The final chapter of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Chapter 8 (Democrat Evangelicals)
Chapter 9 (A Form of Intellectualism)
Chapter 10 (The Presuppositionalists)
Finally, chapter 11: "The Paradox of the Evangelical Imagination"
1. The lead off of this chapter is a now famous question by Mark Noll in his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: could it be that "it is simply impossible to be, with integrity, both an evangelical and an intellectual" (241). Noll wrote that in 1994. He has since converted to Roman Catholicism and moved from Wheaton to Notre Dame.
I wondered if there was a little more opinion in this chapter than the others. But here is the basic point of the chapter and perhaps the book: "The problem with evangelical life is not that its participants obey authority. All rational thought requires the rule of some kind of law based on irreducible assumptions. The problem is that evangelicals attempt to obey multiple authorities at the same time. They demand that presuppositions trump evidence while counting the right kind of evidence as universal fact" (258).
This critique is similar to my critique of Ken Ham. He tries to look like he is using an evidentiary approach but he only uses it until the evidence seems to point away from the desired direction (to be fair, he makes the shift most when shifting from "observational science" to what he calls "historical science." Then he invokes his presuppositions to channel the evidence in a different direction).
So if it looks like stars are millions of light years away, we can simply assume God created the light in mid-stream because of our presuppositions. When our presuppositions are in danger, we find a "possible solution" relating to evidence and thus avoid the more "probable solution." We are still talking evidence but we look for a more complex and less likely interpretation that will fit with our assumptions.
There is a spectrum to this dilemma. At what point should presuppositions be brought in to trump the apparent trajectory of evidence, if ever? We inevitably operate with certain "irreducible assumptions," but are they huge systems or more atomic in nature?
2. Worthen mentions the founding of what came to be called the CCCU in 1971. This coalition of Christian colleges and universities met even a couple weeks ago, I believe. It has made it possible for grants and exchanges to take place. It helped Christian colleges become more than they could have become on their own.
3. The chapter mentioned the bromance that has occasionally happened between evangelicals and Catholics. For example, Notre Dame has hired a string of famous evangelicals over the last few decades: George Marsden (historian), Alvin Plantinga (philosopher), John Howard Yoder (ethicist), Stanley Hauerwas (ethicist), Mark Noll (historian), Christian Smith (sociologist). Chuck Colson and Richard John Neuhaus founded Evangelicals and Catholics Together.
The Catholic idea of "natural law" has provided a way for Christians to argue for various things in the public sphere without explicit religious language. The notion is that there are certain features of the world that argue for certain legislation and that all humans can see these laws without having to reference special revelation or Scripture.
4. I didn't like the way a section on thriving anti-intellectualism threw in together Richard Mouw and Ken Ham. Mouw is worlds away from Ham, IMO. This section also mentioned David Barton, who is very popular in some circles but considered an incompetent historian by most historians. Harper Collins pulled his book on Thomas Jefferson almost as soon as it was published because of its historical problems.
5. Worthen also mentions left-leaning evangelicals in this chapter, the "emergent church" in particular. She depicts the "new monasticism" of a Shane Claiborne as picking a few features of the Middle Ages and laying them over a still very modern mindset. "Without quite realizing what they have done, evangelicals often use these ancient teachings and practices to confirm, rather than challenge, their own assumptions" (254).
She especially has Western individualism in view. "Worship is more of a therapeutic means to personal fulfillment than submission to a higher authority" (256).
6. The last section of the book speaks of the "evangelical imagination," something deeper than ideas, something that involves underlying drives and impulses. She especially engages James Davison Hunter in this section. To him, evangelicals exaggerate the importance of ideas and worldviews. To him, evangelicals take history and "warp it into self-serving myth" (260).
"The anti-intellectual inclinations in evangelical culture stem not from wholehearted and confident obedience to scripture... but from deep disagreements over what the Bible means, a sincere desire to uphold the standards of modern reason alongside God's word--and the defensive reflexes that outsiders' skepticism provokes" (261).
Here is as close to a conclusion as we get: "If we continue to use the word evangelical at all, and we will--we must allow room for diversity and internal contradiction, for those who love the label and those who hate it. We must recognize that American evangelicalism owes more to its fractures and clashes, its anxieties and doubts, than to any political pronouncement or point of doctrine" (264).
7. Take-away
I have personally hated the word evangelical because I have come to associate it with the neo-evangelicalism of the 1940s and the fundamentalism of the Moral Majority. This book has helped me, in the words of Donald Dayton, "re-discover an evangelical heritage." The publisher changed his title to, "discovering," but the title he wanted was "re-discovering."
That is to say, the word evangelical was revivalist before it was co-opted to primarily be what it is today. The book has helped me be able to use that word of my faith community without exactly equating it to the mainstream evangelical establishment that has evolved over the last 50 years. The book, no doubt annoyingly to those who think they speak for evangelicalism, makes it clear that we are a bigger group--and more diverse--than at first appears.
Showing posts with label Molly Worthen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Molly Worthen. Show all posts
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Worthen: Presuppositionalists and the End Times (10)
It neareth the end: Chapter 10 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Chapter 8 (Democrat Evangelicals)
Chapter 9 (A Form of Intellectualism)
And now, chapter 10, "God's Idea Men."
The final sentences of this chapter are worthy to start with: "Schaeffer, Falwell, and other self-appointed spokesmen of the Christian Right appeared, to casual observers, to reflect some kind of consensus. One must not underestimate the power in this illusion of solidarity--but one should not take it for reality either" (240).
1. This statement comes at the end of a section called "history is written by the victors," which tells the story of the conservative take-over of the Southern Baptist Convention. Prior to the 80s and 90s, the Baptists tended to be Arminians, were largely opposed to any kind of credal statement, and put a strong emphasis on "soul competency," the idea that each individual is only accountable before God.
But by the end of the century, the Southern Baptists were controlled by 5 point Reformed Calvinists and had added credal requirements like inerrancy to their core statements. Clear roles for men and women were added to their statements to prevent women in ministry. When I was at Asbury in the late 80s, there were still ordinations of women even in Kentucky, before Al Mohler's notorious purge of the faculty at Louisville Southern Baptist Seminary.
There is an important point here. It can feel like the Bible has an obvious meaning and that all contemporary evangelicals see it. This sets up evangelicalism to be the true elect, those who are truly following the Bible. What isn't remembered is that there was a thirty year political struggle through which a particular ideology consolidated its power. The current "clarity" of Scripture within contemporary evangelicalism is an example of history told by the winners.
2. The chapter begins with the influence of "Reformed presuppositionalism," such as that espoused by Schaeffer, on the American church. Schaeffer wrote, "People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize" (221). His mistake is that he is talking about large ideological systems. He is right that people have underlying values that they live by, but to equate them with overarching philosophical systems is to skew the discussion.
And people are inconsistent. We operate by different paradigms depending on what the area of life is. More primary are our drives and urges, not our thoughts--which often are rationalizations that aim to justify what we want to do. And to the extent to which we might operate by presuppositions, they tend to be micro-presuppositions rather than grand recits.
But we have the "high end" presuppositionalists of Alvin Plantinga and Nicolas Wolterstorff. They argued that belief in God is "properly basic." That is to say, belief in God is something that does not need proof but can be assumed like an axiom of geometry.
They could be right although obviously it is obviously a matter of dispute. I have not read Plantinga's tome where he sets this out (Warranted Christian Belief), but I suspect his claim connects with the ontological argument in some way. If it is impossible to conceive of existence itself without a necessary Being, then the existence of God might be considered properly basic.
I suspect this sort of presuppositionalism is compatible with Wesleyanism, although I consider it a foreign body within our theology. I believe pragmatism is more at home within Wesley-Arminianism, and I hope there will always be room for the more natural breed. By contrast, a whole army of IWU students was indoctrinated in presuppositionalism by one of IWU's best known twentieth century professors.
Rushdoony is another presuppositionist, so radical in his thinking that he wanted to bring back stoning disobedient children. He influenced conservative American thinking with a stark capitalist ideology that he fused with biblical interpretation, sanctifying a particular economic approach as the Christian approach.
John Whitcomb and Henry Morris gave rise to the creationist movement. It's easy to forget some of the diversity that used to exist on evolution in earlier times. They effectively squashed options like the "gap theory" and gave form to the current assumed consensus within fundamentalism. Again, we live at a time when the positions of fundamentalism seem obvious and seem a straightforward reading of the Bible to many, but this consensus was won over a half-century of American religious politics.
3. The final element in this chapter to mention are the envoys of the end times, Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. "Like Schaeffer's offhand references to Locke and Jung, Late Great Planet Earth made the reader feel smart, in the know, and personally involved in history's climax" (229). It is worthwhile noting how often the revealed antichrist has changed over the years. Lindsey was sure that the USSR was going to attack Israel and that the European Common Market reflected the ten horns of Daniel. Who is the antichrist of the day now? It seems to change with the decade.
One more chapter...
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Chapter 8 (Democrat Evangelicals)
Chapter 9 (A Form of Intellectualism)
And now, chapter 10, "God's Idea Men."
The final sentences of this chapter are worthy to start with: "Schaeffer, Falwell, and other self-appointed spokesmen of the Christian Right appeared, to casual observers, to reflect some kind of consensus. One must not underestimate the power in this illusion of solidarity--but one should not take it for reality either" (240).
1. This statement comes at the end of a section called "history is written by the victors," which tells the story of the conservative take-over of the Southern Baptist Convention. Prior to the 80s and 90s, the Baptists tended to be Arminians, were largely opposed to any kind of credal statement, and put a strong emphasis on "soul competency," the idea that each individual is only accountable before God.
But by the end of the century, the Southern Baptists were controlled by 5 point Reformed Calvinists and had added credal requirements like inerrancy to their core statements. Clear roles for men and women were added to their statements to prevent women in ministry. When I was at Asbury in the late 80s, there were still ordinations of women even in Kentucky, before Al Mohler's notorious purge of the faculty at Louisville Southern Baptist Seminary.
There is an important point here. It can feel like the Bible has an obvious meaning and that all contemporary evangelicals see it. This sets up evangelicalism to be the true elect, those who are truly following the Bible. What isn't remembered is that there was a thirty year political struggle through which a particular ideology consolidated its power. The current "clarity" of Scripture within contemporary evangelicalism is an example of history told by the winners.
2. The chapter begins with the influence of "Reformed presuppositionalism," such as that espoused by Schaeffer, on the American church. Schaeffer wrote, "People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize" (221). His mistake is that he is talking about large ideological systems. He is right that people have underlying values that they live by, but to equate them with overarching philosophical systems is to skew the discussion.
And people are inconsistent. We operate by different paradigms depending on what the area of life is. More primary are our drives and urges, not our thoughts--which often are rationalizations that aim to justify what we want to do. And to the extent to which we might operate by presuppositions, they tend to be micro-presuppositions rather than grand recits.
But we have the "high end" presuppositionalists of Alvin Plantinga and Nicolas Wolterstorff. They argued that belief in God is "properly basic." That is to say, belief in God is something that does not need proof but can be assumed like an axiom of geometry.
They could be right although obviously it is obviously a matter of dispute. I have not read Plantinga's tome where he sets this out (Warranted Christian Belief), but I suspect his claim connects with the ontological argument in some way. If it is impossible to conceive of existence itself without a necessary Being, then the existence of God might be considered properly basic.
I suspect this sort of presuppositionalism is compatible with Wesleyanism, although I consider it a foreign body within our theology. I believe pragmatism is more at home within Wesley-Arminianism, and I hope there will always be room for the more natural breed. By contrast, a whole army of IWU students was indoctrinated in presuppositionalism by one of IWU's best known twentieth century professors.
Rushdoony is another presuppositionist, so radical in his thinking that he wanted to bring back stoning disobedient children. He influenced conservative American thinking with a stark capitalist ideology that he fused with biblical interpretation, sanctifying a particular economic approach as the Christian approach.
John Whitcomb and Henry Morris gave rise to the creationist movement. It's easy to forget some of the diversity that used to exist on evolution in earlier times. They effectively squashed options like the "gap theory" and gave form to the current assumed consensus within fundamentalism. Again, we live at a time when the positions of fundamentalism seem obvious and seem a straightforward reading of the Bible to many, but this consensus was won over a half-century of American religious politics.
3. The final element in this chapter to mention are the envoys of the end times, Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. "Like Schaeffer's offhand references to Locke and Jung, Late Great Planet Earth made the reader feel smart, in the know, and personally involved in history's climax" (229). It is worthwhile noting how often the revealed antichrist has changed over the years. Lindsey was sure that the USSR was going to attack Israel and that the European Common Market reflected the ten horns of Daniel. Who is the antichrist of the day now? It seems to change with the decade.
One more chapter...
Sunday, February 09, 2014
Worthen: A Form of Intellectualism... (9)
Chapter 8 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Chapter 8 (Democrat Evangelicals)
And now, chapter 9, "Evangelicals' Great Matter." I lament that this book has taken so much of my time. I would rather be reading something else. But I believe it is important for someone with my particular skill set to be engaging the whims of religious culture. I view my engagement with these sorts of issues a ministry to evangelicalism and to my own faith community.
