9

ARE POSTCONSERVATIVE
EVANGELICALS FUNDAMENTALISTS?
POSTCONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALISM,
OLD PRINCETON, AND THE
RISE OF NEO-FUNDAMENTALISM¹

Paul Kjoss Helseth

I. INTRODUCTION

The Historiographical Consensus

It has become something of an article of faith in the historiography of American Christianity that the theologians at Old Princeton Seminary were scholastic rationalists whose doctrine of Scripture was shaped by the Scottish Common Sense Realism of the “Didactic Enlightenment” in America.² “The standard line,” Roger Schultz notes, “is that in battling the skeptics of the Enlightenment, Scottish realists demanded an extreme (and unbiblical) standard of authority and certainty, and that the Princetonians incorporated this rationalistic element in their inerrantist doctrine of scripture.”³ According to the accepted wisdom, then, Old Princeton’s doctrine of inerrancy—the tap-root of what is considered to be its rather immodest dogmatism—“is not a biblical doctrine, but rather a bastard ideology of the Enlightenment”⁴ that was woven into the fabric of its highly innovative yet thoroughly modern and epistemologically naïve response to “an increasingly secular culture, on the one hand, and a rising liberal Christianity, on the other.”⁵

The Postconservative Endorsement of the Historiographical Consensus

While a growing body of scholarship is establishing that Old Princeton’s indebtedness to the naïve realism of the Scottish philosophy is more imagined than real, many evangelicals nonetheless endorse the broad outline of the standard critique.⁶ Among those who resonate with the historiographical consensus are those ostensibly irenic individuals who presume that the essence of evangelicalism is found not in “propositional truths enshrined in doctrines,” but rather in “a narrative-shaped experience”⁷ that “is more readily ‘sensed’ than described theologically.”⁸ Believing that Christianity is pri-marily a life and only secondarily a doctrine, these evangelicals lament what Gary Dorrien calls “the fundamentalist evangelical establishment[’s]”⁹ endur-ing preoccupation with “questions of propositional truth,”¹⁰ for such preoc-cupation, they contend, is evidence that much of evangelicalism has yet to move beyond the mindset engendered by the wrenching struggles of the fundamentalist- modernist controversy of the early twentieth century. Indeed, having wed themselves to Old Princeton’s doctrine of inerrancy and thereby to the more divisive tendencies of a scholasticized theology,¹¹ conservative evangelicals, these postconservatives maintain, “have exaggerated the rationalistic dimension of Christian belief”¹² and thus have fallen prey to a kind of theological hubris—even bigotry—that threatens to plunge evangelicalism “back toward fundamentalism.”¹³

Because they are convinced that all cognitive expressions of Christian experience “reflect the particular cultural grid in which they were originally articulated,”¹⁴ and because they consequently agree with Alfred Lord Tennyson that “Our little systems have their day . . . and thou, O Lord, are more than they,”¹⁵ postconservative evangelicals therefore advocate a “revisioning” of the theological task along the lines of “the postliberal research program.”¹⁶ Evangelicalism will become something more than “fundamen-talism with good manners,”¹⁷ they contend, only when evangelicals recognize that doctrines are not “timeless and culture-free” summaries of biblical truth that form the cognitive foundation of faith.¹⁸ Rather, they are “reflection[s] on the faith of the converted people of God whose life together is created and shaped by the paradigmatic narrative embodied in scripture.”¹⁹ Doctrines, as such, are not to be afforded the same exalted status as the experiential “ethos” that unites the disparate elements of the evangelical community into a single body of faith.²⁰ Rather, they must be treated as those secondary reflec-tions on Christian experience “that reflect and guide the converted community of God’s people.”²¹

The Sustainability of the Historiographical Consensus and the Crumbling Foundation of Non foundational Theology

the mWhatevererits of postconservatism’s move away from a “propositionalist understanding of the theological enterprise”²² toward a “narrativistcommuni-tarian model” of theology might be,²³ there is no disputing that postconserva-tives justify this transition in part by rejecting what they regard as the “Enlightenment foundationalist rationalism” of the Princeton Theology.²⁴ “Beneath and behind the postconservatives’ approach to theology,” Roger Olson argues, “lies a growing discontent with evangelical theology’s traditional ties to what Wheaton historian Mark Noll describes as the ‘evangelical Enlightenment,’ especially common-sense realism.”²⁵ While most postconservatives acknowledge that the Princeton theologians were not fundamentalists themselves,²⁶ they nonetheless argue that Old Princeton’s scholastic rational-ism—itself the necessary byproduct of the Princetonians’ somewhat credulous endorsement of Scottish Realism²⁷—was “mediated” to contemporary evangel-icalism through the fundamentalism of the early twentieth century.²⁸ Turn-of-the-century fundamentalists endorsed Old Princeton’s doctrine of inerrancy and thereby accommodated the legacy of Protestant scholastic rationalism, post-conservatives contend, and this legacy, in turn, has been passed on to all those whose decidedly cognitive concerns lead them to seek “an invulnerable founda-tion for theology in an error-free Bible, viewed as the storehouse for divine rev-elation.” ²⁹ “Nowhere is neo-evangelicalism’s genesis in fundamentalism more evident,” Grenz concludes, “than in its theology. The fundamentalist acceptance of the Princeton understanding of inspiration . . . gave a particular nineteenth-century cast to neo-evangelicalism’s emphasis on biblical authority.”³⁰

It is the contention of this chapter that however warranted postconservativism’s repudiation of “evangelical propositionalism”³¹ might be for any one of a number of different reasons, it cannot be justified by appealing to the scholastic rationalism of Old Princeton, simply because the Princeton theolo-gians were not scholastic rationalists. While they certainly were the method-ological disciples of Francis Turretin and consequently conceived of theology as that “science” having to do with God,³² nevertheless they were not beholden for their epistemology to scholasticism or Enlightenment rationalism in a formative sense. For not only did they recognize that objective as well as subjective factors are of critical importance to the life of the mind, but they also based their theology on that combination of head and heart, of “cognitive-doctrinal” and “practical-experiential” factors that postconservatives themselves insist is of defining significance to the mainstream of the evangelical tradition.³³

Thus, in order to challenge the viability of a major component of post-conservatism’s justification for repudiating the “evangelical establishment’s” conception of the theological task, what I undertake in the forthcoming discussion is an analysis of important scholarship that buttresses a point that I have attempted to make in other places, a point that calls into question the alleged philosophical connection between scholastic rationalism and the Princeton Theology.³⁴ That point, in short, is that Old Princeton’s emphasis upon “right reason” and the primacy of the intellect in faith is not evidence that the Princeton theolo-gians were covert, if not overt, rationalists, and the purveyors of a theology that was scholasticized by an “alien philosophy.”³⁵ It is evidence, rather, that they stood in the mainstream of the Reformed tradition, and thereby in the main-stream of the evangelical tradition.³⁶ As such, the forthcoming discussion is a call, of sorts, for evangelicals to reassess the standard interpretation of the Princeton mind so that jaded conclusions are corrected and potentially trou-blesome consequences are avoided. When evangelicals undertake such an examination they will discover that a “superficial reading” of the Princetonians will make them appear “considerably more rationalistic” than they really were.³⁷ They will also conclude, as I do in the concluding section of this chap-ter, that conservatism’s postconservative critics—having rejected a caricature of Old Princeton rather than the views of the Princetonians themselves—are them-selves guilty of some of the worst features that they perceive in their conservative brethren.³⁸

II. REASSESSING THE PRINCETON MIND: THE AUGUSTINIAN OR NON-SCHOLASTIC NATURE OF “RIGHT REASON”

The Rogers and McKim Thesis: Simply False

Any attempt to reassess the standard interpretation of the Princeton mind must demonstrate at least a basic awareness of the Rogers and McKim the-sis, in part because recent critiques—including those of postconservative and Neo-Orthodox theologians—cite their conclusions favorably.³⁹ In The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach, Jack Rogers and Donald McKim argue that the Princeton theologians were not the genuine heirs of the central Christian tradition that they claimed to be in part because their distinctively Reformed commitments were jettisoned by their philosophical assumptions. While the Princetonians were convinced that their view of the Bible was that of orthodox believers throughout the history of the church, in fact their doctrine of Scripture was shaped by their reverence for Turretin and their “uncritical acceptance” of the Scottish philosophy.⁴⁰ These factors not only led them to adopt “wholeheartedly the naïve inductive method of Bacon,” but they also conspired to reverse in their thinking the Augustinian approach of “faith seeking understanding as a theological method.”⁴¹ Indeed, they had an “unbounded confidence” in the competence of human reasoning powers,⁴² yet they failed to recognize that this confidence was fundamentally at odds with the theological commitments of the central Christian tradition:

Despite the constant profession of faithfulness to Calvin and the Augustinian tradition, the Princeton theologians seemed never to fear that their minds had been affected by sin. Their later followers worked out the full implications of this faculty psychology. The Princeton men were sure that sin had made the emotions unreliable. But they held an almost Pelagian confidence that the mind was essentially undisturbed by sin’s influence.⁴³

