From a meta point of view, I often ask people to picture Jesus standing on top of a mountain pointing off into the distance at a taller mountain. Conservatives tend to look at where Jesus is standing, progressives tend to look at where Jesus is pointing.
Jesus represented many things, but one thing he represents to me is a trajectory. When understood in the context of the Israelites as represented in the Old Testament, and other cultures of his time, there were certain things he emphasized and certain things that he moved in a given direction. People aren't always, as a group, ready for everything right away. Jesus made certain reforms, in a line of reforms made in the Old Testament and by some Jewish rabbis like Hillel who didn't made it into the Old Testament but would have been almost certainly read by Jesus, and he took their teachings and expanded on them and progressed towards great understandings. Some recent scholarship indicates that there actually may have been a city populated mostly by non-Jewish Romans as little as two miles from where Jesus lived, so his father almost certainly would have been doing some carpentry work for them, and that culture would have influenced him also- so, not just the Hebrew culture, but the Roman culture, and, actually, probably the Greek culture, because not only did the Greek Empire precede the Roman Empire in a lot of the same areas and influence it that way, the "Romans" in Israel were probably most people who spoke Greek from day to day (Common in the eastern Roman Empire, which would eventually become the Byzantine Empire centuries later) the same way Jewish folks spoke Aramaic instead of Hebrew.
Anyway, I look at Jesus as a critical step in our religious development, but the lesson I take from a lot of what he did is that God continues to speak in every era, and that our religious and ethical sense should be evolving and moving forward rather than stagnating. That was the basis of a lot of the clashes he had with the Jewish leaders of his day, at least as chronicled in the bible. So, rather than simply say that the Pharisees were represented as teaching X and Jesus taught Y and so we're at Y and that's the end of it, I look at Y as where Jesus could reasonably move people to at his time and gain enough acceptance to form the basis of what would be a worldwide religion. In the time between Abraham and Moses, and the time between Moses and Jesus, the People of God advanced a certain amount. We've had another 2,000 years to advance, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the example of Jesus, which is just as important as what he was actually saying. He had a way of viewing things that you can logically unpack and apply to continued ethical progress going forward.
The idea of doctrinal evolution and development is extremely important to my theological worldview. Saint John Cardinal Newman (The British one, not the American- Yes, there are two Saints with that exact name who were both Cardinals), and especially the Second Vatican Council, represent a lot of movement in that direction. That is a big part of why some traditionalists tend to reject the council, even though rejecting the teachings of a council and a Pope is probably the least traditional thing you can do, in a generic sense. Traditionalists are trying to role back the teaching on doctrinal development, and progressive tend to be trying to, well,
develop it forward to encompass an even wider sense of development.
The other thing I'd say that's a part of the worldview of most progressives and liberals who are Catholics is that the idea that all of scripture and tradition must be seen first and foremost through a hermetic of love, inclusion, and social justice (or bringing freedom to the oppressed). The thing to look at is often "What does this teach us about love and inclusion?" and not "What rules is this setting up?".
However, the Catholic part of Liberal Catholic is important in that we do consider the history of the People of God as context and aren't starting from scratch. We're part of a long line of spiritual ancestors. We're not done building and renovating, though. The Kingdom of Heaven is not yet fully visible and present as the world, it's still breaking through the cracks. Jesus may have have been the pivotal moment where the momentum swung our way and victory became certain, but we have to continue on the path he opened, with God's help, to bring the war to a close.