Those who control the story, control the future. Most people aren't interested in nuance--slogans and simple narratives win the day. Scholars, who usually deal in nuance and are often boring communicators, are thus easily and often lynched by the masses. I feel like someone needs to be carefully wading in these historical waters and offering simple but accurate counter-narratives.
1. Two names basically sum up this chapter. The first is Harold Lindsell, known for his incendiary 1976 book, The Battle for the Bible. His slogan? Inerrancy.
Simple. An easy idea to rally around. How could a scholar compete, full of nuance and knowledge of ancient genres unfamiliar to the person in the pew or the wealthy donor? Even to make a counter-argument sounds like you are against the Bible. As one Southern Baptist leader at the time put it, "it is no easy matter to bridge the gap between the scholarly historical approach and the views of the Bible which some people hold" (199).
Lindsell would have his revenge on Fuller, where he left in protest in 1962. He would paint a picture in his book of them as liberals abandoning Scripture--a narrative I heard from someone even last week. Here is Fuller's evil statement on the Bible: "All the books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, are the written word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice"
Lindsell wanted more and was instrumental in getting the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy written in 1978. Such a tool would help fight off trends like women in ministry and the way the church growth movement was contextualizing the gospel in new contexts. It would stem the tide of the charismatic movement with its emphasis on the Spirit speaking through Scripture.
"To argue that [his] inerrantist position represented the original view of the early Church Fathers and Protestant Reformers, Lindsell began with a string of quotations plucked from church history and shorn of context" (201). The meaning of words is not merely in quoting them (locution). It is in knowing what they meant within the context where they were spoken (illocution). Lindsell quoted the words, but gave them subtly different meanings, because he had quite different assumptions from a different time and place.
Yes, Christians have never thought of the Bible as having errors. But what is an error? And what meaning to the Bible were they saying did not have error?" Even the Reformers were not reading the text as a science or history book but as a book about faith and practice. Even Lindsell's old roommate and friend, Carl Henry, lamented that Lindsell had "shifted the public perception of the evangelical movement from its role as a dynamic life-growing force to a cult squabbling over inerrancy" (202).
Worse, he basically set conservative Christians on a warpath to devour each other, which made no one more godly, did great harm to the church internally, and turned lost souls off to Christ.
2. The second name in this chapter is Francis Schaeffer. Mark Noll, then the darling evangelical historian of Wheaton, had this to say about Francis Schaeffer to Newsweek: "the danger is that people will take [Schaeffer] for a scholar, which he is not. Evangelical historians are especially bothered by his simplified myth of America's Christian past" (218).
Worthen sums up his historiography in this way: "Schaeffer wowed audiences by explaining 500 years of intellectual history in a paragraph and a casual chalkboard diagram--but he did so with exaggeration, oversimplifications, and misinformation that would make a specialist cry" (216).
What was this grand narrative? It was one of decline. It was Schaeffer that made abortion the climax of a Western decline that he said started with Thomas Aquinas in the 1100s. Interestingly, it was Schaeffer who made abortion the centerpiece of conservative American Christian politics, to where even today many Christians can't even imagine a Christian voting for a Democratic candidate.
His book, How Should We Then Live?, was more than influential in ideas. It was a multi-media presentation. Evangelicals would now begin to enter the entertainment world to try to influence the popular imagination. He would revive the slogan, "Ideas have consequences" (from a 1948 book that instead looked to William of Ockham instead of Aquinas as the beginning of the end).
Schaeffer created a battle for civilization based in ideas. After all, Schaeffer had dabbled in the fundamentalist Calvinist world of Kuyper and Van Til. So it is predictable that he would see a decline of ideas at the root of civilization's decline, starting with the ridiculous notion that Aquinas stood at the fountainhead.
True decline, from a biblical standpoint, has to do with submission to God and love of our neighbor. Has love of neighbor declined in our world? I seriously doubt it. There was as much hatred and prejudice in the Middle Ages down to the civil rights era as ever. In fact, if anything, the Western world is more loving than ever toward the other.
Submission to God appears to be in decline, especially if you filter it through a question of what people believe. But are less people truly in submission to God than before? In truth, people who call themselves Christians have always used the name of God, even the Bible as a cover to do hateful things opposed to God! Were the fundamentalists pastors who rallied with the KKK more in submission to God than Bill Nye the science guy, even though he is an atheist?
I don't want to push too hard on Schaeffer's ideas here. I think he even influenced some of my early thinking on the last 500 years, at least indirectly. I believe that Schaeffer was a wonderful man and I wish I could have met him. I believe L'Abri must have been a wonderful place for people to find Christ. I think I would have enjoyed the warmth of this man, who believed in taking care of God's creation and helping those in need.
I have only pushed back because, as you know, ideas have consequences.
3. I also push back because these forces so easily capture popular imagination, so much so that my own tradition is infected. I didn't think much of it at the time, but what business did Wesleyans have going to Bill Gothard's seminars in the 70s, when his sentiments are vastly different from those of historical Wesleyanism?
In 1978, Nazarene scholar Mildred Wynkoop summed up my feelings well: young Nazarenes "are being drawn in to the many 'cultish' movements in our religious world, today... These include groups with a very strong Calvinist ground, often camouflaged by social activity or flashy philosophy... A one-man (or woman) operation... 'Un-Christianizes' all those who question or reject some theory of Scripture... Claiming to be a Shepherd over others (only Christ is Shepherd) rather than Servanthood, as Jesus and Paul indicated" (209).
Finally, this chapter covered the switch to the NIV that took place in the 70s. Interestingly, it was facilitated in reaction to The Living Bible. Next to the KJV, the NIV looked like a liberal force. But next to the Living Bible, it seemed conservative.
The bottom line of the NIV debate is that many people can't tell the difference between what is a matter of faith and what is a matter of tradition. A person's faith inevitably gets formed around whatever form of faith they grow up with. Accordingly, when a person says something about there not just being three wise men, they take that as an attack on faith rather than as a refining of faith.
So it was with the NIV. If you grew up with the ending of Mark, it seemed like an attack on faith to suggest it wasn't original. In reality, it was just a refining of the form of faith. Ironically, when the TNIV and then NIV2011 came out, those who had formed their faith around the old NIV made the same KJV complaints again and came up with the ESV.
Hear the conclusion of the matter: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again!
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Chapter 8 (Democrat Evangelicals)
And now, chapter 9, "Evangelicals' Great Matter." I lament that this book has taken so much of my time. I would rather be reading something else. But I believe it is important for someone with my particular skill set to be engaging the whims of religious culture. I view my engagement with these sorts of issues a ministry to evangelicalism and to my own faith community.
Those who control the story, control the future. Most people aren't interested in nuance--slogans and simple narratives win the day. Scholars, who usually deal in nuance and are often boring communicators, are thus easily and often lynched by the masses. I feel like someone needs to be carefully wading in these historical waters and offering simple but accurate counter-narratives.
1. Two names basically sum up this chapter. The first is Harold Lindsell, known for his incendiary 1976 book, The Battle for the Bible. His slogan? Inerrancy.
Simple. An easy idea to rally around. How could a scholar compete, full of nuance and knowledge of ancient genres unfamiliar to the person in the pew or the wealthy donor? Even to make a counter-argument sounds like you are against the Bible. As one Southern Baptist leader at the time put it, "it is no easy matter to bridge the gap between the scholarly historical approach and the views of the Bible which some people hold" (199).
Lindsell would have his revenge on Fuller, where he left in protest in 1962. He would paint a picture in his book of them as liberals abandoning Scripture--a narrative I heard from someone even last week. Here is Fuller's evil statement on the Bible: "All the books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, are the written word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice"
Lindsell wanted more and was instrumental in getting the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy written in 1978. Such a tool would help fight off trends like women in ministry and the way the church growth movement was contextualizing the gospel in new contexts. It would stem the tide of the charismatic movement with its emphasis on the Spirit speaking through Scripture.
"To argue that [his] inerrantist position represented the original view of the early Church Fathers and Protestant Reformers, Lindsell began with a string of quotations plucked from church history and shorn of context" (201). The meaning of words is not merely in quoting them (locution). It is in knowing what they meant within the context where they were spoken (illocution). Lindsell quoted the words, but gave them subtly different meanings, because he had quite different assumptions from a different time and place.
Yes, Christians have never thought of the Bible as having errors. But what is an error? And what meaning to the Bible were they saying did not have error?" Even the Reformers were not reading the text as a science or history book but as a book about faith and practice. Even Lindsell's old roommate and friend, Carl Henry, lamented that Lindsell had "shifted the public perception of the evangelical movement from its role as a dynamic life-growing force to a cult squabbling over inerrancy" (202).
Worse, he basically set conservative Christians on a warpath to devour each other, which made no one more godly, did great harm to the church internally, and turned lost souls off to Christ.
2. The second name in this chapter is Francis Schaeffer. Mark Noll, then the darling evangelical historian of Wheaton, had this to say about Francis Schaeffer to Newsweek: "the danger is that people will take [Schaeffer] for a scholar, which he is not. Evangelical historians are especially bothered by his simplified myth of America's Christian past" (218).
Worthen sums up his historiography in this way: "Schaeffer wowed audiences by explaining 500 years of intellectual history in a paragraph and a casual chalkboard diagram--but he did so with exaggeration, oversimplifications, and misinformation that would make a specialist cry" (216).
What was this grand narrative? It was one of decline. It was Schaeffer that made abortion the climax of a Western decline that he said started with Thomas Aquinas in the 1100s. Interestingly, it was Schaeffer who made abortion the centerpiece of conservative American Christian politics, to where even today many Christians can't even imagine a Christian voting for a Democratic candidate.
His book, How Should We Then Live?, was more than influential in ideas. It was a multi-media presentation. Evangelicals would now begin to enter the entertainment world to try to influence the popular imagination. He would revive the slogan, "Ideas have consequences" (from a 1948 book that instead looked to William of Ockham instead of Aquinas as the beginning of the end).
Schaeffer created a battle for civilization based in ideas. After all, Schaeffer had dabbled in the fundamentalist Calvinist world of Kuyper and Van Til. So it is predictable that he would see a decline of ideas at the root of civilization's decline, starting with the ridiculous notion that Aquinas stood at the fountainhead.
True decline, from a biblical standpoint, has to do with submission to God and love of our neighbor. Has love of neighbor declined in our world? I seriously doubt it. There was as much hatred and prejudice in the Middle Ages down to the civil rights era as ever. In fact, if anything, the Western world is more loving than ever toward the other.
Submission to God appears to be in decline, especially if you filter it through a question of what people believe. But are less people truly in submission to God than before? In truth, people who call themselves Christians have always used the name of God, even the Bible as a cover to do hateful things opposed to God! Were the fundamentalists pastors who rallied with the KKK more in submission to God than Bill Nye the science guy, even though he is an atheist?
I don't want to push too hard on Schaeffer's ideas here. I think he even influenced some of my early thinking on the last 500 years, at least indirectly. I believe that Schaeffer was a wonderful man and I wish I could have met him. I believe L'Abri must have been a wonderful place for people to find Christ. I think I would have enjoyed the warmth of this man, who believed in taking care of God's creation and helping those in need.
I have only pushed back because, as you know, ideas have consequences.
3. I also push back because these forces so easily capture popular imagination, so much so that my own tradition is infected. I didn't think much of it at the time, but what business did Wesleyans have going to Bill Gothard's seminars in the 70s, when his sentiments are vastly different from those of historical Wesleyanism?
In 1978, Nazarene scholar Mildred Wynkoop summed up my feelings well: young Nazarenes "are being drawn in to the many 'cultish' movements in our religious world, today... These include groups with a very strong Calvinist ground, often camouflaged by social activity or flashy philosophy... A one-man (or woman) operation... 'Un-Christianizes' all those who question or reject some theory of Scripture... Claiming to be a Shepherd over others (only Christ is Shepherd) rather than Servanthood, as Jesus and Paul indicated" (209).
Finally, this chapter covered the switch to the NIV that took place in the 70s. Interestingly, it was facilitated in reaction to The Living Bible. Next to the KJV, the NIV looked like a liberal force. But next to the Living Bible, it seemed conservative.
The bottom line of the NIV debate is that many people can't tell the difference between what is a matter of faith and what is a matter of tradition. A person's faith inevitably gets formed around whatever form of faith they grow up with. Accordingly, when a person says something about there not just being three wise men, they take that as an attack on faith rather than as a refining of faith.
So it was with the NIV. If you grew up with the ending of Mark, it seemed like an attack on faith to suggest it wasn't original. In reality, it was just a refining of the form of faith. Ironically, when the TNIV and then NIV2011 came out, those who had formed their faith around the old NIV made the same KJV complaints again and came up with the ESV.
Hear the conclusion of the matter: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again!
Thursday, February 06, 2014
Worthen: Democratic Evangelicals (8)
Chapter 8 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Now chapter 8, "The Gospel of Liberation"
This chapter deals with the awkward evangelicals of the 60s, 70s, and 80s who didn't fit the political mould of the central neo-evangelicals. It is no surprise that Wesleyans and Anabaptists feature strongly in this chapter, because strong streams of our tradition stand in tension with the political sensibilities of other evangelicals.