According to Rogers and McKim, then, Old Princeton’s understanding of the place of Scripture in the central Christian tradition was informed not by sound scholarly analysis but rather by tendentious historical scholarship that was colored by the assumptions of Enlightenment philosophy. This philosophy lent itself to Old Princeton’s narrow apologetical concerns, which cul-minated, as Rogers suggests in a later essay, in B. B. Warfield’s rationalistic appeal “to the natural man’s ‘right reason’ to judge of the truth of Christianity.”⁴⁴ It also subverted the Princetonians’ standing in the Augustinian tradition, for it turned them into scholastic rationalists who were indifferent to the role that subjective and experiential factors play in religious epistemology, and who, as a consequence, “self-consciously and carefully fol-lowed the Thomistic order that reason had to precede faith.”⁴⁵

An important piece of scholarship that challenges the assumptions behind this line of argumentation is the examination of Charles Hodge’s philosophy by Peter Hicks. Although Hicks’s analysis has yet to make much of an impact upon the historiography of the Princeton Theology, it makes a number of important points that call into question prevailing assumptions about Old Princeton, and which, as such, are relevant to the thesis of this chapter.⁴⁶ In The Philosophy of Charles Hodge: A Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Approach to Reason, Knowledge and Truth, Hicks argues that although the Princeton theologians used ideas and expressions that were “influenced by” the Scottish philosophy, “there is no indication in their writings that they saw it as in any way binding, or that they saw [Thomas] Reid, for instance, as the ‘pure’ form by which subsequent deviations were to be tested.”⁴⁷ Indeed, while they agreed with the Scottish philosophers that truth exists objectively, that truth is a unity, and that we can have real, though partial, knowledge of it, “it would seem from the evidence that the Princetonians did not hold this position because Reid and his followers taught it; rather, they accepted the Scottish philosophy because it concurred with their fundamental epistemology.”⁴⁸ At the foundation of their think-ing about knowledge, Hicks suggests, was the conviction that “the basis of epistemological realism” is “theological rather than philosophical.”⁴⁹ That is to say, while the Princetonians “[were] able to agree with the Scottish philosophers that ‘it is universally admitted that we have no foundation for knowledge or faith, but the veracity of consciousness’ [their] own convic-tion went one stage deeper: ‘The ultimate ground of faith and knowledge is confidence in God.’”⁵⁰ God, the Princetonians argued, is not only “the creator and controller of the world and so guarantor of its ontological stability and epistemological coherence.”⁵¹ More importantly, he is the author of our nature who has made us “capable of accurate belief about the exter-nal world and who would not let us be deceived.”⁵² For Hicks, therefore, the Princeton theologians endorsed certain elements of the Scottish philos-ophy neither for purely speculative nor for merely apologetical reasons, but rather because those elements were “a useful means of expressing princi-ples that had their origin in [the Princetonians’] theological convictions.”⁵³ The Princeton theologians were “sophisticated theological realists” rather than “naïve theological realists,” Hicks concludes, and thus they were con-vinced that we can have real knowledge of God and of the external world because God has condescended to make himself and the contents of his mind known “in his works, in our nature, in the Bible, and in Christ,” and because “we have been made deliberately by the creator of the world, and have been endowed with means of obtaining accurate information about that world.”⁵⁴

The Epistemological Context: The Unitary Operation of the “Whole Soul”

How, then, has God made us, and why can we legitimately conclude that Old Princeton’s epistemological assumptions—“especially in the sphere of religion” ⁵⁵—in no way suggest accommodation to scholastic rationalism? One of the most important aspects of Hicks’s analysis is his repeated assertion that Hodge did not divide the soul “into various faculties or aspects,” but rather conceived of the soul as a whole or integrated “unit” that acts in all of its functions—its thinking, its feeling, and its willing—as a single substance.⁵⁶ While this “unified anthropology” was “very much at odds with the current faculty concepts that were based on two centuries of rationalism and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy,” Hodge nonetheless insisted, following Scripture, that our intellects and our wills “are not detachable parts of us which can operate in isolation from each other,” but rather are faculties or powers that act as a single unit in response to the governing disposition of the soul.⁵⁷ “The Scriptures do not contemplate the intellect, the will, and the affections, as independent, separable elements of a composite whole,” he argued. “These faculties are only different forms of activity in one and the same subsistence.”⁵⁸

It is this rejection of the faculty psychology, then, i.e., this conviction that our intellects and our wills “are neither independent nor distinct”⁵⁹ but are both expressions of an integrated whole that is “the thinking, feeling, and will-ing subject in man,”⁶⁰ that suggests at least three factors that are of critical importance to our analysis of the Princeton mind. In the first place, Hodge’s unified anthropology suggests that he conceived of reason in a “broad” and not in a narrow sense,⁶¹ and that he consequently acknowledged that a true or “right” understanding of whatever is apprehended by the mind involves more than just a movement of the rational faculty. Indeed, he recognized that since “[t]here is always an exercise of will in thought, and an exercise of feel-ing in cognition,” a true or “right” understanding of what is rationally perceived involves “not mere intellectual apprehension. . . . It includes also the proper apprehension . . . [of an object’s] qualities; and if those qualities be either esthetic or moral, it includes the due apprehension of them and the state of feeling which answers to them.”⁶² That Hodge conceived of cognition as an activity involving the whole soul is perhaps nowhere more succinctly manifest than in a sermon on knowing Christ. “The knowledge of Christ,” he argued, “. . . is not the apprehension of what he is, simply by the intellect, but also a due apprehension of his glory as a divine person arrayed in our nature, and involves not as its consequence merely, but as one of its elements, the corresponding feeling of adoration, delight, desire and complacency.”⁶³

If Hodge’s emphasis upon the unitary operation of the soul suggests that cognition is an activity involving both the intellect and the will, it also suggests that it is a moral rather than a merely rational enterprise. It also suggests, in other words, that the extent to which truth is apprehended by the mind and then followed in life is ultimately determined not by the rational power of the intellect alone, but rather by the moral character of the know-ing agent. That this is the case, and that Hodge “combined both intellectual apprehension and moral response in the notion of knowledge,”⁶⁴ is clearly revealed in his endorsement of the classical Reformed distinction between a merely “speculative” and a “spiritual” understanding of the gospel, the distinction that grounds his insistence that the teaching of the Spirit is necessary “in order to the right understanding of the Scriptures.”⁶⁵ While Hodge was convinced that the unregenerate can entertain “correct intellectual convic-tions” ⁶⁶ about the truth of Scripture because they can apprehend that truth in a “speculative” or merely rational sense, he nonetheless insisted that they cannot “come to the knowledge of the truth”⁶⁷ because they “cannot know the things of the Spirit.”⁶⁸ They can neither discern the beauty nor taste the sweetness of the truth that they can rationally perceive,⁶⁹ in other words, because a moral defect “in the organ of vision”⁷⁰ prevents a “true” or “right”apprehension of the truth that is presented to their consciousness.⁷¹

The regenerate, on the other hand, can discern the “spiritual excel-lence” ⁷² of what is apprehended by their minds because they have the moral ability to “see and love the beauty of holiness.”⁷³ Indeed, they can “know the things of the Spirit”⁷⁴ because they were infused with “a new spiritual principle” in regeneration,⁷⁵ and as a consequence they “embrace [the truth] with assurance and delight”⁷⁶ because they “see truth to be truth, to be excellent, lovely and divine.”⁷⁷ That “right knowledge as well as right feeling . . . are inseparable effects of a work that affects the whole soul” and that certainly leads to saving faith is made clear in a sermon on delighting in the Law of God.⁷⁸ Delighting in the Law of God, Hodge argued,

is peculiar to the spiritual man, and is due to the influence of the Spirit. This influence is two-fold, or produces a two-fold effect. First, a subjective change in the state of the mind analogous to opening the eyes of the blind. It is such a change as imparts the power of spiritual vision, i.e., the vision of the spiritual excellence of divine things. . . . Second, it produces a revelation of the truth, a presentation of it to the mind in its true nature and relations. This is a special work of the Spirit. . . . The effect of these operations of the Spirit is delighting in the law of God, which includes,

1. An apprehension of its truth and consequent conviction of its divine origin.

2. An apprehension of its excellence, of its purity, of its justice, and its goodness. It is seen to be right, to be morally glorious.

3. An experience of its power to convince, to sanctify, to console, to guide, to render wise unto salvation; an experience of its appropriateness to our necessities. It is seen to suit our nature as rational beings, as moral beings, as sinners.

