Eve's mishandling of their responsibility to care, steward, and be faithful rulers of God's good creation--then in Jesus there is a reversal of Adam's disobedient act, a healing and fix to the Fall, and ultimately the making-new of all creation. Through Jesus we, even today and right now, are called to become partakers of that new creation through faith, by grace, as we are being conformed to the image of Jesus, looking forward to the Day when God sets all things to rights; that through our forgiveness and call to follow Jesus we are supposed to be agents of transformative love and representatives of God's kingdom, and living lives that are infused with the hope of renewal and resurrection. To live a godly life is not that I might secure my spot in a good afterlife apart from earth; but because it reflects the hope of renewal, the cessation of death, the setting-to-rights of all things by God in a life of hopeful anticipation and confidence that Jesus has overcome death and the wicked powers and principalities are already defeated--I can therefore go and live my neighbor because that is my full human purpose as an Image-bearing creation of God, reflecting the new reality in Jesus, because God desires the full flourishing of His creation, not just of human beings, but the whole of creation ("Be fruitful and multiply").
And none of what I'm saying here is controversial, this is all of it pretty basic historic Christian dogma.
-CryptoLutheran