1. For example, the Wesleyan tradition was an abolitionist movement in the early 1800s (the equivalent today of being pro-immigration reform, pro-civil rights, etc). Meanwhile, social action to the NAE in the 60s meant anti-communism, anti-Roman Catholic, anti-IRS taxing of ministers, stopping alcohol on airplanes, and anti-Hollywood. So Nazarenes like Timothy Smith pointed out that evangelicals were "social progressives" long before liberal Protestant theology.
The problem with the social gospel, as I've often said, was not that it wanted to help the poor--that's straight Bible. The problem was that it no longer believed Jesus was God.
2. This chapter also introduced us to Jim Wallis, Sojourners, and Ron Sider. They are evangelicals in the older sense, even though they support what are often thought of as "liberal" causes.
3. Again, churches in the Wesleyan tradition have been supporting women's rights since before Protestant liberalism even existed. It ordained women in the 1800s, almost a century even before the United Methodist Church did. Many in the Wesleyan tradition thus have seen no contradiction between being a "feminist" and being a Wesleyan.
4. "Evangelicals for McGovern" McGovern was the son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister and a Democratic candidate for president. This was before the issue of abortion had become what it is today. This was before Roe vs. Wade. "Historian David Swartz has suggested that as late as the mid-1970s, the political prospects of the evangelical Left seemed nearly as bright as those of their peers on the Right. Evangelicals' ambivalent opinions on social policy, gender equality, and abortion rights had not yet hardened into the slogans of the Moral Majority" (191).
I think this is an important point. The political positions of conservative Christians today seem clearer than they were in the year 1970. We do not have a good memory of the period when these positions were hardening. And I should throw in here that memory studies show that the human brain infects earlier memories with later ones. That is to say, it is predictable that some of those who lived through this period will remember themselves having a firmer opinion on abortion in 1970 than they actually did at the time.
Worthen is spot on with this analysis--the right had a better "grand narrative." That is to say, the narrative of American moral deterioration has had staying power in a Christian premillennial culture that expects things to get worse and worse before Christ's return.
5. A strain of scholars continued to engage Europe. People like George Ladd, Geoffrey Bromiley, Paul Jewett engaged the thinking of people like Karl Barth. Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a hero.
There was also an Anabaptist renaissance during the Vietnam War. Pacifism was anathema during WW2, but the Vietnam War was a different story. Stanley Hauerwas became part of the mix, along with John Howard Yoder.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Chapter 7 (The Canterbury Trail)
Now chapter 8, "The Gospel of Liberation"
This chapter deals with the awkward evangelicals of the 60s, 70s, and 80s who didn't fit the political mould of the central neo-evangelicals. It is no surprise that Wesleyans and Anabaptists feature strongly in this chapter, because strong streams of our tradition stand in tension with the political sensibilities of other evangelicals.
1. For example, the Wesleyan tradition was an abolitionist movement in the early 1800s (the equivalent today of being pro-immigration reform, pro-civil rights, etc). Meanwhile, social action to the NAE in the 60s meant anti-communism, anti-Roman Catholic, anti-IRS taxing of ministers, stopping alcohol on airplanes, and anti-Hollywood. So Nazarenes like Timothy Smith pointed out that evangelicals were "social progressives" long before liberal Protestant theology.
The problem with the social gospel, as I've often said, was not that it wanted to help the poor--that's straight Bible. The problem was that it no longer believed Jesus was God.
2. This chapter also introduced us to Jim Wallis, Sojourners, and Ron Sider. They are evangelicals in the older sense, even though they support what are often thought of as "liberal" causes.
3. Again, churches in the Wesleyan tradition have been supporting women's rights since before Protestant liberalism even existed. It ordained women in the 1800s, almost a century even before the United Methodist Church did. Many in the Wesleyan tradition thus have seen no contradiction between being a "feminist" and being a Wesleyan.
4. "Evangelicals for McGovern" McGovern was the son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister and a Democratic candidate for president. This was before the issue of abortion had become what it is today. This was before Roe vs. Wade. "Historian David Swartz has suggested that as late as the mid-1970s, the political prospects of the evangelical Left seemed nearly as bright as those of their peers on the Right. Evangelicals' ambivalent opinions on social policy, gender equality, and abortion rights had not yet hardened into the slogans of the Moral Majority" (191).
I think this is an important point. The political positions of conservative Christians today seem clearer than they were in the year 1970. We do not have a good memory of the period when these positions were hardening. And I should throw in here that memory studies show that the human brain infects earlier memories with later ones. That is to say, it is predictable that some of those who lived through this period will remember themselves having a firmer opinion on abortion in 1970 than they actually did at the time.
Worthen is spot on with this analysis--the right had a better "grand narrative." That is to say, the narrative of American moral deterioration has had staying power in a Christian premillennial culture that expects things to get worse and worse before Christ's return.
5. A strain of scholars continued to engage Europe. People like George Ladd, Geoffrey Bromiley, Paul Jewett engaged the thinking of people like Karl Barth. Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a hero.
There was also an Anabaptist renaissance during the Vietnam War. Pacifism was anathema during WW2, but the Vietnam War was a different story. Stanley Hauerwas became part of the mix, along with John Howard Yoder.
Friday, January 31, 2014
Worthen: The Canterbury Trail (7)
Chapter 7 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Now chapter 7, "Renewing the Church Universal."
I'll try to be brief. The chapter starts with a little on Vatican 2, which brought extensive reforms to the Roman Catholic Church. The most important was the acknowledgement that the rest of us Christians are not going to hell. We are "separated brothers." The mass could now be said in English. Exaggerations of papal authority were pealed back. This is what was said about the Bible: Scripture teaches "solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation" (150). Sounds good to me!
There is a little mention of the rise of the megachurch, with the Crystal Cathedral and Willow Creek mentioned, the application of modern business principles to church.
The chapter mentions the surprising attraction of Anglicanism, Catholicism, and the Orthodox church beginning in the 60s and 70s, what Robert Webber called the "Canterbury Trail." Some were drawn to catholic spirituality (e.g., Richard Foster's, Celebration of Discipline). Some liked the historical groundedness of liturgical worship.
Protestantism and evangelicalism seemed to have a certain "rudderlessness." Worthen mentions conversions in this period. Robert Webber became Anglican. Thomas Howard, brother of Elisabeth Elliott, became Catholic having been a Wheaton grad and Gordon professor.
Even today, we see a steady trickle of students who are attracted to Anglicanism and the Orthodox church. One reason, I think, is that once you begin to read the books of the Bible on their own terms, you begin to realize how large a role tradition plays in how we put the Bible together. Conservative evangelicalism pretends that it is just following the Bible alone, but it is simply a strongly asserted (and enforced) tradition of how to interpret and glue the Bible together. When students realize this fact, they often look for a way of organizing Scripture that has more historical depth.
The final section is perhaps the first time since the Introduction that I really see the thesis of the book developing. This section is about the "evangelical" response to the ecumenical movement. The first Lausanne conference seems to capture the picture well. They produce a statement alright, but underneath are all sorts of contradictory currents.
For example, you have a Peter Wagner of Fuller arguing that the conference's emphasis on social justice was a mistake. You had resistance to the way people like Billy Graham were reaching out to broader Christianity. "Church growth types" had one emphasis. The charismatics had another. There was an "undercurrent of recalcitrance" (169).
Worthen sums it up in this way: "they did not solve the underlying problem" (171). This, for her, is the conflict between a particular way of reading the Bible and the modern forces of human reason and modern pluralism.
Afternote: Any group can have a coherent identity if everyone is on the same page. It doesn't matter if that page makes any sense or not (cf. the Mormons). When you're in such a group, you can be deceived into thinking you have some divine right behind your position because everyone around you seems to agree. The problem is if the group starts to run over people who don't agree.
The kind of movement I would like to see develop is a "Consensus Movement." This would be Christians who affirm the basic "law of love" and "rule of faith." Within that framework, individual Christian groups are free to have their own emphases and can just agree to disagree. The common Chrisitanity of the first five centuries provides the most stable fixed point for Christian belief, and the "law of love" has Jesus and the New Testament's clear endorsement for Christian ethics.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Chapter 6 (The Church Growth Movement)
Now chapter 7, "Renewing the Church Universal."
I'll try to be brief. The chapter starts with a little on Vatican 2, which brought extensive reforms to the Roman Catholic Church. The most important was the acknowledgement that the rest of us Christians are not going to hell. We are "separated brothers." The mass could now be said in English. Exaggerations of papal authority were pealed back. This is what was said about the Bible: Scripture teaches "solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation" (150). Sounds good to me!
There is a little mention of the rise of the megachurch, with the Crystal Cathedral and Willow Creek mentioned, the application of modern business principles to church.
The chapter mentions the surprising attraction of Anglicanism, Catholicism, and the Orthodox church beginning in the 60s and 70s, what Robert Webber called the "Canterbury Trail." Some were drawn to catholic spirituality (e.g., Richard Foster's, Celebration of Discipline). Some liked the historical groundedness of liturgical worship.
Protestantism and evangelicalism seemed to have a certain "rudderlessness." Worthen mentions conversions in this period. Robert Webber became Anglican. Thomas Howard, brother of Elisabeth Elliott, became Catholic having been a Wheaton grad and Gordon professor.
Even today, we see a steady trickle of students who are attracted to Anglicanism and the Orthodox church. One reason, I think, is that once you begin to read the books of the Bible on their own terms, you begin to realize how large a role tradition plays in how we put the Bible together. Conservative evangelicalism pretends that it is just following the Bible alone, but it is simply a strongly asserted (and enforced) tradition of how to interpret and glue the Bible together. When students realize this fact, they often look for a way of organizing Scripture that has more historical depth.
The final section is perhaps the first time since the Introduction that I really see the thesis of the book developing. This section is about the "evangelical" response to the ecumenical movement. The first Lausanne conference seems to capture the picture well. They produce a statement alright, but underneath are all sorts of contradictory currents.
For example, you have a Peter Wagner of Fuller arguing that the conference's emphasis on social justice was a mistake. You had resistance to the way people like Billy Graham were reaching out to broader Christianity. "Church growth types" had one emphasis. The charismatics had another. There was an "undercurrent of recalcitrance" (169).
Worthen sums it up in this way: "they did not solve the underlying problem" (171). This, for her, is the conflict between a particular way of reading the Bible and the modern forces of human reason and modern pluralism.
Afternote: Any group can have a coherent identity if everyone is on the same page. It doesn't matter if that page makes any sense or not (cf. the Mormons). When you're in such a group, you can be deceived into thinking you have some divine right behind your position because everyone around you seems to agree. The problem is if the group starts to run over people who don't agree.
The kind of movement I would like to see develop is a "Consensus Movement." This would be Christians who affirm the basic "law of love" and "rule of faith." Within that framework, individual Christian groups are free to have their own emphases and can just agree to disagree. The common Chrisitanity of the first five centuries provides the most stable fixed point for Christian belief, and the "law of love" has Jesus and the New Testament's clear endorsement for Christian ethics.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Worthen: The Church Growth Movement (7)
Chapter 6 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Now chapter 6, "Missions Beyond the West"...
Around the turn of the millennium, Robert Webber wrote a helpful book called The Younger Evangelicals. Much more broadly than Worthen, he depicted the first two phases of evangelicalism in the twentieth century as 1) traditional evangelicals and 2) pragmatic evangelicals.
Even this far into Worthen, we can see that Webber's picture was somewhat simplified. By traditional evangelicals, Webber referred to the leaders of the neo-evangelical movement. But even then there were older style evangelicals around, like Nazarenes, who didn't fit C. F. H. Henry's mould.
With this chapter, we get to the pragmatic evangelicals and the church growth movement. For Worthen, this is another strand in the complex puzzle. My colleague Bob Whitesel knows the CGM intimately, and the father of my colleague Charles Arn is actually mentioned in this chapter. If they happen to look at this post, I hope they will register any disagreements or reflections.
1. colonialism
The mid-twentieth century saw an increased sensitivity to the imperialism of the West. Missionaries found increased resistance to their evangelistic endeavors. "Missionaries struggled with their reputations as agents of the white man's oppression" (125). For centuries the West had exploited its colonies and treated indigenous peoples as inferior or even dirt. Newly empowered, colonies were re-evaluating missionaries and their methods.
So the Soviets used the West's previous exploitation to try to bring colonies to their side. Islam used the Western nature of Christianity to draw converts. These dynamics had an impact on reflective missionaries like Donald McGavran, Eugene Nida, Charles Kraft, and Peter Wagner. For Kraft and Nida, it drove them to become sophisticated in their understanding of culture. For McGavran, it drove him to use analytics and social-scientific research to determine the best ways to grow a church. For Wagner, it led to a rediscovery of spiritual gifts and spiritual warfare.
2. science of mission
If Billy Graham had used a frontal assault for evangelism, these mission minded practitioners called for research before storming the castle. The blunt evangelistic approach called for an individual decision, even going door to door passing out tracts. McGavran had enough missionary experience to know that families are more often the key to conversion in a world context.