4. An acquiescence in it, and rejoicing in it, as an exhibition of the character of God, of the rule of duty, of the plan of salvation, of the person and work of Christ, and of the future state. The Scriptures, therefore, are the treasury of truth; the store-house of promises; the granary of spiritual food; the never-failing river of life.⁷⁹

Finally and most importantly, Hodge’s emphasis upon the unitary operation of the soul suggests that he conceived of reason in an Augustinian rather than in a scholastic sense, and thus is not properly regarded as a scholastic rationalist. Although this contention certainly challenges the historiographical consensus, nevertheless it is largely con-firmed by an unlikely source, namely, the historical analysis of the Westminster Confession of Faith by Jack Rogers. In Scripture in the Westminster Confession: A Problem of Historical Interpretation for American Presbyterianism, Rogers alleges that the Princeton theologians “did not develop an historically valid interpretation of Scripture in the Westminster Confession,” in part because they failed to interpret the Confession in light of “the distinctively British background which . . . informed the thinking of the Westminster Divines and which created the context in which they thought and wrote.”⁸⁰ Whereas the Princetonians interpreted the Confession in light of the “Aristotelian and Scholastic”assumptions of “later Continental Reformed orthodoxy” and thus under-emphasized “the witness of the Spirit and the saving purpose of Scripture in their formulation of the doctrine of Scripture,” the Westminster Divines, being “both Puritans and Calvinists,” “placed primary emphasis” on these “motifs” because they drew heavily on “an anti-Aristotelian Augustinianism”⁸¹ that was “a deep-rooted tradition carried on in the Puritan party.”⁸²

One of the “principal threads” in this “anti-Aristotelian Augustinianism,” Rogers argues, and thus one of the primary influences that distinguished the Westminster Divines from their more scholastic counterparts both in England and on the Continent, was “the presence of an Augustinian conception of ‘right reason.’”⁸³ While those who followed Aquinas conceived of “right reason” as a faculty that “was implanted by God in all men, Christian and heathen alike, as a guide to truth and con-duct,” ⁸⁴ those who followed Augustine insisted that the regenerate alone “may rise to an understanding of the truth”⁸⁵ because the regenerate alone have the moral ability to see revealed truth for what it objectively is, namely, glorious. Although those who followed Augustine acknowledged that there is a logical priority of the intellect in faith and thus were not “irrationalists” in any sense of the term, nevertheless they refused to give reason “a sphere of primary authority . . . in religious matters” because they recognized that the intellect and the will work together as a single sub-stance in response to the governing inclination of the soul.⁸⁶ Indeed, they recognized that there is an intimate connection between the unitary operation of the soul and the quality of the reception of revealed truth, and as a consequence they insisted that the ability to apprehend revealed truth in something more than a merely speculative sense necessitates that the depravity “of both intellect and will” be taken away “by the power of God.”⁸⁷

For the followers of Augustine, therefore, “right reason” is not a faculty all human beings possess that forms the epistemological foundation for a natural theology and a naïve approach to evidentialist apologetics. Rather, it is an epistemological ability of the regenerated soul “which acknowledges the authority of God and which functions for moral, not [merely] speculative ends.”⁸⁸ Whereas Rogers and McKim⁸⁹ would have us believe that Hodge’s assimilation of the Scottish philosophy subverted his commitment to an Augustinian understanding of “right reason” and turned him into a scholastic rationalist who afforded reason “an independent sphere of oper-ation prior to faith,” in fact his understanding of “right reason” is remark-ably similar to that of the Westminster Divines.⁹⁰ For not only did he recognize that reasoning itself is an inherently moral enterprise involving all the powers of the soul, but he also acknowledged that the extent to which truth is apprehended by the mind and then followed in life is ultimately determined by the moral character of the knowing agent. This suggests, in short, that “it [is] inappropriate to categorize Hodge as a doctrinaire ratio-nalist or a curmudgeonly scholastic,”⁹¹ for he stood with the Westminster Divines in the mainstream of an epistemological tradition that was, as Rogers himself insists, “quite clearly” opposed to the rationalism of the scholastic tradition.⁹²

Postconservative Evangelicalism’s Misunderstanding of
the Princeton Mind

If we assume, for the purposes of this chapter, that Hodge’s epistemological assumptions are representative of those of the best thinkers in the Princeton tradition, then we have grounds for concluding that postconservatism’s repudiation of Old Princeton’s “propositionalist understanding of the theological enterprise” is based upon at least two profound misunderstandings of the Princeton mind. The first has to do with the alleged rationalism of the Princeton theologians. Whereas postconservatives follow the consensus of critical opinion and thus presume that the theologians at Old Princeton Seminary were scholastic rationalists who were indifferent to the subjective and experiential components of religious epistemology, in fact the Princetonians were committed Augustinians who conceived of reason in a moral rather than a merely rational sense. They recognized, in other words, that the reception of revealed truth is an activity involving the “whole soul”rather than the rational faculty alone, and consequently they insisted, the allegations of Rogers and McKim notwithstanding,⁹³ that the regenerate alone could apprehend this truth in a “right” or saving sense. As Iain Murray has incisively argued:

The use of the mind is not “rationalism”; it all depends on whether that use is right or wrong. Rationalism is a use of the mind which trusts in its own ability to arrive at truth about God without his aid and apart from revelation: it treats the mind as a source of knowledge rather than as a channel. The Enlightenment was a classic demonstration of innate human pride in the exaltation of the human intellect. To equate that spirit with the teaching of the Princeton men, who believed that it is the grace of God alone which sets men free to understand, is to stand truth on its head.⁹⁴

The second misunderstanding follows from the first and has to do with the nature of Old Princeton’s opposition to the rise of theological liberalism. While the Princeton theologians certainly were convinced that those who are “taught by God” articulate their thoughts about the things of God in an “orthodox” fashion,⁹⁵ nevertheless their opposition to the rise of theological liberalism was grounded in more than just a stubborn reluctance to allow “more light and truth to break forth from God’s Word” (after all, even B. B. Warfield was a proponent of “progressive orthodoxy”).⁹⁶ The Princetonians were opposed to the rise of theological liberalism, in short, not simply because liberals advanced interpretations of doctrine that differed from their own dogmatic assertions, but more specifically because liberals conceived of doctrines in an “anti-intellectual” or “feminized” sense.⁹⁷ Whereas the Princetonians conceived of doctrines as foundational summaries of biblical truth that must be believed in order for there to be faith, liberals conceived of doctrines as little more than expressions of an ineffable religious experience for a particular time and place. They considered doctrines to be true, in other words, not because they corresponded to real states of affairs in the external world, but rather because they captured the subjective experience of religion in the thought forms of a particular age.⁹⁸

Although this pragmatic conception of truth certainly allowed for a broadening of theological boundaries along intra- and even intertextual lines, it needed to be opposed, the Princetonians reasoned, because it left fallen sinners without access to a source of salvation outside of their own (or their community’s) experience. Indeed, it presumed an experiential orientation that emptied the Christian religion of enduring cognitive substance, and as a consequence it engendered a progressive inclination that confounded the stating of Christian belief “in terms of modern thought” with the stating of modern thought “in terms of Christian belief.”⁹⁹ While the denominational heirs of classical theological liberalism have milked this progressive tendency for practically all it is worth,¹⁰⁰ it is unfortunately enjoying something of a renaissance in certain quarters of the evangelical camp, albeit in a strangely nuanced form.¹⁰¹ That this is the case, and that a new kind of fundamental-ism is rising within the ranks of those who are searching for a “generous orthodoxy” with a large, forgiving center,¹⁰² is manifest in the baldly imperi-alistic tendencies of postconservative evangelicals like Robert Webber.

III. PARADIGM THINKING AND THE POSTCONSERVATIVE
EVANGELICAL

The Postconservative Project

According to Robert Webber, Professor of Ministry at Northern Seminary and a prominent leader in the postconservative evangelical movement, the thinking of the evangelical community has been shaped by the “paradigm”of the modern era for too long, and thus it is high time for evangelicals to “rethink” the faith for a postmodern age. His recent offering, Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World, is intended for precisely this purpose. Evangelicals will liberate themselves from their bondage to the rationalistic assumptions of Enlightenment thought and faith-fully “re-present” the faith in our postmodern world, he suggests, neither by “preserving the Christian faith in its modern form,” nor by running “head-long into the sweeping changes that accommodate Christianity to postmodern forms.”¹⁰³ They will “re-present” the faith “in a fresh way,” rather, by recovering the insights of an age very similar to our own, namely that of clas- sical Christianity (100–600 A.D.).¹⁰⁴ “The fundamental concern of this book,” Webber writes,

is to find points of contact between classical Christianity and postmodern thought. Classical Christianity was shaped in a pagan and relativistic society much like our own. Classical Christianity was not an accommodation to paganism but an alternative practice of life. Christians in a postmodern world will succeed, not by watering down the faith, but by being a countercultural community that invites people to be shaped by the story of Israel and Jesus.¹⁰⁵

At first glance, the basic thrust of Webber’s proposal will undoubtedly resonate with thoughtful members of the “evangelical establishment.” After all, both Luther and Calvin were indebted to the insights of classical Christianity, and even B. B. Warfield, the “lion of strict Presbyterian orthodoxy,” ¹⁰⁶ insisted that Christians must state their beliefs in terms of the thought of the age in which they live.¹⁰⁷ More critical readers will quickly rec-ognize, however, that Webber’s approach to the Christian faith is altogether different from “the Book-oriented approach” of Luther, Calvin, and Warfield.¹⁰⁸ Indeed, whereas evangelicals like Warfield emphasize “the foundational nature of Scripture” and consequently acknowledge that the Christian faith can be “rationally explained and defended,” Webber insists that the authoritative nexus of both faith and truth is found in an inherently mysterious, “event-oriented perception of the world” that is handed down from age to age in “the community of God’s presence,” the church.¹⁰⁹Webber therefore argues that the responsibility of the church in the postmodern world is not to recover an articulation of this perception that was “incarnated” in an earlier age.¹¹⁰ It is rather to “construct a theology that will be consistent with historic Christianity yet relevant to our new time in culture.”¹¹¹ What is needed, he contends, is a faithful application of the essence of the Christian faith “to a postmodern worldview.”¹¹²

Paradigm Thinking and the Continuity of the Christian Tradition

At the heart of Webber’s attempt “to interface historic Christian truths into the dawning of a new era” is his insistence that evangelicals will “face the changing cultural situation with integrity” only if they allow themselves to think paradigmatically.¹¹³ According to Webber, there have been six discernible “paradigms of time” throughout the history of the church in which believers have struggled to articulate the essence of the faith in response to the prevailing cultural circumstances of the day.¹¹⁴ While the circumstances have changed from age to age and the “incarnations” of the faith have thus varied according to “the specific cultural context in which [they were] expressed (e.g., medieval Roman versus sixteenth-century Reformation),”what has remained constant throughout the ages, Webber contends, is a “transcultural framework of faith . . . that has been blessed by sociocultural particularity in every period of church history.”¹¹⁵ Since the “multiplicities of faith expressions” reflect merely the “attempts within a particular cultural moment and geographical place to express the faith in a fresh way,” those who would “incarnate the historic faith in the emerging culture” will do so only by recovering “the framework of faith that is common to the diver-sity.” 116 It follows, therefore, that if we would faithfully “re-present” the faith in the postmodern context we must not “root” or “freeze” our understand-ing of the faith in a particular “incarnation” of the faith from the past (like that of the Reformation, for example).¹¹⁷ Rather, we must “affirm the whole church in all its previous manifestations” by retrieving

the universally accepted framework of faith that originated with the apostles, was developed by the Fathers, and has been handed down by the church in its liturgical and theological traditions. . . . Our calling is not to reinvent the Christian faith, but, in keeping with the past, to carry forward what the church has affirmed from its beginning. We change . . . “not to be different, but to remain the same.”¹¹⁸

While there is little doubt that most conservative readers will be intrigued by Webber’s call for theological reconstruction, they likely will wonder if the call sounds plausible only because Webber has emptied religious language of real significance. After all, they might ask, is it not possible that one theo-logical formulation differs from another because the framers of the two formulations were actually talking about different religious realities? In other words, if the words that are used in theological formulations are significant precisely because the framers presume that the words they use correspond to extra-linguistic realities, and if as a consequence the framers of those formulations are convinced of the extra-linguistic truthfulness of the particular “incarnation” they affirm, then can it really be true that “while we are all Christians, some of us are Roman Catholic Christians, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Reformation Christians, twentieth-century evangelical Christians, or some other form of modern or postmodern Christians”?¹¹⁹

It can and indeed it must be true, Webber assures us, if all genuine expressions of the faith in fact share a common core. What, then, might this unify-ing core be? The answer is found in the assumptions that inform “the hermeneutic of paradigm thinking.”¹²⁰ In the first place, Webber insists that religious truth is found in subjective encounter with the classical origins of the Christian tradition. Following the postmodern theorist Hans-Georg Gadamer, Webber argues that it is possible for one paradigm of history to speak to another because it is possible for an individual living in one historical “horizon” to “fuse” with the “horizon” that is the source of the tradi-tion. ¹²¹ In Webber’s thinking, this “fusion” takes place in the life and worship of the church, the “body of Christ” that is the living sign of Christus Victor, “the community of people where the victory of Christ over evil becomes pre-sent in and to this world.”¹²²

In the second place, Webber contends that a “fusion of horizons” is possible in the community of faith because the truth-value of the religious utter-ances that sustain the community—be they the propositions of Scripture or of historic confessions—is not found in a correspondence between the words themselves and the extra-linguistic realities to which they refer, but in the reli-gious function those words perform. Following the “cultural-linguistic”approach of postliberal theologian George Lindbeck, Webber insists that the truth-value of religious utterances is “intratextual” rather than “extra-textual.” ¹²³ That is to say, religious utterances are true because they form a perspective on life that is consistent with the perspective of a particular tradition, not because they correspond to “extratextual” reality as such.¹²⁴ Since the perception of the world that is characteristic of the Christian tradition was articulated by the apostles and summarized by the early church in the “rule of faith” (the classical summary of the apostolic interpretation of the Christ event that is embodied in the ecumenical creeds), it follows that the religious utterances of Christians from various “frame[s] of reference” are true to the extent that they form a “framework of thought” that is shaped by the cen-tral component of that “rule,” namely the cosmic reality of Christus Victor.¹²⁵ The theme of Christus Victor, Webber insists, is “central to the classical Christian vision of reality. It does not stand alone, but is connected to all other aspects of the Christian faith as the central thread to the entire tapestry.”¹²⁶

When we consider Webber’s call for unity within diversity in light of these hermeneutical assumptions, the justification for his reluctance to make one expression of the faith the “standard” by which all other expressions are measured suddenly comes into clearer focus.¹²⁷ The church is the community of faith in which the perception of the world that is grounded in the reality of Christus Victor and summarized in the “rule of faith” is “handed over” from one generation of believers to another in the life and worship of the body, the “fellowship in faith.”¹²⁸ The task of the church in each successive age and in every sociocultural context, then, is not to explain and defend a specific incar-nation of the faith (for the essence of faith is found in a perspective on life rather than in submission to propositions that correspond to objective real-ity as such). It is, rather, first to express the faith “within the context of his- tory and culture” through “the critical use of human methods of thought,” and then to beckon “seekers” into the ongoing fellowship of the community so that their perspective on life can be shaped by that which is shared by all genuine expressions of the faith, namely the perception of the world that is embodied in the Word, liturgy, and symbolism of the “people of the Event.”¹²⁹ “The goal of the church,” Webber contends,

is to be a divine standard, a sign of God’s incarnational presence and activity in history. In a postmodern world the most effective witness to a world of disconnected people is the church that forms community and embodies the reality of the new society. People in a postmodern world are not persuaded to faith by reason as much as they are moved to faith by participa-tion in God’s earthly community.¹³⁰

Say What? The Imperialistic Nature of
Neo-Fundamentalism

No matter what one’s initial reaction to Webber’s proposal might be, even the harshest critic must concede that the typical author would kill for the kinds of reviews Ancient-Future Faith has received. Clark Pinnock, for example, not only suggests that Ancient-Future Faith presents a faith that has “the power to speak to the postmodern world,” but more significantly he praises Webber in much the same way that the editors of liberal newspapers praise staunchly conservative politicians for voting in the “correct” fashion on conspicuous social issues.¹³¹ Just as editors cite those votes as evidence that the politician in question has “grown” while in office, so too Pinnock cites Ancient-Future Faith as evidence of “Webber’s own experience of growth as a hearer of God’s Word.”¹³²

Most conservative readers will likely wonder, however, just what exactly it is that Webber has been hearing, for his proposal is marred by an ambivalence that undermines his attempt to move the evangelical camp out of the modern era and into the postmodern paradigm, an ambivalence that I would suggest is characteristic of the postconservative project. While Webber incisively critiques the deleterious influence that modern thought has had and continues to have on certain habits of the evangelical mind, nevertheless his own proposal is profoundly modern in three distinct yet interrelated senses.¹³³ In the first place, it is based upon the assumption that Christianity is, as J. Gresham Machen used to say when critiquing theological liberalism, “a life, not a doctrine.”¹³⁴ Postconservative evangelicals do not draw people into the Kingdom of God by proclaiming propositions that articulate the objective foundations of the Christian life; rather they draw people into the corporate experience of the “fellowship in faith,” and it is this experience that then moves seekers to embrace the “framework of faith” in some mysterious fashion. ¹³⁵ As Machen made clear in his classic work Christianity and Liberalism, such an approach not only has it backwards, but more importantly it can sur-vive only because its advocates tragically presume that fallen sinners need an ineffable experience rather than a gospel that is proclaimed objectively.

If Webber’s proposal is profoundly modern in one sense because it con-founds the relationship between life and doctrine, it is so in another because it presumes that the sine qua non of the Christian religion is subjective rather than objective. This presumption, which is grounded in the modern era’s relocation of the divine-human nexus, is perhaps nowhere more clearly manifest than in the “communal epistemology” that informs Webber’s functional understand-ing of doctrine.¹³⁶ “Information,” he contends, “is no longer something that can be objectively known and verified through evidence and logic. Knowledge is more subjective and experiential. Knowledge comes through participation in a community and in an immersion with the symbols and the meaning of the com-munity.” ¹³⁷ When the relationship between life and doctrine is considered in light of this decidedly anti-intellectual understanding of religious epistemology, it becomes immediately clear that religious life precedes doctrine in Webber’s thinking not because there is something substandard about doctrine itself, but rather because doctrines qua doctrines must be kept in their proper place. Doctrines are not important because they carry the “‘cognitive and informational meaningfulness’” that must be appropriated in order for there to be faith.¹³⁸ Rather, they are the expressions of faith that sustain the religious life of the community and mediate the “framework of faith” to those who are drawn into the corporate experience of the “fellowship in faith.” Doctrines, in short, are of secondary—not primary—significance, because they simply express the “framework of faith” for a particular time and place.¹³⁹