But in the US, this observation led to a controversial approach that has seemed deeply problematic in more recent times. Like clings to like. McGavran advocated conversion in "homogeneous units," and advocated a data-driven approach to doing it. The unintended consequence was to create a lot of large middle to upper-class white churches. "The Church Growth movement, with its assumption that Christians prefer to attend church with people like themselves, may have slowed the pace of integration in many evangelical congregations--an ironic twist on its spirit of cultural accommodation" (140).
3. understanding culture
It is interesting that Charles Kraft and Eugene Nida were sometimes viewed negatively by other evangelicals and fundamentalists. I personally view them as brilliant and opposition to them largely a matter of ignorance. When Wesley Seminary first started, I pushed for Kraft's book Christianity in Culture to provide the lens through which our students would process culture and be able to distinguish the timeless from the transitory. Nida's Customs and Culture similarly helped missionaries see how relative practices and ways of thinking are to culture.
Those lacking serious interaction with other cultures of course lambasted them as relativists. Even people like John Howard Yoder saw these anthropologists as fudging on core doctrines and practices in the name of conversion. Should the church really turn a blind eye to polygamy?
On a popular level, the CGM tended to downplay matters like theology in the name of getting people in the church. The seeker-sensitive service pushed doctrinal distinctives into the background and emphasized an entry-level type approach. Elite theologians and fundamentalists alike thus tended to scoff at what they saw as either a shallow movement or a corrupting influence.
4. the color line
Mission work tended to push churches back home toward embracing the civil rights movement. "Missionaries complained loudest that segregation cost souls abroad" (136). Yet at home, "magnanimous feelings on converting the 'noble savage' thousands of miles away did not always temper their reactions to African-American children bound for their neighborhood's newly integrated school" (137). Some churches softened. On the other side, Bob Jones still wouldn't accept black students in 1970.
5. charismatic movement
One of the most distinctive elements of the 60s and 70s in evangelicalism is the rise of the charismatic movement. If the CGM was very rational and quasi-scientific, individuals like John Wimber and Peter Wagner wanted to reclaim the spiritual gifts of the early church. Tongues were sweeping every church, including churches like the Episcopals and the Anglicans. Meanwhile, the Jesus People were "getting high on Jesus."
This was the time when Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman were on the rise. Classic dispensationalism was revised in the light of current events. Israel's restoration as a nation in 1948 became part of a newly issued Scofield Bible. Miracles were extended beyond the apostolic age.
6. conclusion
As usual, I'm not exactly sure what to take away from this chapter. It of course reminds us that it is hard to get a good perspective on what is going on when it is happening. If you think back to the positions different people took at these junctures, there were obviously cultural elements to what they thought. It perhaps behooves us not to take ourselves or our ideas too seriously. May we never look back and be embarrassed because we made a big deal out of something that ultimately really doesn't matter.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Now chapter 6, "Missions Beyond the West"...
Around the turn of the millennium, Robert Webber wrote a helpful book called The Younger Evangelicals. Much more broadly than Worthen, he depicted the first two phases of evangelicalism in the twentieth century as 1) traditional evangelicals and 2) pragmatic evangelicals.
Even this far into Worthen, we can see that Webber's picture was somewhat simplified. By traditional evangelicals, Webber referred to the leaders of the neo-evangelical movement. But even then there were older style evangelicals around, like Nazarenes, who didn't fit C. F. H. Henry's mould.
With this chapter, we get to the pragmatic evangelicals and the church growth movement. For Worthen, this is another strand in the complex puzzle. My colleague Bob Whitesel knows the CGM intimately, and the father of my colleague Charles Arn is actually mentioned in this chapter. If they happen to look at this post, I hope they will register any disagreements or reflections.
1. colonialism
The mid-twentieth century saw an increased sensitivity to the imperialism of the West. Missionaries found increased resistance to their evangelistic endeavors. "Missionaries struggled with their reputations as agents of the white man's oppression" (125). For centuries the West had exploited its colonies and treated indigenous peoples as inferior or even dirt. Newly empowered, colonies were re-evaluating missionaries and their methods.
So the Soviets used the West's previous exploitation to try to bring colonies to their side. Islam used the Western nature of Christianity to draw converts. These dynamics had an impact on reflective missionaries like Donald McGavran, Eugene Nida, Charles Kraft, and Peter Wagner. For Kraft and Nida, it drove them to become sophisticated in their understanding of culture. For McGavran, it drove him to use analytics and social-scientific research to determine the best ways to grow a church. For Wagner, it led to a rediscovery of spiritual gifts and spiritual warfare.
2. science of mission
If Billy Graham had used a frontal assault for evangelism, these mission minded practitioners called for research before storming the castle. The blunt evangelistic approach called for an individual decision, even going door to door passing out tracts. McGavran had enough missionary experience to know that families are more often the key to conversion in a world context.
But in the US, this observation led to a controversial approach that has seemed deeply problematic in more recent times. Like clings to like. McGavran advocated conversion in "homogeneous units," and advocated a data-driven approach to doing it. The unintended consequence was to create a lot of large middle to upper-class white churches. "The Church Growth movement, with its assumption that Christians prefer to attend church with people like themselves, may have slowed the pace of integration in many evangelical congregations--an ironic twist on its spirit of cultural accommodation" (140).
3. understanding culture
It is interesting that Charles Kraft and Eugene Nida were sometimes viewed negatively by other evangelicals and fundamentalists. I personally view them as brilliant and opposition to them largely a matter of ignorance. When Wesley Seminary first started, I pushed for Kraft's book Christianity in Culture to provide the lens through which our students would process culture and be able to distinguish the timeless from the transitory. Nida's Customs and Culture similarly helped missionaries see how relative practices and ways of thinking are to culture.
Those lacking serious interaction with other cultures of course lambasted them as relativists. Even people like John Howard Yoder saw these anthropologists as fudging on core doctrines and practices in the name of conversion. Should the church really turn a blind eye to polygamy?
On a popular level, the CGM tended to downplay matters like theology in the name of getting people in the church. The seeker-sensitive service pushed doctrinal distinctives into the background and emphasized an entry-level type approach. Elite theologians and fundamentalists alike thus tended to scoff at what they saw as either a shallow movement or a corrupting influence.
4. the color line
Mission work tended to push churches back home toward embracing the civil rights movement. "Missionaries complained loudest that segregation cost souls abroad" (136). Yet at home, "magnanimous feelings on converting the 'noble savage' thousands of miles away did not always temper their reactions to African-American children bound for their neighborhood's newly integrated school" (137). Some churches softened. On the other side, Bob Jones still wouldn't accept black students in 1970.
5. charismatic movement
One of the most distinctive elements of the 60s and 70s in evangelicalism is the rise of the charismatic movement. If the CGM was very rational and quasi-scientific, individuals like John Wimber and Peter Wagner wanted to reclaim the spiritual gifts of the early church. Tongues were sweeping every church, including churches like the Episcopals and the Anglicans. Meanwhile, the Jesus People were "getting high on Jesus."
This was the time when Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman were on the rise. Classic dispensationalism was revised in the light of current events. Israel's restoration as a nation in 1948 became part of a newly issued Scofield Bible. Miracles were extended beyond the apostolic age.
6. conclusion
As usual, I'm not exactly sure what to take away from this chapter. It of course reminds us that it is hard to get a good perspective on what is going on when it is happening. If you think back to the positions different people took at these junctures, there were obviously cultural elements to what they thought. It perhaps behooves us not to take ourselves or our ideas too seriously. May we never look back and be embarrassed because we made a big deal out of something that ultimately really doesn't matter.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Worthen: The Drive to Accreditation (6)
On to chapter 5 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. Man, I wish I were a faster reader. Or maybe I shouldn't try to read too many things at once?
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Now chapter 5, "The Marks of Campus Conversion." This chapter gives another angle on the collection of social groups and forces we might call fundamentalist and evangelical in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It's the evangelism and education angle.
If you look at some of the great revivalists of the late 1800s, the great evangelist D. L. Moody founded Moody Bible Institute (Chicago Bible Institute) in 1886. Pastor William Bell Riley started Northwestern in St. Paul in 1902. The first Dean of Biola was a revivalist (R. A. Torrey) in 1912. The radio evangelist Charles Fuller helped found Fuller Theological Seminary in 1947. Bible colleges had a way of being founded by evangelists, it seems, as places to train more evangelists and missionaries. These evangelists also had the people skills to attract the students that made such institutes and colleges financially viable.
As much as we may hate the stereotypical divide between the thinker and the doer, history has often played into the stereotype. So Fuller's goals and the goals of his Machen-trained elite faculty pulled against each other from time to time. In 1962, Sam Sutherland, president of Biola, was a "Bible Institute man" who may not have been interested in theologians like C. F. H. Henry or in engaging the public forum. Sutherland was not interested in academic prestige but training people to be evangelists.
But he needed students too. In the first part of the twentieth century, the institutes and Bible colleges of fundamentalism weren't interested in things like accreditation. Self-described professionals invented clubs that conferred on each other status, or so it seemed. Academic acknowledgement seekers like Wheaton were the outliers initially. "Early Bible college leaders were unimpressed by a self-policing, credentialed elite. They exalted the common sense of the layman whose faith was unmuddled by the mystifications of so-called experts" (102). So what else is new.
The fundamentalists had their own accrediting system of sorts. They invited each other to come speak at each other's campuses. They gave each other (unaccredited) honorary degrees.
Then came the GI Bill after World War 2. Expectations for standard of living increased--standards that couldn't be met as a typical pastor or missionary. As is almost always the case, money was the decider. And although the leaders of the Bible colleges and institutes bemoaned the fact that the church was losing its spirituality, they began to pursue accreditation and broaden into liberal arts colleges. Although they believed their students were becoming materialistic, they knew well enough that they needed students to survive.
They applied for secular accreditation so that students could receive aid from the federal government. They started offering more than just ministry and missionary majors.
But before that, a collection of Bible colleges set up their own accreditation organization, what is now called the Association for Biblical Higher Education. It would eventually drink from the same well of academic standards of the age. For example, it would turn down Columbia Bible College for accreditation renewal in the 1960s because of low standards, irregular grading, and not teaching much beyond Christian beliefs.
As much as they might disdain academia in general, Bible institutes also longed for outside recognition. They valued professors with PhDs. There were ways to get PhDs without being infected by secular research institutions, particularly if you worked on them while you were teaching at the Bible institute.
Academic freedom was a problem, as was the increase of students in the late 60s who were thinking outside the box. Sutherland, president of Biola, would try to defend Biola to donors as being 80% Republican and would first gently try to encourage students not to write articles opposing the Vietnam War or in favor of Bobby Kennedy.
Wheaton in particular seems to have pushed the limits of student freedom of expression. Worthen ends the chapter arguing more or less that every generation thinks the next is spiritually losing it and becoming more liberal. Every older generation, as young people grow up, clamors for revival to get back to the good old days, when we were a Christian nation and everyone was spiritual.
Rather, in her opinion, "the history of Christianity... is one long story of the mutual accommodation between sacred tradition and new cultural contexts, needs, and threats" (122). It is not secularization but the continual "reenchantment of earthly life" in the light of an ever changing world.
The chapter ends with the fascination of evangelicals and fundamentalists with C. S. Lewis. Even Bob Jones, puzzled by his pipe and liquor, had to conclude he was a Christian. C. S. Lewis was the patron saint of intellect for evangelicals, proof positive that you could be smart and be a believer. Colleges like Wheaton and Westmont treated his artifacts like medieval relics, and Taylor University reconstructed his favorite pub in the basement of its library--minus the alcohol of course.
Lewis proved that you could have an imagination and love the arts and still be a Christian, unlike A. W. Tozer, who suggested that fiction had nothing to do with Christianity. Similarly, Clyde Kilby of Wheaton could puzzle at the propositionalism of his long acquaintance C. F. H. Henry, "How can the Psalms be propositional?" he posed in disagreement with his ever rational, fellow alumnus.
The chapter also mentions Wheaton professor, Arthur Holmes, whose short, classic work, The Idea of a Christian College, remains to my mind an excellent model of the integration of faith with learning. He suggests levels of integration, ranging from the attitude of the professor to the element of ethics in applying a discipline to to foundations to worldview. It was Holmes who popularized the truism, "All truth is God's truth."
To my mind, Holmes was a giant when it comes to what it means to be a Christian liberal arts college, at least in terms of the principles. Obviously the person who knows the trick on how a liberal arts oriented college can thrive in the current climate will also be mentioned in the history of education. We are in a time of transformation in education not unlike that facilitated by the GI Bill, IMO.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Now chapter 5, "The Marks of Campus Conversion." This chapter gives another angle on the collection of social groups and forces we might call fundamentalist and evangelical in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It's the evangelism and education angle.
If you look at some of the great revivalists of the late 1800s, the great evangelist D. L. Moody founded Moody Bible Institute (Chicago Bible Institute) in 1886. Pastor William Bell Riley started Northwestern in St. Paul in 1902. The first Dean of Biola was a revivalist (R. A. Torrey) in 1912. The radio evangelist Charles Fuller helped found Fuller Theological Seminary in 1947. Bible colleges had a way of being founded by evangelists, it seems, as places to train more evangelists and missionaries. These evangelists also had the people skills to attract the students that made such institutes and colleges financially viable.