Finally, Webber’s proposal is profoundly modern because his functional understanding of truth reduces to pragmatism. Not only does he insist that Scripture must be read “theologically” rather than propositionally—i.e., we read the text not to discover the foundational meaning of the text but to ask how “this book, this passage, this verse has been used in the history of the church” to form the life of the people of God—but he also contends that doctrines are true to the extent that they form a “framework of thought” that is consistent with the perspective of the Christian tradition.¹⁴⁰ The truth-value of the Nicene Creed, for example, “is not to be found in words that corre-spond with an exact reality, but in words that truthfully signify the religious reality of the Trinity in the system of thought (in this case, Hellenistic) in which it is articulated.”¹⁴¹ But as F. LeRon Shults has incisively argued, although the Nicene Divines certainly developed doctrines in order to shape the life of the Christian community, they did so “because of certain things they thought were ontologically true.”¹⁴² Surely, to miss this point is to gut the creed of its truth content, to consign the believer to “a theological culdesac of the worst kind, mired in the circular reasoning of fideism,”¹⁴³ and to raise the specter of religious imperialism. In an age when all truth claims are reduced to the level of subjective preference, any claim to universal truthfulness that is not grounded in an objective state of affairs in the external world will smack of precisely that kind of religious chauvinism that committed post-modernists rightly despise. While Webber repeatedly asserts that the Christian narrative is universally true, he fails to recognize that such an assertion is baldly imperialistic when it is grounded in nothing more than the experiential “ethos” of the believing community.¹⁴⁴ Indeed, we could say that it is in the inherently chauvinistic nature of truth claims that presume a functional understanding of truth while simultaneously privileging the corporate expe-rience of the Christian community that the fundamentalism of postconser-vative evangelicalism is to be found.¹⁴⁵

IV. CONCLUSION

I have argued in this chapter that despite what the consensus of critical opinion would have us believe, the Princeton theologians ought not to be regarded as scholastic rationalists, because they conceived of reason in a moral rather than a merely rational sense. They recognized, in other words, that cognition involves the “whole soul” rather than the rational faculty alone, and consequently they insisted that the regenerate alone could apprehend revealed truth in a “right” or saving sense. I have also suggested that since postconservatism’s repudiation of Old Princeton’s “propositionalist understanding of the theological enterprise” presumes the consensus of critical opinion, this repudiation, in short, is based upon a caricature of Old Princeton rather than upon the views of the Princetonians themselves. This is unfortunate, not simply because it severs postconservative evangelicals from the epistemological capital of Old Princeton’s emphasis upon the unity of head and heart, but more significantly because it leaves them without the epistemological where-withal to claim that the Christian worldview is universally true. Without the willingness to affirm that the regenerate are “taught by God,” and without the eagerness to acknowledge that this teaching has reference to something more than merely subjective states of affairs, all claims to universal truthfulness—even those articulated by the most irenic among us—necessarily clank with the bigoted ring “of triumphalism, elitism, and separatism, which is the hallmark of fundamentalism.”¹⁴⁶

This, then, is what I take to be one of the more significant obstacles to the viability of postconservative evangelicalism’s “narrativist-communitarian model” of theology. While postconservative evangelicals are convinced that the heart of Christian faith is found in an “identity-producing” experience that is facilitated by an “interpretive framework” that is shaped by an “identity-constituting narrative,” they nonetheless acknowledge that different kinds of religious experiences are facilitated by different kinds of “interpre-tive frameworks.”¹⁴⁷ But if all that sets one religious experience apart from another is the “interpretive framework” that facilitates the experience, on what basis can Christians claim that their experience is truer than another, when the truth-value of the religious utterances that shape their “interpretive framework”—including the utterances of Scripture and of historic confes-sions—is functional rather than propositional, “intratextual” rather than “extratextual”? Postconservatives might suggest that the universal truthfulness of the Christian narrative is ultimately found in “the explicative power of the Christian faith,” and in “the value of the Christian worldview for illu-minating human experience, as well as our human understanding of our world.”¹⁴⁸ Yet how can such claims be anything more than blatantly chau-vinistic when they are grounded in utterances that themselves can only be sub-jectively true? Although Grenz and Webber and their postconservative colleagues might imagine that the “explicative power” of the Christian faith surpasses that of other religious traditions, thinkers from other religious traditions—who are similarly convinced of the “explicative power” of their own “interpretive frameworks”—will certainly want to know who died and left the postconservatives in charge. A number of years ago, Millard Erickson zeroed in on this problem with characteristic clarity, and it is with his evaluation that I conclude this chapter:

We now are aware of the claims of other religions, whose adherents are to be found even within what have previously been primarily Christian cultures. Many of them have the same sort of subjective certitude about the validity of their faith as do Christians. If indeed postconservative evangelicals hold that Christianity is the true religion, they must make some note of this phenomenon and offer a further reason for their conclusion. If not, this either looks like ethnocentrism or at least ignorance of the postmodern scene.¹⁴⁹

1 This chapter is a revised edition of an essay published previously as, “‘Re-Imagining’ the Princeton Mind: Postconservative Evangelicalism, Old Princeton, and the Rise of Neo-Fundamentalism,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 45 (September 2002): 427-450. Material published previously is used with permission.

2 According to Henry May, the Didactic Enlightenment was in part a counter-Enlightenment because it espoused “a variety of thought which was opposed both to skepticism and revolution, but tried to save from what it saw as the debacle of the Enlightenment the intelligible universe, clear and certain moral judgments, and progress” (The Enlightenment in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1976], xvi).

3 Roger Schultz, “Evangelical Meltdown: The Trouble with Evangelhistoire,” Contra Mundum 2 (Winter 1992); available online at http://www.visi.com/~contra_m/cm/columns/cm02_meltdown.html.

4 Ibid.

5 Stanley J. Grenz, Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological Era (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2000), 73; cf. Gary Dorrien, The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (Louisville:Westminster John Knox, 1998), 13-47.

6 See the literature cited in my articles on Old Princeton: Paul Kjoss Helseth, “B. B. Warfield on the Apologetic Nature of Christian Scholarship: An Analysis of His Solution to the Problem of the Relationship Between Christianity and Culture,” Westminster Theological Journal 62 (Spring 2000): 89111; idem, “‘Right Reason’ and the Princeton Mind: The Moral Context,” The Journal of Presbyterian History 77 (Spring 1999): 13-28; idem, “B. B. Warfield’s Apologetical Appeal to ‘Right Reason’: Evidence of a ‘Rather Bald Rationalism’?” The Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 16 (Autumn 1998): 156177; idem, “The Apologetical Tradition of the OPC: A Reconsideration,” Westminster Theological Journal 60 (Spring 1998): 109-129.

7 Roger E. Olson, “Postconservative Evangelicals Greet the Postmodern Age,” Christian Century 112 (May 3, 1995): 481.

8 Stanley J. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology: A Fresh Agenda for the Twenty-first Century (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 31; cf. idem, “Concerns of a Pietist with a Ph.D.,”Wesleyan Theological Journal 36 (Fall 2002): 60-64, 70; Robert E. Webber, The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2002), 27, 31, 37.

9 Dorrien, Remaking of Evangelical Theology, 10; cf. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 21-35.

10 Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 26.

11 According to Jack Rogers and Donald McKim, the Princetonians developed a doctrine of Scripture “that would engender continuing strife on the American religious scene” (The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979], 247).

12 Dorrien, Remaking of Evangelical Theology, 195.

13 Olson, “Postconservative Evangelicals Greet the Postmodern Age,” 480, 482. The word “fundamentalism” is being used in this chapter in the largely negative sense in which it is used by Roger E. Olson in “The Future of Evangelical Theology,” Christianity Today 42 (February 9, 1998): 40-48. As such, it is being used in the sense that has less to do with the affirmation of particular doctrines than it does with the dogmatic manner in which those doctrines are affirmed, for it describes a way of thinking about and doing theology that leads to a kind of gratuitous arrogance, i.e., to unwarranted “triumphalism, elitism, and separatism” (ibid., 47). On the “religious bigotry” of those who insist upon drawing distinct boundaries between theological views that are thought to be acceptable and unacceptable, see the comments of Robert Webber in Between Peril and Promise, ed. James R. Newby and Elizabeth Newby (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1984), 111. Interestingly, Webber’s remarkably harsh intimation that evangelicals who are “enmeshed in modern categories of thought” articulate the faith in a more or less bigoted fashion itself borders on bigotry. It is, moreover, a fine example of special pleading. Unlike their modern counterparts who have an ahistorical understanding of the faith, the younger evangelicals, Webber argues, “are humbled by the complexity of truth, and they are gentle and generous toward those who differ. The younger evangelicals are not fighters intent on splitting churches. They are not dogmatic zealots or mean-spirited close-minded bigots. They seek to hold that which has always been held by all and affirm affection for those with whom they differ. Their love of the ancient and their return to tradition has given them this ‘catholic spirit’” (Younger Evangelicals, 79, 81).

14 Alan F. Johnson and Robert E. Webber, What Christians Believe: A Biblical and Historical Summary (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1989), ix-x, emphasis theirs.

15 Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam.”

16 Cf. F. LeRon Shults, “Truth Happens? The Pragmatic Conception of Truth and the Postliberal Research Program,” Princeton Theological Review 4 (February 1997): 26-36.

17 Dorrien, Remaking of Evangelical Theology, 9.

18 Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 67.

19 Olson, “Postconservative Evangelicals Greet the Postmodern Age,” 481.

20 Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 30-35.

21 Olson, “Postconservative Evangelicals Greet the Postmodern Age,” 481.

22 Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 67.

23 Dorrien, Remaking of Evangelical Theology, 195.

24 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 70; cf. Rodney Clapp, “How Firm a Foundation: Can Evangelicals Be Nonfoundationalists?” in The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Liberals in Conversation, ed. Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis Okholm (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1996), 83-84.

25 Olson, “Postconservative Evangelicals Greet the Postmodern Age,” 481; cf. Grenz, Renewing the Center, 71; Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994), 83-107.

26 For example, see Roger E. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1999), 556-561; Grenz, Renewing the Center, 79. For a notable exception, see Webber, Younger Evangelicals, 81.