As much as we may hate the stereotypical divide between the thinker and the doer, history has often played into the stereotype. So Fuller's goals and the goals of his Machen-trained elite faculty pulled against each other from time to time. In 1962, Sam Sutherland, president of Biola, was a "Bible Institute man" who may not have been interested in theologians like C. F. H. Henry or in engaging the public forum. Sutherland was not interested in academic prestige but training people to be evangelists.
But he needed students too. In the first part of the twentieth century, the institutes and Bible colleges of fundamentalism weren't interested in things like accreditation. Self-described professionals invented clubs that conferred on each other status, or so it seemed. Academic acknowledgement seekers like Wheaton were the outliers initially. "Early Bible college leaders were unimpressed by a self-policing, credentialed elite. They exalted the common sense of the layman whose faith was unmuddled by the mystifications of so-called experts" (102). So what else is new.
The fundamentalists had their own accrediting system of sorts. They invited each other to come speak at each other's campuses. They gave each other (unaccredited) honorary degrees.
Then came the GI Bill after World War 2. Expectations for standard of living increased--standards that couldn't be met as a typical pastor or missionary. As is almost always the case, money was the decider. And although the leaders of the Bible colleges and institutes bemoaned the fact that the church was losing its spirituality, they began to pursue accreditation and broaden into liberal arts colleges. Although they believed their students were becoming materialistic, they knew well enough that they needed students to survive.
They applied for secular accreditation so that students could receive aid from the federal government. They started offering more than just ministry and missionary majors.
But before that, a collection of Bible colleges set up their own accreditation organization, what is now called the Association for Biblical Higher Education. It would eventually drink from the same well of academic standards of the age. For example, it would turn down Columbia Bible College for accreditation renewal in the 1960s because of low standards, irregular grading, and not teaching much beyond Christian beliefs.
As much as they might disdain academia in general, Bible institutes also longed for outside recognition. They valued professors with PhDs. There were ways to get PhDs without being infected by secular research institutions, particularly if you worked on them while you were teaching at the Bible institute.
Academic freedom was a problem, as was the increase of students in the late 60s who were thinking outside the box. Sutherland, president of Biola, would try to defend Biola to donors as being 80% Republican and would first gently try to encourage students not to write articles opposing the Vietnam War or in favor of Bobby Kennedy.
Wheaton in particular seems to have pushed the limits of student freedom of expression. Worthen ends the chapter arguing more or less that every generation thinks the next is spiritually losing it and becoming more liberal. Every older generation, as young people grow up, clamors for revival to get back to the good old days, when we were a Christian nation and everyone was spiritual.
Rather, in her opinion, "the history of Christianity... is one long story of the mutual accommodation between sacred tradition and new cultural contexts, needs, and threats" (122). It is not secularization but the continual "reenchantment of earthly life" in the light of an ever changing world.
The chapter ends with the fascination of evangelicals and fundamentalists with C. S. Lewis. Even Bob Jones, puzzled by his pipe and liquor, had to conclude he was a Christian. C. S. Lewis was the patron saint of intellect for evangelicals, proof positive that you could be smart and be a believer. Colleges like Wheaton and Westmont treated his artifacts like medieval relics, and Taylor University reconstructed his favorite pub in the basement of its library--minus the alcohol of course.
Lewis proved that you could have an imagination and love the arts and still be a Christian, unlike A. W. Tozer, who suggested that fiction had nothing to do with Christianity. Similarly, Clyde Kilby of Wheaton could puzzle at the propositionalism of his long acquaintance C. F. H. Henry, "How can the Psalms be propositional?" he posed in disagreement with his ever rational, fellow alumnus.
The chapter also mentions Wheaton professor, Arthur Holmes, whose short, classic work, The Idea of a Christian College, remains to my mind an excellent model of the integration of faith with learning. He suggests levels of integration, ranging from the attitude of the professor to the element of ethics in applying a discipline to to foundations to worldview. It was Holmes who popularized the truism, "All truth is God's truth."
To my mind, Holmes was a giant when it comes to what it means to be a Christian liberal arts college, at least in terms of the principles. Obviously the person who knows the trick on how a liberal arts oriented college can thrive in the current climate will also be mentioned in the history of education. We are in a time of transformation in education not unlike that facilitated by the GI Bill, IMO.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Mennonites, Nazarenes, and Neo-Evangelicals in the 50s (5)
Continuing to unclog my blogging backlog, here are some thoughts on chapter 4 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Now chapter 4, "Reform and Its Discontents."
This chapter finishes the first section of the book, "Knights Inerrant."My take-away from this chapter is that "evangelicals" like Mennonites and Nazarenes didn't fit neatly with Reformed "neo-evangelicals" like Henry and friends.
John Howard Yoder features as the prominent Mennonite reaction to neo-evangelicalism in this chapter. Yoder apparently was no moral model. In fact, his life seems to have been an anti-type of his theology. He is best known for his advocacy of non-violence, yet he was an abusive personality. The fact that his thinking was the opposite of his life suggests there may be something redeemable in it.
His words to C. F. H. Henry are worth quoting:
"Your ultimate criteria are your idea of reason... in theology the chances are great that they will get in the way of Christ as the only source of knowledge" (75).
Worthen concludes, "Yoder had hit on the crux of the divide between Reformed evangelicals and many other evangelical traditions." For Mennonites, "discipleship more than dogma, was the the primary way to follow Christ" (76).
The neo-evangelical and a fundamentalist worldview, according to Worthen, were making great strides in churches like those of the Mennonites and the Nazarenes. I have noted to myself that is it incredibly easy to make a pre-modern into a fundamentalist, and I fear it of my own time. You take someone who knows little of reading the Bible in context and sprinkle historical scholarship on them in a threatening way.
So I picture it being in the 50s. Scholars like Harold Bender in the Mennonite tradition and H. Orton Wiley in the Nazarenes walked these careful political lines. The Mennonites strove to make sure that their belief in pacifism did not get displaced in the middle of crises like Vietnam. They strove to strengthen their own institutions so that their ministers did not become allured of mainline institutions. They strove to maintain the importance of experience in the Christian life. The neo-evangelicals largely ignored them.
The Wesleyan Theological Society was founded as a Wesleyan version of ETS and was very neo-evangelical in its founding. Interestingly, Nazarenes did not feel very welcome at first. In the words of one Nazarene theology professor in 1967, "A 'Wesleyan' society should make Holiness its main point and not get involved in this fundamentalistic shibboleth of inerrancy" (92). Things have changed dramatically since then as WTS underwent a broadening something like Fuller did.
If the Mennonites strove not to lose distinctives like pacifism, Nazarenes fought to maintain elements like social justice amid outside influences. Mildred Bangs Wynkoop clarified the nature of holiness in terms of love and, in my opinion, provided important language to translate the doctrine of holiness into terms that would speak to a new generation.
By contrast, Reformed fundamentalism threatened to sever the link between personal piety and social justice, as it still does today. William Greathouse led a "back to Wesley" movement to try to get Nazarenes back in touch with their theological roots. These efforts would spill over into thinkers in the Free Methodist and Wesleyan Methodist church as well.
Restorationist and Pentecostals are briefly mentioned. Influenced by Reformed presuppositionalism but remaining on the periphery. Influenced by worldview language but on the periphery. Treating Scripture as a compilation of ideas and objective facts was the neo-evangelical way. There was a great fusion of elements in each tradition going on in the mid-twentieth century.
Another element in the midst (and I'm not really sure what makes this chapter hold together) is the fact that a lot of budding young scholars in this time period ran off to Europe to do their doctoral work. Yoder went to Basel to study with Barth. Paul Jewett at Fuller ran off to study with Emil Brunner at Zurich. George Ladd and Dan Fuller went to Basel. "Evangelicals who spent time at Basel and other European universities usually did not convert to more liberal forms of the faith, but they sometimes revised their views of biblical inerrancy and eschatology" (80).
It is interesting that this same phenomenon was taking place in England when I did my doctorate in the 90s. British universities neither had the biases against conservatives that a lot of American universities did, yet they were not as biased against liberals as a lot of American evangelical institutions were. In short, there was a freedom to British universities in the 90s to have faith and yet explore ideas freely as well.
My sense is that the era of conservatives running to Europe for education has slowed down significantly. Part of it is the fact that the market for experts in biblical studies, theology, and church history has dried up. I think there are also more and more accessible doctoral programs here in the US. The British universities of the 90s were doing very well with part-time doctorates, with the allure of going to Europe. But American institutions are catching on or dying.
I think I'll leave the chapter with that. It was a chapter full of emotion for me. I am thankful for the opportunities I have had to study with some truly great minds and to think through ideas with anyone who was interested. I used to say I would "teach" (or at least banter together) for free if I had some other means of supporting my family.
Yet people don't pay for what some teacher wants to say, even if the teacher thinks they need to hear it. People pay to hear what they want to hear. Institutions that forget this fundamental dynamic die, IMO.
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Now chapter 4, "Reform and Its Discontents."
This chapter finishes the first section of the book, "Knights Inerrant."My take-away from this chapter is that "evangelicals" like Mennonites and Nazarenes didn't fit neatly with Reformed "neo-evangelicals" like Henry and friends.
John Howard Yoder features as the prominent Mennonite reaction to neo-evangelicalism in this chapter. Yoder apparently was no moral model. In fact, his life seems to have been an anti-type of his theology. He is best known for his advocacy of non-violence, yet he was an abusive personality. The fact that his thinking was the opposite of his life suggests there may be something redeemable in it.
His words to C. F. H. Henry are worth quoting:
"Your ultimate criteria are your idea of reason... in theology the chances are great that they will get in the way of Christ as the only source of knowledge" (75).
Worthen concludes, "Yoder had hit on the crux of the divide between Reformed evangelicals and many other evangelical traditions." For Mennonites, "discipleship more than dogma, was the the primary way to follow Christ" (76).
The neo-evangelical and a fundamentalist worldview, according to Worthen, were making great strides in churches like those of the Mennonites and the Nazarenes. I have noted to myself that is it incredibly easy to make a pre-modern into a fundamentalist, and I fear it of my own time. You take someone who knows little of reading the Bible in context and sprinkle historical scholarship on them in a threatening way.
So I picture it being in the 50s. Scholars like Harold Bender in the Mennonite tradition and H. Orton Wiley in the Nazarenes walked these careful political lines. The Mennonites strove to make sure that their belief in pacifism did not get displaced in the middle of crises like Vietnam. They strove to strengthen their own institutions so that their ministers did not become allured of mainline institutions. They strove to maintain the importance of experience in the Christian life. The neo-evangelicals largely ignored them.
The Wesleyan Theological Society was founded as a Wesleyan version of ETS and was very neo-evangelical in its founding. Interestingly, Nazarenes did not feel very welcome at first. In the words of one Nazarene theology professor in 1967, "A 'Wesleyan' society should make Holiness its main point and not get involved in this fundamentalistic shibboleth of inerrancy" (92). Things have changed dramatically since then as WTS underwent a broadening something like Fuller did.
If the Mennonites strove not to lose distinctives like pacifism, Nazarenes fought to maintain elements like social justice amid outside influences. Mildred Bangs Wynkoop clarified the nature of holiness in terms of love and, in my opinion, provided important language to translate the doctrine of holiness into terms that would speak to a new generation.
By contrast, Reformed fundamentalism threatened to sever the link between personal piety and social justice, as it still does today. William Greathouse led a "back to Wesley" movement to try to get Nazarenes back in touch with their theological roots. These efforts would spill over into thinkers in the Free Methodist and Wesleyan Methodist church as well.
Restorationist and Pentecostals are briefly mentioned. Influenced by Reformed presuppositionalism but remaining on the periphery. Influenced by worldview language but on the periphery. Treating Scripture as a compilation of ideas and objective facts was the neo-evangelical way. There was a great fusion of elements in each tradition going on in the mid-twentieth century.
Another element in the midst (and I'm not really sure what makes this chapter hold together) is the fact that a lot of budding young scholars in this time period ran off to Europe to do their doctoral work. Yoder went to Basel to study with Barth. Paul Jewett at Fuller ran off to study with Emil Brunner at Zurich. George Ladd and Dan Fuller went to Basel. "Evangelicals who spent time at Basel and other European universities usually did not convert to more liberal forms of the faith, but they sometimes revised their views of biblical inerrancy and eschatology" (80).
It is interesting that this same phenomenon was taking place in England when I did my doctorate in the 90s. British universities neither had the biases against conservatives that a lot of American universities did, yet they were not as biased against liberals as a lot of American evangelical institutions were. In short, there was a freedom to British universities in the 90s to have faith and yet explore ideas freely as well.
My sense is that the era of conservatives running to Europe for education has slowed down significantly. Part of it is the fact that the market for experts in biblical studies, theology, and church history has dried up. I think there are also more and more accessible doctoral programs here in the US. The British universities of the 90s were doing very well with part-time doctorates, with the allure of going to Europe. But American institutions are catching on or dying.
I think I'll leave the chapter with that. It was a chapter full of emotion for me. I am thankful for the opportunities I have had to study with some truly great minds and to think through ideas with anyone who was interested. I used to say I would "teach" (or at least banter together) for free if I had some other means of supporting my family.
Yet people don't pay for what some teacher wants to say, even if the teacher thinks they need to hear it. People pay to hear what they want to hear. Institutions that forget this fundamental dynamic die, IMO.
Friday, December 27, 2013
Christianity Today and Social Complexity 4
I've been reviewing Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
1. I gave my own title to the chapter above, but Worthen's title is "Fundamentalist Demons." For her, this chapter seems to be about the struggle for individuals like C. F. H. Henry to distinguish the new evangelicalism from its fundamentalist roots, while also courting financial sources. Ground zero for this chapter seems to be the new evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, started in 1955.
A lot of thoughts ran through my head reading this chapter, including parallels with today. First, meaning no disrespect to these individuals, I'm glad most of them are gone. When an important figure from the past dies, a lot of wisdom dies with them to be sure. But a lot of baggage dies with them too.
It is both a blessing and a curse that young people have fresh eyes to look at the issues of the day. It is a curse because sometimes they go on to repeat the mistakes of the past. It is a blessing because a lot of people get stuck in their ways and can't see things objectively. They are always seeing the shadows of the past.
So if this chapter is even half right, it is clear that the Cold War, coming out WW2 and the struggle against Hitler, played a significant role in forming the psyche of the neo-evangelicals of the 50s. Indeed, the primary funder of Christianity Today (it ran at a huge loss for its first years because it distributed so many copies to pastors for free to get them hooked), Howard Pew, was apparently more interested in CT fighting communism than in Henry's desire for promoting good theology.
Apparently, Henry was forced to resign as Editor-in-Chief in the late 60s after tensions between him and Pew reached its peak. By that point, Pew was calling him a socialist because he believed social justice was part of the gospel, which of course it is. Henry was conservative by any normal standard, but that's where America was in the 1950s and 60s.
I'm glad most Americans my age and younger didn't grow up with the fear of communism that so dominated the previous generation. We should at least have the potential to be more objective about such things. But beware, 9-11 has revived some of those dynamics. As far as I can tell, America is in no danger of becoming socialist by any knowledgeable standard of history or political philosophy, but a similar fear rhetoric is back.
2. It is interesting that Pew and others saw themselves in a battle for civilization. Communism was the enemy then, just as Islam was in the last decade. Now the same rhetoric has shifted to Obama and his "socialism." It is worth noting that the constant here is not the object of fear, but the drive to fear itself.
Henry and CT carefully tried to negotiate this complex social situation. On the one side was Pew's money, the hand that fed CT. He had his own interests--capitalism and anti-communism. He would rather side with economic conservatives than with those of his own theological stripe. Like today, there was the usual blurring of conservative Christianity with conservative politics and economics.
On the other side was the desire not to be divisive and separatist like fundamentalists. They wanted to engage Catholics, Methodists, and Lutherans while staying firmly Calvinist and Reformed in their base. They even invited neo-orthodox theologians in Germany to submit articles, people like Brunner and Barth. Soon enough, they had more readers than the old mainline Christian Century.
As someone who is part of a Christian university, I feel these tensions deeply. How do you make students of all theological stripes feel welcome while retaining a core Wesleyan identity? How can you be faithful to critique the dark side of capitalism if wealthy donors are courting you? If you can become more "respectable" by downplaying your differences with mainstream evangelicalism, should you do it to play ball with the big boys?
3. So if CT was balancing political conservatism with a desire to reach out to non-Calvinist Christian conservatives, it was also trying to distinguish itself from fundamentalist forces that were more separatist in nature. Here Worthen especially has Bob Jones and Bob Jones University in mind. She depicts Bob Jones as an authoritarian who strongly disagreed with how Billy Graham cooperated with non-evangelicals like Roman Catholics.
Billy Graham and his father-in-law, Nelson Bell, were the founders of CT. Bell was a Presbyterian medical missionary and a pragmatist. He would go on behind the scenes advocating for the magazine and his son-in-law. Bell promoted it in part as having the same theology as the fundamentalists "in the old sense of the word" but having a different method, one that sought common ground rather than emphasizing points of disagreement.
What I am seeing here continues to support what I have been intuiting for some time now. It was not until the 50s and 60s that the sense of fundamentalist shifted from those who wrote The Fundamentals to refer to conservative separatists like Bob Jones. Time magazine would describe CT as a kind of "high-brow fundamentalism." Today, I think of a fundamentalist as a militant, religious idealist. Words change meanings over time.
4. I didn't realize that Billy Graham, Carl Henry, and others had tried to start an evangelical research university, "Crusade University." It never happened and I am not surprised. There is an inherent contradiction between a movement whose core principles are anti-evidentiary and the aspiration to be a top-flight evidentiary institution.
The quest has continued. Baylor probably comes closest. But to the extent that an institution bases its identity on presuppositions that limit how you can interpret evidence, it will have difficulty becoming a great research institution, IMO.
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
1. I gave my own title to the chapter above, but Worthen's title is "Fundamentalist Demons." For her, this chapter seems to be about the struggle for individuals like C. F. H. Henry to distinguish the new evangelicalism from its fundamentalist roots, while also courting financial sources. Ground zero for this chapter seems to be the new evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, started in 1955.
A lot of thoughts ran through my head reading this chapter, including parallels with today. First, meaning no disrespect to these individuals, I'm glad most of them are gone. When an important figure from the past dies, a lot of wisdom dies with them to be sure. But a lot of baggage dies with them too.
It is both a blessing and a curse that young people have fresh eyes to look at the issues of the day. It is a curse because sometimes they go on to repeat the mistakes of the past. It is a blessing because a lot of people get stuck in their ways and can't see things objectively. They are always seeing the shadows of the past.
So if this chapter is even half right, it is clear that the Cold War, coming out WW2 and the struggle against Hitler, played a significant role in forming the psyche of the neo-evangelicals of the 50s. Indeed, the primary funder of Christianity Today (it ran at a huge loss for its first years because it distributed so many copies to pastors for free to get them hooked), Howard Pew, was apparently more interested in CT fighting communism than in Henry's desire for promoting good theology.
Apparently, Henry was forced to resign as Editor-in-Chief in the late 60s after tensions between him and Pew reached its peak. By that point, Pew was calling him a socialist because he believed social justice was part of the gospel, which of course it is. Henry was conservative by any normal standard, but that's where America was in the 1950s and 60s.
I'm glad most Americans my age and younger didn't grow up with the fear of communism that so dominated the previous generation. We should at least have the potential to be more objective about such things. But beware, 9-11 has revived some of those dynamics. As far as I can tell, America is in no danger of becoming socialist by any knowledgeable standard of history or political philosophy, but a similar fear rhetoric is back.
2. It is interesting that Pew and others saw themselves in a battle for civilization. Communism was the enemy then, just as Islam was in the last decade. Now the same rhetoric has shifted to Obama and his "socialism." It is worth noting that the constant here is not the object of fear, but the drive to fear itself.
Henry and CT carefully tried to negotiate this complex social situation. On the one side was Pew's money, the hand that fed CT. He had his own interests--capitalism and anti-communism. He would rather side with economic conservatives than with those of his own theological stripe. Like today, there was the usual blurring of conservative Christianity with conservative politics and economics.
On the other side was the desire not to be divisive and separatist like fundamentalists. They wanted to engage Catholics, Methodists, and Lutherans while staying firmly Calvinist and Reformed in their base. They even invited neo-orthodox theologians in Germany to submit articles, people like Brunner and Barth. Soon enough, they had more readers than the old mainline Christian Century.
As someone who is part of a Christian university, I feel these tensions deeply. How do you make students of all theological stripes feel welcome while retaining a core Wesleyan identity? How can you be faithful to critique the dark side of capitalism if wealthy donors are courting you? If you can become more "respectable" by downplaying your differences with mainstream evangelicalism, should you do it to play ball with the big boys?
3. So if CT was balancing political conservatism with a desire to reach out to non-Calvinist Christian conservatives, it was also trying to distinguish itself from fundamentalist forces that were more separatist in nature. Here Worthen especially has Bob Jones and Bob Jones University in mind. She depicts Bob Jones as an authoritarian who strongly disagreed with how Billy Graham cooperated with non-evangelicals like Roman Catholics.
Billy Graham and his father-in-law, Nelson Bell, were the founders of CT. Bell was a Presbyterian medical missionary and a pragmatist. He would go on behind the scenes advocating for the magazine and his son-in-law. Bell promoted it in part as having the same theology as the fundamentalists "in the old sense of the word" but having a different method, one that sought common ground rather than emphasizing points of disagreement.
What I am seeing here continues to support what I have been intuiting for some time now. It was not until the 50s and 60s that the sense of fundamentalist shifted from those who wrote The Fundamentals to refer to conservative separatists like Bob Jones. Time magazine would describe CT as a kind of "high-brow fundamentalism." Today, I think of a fundamentalist as a militant, religious idealist. Words change meanings over time.
4. I didn't realize that Billy Graham, Carl Henry, and others had tried to start an evangelical research university, "Crusade University." It never happened and I am not surprised. There is an inherent contradiction between a movement whose core principles are anti-evidentiary and the aspiration to be a top-flight evidentiary institution.
The quest has continued. Baylor probably comes closest. But to the extent that an institution bases its identity on presuppositions that limit how you can interpret evidence, it will have difficulty becoming a great research institution, IMO.
Monday, December 23, 2013
Evangelical Authority on the Edges 3
I've been reviewing Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Now on to Chapter 2: "The Authority Problem"...
Once again, I found it a little hard to process this chapter in my current categories. I've tried to capture what this chapter is about by thinking of neo-evangelicalism "at its edges." My working narrative goes something like the following.
The 1920s saw a fairly strong reaction to several challenges of the day (e.g., evolution, German higher criticism) among a group of mostly mainline scholars. They wrote The Fundamentals. Many of them felt pushed out of their churches and ended up leaving to form new churches and institutions. Most were Presbyterian/Reformed. The most famous incident is when J. Gresham Machen and others left Princeton Seminary to form Westminster Theological Seminary.
By the 1940s, some of these "fundamentalists" were ready to strike back and try to reclaim "the faith" in the public sphere. Harold Ockenga facilitated the start of the NAE, the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942. The goal was to bring together and unite America's conservative Protestants, to form an ecumenical evangelicalism. In the post-war era, when individuals like C. F. H. Henry and Harold Lindsell got involved, it would become "zealous" as befit the Cold War era of McCarthyism.
1. Chapter 2 begins by noting that Pentecostals were invited to the formational meeting of the NAE and that, immediately, a Presbyterian minister questioned whether they belonged there. Some things never change. Again, I found Worthen confused (maybe I am) because she glides back and forth between using the the word "fundamentalist" in the way I do above and "fundamentalist" in reference to groups like the Nazarenes who had been around before The Fundamentals and were not formed as a reaction to modernism.
So the Mennonites refused Ockenga's invitation and the Nazarenes did not join the NAE until the 80s. Southern Baptists considered words like "fundamentalist" and "evangelical" to be Yankee words. Worthen spends much of this chapter talking about the "other evangelicals" who were more or less on the periphery of the movement.
So she talks a bit about H. Orton Wiley and the Nazarenes. Again, I found this section pushing me toward Nazarene sources because the word fundamentalism seemed to refer to two different things--inerrancy on the one hand and cultural separatism on the other. Did Wiley resist both? Apparently so, but they are two quite different things. To hear Nazarenes talk about Wiley, he was wary of Calvinist inerrancy, wanting instead to focus on the centrality of Christ.
Worthen also talks about the Mennonites in this chapter and Harold Bender. His struggle, however, was to help Mennonites maintain their pacifist beliefs at a time when WW2 pushed strongly against them. Again, throughout this section I found the blurred confusion of what a fundamentalist was. Is a fundamentalist a holiness, Pentecostal, dispensational type who isolates him/herself from the world for purity reasons? Or is a fundamentalist someone who separated from a mainline denomination over issues like German higher criticism.
Thus the Marsden/Noll hangover continues...
2. The next section comes to the founding of Fuller Seminary. Fuller was apparently to be the golden child of the new evangelicalism. It was founded by evangelist Charles Fuller but staffed by the founders of the new evangelicalism--Henry, Lindsell, Wilbur Smith of Moody. "Almost to a man, the founders of Fuller Theological Seminary were J. Gresham Machen's students or admirers" (47).
The story of Fuller is fascinating. John Carnell, second president of Fuller, got into big trouble for writing a book called The Case for Orthodoxy. I hit pay dirt here that I hope to revisit on how a key player in the 1950s saw these religio-social struggles of the day. I will probably post an excerpt on fundamentalism from that book later today.
Carnell was forced out as president for pushing orthodoxy over what he called a fundamentalist mindset. Carnell's book decries the idealism of fundamentalism that "would not even buy groceries from a modernist" (Orthodoxy, 114).
Ultimately, Henry, Lindsell, and friends would lose at Fuller. Fuller would favor a big tent evangelicalism over the separatism that would become the standard fair of the Evangelical Theological Society, founded in 1949. "Some members, like Harold Lindsell, made it their business to smoke out anyone who blinked at the mention of inerrancy" (52). What exactly did the word even mean? Fuller in the end would choose not to use it in its faith statement.