27 For example, see Grenz, Renewing the Center, 73; Olson, Story of Christian Theology, 558; Dorrien, Remaking of Evangelical Theology, 23-28.

28 Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 65-72; cf. idem, “Concerns of a Pietist with a Ph.D.,” 6568; Webber, Younger Evangelicals, 31, 37.

29 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 70; cf. 70-84.

30 Ibid., 83. For a noteworthy response to this contention, see Kenneth J. Stewart, “That Bombshell of a Book: Gaussen’s Theopneustia and Its Influence on Subsequent Evangelical Theology” (paper presented at the Wheaton Theology Conference, Spring 2001): 15-18. Stewart suggests that since 1950, “Evangelical thinking about the Bible has, without our realizing it, been in process of necessary recovery [not from the influence of Warfield and Old Princeton, but] from the exaggerated emphases of [Gaussen’s] Theopneustia.”

31 Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 65.

32 Cf. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 3 vols., trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1992), 1:1-3.

33 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 84, cf. 44-47; idem, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 22-26; idem, “Concerns of a Pietist with a Ph.D.,” 71-76; Olson, “Future of Evangelical Theology,” 42. In a recent article, Mark Noll insists, “the difficulty with [Charles] Hodge’s view of the spiritual life was not a neglect of lived religious experience, of the person, or of the affections. It was rather his predilection for affirming Christianity both as a set of scriptural doctrines and as a living connection with Christ, while yet never finding a way to bring these two affirmations into cohesive unity” (“Charles Hodge as an Expositor of the Spiritual Life,” in Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work, ed. John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002], 191-192). It is the contention of this chapter that both of these affirmations are more or less unified in Hodge’s understanding of “right reason.” If this contention is essentially correct, then it follows that: (1) the weaknesses Noll cites in his analysis of Hodge’s exposition of the spiritual life (cf. ibid., 205) are significantly less troublesome than they might otherwise appear to be; and (2) postconservatives who cite Hodge’s alleged shortcomings as justification for advancing new theological methodologies or epistemologies must be on guard lest they fall prey to a kind of iconoclasm that pressures evangelicals to make what Richard J. Mouw calls, in this regard, “some false choices.” With respect to this second point, Mouw worries about what he regards as “an iconoclastic spirit that often manifests itself in evangelical calls for new constructive theological initiatives.” In short, he is not confident that recent evangelical efforts “to clear the way for new theological paths” will accomplish “much that is good,” in part because these efforts appear to be based upon misrepresentations of the evangelical heritage. He suggests, “What some of my evangelical friends seem to be after in calling for such new moves [—including the moves toward a theological interpretation of the text and a combination of head and heart in religious epistemology—] seems already to be there in past evangelical thinkers who have helped me in my theological journey” (“Comments on Grenz Paper and ‘The Word Made Fresh’” [presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Toronto, November 2002]: 2; cf. idem, “How Should Evangelicals Do Theology? Delete the ‘Post’ from ‘Postconservative,’” Books and Culture [May/June 2001]: 21-22). For an example of iconoclasm, note that Robert Webber writes as if virtually all traditional evangelicals neglected the importance of the heart in religious epistemology. See Younger Evangelicals, 52-53, 103.

34 Please see the articles cited in note 6 above.

35 This is the general theme of John Vander Stelt’s Philosophy and Scripture: A Study of Old Princeton and Westminster Theology (Marlton, N.J.: Mack, 1978). The Dutch and Neo-Orthodox branches of the Reformed camp generally agree with this critique of Old Princeton, as do the postconservative scholars with whom I am familiar.

36 Obviously, I think that the Reformed interpretation of the history of evangelicalism is largely correct.I recognize, however, that the issues involved are complex, which is why I like what Douglas A. Sweeney has to say about the matter: “When the historiographical wrangling ends and the dust settles, it may well be seen that ‘Reformed’ and ‘Holiness’ themes, indeed Calvinist/forensic/confessional and Arminian/realistic/revivalist themes, have been functioning dialectically all along (for better and for worse) in both evangelical history and evangelical historiography. In evangelical history, Arminianism and Wesleyanism (even Pentecostalism, though less directly) have arisen, not in seclusion, but from within Reformed Protestantism. They were not intended as radically new alternatives but as correctives to trends prevalent among other more established members of the Reformed family. Likewise in recent evangelical historiography, [Donald] Dayton and the Holiness camp have offered criticisms of and provided helpful correctives to trends prevalent within the more established Reformed paradigm” (“Historiographical Dialectics: On Marsden, Dayton, and the Inner Logic of Evangelical History,” Christian Scholar’s Review 23, no. 1 [1993]: 52). For an overview of the debate over the essential character of evangelicalism, see the entire issues of the Christian Scholar’s Review 23, no. 1 (1993); and Modern Reformation 10, no. 2 (March/April 2001). See also the recent “Reflection and Response” involving Michael S. Horton and Roger E. Olson in Christian Scholar’s Review 31, no. 2 (2001): 131-168.

37 Peter Hicks, The Philosophy of Charles Hodge: A Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Approach to Reason, Knowledge and Truth (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1997), 115. Richard Mouw concurs with this assessment. See his “Comments on Grenz Paper and ‘The Word Made Fresh.’”

38 Among these is the kind of dogmatism that breeds both fundamentalism and an inability to engage in genuine dialogue with those with whom they have serious theological disagreements. One of the more exasperating aspects of life under the “big tent” of contemporary evangelicalism is the tendency of postconservatives to call for dialogue with their conservative brethren without acknowledging that the kind of dialogue they are encouraging can take place only if conservatives concede from the start that postconservative assumptions are correct. See, for example, Michael Horton’s “Response to Roger Olson’s Reply,” 165, 166, in which Horton, a confessional Protestant, chastises Olson for doing the very thing he (Olson) deplores in others, namely claiming the evangelical tent for his party. “By making his own heritage, which emphasizes the individual’s experience, definitive for the whole of evangelicalism,”Horton suggests, “[Olson] has pushed the rest of us to the margins.” Obviously, the same could be said of many conservatives. The point, though, is that while the conservative has an epistemological basis for affirming a kind of dogmatism, the postconservative, as far as I can tell, does not. For a brief explanation of how the word “fundamentalism” is being used in this chapter, please see note 13 above.

39 For example, cf. Grenz, Renewing the Center, 77; Olson, Story of Christian Theology, 566, 639 n. 23; Dorrien, Remaking of Evangelical Theology, 215 n. 19.

40 Rogers and McKim, Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, 289.

41 Ibid., 289, 296; cf. 269; 289-290.

42 Ibid. 245; see also Lefferts Loetscher, The Broadening Church: A Study of Theological Issues in the Presbyterian Church Since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1957), 70.

43 Rogers and McKim, Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, 290.

44 Jack B. Rogers, “Van Til and Warfield on Scripture in the Westminster Confession,” in Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Philosophy and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til, ed. E. R. Geehan (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1980), 154, emphasis his.

45 Rogers and McKim, Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, 296. In personal correspondence that is cited with permission, Stanley Grenz suggests that Old Princeton’s theological method is problematic not primarily because of its “dependence” upon the Scottish philosophy (“although this is not to be discounted”), but because of its “indebtedness to the method of empirical science . . . inherited from the Enlightenment, which led [the Princetonians] . . . to model theology on the pattern of the natural sciences.This legacy in turn was passed on to neo-evangelicalism via fundamentalism,” and neo-evangelicals then elevated this program “to normative status” (Stanley J. Grenz to Paul Kjoss Helseth, November 21, 2001).While I welcome Grenz’s eagerness to downplay the significance of Scottish Common Sense Realism, I wonder if taking the focus off of the Scottish philosophy and placing it on Old Princeton’s inductive method hurts rather than helps his critique. According to the historiographical consensus the Princetonians “modeled theology on the pattern of the natural sciences” precisely because their accommodation of Scottish Common Sense Realism jettisoned their commitment to the distinctive emphases of Reformed orthodoxy, including the noetic effects of sin. Although I disagree with this consensus, I nonetheless acknowledge that if the Princetonians in fact were “dependent” upon the Scottish philosophy, then their employment of an inductive method was extremely problematic, because it was then simply the practical outworking of warmed-over humanism. Thus, by downplaying the significance of Scottish Common Sense Realism, I wonder if Grenz is downplaying the primary reason for being opposed to an inductive method in the first place. As far as I can tell, the problem is not an inductive method per se, but an inductive method that has been bastardized by humanistic philosophical assumptions. What I am trying to establish in this chapter is that since the Princetonians themselves were not unduly influenced by such assumptions, one cannot repudiate their approach to doing theology by repudiating the methodological indiscretions of those who in fact have sacrificed the theological integrity of Old Princeton’s method to the assumptions of an essentially humanistic philosophy. To state the matter clearly, I would suggest that if there is in fact a problem with “a propositionalist understanding of the theological enterprise,” it is not to be found in the consistently Reformed understanding of the Princetonians, but in the latent humanism of their later-day friends, especially their later-day Arminian friends. On the relationship between humanism, Scottish Common Sense Realism, and the historiography of American Christianity, cf. Helseth, “‘Right Reason’ and the Princeton Mind,” 19-21. For Richard Mouw’s rather sympathetic comments on induction, cf.“Comments on Grenz Paper and ‘The Word Made Fresh.’”