3. Although I am finding Worthen's book a bit muddled, it is serving as an excellent jumping off point into the primary sources, many of which are available online. Carnell's book looks to be a treasure trove and I have ordered it off of Amazon. Right now it seems to me that American Christianity in the 1950s was a mixture of:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Now on to Chapter 2: "The Authority Problem"...
Once again, I found it a little hard to process this chapter in my current categories. I've tried to capture what this chapter is about by thinking of neo-evangelicalism "at its edges." My working narrative goes something like the following.
The 1920s saw a fairly strong reaction to several challenges of the day (e.g., evolution, German higher criticism) among a group of mostly mainline scholars. They wrote The Fundamentals. Many of them felt pushed out of their churches and ended up leaving to form new churches and institutions. Most were Presbyterian/Reformed. The most famous incident is when J. Gresham Machen and others left Princeton Seminary to form Westminster Theological Seminary.
By the 1940s, some of these "fundamentalists" were ready to strike back and try to reclaim "the faith" in the public sphere. Harold Ockenga facilitated the start of the NAE, the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942. The goal was to bring together and unite America's conservative Protestants, to form an ecumenical evangelicalism. In the post-war era, when individuals like C. F. H. Henry and Harold Lindsell got involved, it would become "zealous" as befit the Cold War era of McCarthyism.
1. Chapter 2 begins by noting that Pentecostals were invited to the formational meeting of the NAE and that, immediately, a Presbyterian minister questioned whether they belonged there. Some things never change. Again, I found Worthen confused (maybe I am) because she glides back and forth between using the the word "fundamentalist" in the way I do above and "fundamentalist" in reference to groups like the Nazarenes who had been around before The Fundamentals and were not formed as a reaction to modernism.
So the Mennonites refused Ockenga's invitation and the Nazarenes did not join the NAE until the 80s. Southern Baptists considered words like "fundamentalist" and "evangelical" to be Yankee words. Worthen spends much of this chapter talking about the "other evangelicals" who were more or less on the periphery of the movement.
So she talks a bit about H. Orton Wiley and the Nazarenes. Again, I found this section pushing me toward Nazarene sources because the word fundamentalism seemed to refer to two different things--inerrancy on the one hand and cultural separatism on the other. Did Wiley resist both? Apparently so, but they are two quite different things. To hear Nazarenes talk about Wiley, he was wary of Calvinist inerrancy, wanting instead to focus on the centrality of Christ.
Worthen also talks about the Mennonites in this chapter and Harold Bender. His struggle, however, was to help Mennonites maintain their pacifist beliefs at a time when WW2 pushed strongly against them. Again, throughout this section I found the blurred confusion of what a fundamentalist was. Is a fundamentalist a holiness, Pentecostal, dispensational type who isolates him/herself from the world for purity reasons? Or is a fundamentalist someone who separated from a mainline denomination over issues like German higher criticism.
Thus the Marsden/Noll hangover continues...
2. The next section comes to the founding of Fuller Seminary. Fuller was apparently to be the golden child of the new evangelicalism. It was founded by evangelist Charles Fuller but staffed by the founders of the new evangelicalism--Henry, Lindsell, Wilbur Smith of Moody. "Almost to a man, the founders of Fuller Theological Seminary were J. Gresham Machen's students or admirers" (47).
The story of Fuller is fascinating. John Carnell, second president of Fuller, got into big trouble for writing a book called The Case for Orthodoxy. I hit pay dirt here that I hope to revisit on how a key player in the 1950s saw these religio-social struggles of the day. I will probably post an excerpt on fundamentalism from that book later today.
Carnell was forced out as president for pushing orthodoxy over what he called a fundamentalist mindset. Carnell's book decries the idealism of fundamentalism that "would not even buy groceries from a modernist" (Orthodoxy, 114).
Ultimately, Henry, Lindsell, and friends would lose at Fuller. Fuller would favor a big tent evangelicalism over the separatism that would become the standard fair of the Evangelical Theological Society, founded in 1949. "Some members, like Harold Lindsell, made it their business to smoke out anyone who blinked at the mention of inerrancy" (52). What exactly did the word even mean? Fuller in the end would choose not to use it in its faith statement.
3. Although I am finding Worthen's book a bit muddled, it is serving as an excellent jumping off point into the primary sources, many of which are available online. Carnell's book looks to be a treasure trove and I have ordered it off of Amazon. Right now it seems to me that American Christianity in the 1950s was a mixture of:
- mainliners, "liberals"
- traditional sects like Wesleyans, Pentecostals, Baptists, Mennonites
- new evangelicals on the rise
But these new evangelicals were of two sorts. Some were the inclusionists. These were people like Billy Graham, Harold Ockenga, and Charles Fuller. They wanted a big tent of conservative Protestants and were charitable toward other groups.
But there was also the Henry, Lindsell faction who were more ideological purists. They would push inerrancy as the binding principle and would be oriented more toward exclusion of those who didn't agree. They would prevail in the Evangelical Theological Society.
That's how it's looking to me at the end of chapter 2.
But there was also the Henry, Lindsell faction who were more ideological purists. They would push inerrancy as the binding principle and would be oriented more toward exclusion of those who didn't agree. They would prevail in the Evangelical Theological Society.
That's how it's looking to me at the end of chapter 2.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism 2
This is my second post reviewing Molly Worthen's new, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. Today I want to review chapter 1: "Errand from the Wilderness."
I wasn't as enthusiastic about this chapter for a couple reasons. For one, its point didn't seem quite as clear to me. I suppose the "wilderness" in the title is the situation from which neo-evangelicals like C. F. H. Henry and Harold Ockenga wanted to emerge. By the way, I want to emphasize how irrelevant these figures were to my life as a holiness child. Even to this day I know precious little about them. Their story has intruded on my story from the outside.
My bias alerts went off a little in this chapter. For example, as someone who is not a student of this segment of history, I found myself wondering how accurate her semi-psychoanalysis of Henry's feelings were. I consider my reaction below somewhat provisional until I read more.
1. She begins the first chapter with the scene where Carl F. H. Henry and Karl Barth come face to face. It is the famous story of how Henry tried to pin Barth down on the historicity of the resurrection and Barth, in almost Jesus style fashion, completely side stepped his question.
So Henry asks whether the resurrection was the kind of event that a reporter would have written up in the news. Barth asked back if he was from Christianity Today or Christianity Yesterday. Now, mind you, I am quite confident that the answer was yes for Barth. It was the question that Barth rejected, the values embodied in the question, the standard of what was important to Henry.
I have always enjoyed this story about Barth. I'm not sure, however, that Henry would enjoy Worthen's depiction of him. She seems to portray him almost as someone with an inferiority complex, a wannabee. Could be. I found myself wishing I had read some Henry so I could verify the tone, but I have no desire to do so. To me he is "other" and tangential to my tradition.
That these neo-evangelicals hated Barth I think is overwhelmingly substantiated. I seem to remember someone once accusing me of being Barthian and neo-orthodox, and they were not complimenting me. (By the way, I think my Barth-loving friends would have a good chuckle to hear this. The whole semester our reading group read through Barth, I repeatedly said, "What does that mean?" For all their hatred of each other, Barth was also a presuppositionalist of his own kind.)
2. To my mind, Worthen's understanding of who fundamentalists were is still muddled with the Marsden/Noll confusion of them with holiness, Pentecostal, and dispensationalists. I continue to wait for someone to show me the error of my way, but every author I read simply strengthens my sense that the guild of historians of American Christianity are confused here.
The individuals who wrote The Fundamentals were scholars. They were not holiness, Pentecostals, or dispensational types as far as I can tell. The founders of Westminster Seminary, like J. Gresham Machen, did not withdraw from Princeton to start a Bible college in the wilderness. They started a seminary and they were the forebears of the neo-evangelicals.
In response to my previous post, Keith Drury pointed out to me that the people who started Bible colleges were not people withdrawing from broader education. They were people who did not go to college at all. The founding of Bible colleges was a movement toward education, not a withdrawal from the world. The fundamentalists were educated folk, not my generally uneducated holiness forebears.
These fundamentalists were losing status in the public sphere (as opposed to my forebears who never had it). Worthen writes, "In the years between the world wars, conservatives found themselves expelled from or silenced in denominational leadership, church seminaries, colleges, and periodicals" (19). OK, so what you're telling me is that the original fundamentalist separatists were formerly mainliners, not holiness-Pentecostal-dispensational types. Hmmm.
Would someone please fix this history for us please so major historians will stop perpetuating this skew???
3. The idea of inerrancy would play a central role in the rise of neo-evangelicalism because it was the central presuppositional tool the neo-evangelicals used to combat everything to which they were opposed in the currents of their day. Again, I think Worthen lacks some historical sophistication in her parsing of this history. In particular, I think she misses the role that slavery played in crystalizing Charles Hodge's version of inerrancy, which shifted the focus of the Bible's truthfulness from the greatest common denominator to the details.
4. In 1942, the National Association of Evangelicals was born. This was a group of disaffected fundamentalists (not holiness types) who were tired of being cast out of mainline churches and were regrouping to fight back to reclaim America for their kind of Christianity. They were not content simply to separate like Machen and friends. They wanted the center stage back. They wanted to reclaim America, their kind of America.
[Again, it is fascinating how, it seems to me, evangelicals have rewritten history to make themselves look better. Machen and Westminster were no dispensationalists. In fact, it is my understanding that WTS has always looked down the nose at those "unsophisticated" dispensationalists at Dallas Theological Seminary. How have they pulled off this switch-a-roo of who the true fundamentalists were? ... namely, themselves!]
Worthen tosses out some things I would like to hear more about. So she mentions the Reformed and Presbyterian background of many of these individuals. She mentions the importance of Calvinist presuppositionalism at Wheaton where Henry studied under Gordon Clark. She mentions how important "worldview" was considered at this time, how it was a word that Hitler himself had used and that was invoked in relation to communism.
Henry wanted to formulate the right Christian worldview: "The modern ideology needs to be remade" (35). Again, I found her presentation less than clear. That Henry was interested in presuppositions I don't doubt. But his exchange with Barth shows that he also accepted the standards of modernism to a large degree. No Cornelius van Til was he. I think we'll get more as we proceed.
5. One thing that this chapter did impress on me was the coinciding of neo-evangelicalism's birth with the post-WW2 era. I was trying to think of what that must have been like. A time of clashing ideologies. The terror of Hitler had almost won. The fear of Soviet communism was on the rise. Traditional Christianity had been displaced from power in the public sphere (or so they thought--I'm not sure it was ever really there in America's history).
You could see where a Henry would be driven to identify the right Christian ideology. You could see where the trajectory of fight against evil ideology could push in this direction. After all, the NAE was founded a year after Pearl Harbor when the US was in the thick of things, two years before D-Day. I'm also wondering what role anti-German sentiment might have played in the mix...
I wasn't as enthusiastic about this chapter for a couple reasons. For one, its point didn't seem quite as clear to me. I suppose the "wilderness" in the title is the situation from which neo-evangelicals like C. F. H. Henry and Harold Ockenga wanted to emerge. By the way, I want to emphasize how irrelevant these figures were to my life as a holiness child. Even to this day I know precious little about them. Their story has intruded on my story from the outside.
My bias alerts went off a little in this chapter. For example, as someone who is not a student of this segment of history, I found myself wondering how accurate her semi-psychoanalysis of Henry's feelings were. I consider my reaction below somewhat provisional until I read more.
1. She begins the first chapter with the scene where Carl F. H. Henry and Karl Barth come face to face. It is the famous story of how Henry tried to pin Barth down on the historicity of the resurrection and Barth, in almost Jesus style fashion, completely side stepped his question.
So Henry asks whether the resurrection was the kind of event that a reporter would have written up in the news. Barth asked back if he was from Christianity Today or Christianity Yesterday. Now, mind you, I am quite confident that the answer was yes for Barth. It was the question that Barth rejected, the values embodied in the question, the standard of what was important to Henry.
I have always enjoyed this story about Barth. I'm not sure, however, that Henry would enjoy Worthen's depiction of him. She seems to portray him almost as someone with an inferiority complex, a wannabee. Could be. I found myself wishing I had read some Henry so I could verify the tone, but I have no desire to do so. To me he is "other" and tangential to my tradition.
That these neo-evangelicals hated Barth I think is overwhelmingly substantiated. I seem to remember someone once accusing me of being Barthian and neo-orthodox, and they were not complimenting me. (By the way, I think my Barth-loving friends would have a good chuckle to hear this. The whole semester our reading group read through Barth, I repeatedly said, "What does that mean?" For all their hatred of each other, Barth was also a presuppositionalist of his own kind.)
2. To my mind, Worthen's understanding of who fundamentalists were is still muddled with the Marsden/Noll confusion of them with holiness, Pentecostal, and dispensationalists. I continue to wait for someone to show me the error of my way, but every author I read simply strengthens my sense that the guild of historians of American Christianity are confused here.
The individuals who wrote The Fundamentals were scholars. They were not holiness, Pentecostals, or dispensational types as far as I can tell. The founders of Westminster Seminary, like J. Gresham Machen, did not withdraw from Princeton to start a Bible college in the wilderness. They started a seminary and they were the forebears of the neo-evangelicals.
In response to my previous post, Keith Drury pointed out to me that the people who started Bible colleges were not people withdrawing from broader education. They were people who did not go to college at all. The founding of Bible colleges was a movement toward education, not a withdrawal from the world. The fundamentalists were educated folk, not my generally uneducated holiness forebears.
These fundamentalists were losing status in the public sphere (as opposed to my forebears who never had it). Worthen writes, "In the years between the world wars, conservatives found themselves expelled from or silenced in denominational leadership, church seminaries, colleges, and periodicals" (19). OK, so what you're telling me is that the original fundamentalist separatists were formerly mainliners, not holiness-Pentecostal-dispensational types. Hmmm.
Would someone please fix this history for us please so major historians will stop perpetuating this skew???
3. The idea of inerrancy would play a central role in the rise of neo-evangelicalism because it was the central presuppositional tool the neo-evangelicals used to combat everything to which they were opposed in the currents of their day. Again, I think Worthen lacks some historical sophistication in her parsing of this history. In particular, I think she misses the role that slavery played in crystalizing Charles Hodge's version of inerrancy, which shifted the focus of the Bible's truthfulness from the greatest common denominator to the details.
4. In 1942, the National Association of Evangelicals was born. This was a group of disaffected fundamentalists (not holiness types) who were tired of being cast out of mainline churches and were regrouping to fight back to reclaim America for their kind of Christianity. They were not content simply to separate like Machen and friends. They wanted the center stage back. They wanted to reclaim America, their kind of America.
[Again, it is fascinating how, it seems to me, evangelicals have rewritten history to make themselves look better. Machen and Westminster were no dispensationalists. In fact, it is my understanding that WTS has always looked down the nose at those "unsophisticated" dispensationalists at Dallas Theological Seminary. How have they pulled off this switch-a-roo of who the true fundamentalists were? ... namely, themselves!]
Worthen tosses out some things I would like to hear more about. So she mentions the Reformed and Presbyterian background of many of these individuals. She mentions the importance of Calvinist presuppositionalism at Wheaton where Henry studied under Gordon Clark. She mentions how important "worldview" was considered at this time, how it was a word that Hitler himself had used and that was invoked in relation to communism.
Henry wanted to formulate the right Christian worldview: "The modern ideology needs to be remade" (35). Again, I found her presentation less than clear. That Henry was interested in presuppositions I don't doubt. But his exchange with Barth shows that he also accepted the standards of modernism to a large degree. No Cornelius van Til was he. I think we'll get more as we proceed.
5. One thing that this chapter did impress on me was the coinciding of neo-evangelicalism's birth with the post-WW2 era. I was trying to think of what that must have been like. A time of clashing ideologies. The terror of Hitler had almost won. The fear of Soviet communism was on the rise. Traditional Christianity had been displaced from power in the public sphere (or so they thought--I'm not sure it was ever really there in America's history).
You could see where a Henry would be driven to identify the right Christian ideology. You could see where the trajectory of fight against evil ideology could push in this direction. After all, the NAE was founded a year after Pearl Harbor when the US was in the thick of things, two years before D-Day. I'm also wondering what role anti-German sentiment might have played in the mix...
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Crisis of Evangelicalism (Intro)
I did a quick read of the introduction to the new buzz book in the evangelical blogosphere: Molly Worthen's Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. This book promises to be both delightful and challenging, whether we end up agreeing with everything in it or not.
1. She begins with something I hope is fairly obvious. The word "evangelical" is ambiguous. It can refer to everything from "churchly Virginia Baptists" to "nondenominational charismatics" in LA. It seems to be a "nebulous community that shares something, even if it is not always clear what that something is" (4). Despite the power-brokers most associated with the name, she insists that individuals like my own tradition must be included in the discussion, people like "Wesleyans, Anabaptists, and Pentecostals," "communities on the fringes of evangelicalism's 'mainstream' that might contest the term altogether" (5).
What I like about the way she sets up the discussion (I put YES!!! in my margin with two additional underlines). She realizes that the definition of evangelicalism is NOT a question of core ideas or a core truth. "American evangelicals have a strong primitivist bent. They often prefer to think their faith indistinguishable from the faith of Christ's apostles, and scoff at history's claims on them. But they are creatures of history like everyone else, whether they like it or not" (4).
That is to say, she does not define evangelicalism in terms of some dreamy, abstract core like Bebbington (biblicism, cruciformism, conversionism, activism). Bebbington may use history as the foil for these principles, but many evangelicals use these four as if they dropped out of heaven like the image of Artemis that fell from heaven to Ephesus. Ironically, they make it the true catholic faith--one Lord, one faith, one evangelicalism. Pishah.
She hits the bull's eye smack center: "History--rather than theology or politics--is the most useful tool for pinning down today's evangelicals" (4). For background on why I respond enthusiastically to this comment, see here.
I might add that, true to history, she does not discuss African-American Protestants, Latinos, Asian evangelicals, and other immigrants. "Many, especially in the African-American community, view evangelicalism as a white word and claim the label rarely, and always cautiously" (5). She is not saying that these other groups would not have ideally been included, but that evangelicalism is such a white phenomenon in the US that, in the need to provide limits to her study, the lack of detailed focus on these groups actually contributes to her point.
2. She identifies three elemental concerns that drive evangelicalism historically: 1) How do you reconcile faith with reason, 2) how can you be saved and have a true relationship with God, and 3) how do you resolve the tension between personal belief and a secular age?
"The preoccupations that define evangelicalism emerged here, at the intersection of premodern dogma, personal religious experience, and modern anxieties" (6). She is speaking of the age in which Pietism emerged. Pietism was emphasizing the need for "heart religion" at the same time that the Enlightenment was on the rise as well. Herein arose the tension we have been playing out ever since.
"I believe" changed from a statement meaning something like "I love," "I will be faithful to" to the Enlightenment period's, "I assent to the following doctrinal proposition." This relates to what I have said over and over and over and over. The meaning of words is not in the words, nor is it self-evident in all contexts. There is a socio-cultural background that informs what words mean.
"Since that time a broad swath of Protestant believers have found themselves united, not by specific doctrines... but by questions borne out of their peculiar relationship to the convulsions of the early modern era" (7). Here is a key point: "While many ancient Christians assented to the basic doctrines that scholars mark as 'evangelical,' that assent took on a different character after the seventeenth-century rebirth of reason and the invention of our present-day notions of 'religious' and 'secular.'"
Again, the same words can have drastically different connotations in different contexts. This is why the "self-evident" meaning of the Bible to people today is often an invention of their own making (and their tradition's) rather than what the original authors understood. This is also the mechanism by which the Spirit gave new meanings to the OT words in the NT (and why Walter Kaiser is a hermeneutical imbecile who should generally be ignored). The Spirit continues to speak to us in this way today.
Another nugget: "The sundry believers who share the evangelical label have all lacked an extrabiblical authority powerful enough to guide them through these crises." Thus, I might add, Tillich's Protestant Principle--in the absence of a standard to determine what the Bible means, Protestantism will continue to multiply into tens of thousands of little groups, all of which are absolutely convinced that they are following the inerrant Bible alone. When you look at 20,000 Protestant denominations, sola scriptura is, from a practical standpoint, completely ineffective as an operating principle.
Evangelicals "are children of estranged parents--Pietism and the Enlightentment--but behave like orphans." That is to say, we pretend like we are following the Bible alone when in fact our beliefs and practices are historically located. She has a great way of saying what so MANY of us have been saying now FOREVER!
3. She ends with something so many of us wrestle with--the movements associated with the evangelical stream have tended toward the anti-intellectual. We might tout our educational institutions as islands of protection from the world and then wanted to be accredited so we could be respectable. These twin drives conflict with each other.
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a long time ago, "Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepticism has entered the soul... Men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold on them has been shaken" (8). WOW! Pictures of several individuals came immediately to mind. "Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt" (also Niebuhr). I like how Worthen notes that so called "anti-intellectuals" are themselves "staunchly committed to ideas" (8).
The book is about the last 70 years of intellectual life (i.e., from the rise of neo-evangelicalism in the 1940s to today). The introduction ends with this: "If American evangelicals do not share a single mind, they do share an imagination: one grounded in a substrate of basic questions about the relationship of faith and experience to human reason, and the direction of the modern world" (11).
The game is afoot!
1. She begins with something I hope is fairly obvious. The word "evangelical" is ambiguous. It can refer to everything from "churchly Virginia Baptists" to "nondenominational charismatics" in LA. It seems to be a "nebulous community that shares something, even if it is not always clear what that something is" (4). Despite the power-brokers most associated with the name, she insists that individuals like my own tradition must be included in the discussion, people like "Wesleyans, Anabaptists, and Pentecostals," "communities on the fringes of evangelicalism's 'mainstream' that might contest the term altogether" (5).
What I like about the way she sets up the discussion (I put YES!!! in my margin with two additional underlines). She realizes that the definition of evangelicalism is NOT a question of core ideas or a core truth. "American evangelicals have a strong primitivist bent. They often prefer to think their faith indistinguishable from the faith of Christ's apostles, and scoff at history's claims on them. But they are creatures of history like everyone else, whether they like it or not" (4).
That is to say, she does not define evangelicalism in terms of some dreamy, abstract core like Bebbington (biblicism, cruciformism, conversionism, activism). Bebbington may use history as the foil for these principles, but many evangelicals use these four as if they dropped out of heaven like the image of Artemis that fell from heaven to Ephesus. Ironically, they make it the true catholic faith--one Lord, one faith, one evangelicalism. Pishah.
She hits the bull's eye smack center: "History--rather than theology or politics--is the most useful tool for pinning down today's evangelicals" (4). For background on why I respond enthusiastically to this comment, see here.
I might add that, true to history, she does not discuss African-American Protestants, Latinos, Asian evangelicals, and other immigrants. "Many, especially in the African-American community, view evangelicalism as a white word and claim the label rarely, and always cautiously" (5). She is not saying that these other groups would not have ideally been included, but that evangelicalism is such a white phenomenon in the US that, in the need to provide limits to her study, the lack of detailed focus on these groups actually contributes to her point.
2. She identifies three elemental concerns that drive evangelicalism historically: 1) How do you reconcile faith with reason, 2) how can you be saved and have a true relationship with God, and 3) how do you resolve the tension between personal belief and a secular age?
"The preoccupations that define evangelicalism emerged here, at the intersection of premodern dogma, personal religious experience, and modern anxieties" (6). She is speaking of the age in which Pietism emerged. Pietism was emphasizing the need for "heart religion" at the same time that the Enlightenment was on the rise as well. Herein arose the tension we have been playing out ever since.
"I believe" changed from a statement meaning something like "I love," "I will be faithful to" to the Enlightenment period's, "I assent to the following doctrinal proposition." This relates to what I have said over and over and over and over. The meaning of words is not in the words, nor is it self-evident in all contexts. There is a socio-cultural background that informs what words mean.
"Since that time a broad swath of Protestant believers have found themselves united, not by specific doctrines... but by questions borne out of their peculiar relationship to the convulsions of the early modern era" (7). Here is a key point: "While many ancient Christians assented to the basic doctrines that scholars mark as 'evangelical,' that assent took on a different character after the seventeenth-century rebirth of reason and the invention of our present-day notions of 'religious' and 'secular.'"
Again, the same words can have drastically different connotations in different contexts. This is why the "self-evident" meaning of the Bible to people today is often an invention of their own making (and their tradition's) rather than what the original authors understood. This is also the mechanism by which the Spirit gave new meanings to the OT words in the NT (and why Walter Kaiser is a hermeneutical imbecile who should generally be ignored). The Spirit continues to speak to us in this way today.
Another nugget: "The sundry believers who share the evangelical label have all lacked an extrabiblical authority powerful enough to guide them through these crises." Thus, I might add, Tillich's Protestant Principle--in the absence of a standard to determine what the Bible means, Protestantism will continue to multiply into tens of thousands of little groups, all of which are absolutely convinced that they are following the inerrant Bible alone. When you look at 20,000 Protestant denominations, sola scriptura is, from a practical standpoint, completely ineffective as an operating principle.
Evangelicals "are children of estranged parents--Pietism and the Enlightentment--but behave like orphans." That is to say, we pretend like we are following the Bible alone when in fact our beliefs and practices are historically located. She has a great way of saying what so MANY of us have been saying now FOREVER!
3. She ends with something so many of us wrestle with--the movements associated with the evangelical stream have tended toward the anti-intellectual. We might tout our educational institutions as islands of protection from the world and then wanted to be accredited so we could be respectable. These twin drives conflict with each other.
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a long time ago, "Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepticism has entered the soul... Men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold on them has been shaken" (8). WOW! Pictures of several individuals came immediately to mind. "Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt" (also Niebuhr). I like how Worthen notes that so called "anti-intellectuals" are themselves "staunchly committed to ideas" (8).
The book is about the last 70 years of intellectual life (i.e., from the rise of neo-evangelicalism in the 1940s to today). The introduction ends with this: "If American evangelicals do not share a single mind, they do share an imagination: one grounded in a substrate of basic questions about the relationship of faith and experience to human reason, and the direction of the modern world" (11).
The game is afoot!
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