46 According to John W. Stewart, Hicks’s work addresses three important “lacunae” in the current scholarship about Hodge: first, “the degree to which Hodge may be characterized properly as a rationalist”; second, the nature of Hodge’s relationship to Schleiermacher and other nineteenth-century romantic thinkers; and third, “Hodge’s understanding—and eventual dismissal—of Immanuel Kant”(review of The Philosophy of Charles Hodge by Peter Hicks, in The Journal of Presbyterian History 77 [Spring 1999]: 64-65).

47 Hicks, Philosophy of Charles Hodge, 206, 26.

48 Ibid., 28.

49 Ibid., 166.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 167; cf. 206.

52 Ibid., 168.

53 Ibid. 167.

54 Ibid., 191, 167. According to Hicks, Naïve theological realism is the position of most unphilosophical people, past and present. If truth about God exists it may be known in essentially the same way as truth about anything else. Though it may be harder to believe, the statement “God loves you” is not radically different from the statement “John loves Mary.” We know how to use the words involved. We accept God is different from John and that his love will be appropriately different, but the logic of the two sentences appears to be identical. In a parallel way our knowledge of God is accepted by the naïve theological realist as on the same model as our knowledge of John, or of the “numinousness” of a Gothic cathedral. We know what we mean by John, or the numinous, or God, and we know what we mean by saying we know, whether it is in the sense of being acquainted with, or being aware of, John, the numinous, or God.Sophisticated theological realism would agree that there is a close relationship between ordinary knowledge and religious knowledge. But it would want to reverse the direction of the presentation. Granted, it would claim that in experience our knowledge of ordinary things provides the model for our knowledge of the divine, nevertheless in reality the reverse is the case. We can have knowledge because knowledge is something that has prior existence in God. Our knowledge is modeled on his knowledge. He is a God who knows, and he has created us able to know. We might cite as a parallel the case of divine love. For us experientially, human love is primary. We learn of it from our human parents, and then only later learn to project what we know on the human level on to God. But in reality love is primary in God; it can be experienced on the human level because the creator has chosen to incorporate into his creation aspects of what already existed in the divine being. So while our knowledge of love starts with the human and rises to the divine, the true movement is in the other direction. Our experience of love moves not from the real to the metaphysical, but from the copy or the derived to the original. The love of God is the reality that lies behind and the fulfilling of all that we have tasted in the lesser loving of our human experience (ibid., 191-192).

55 Ibid., 107.

56 Ibid., 175, 174; see, for example, Charles Hodge, “Free Agency,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 29 (January 1857): 115; idem, “My Son, Give Me Thy Heart,” in Princeton Sermons: Outlines of Discourses, Doctrinal and Practical (London: Thomas Nelson, Paternoster Row, 1879), 131; idem, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1872–1873; reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982), 2:255.

57 Hicks, Philosophy of Charles Hodge, 175, 17.

58 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:16; cf. Hicks, Philosophy of Charles Hodge, 173.

59 Charles Hodge, “Excellency of the Knowledge of Christ Jesus Our Lord,” in Princeton Sermons, 214.

60 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:46.

61 Hicks, Philosophy of Charles Hodge, 99.

62 Hodge, “Excellency of the Knowledge of Christ Jesus Our Lord,” 214; cf. idem, “Necessity of the Spirit’s Teaching in Order to the Right Understanding of the Scriptures,” in Princeton Sermons, 75-77; Hicks, Philosophy of Charles Hodge, 100, 107-108, 206.

63 Hodge, “Excellency of the Knowledge of Christ Jesus Our Lord,” 214.

64 Hicks, Philosophy of Charles Hodge, 175.

65 Hodge, “Necessity of the Spirit’s Teaching in Order to the Right Understanding of the Scriptures,” 7577; idem, “Excellency of the Knowledge of Christ Jesus Our Lord,” 214-215.

66 Charles Hodge, “Indwelling of the Spirit,” in Princeton Sermons, 77.

67 Hodge, “Necessity of the Spirit’s Teaching in Order to the Right Understanding of the Scriptures,” 77, 76.

68 Charles Hodge, “Delighting in the Law of God,” in Princeton Sermons, 249.

69 Cf. Charles Hodge, “Inability of Sinners,” in Theological Essays: Reprinted from the Princeton Review (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1846), 270; idem, Systematic Theology, 2:261.

70 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:51.

71 Cf. Charles Hodge, The Way of Life, introduction by Mark A. Noll (1841; reprint, Mahwah, N.J.:Paulist, 1987), 60; idem, Systematic Theology, 2:234; idem, “Inability of Sinners,” 269-271.

72 Hodge, “Necessity of the Spirit’s Teaching in Order to the Right Understanding of the Scriptures,” 76.

73 Charles Hodge, “Regeneration, and the Manner of Its Occurrence,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 2 (1830): 285.

74 Hodge, “Delighting in the Law of God,” 249.

75 Charles Hodge, “Regeneration,” in Princeton Sermons, 136.

76 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:71.

77 Charles Hodge, “Evidences of Regeneration,” in Princeton Sermons, 138. Note that there is a certain relationship between seeing and believing in Hodge’s thought because of the internal work of the Spirit on the “whole soul” of a moral agent (cf. Helseth, “‘Right Reason’ and the Princeton Mind,” 21-23).Note as well that while Hodge clearly affirmed the primacy of the intellect in faith, he was unyielding in his insistence that the whole soul is the subject of the Spirit’s influence. As such, he rejected “what has been called the ‘light system,’ which teaches that men are regenerated by light or knowledge, and that all that is needed is that the eyes of the understanding should be opened. As the whole soul is the subject of original sin the whole soul is the subject of regeneration. A blind man cannot possibly rejoice in the beauties of nature or art until his sight is restored. But, if uncultivated, the mere restoration of sight will not give him the perception of beauty. His whole nature must be refined and elevated. So also the whole nature of apostate man must be renewed by the Holy Ghost; then his eyes being opened to the glory of God in Christ, he will rejoice in Him with joy unspeakable and full of glory. But the illumination of the mind is indispensable to holy feelings, and is their proximate cause” (Systematic Theology, 2:263).

78 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:36.

79 Hodge, “Delighting in the Law of God,” 249-250.

80 Jack B. Rogers, Scripture in the Westminster Confession: A Problem of Historical Interpretation for American Presbyterianism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1967), 448, 438.

81 Ibid., 438, 449, 220, 449, 438.

82 Rogers and McKim, Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, 202.

83 Rogers, Scripture in the Westminster Confession, 82, 438. According to Robert Hoopes, the author of the most extensive study on the concept of “right reason” to date, the concept of “right reason” was born in classical Greece when Socrates advanced the notion that “virtue and knowledge are identical” (Right Reason in the English Renaissance [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962], 1). As an epistemological concept that was “assimilated by the early Church Fathers and redefined in the Christian context of sin and grace” (1), the concept was controlled by two formative convictions. Not only did it advance the notion that there is a realm of absolute or non-subjective truth that “includes both intellectual and moral truths” (4), but more importantly it recognized that in order for men to know this truth “they must themselves become good” (6). According to Hoopes, “wherever classical and Christian humanists speak of the achievement of true knowledge . . . they invariably speak of a certain transformation that must take place in the character of the knower before that knowledge can be attained. . . . Since Truth in its totality is at once intellectual and moral in nature, the conditions of wisdom are for men both intellectual and moral. True knowledge, i.e., knowledge of Truth, involves the perfection of the knower in both thought and deed” (5). How, though, do men become good so that they can then know what is true? In his incisive analysis of Hoopes’s work, Rogers correctly notes that the concept of “right reason” developed along two different lines in the Christian world, in large measure because differing anthropologies led to different answers to this question (Scripture in the Westminster Confession, 84). While those who followed Aquinas emphasized the “essential goodness” of man and consequently conceived of “right reason” as a faculty that all possess, Augustine took the reality of original sin and the need for regenerating grace seriously and thus insisted that the regenerate alone can reason “rightly.” For a more recent examination of this concept, see William J. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reason (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1995).

84 Douglas Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1945), 37; cf .Hoopes, Right Reason, 3.

85 Hoopes, Right Reason, 64; cf. Rogers, Scripture in the Westminster Confession, 83.

86 Rogers, Scripture in the Westminster Confession, 230, 86, 85.

87 Ibid., 232.

88 Ibid., 231.

89 Cf. Rogers and McKim, Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, 296.

90 Rogers, Scripture in the Westminster Confession, 85.

91 Stewart, review of Philosophy of Charles Hodge, 65.

92 Rogers, Scripture in the Westminster Confession, 87 n. 226. For Rogers’s full discussion of “right reason” and related matters, cf. 82-87, 222-253.

93 Cf. Rogers and McKim, Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, 290; Rogers, “Van Til and Warfield on Scripture in the Westminster Confession,” 154.

94 Iain H. Murray, Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950 to 2000 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2000), 197.

95 For example, see Charles Hodge, “The Indwelling of the Spirit,” in Princeton Sermons, 77; cf. John 6:44-45.

96 John Robinson, quoted in Dorrien, Remaking of Evangelical Theology, 11. Theologians like Roger Olson employ this phrase to help them distinguish between evangelicals who are “reformists” and evangelicals who are “traditionalists.” Whereas “reformists” are open to “new light,” “traditionalists,” apparently, are “unwilling” to modify their positions (“Future of Evangelical Theology,” 42, 47). While this rather strained distinction certainly packs a rhetorical punch, it is grossly unfair to both past and present members of the “traditionalist” camp. Warfield, for example, believed in “progressive orthodoxy” (cf. Robert Swanton, “Warfield and Progressive Orthodoxy,” Reformed Theological Review 23 [October 1964]: 76-77), and today traditionalist evangelicals like Ardel B. Caneday and Thomas R. Schreiner are challenging accepted understandings of perseverance and assurance in a constructive rather than a destructive fashion (cf. The Race Set Before Us: A Biblical Theology of Perseverance and Assurance [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2001]). This suggests, among other things, that the categories of commentators like Olson have become sufficiently hardened to warrant immediate revision. For an interesting discussion of “hardening of the categories,” which apparently is an affliction that cripples even the most irenic of evangelicals, see Olson, Story of Christian Theology, 554-569.

97 Cf. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962, 1963), 55 141; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977; reprint New York: Noonday, 1998), 3-13, 17-43, 121-164.

98 See, for example, Shailer Mathews, The Faith of Modernism (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 100, 115, 119, 148, 174-175; and idem, New Faith for Old (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 225, 233, 237.

99 B. B. Warfield, review of Foundations: A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought, by Seven Oxford Men, in Critical Reviews, vol. 10, The Works of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1932; reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1991), 322. On the definite meaning of the word “Christianity,” cf. idem, “‘Redeemer’ and ‘Redemption,’” in Biblical Doctrines, vol. 2, The Works of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1929; reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1991), 396.

100 Cf. Peter Jones, Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America (Mukilteo, Wash.: WinePress;Escondido, Calif.: Main Entry Editions, 1997).

101 Note the interesting remarks of B. A. Gerrish in “The New Evangelical Theology and the Old: An Opportunity for the Next Century?” available online at http://www.union-psce.edu/news/Publications/ archive/aisit-gerrish.html. Commenting on postconservative evangelicalism in general and Grenz’s attempt to conceive of theology as a second-order discipline in particular, Gerrish notes that, I couldn’t agree more. But I can’t help thinking that I’ve heard it before. Grenz does not seem to recognize, or perhaps he prefers not to say, that his theological program for the twenty-first century is pretty much the program that the supposed arch-liberal Friedrich Schleiermacher proposed for the nineteenth century. Differences there may be. But the threefold emphasis on experience, community, and context was precisely Schleiermacher’s contribution to evangelical dogmatics. Successive waves of neoorthodox and postmodernist attacks on him have submerged his contribution beneath an ocean of misunderstandings. He never renounced his evangelical-pietistic experience: rather, his theology at its center was reflection upon this experience from within the believing community in its new situation. He was certain that his experience must point to something constant since the time of the apostles, yet always to be conveyed in language that is historically conditioned. No less a critic of his doctrines than Karl Barth correctly perceived in Schleiermacher’s faith “a personal relationship with Jesus that may well be called ‘love.’”

102 For example, see Grenz, Renewing the Center, 325-351; Olson, “Future of Evangelical Theology,”42. For a brief explanation of how the word “fundamentalism” is being used in this chapter, please see note 13 above.

103 Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1999), 14.

104 Ibid., 16.

105 Ibid., 7.

106 George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 98.

107 Cf. Warfield, review of Foundations, 320-334. “No one will doubt,” he argued, “that Christians of to-day must state their Christian beliefs in terms of modern thought. Every age has a language of its own and can speak no other. Mischief comes only when, instead of stating Christian belief in terms of modern thought, an effort is made, rather, to state modern thought in terms of Christian belief” (322).

108 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 45.

109 Ibid., 45, 18, 78, 46.

110 Ibid., 17.

111 Ibid., 20-21.

112 Ibid., 12; cf. idem, Younger Evangelicals, 14-17.

113 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 14, 17.

114 Ibid., 13.

115 Ibid., 17.

116 Ibid., 16, 17.

117 Ibid., 16.

118 Ibid., 16, 17. On the process of “deconstruction and reconstruction” that accompanies the re-presentation of the faith in each new age, cf. Webber, Younger Evangelicals, 17.

119 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 17. Conservative readers will remain baffled by postconservative proposals as long as they fail to recognize that conservative and postconservative evangelicals have significant disagreements over theological method. Webber describes this disagreement as follows: “The method of the traditionalists is to treat theology as a science, subject, as all other sciences are, to the empirical method. Through an analysis of the data of revelation, one could be brought to propositional truth. Theology, the traditionalist says, is a system of objective truth understood by the mind.” Postconservative evangelicals, on the other hand, see theology “as the way to understand the world. It is an understanding based on the biblical narrative. This is the approach to faith that has captured the postmodern mind. Postmoderns have abandoned the modern worldview in which the supremacy of interpretation is given to science. In this context younger evangelicals are calling us to see the world primarily through the Christian story. . . . Theology [they contend] is not a science but a reflection of God’s community on the narrative of God’s involvement in history as found in the story of Israel and Jesus” (idem, Younger Evangelicals, 91-92).

120 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 16.

121 Ibid., 24, 29; cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1995).

122 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 81, 77.

123 Ibid. 30, 185; cf. idem, Younger Evangelicals, 74-75; George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984).

124 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 30, 46, 182-185; cf. idem, Younger Evangelicals, 90-92. According to William Placher, “A good Lindbeckian, postliberal theologian will . . . operate less like a philosophically oriented apologist and more like a sensitive anthropologist, who tries to describe the language and practice of a tribe in terms of how they function in the life of that community and how they shape the way that community sees the world, rather than trying to defend these people’s way of talking by the standards of some universal rationality or experience” (Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1989], 163).

125 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 180-186, 196.

126 Ibid., 31.

127 Ibid., 16.

128 Ibid., 180-183, 79.

129 Ibid., 196, 163; Robert E. Webber, “Out with the Old,” Christianity Today 34 (February 19, 1990): 17.

130 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 72, 79. Postconservative evangelicals like Webber advocate an “embodied” or “incarnational” apologetic because they are persuaded that the believing community has the power not only “to communicate the reality of the gospel,” but also “to lead people into conversion.” The gospel, they contend, is a “story” that must be experienced; it is “not a noncontradictory, rationally defended, logically consistent fact [to be] apprehended by cognitive acquiescence.” Since postconservative evangelicals are convinced that gospel truth is “embodied by individuals and by the community known as the church,” they insist that this truth is “known” not when it is “proven,” but when an individual “step[s] inside the community and into the stream of its interpretation and experience of reality.” From this it follows that faith “is not born outside the church” in submission to propositions that are presumed to be objectively true. Rather, faith involves “participation in truth embodied by the community,” and as such it is born “within the church as individuals see themselves and their world through the eyes of God’s earthed community. . . . In sum the community embodies the Christian narrative, the unchurched ‘step into’ the narrative, the narrative grasps them even as they grasp it, and eventually the individual embodies the reality of the church’s story as he chooses to live his life from the standpoint of the community of faith” (Younger Evangelicals, 95, 101, 220, 49, 101, 104, 101, 104).

131 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, back cover.

132 Ibid.

133 Thus, I am challenging Webber’s contention that postconservative evangelicals “are not of the twentieth century and its mindset” (Younger Evangelicals, 24).

134 J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (1923; reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990), 19. See, for example, Webber, Younger Evangelicals, 102-105.

135 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 77-83.

136 Webber, Younger Evangelicals, 104. I recognize that Webber would reject the notion that his subjectivism is grounded in the modern era’s “retreat from the intellect into the heart” (cf. Ancient-Future Faith, 121-125). It is not entirely clear how he can avoid this charge, however, given his emphasis on the functional rather than the propositional significance of religious utterances in the corporate experience of the Christian community.

137 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 101.

138 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 16, quoted in Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 19.

139 In personal correspondence, Grenz suggests that it is inappropriate for me to argue that postconservatives like Webber are subjectivists. I am misrepresenting theologians like Webber, he insists, because I am “reading these folks through Enlightenment lenses” (Grenz to Helseth, November 21, 2001). While I do affirm with Stephen J. Nichols that “By basing truth in the interpretive community of the church and rejecting truth as grounded upon objectivity, one is left with a subjective faith and a subjective apologetic” (“Contemporary Apologetics and the Nature of Truth” [paper presented at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Orlando, November 1998]: 7), I have yet to be convinced that being critical of those who engage in an extended polemic against the concept of objective truth is necessarily evidence of indebtedness to Enlightenment categories of thought. Again, Nichols makes the crucial point: “While it is true that objectivity is a crucial part of the enlightenment, it is not true that the enlightenment is a crucial part of objectivity. In the enlightenment project, objectivity was predicated upon the autonomy of the individual. If, however, objectivity is predicated upon something different, can one affirm objectivity?” (ibid., 6). With Nichols and the Princetonians, I would argue that one can and indeed one must, since it is the objective content of faith that saves, not faith as a merely subjective phenomenon.

140 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 19-20, 30, 189-190. Webber’s understanding of the authority of Scripture is difficult to get a handle on. He insists that the text is inspired; yet he rejects sola Scriptura. He is less than enthused about the doctrine of inerrancy because it is grounded in “the notion of propositional truth.” And he is convinced that “in the modern era biblical criticism has eroded the authority of Scripture.” Such commitments, it seems, are difficult to square with what evangelicals have historically believed about Scripture. For a concise statement of how he uses the Bible in doing theology, see Robert E. Webber, “An Evangelical and Catholic Methodology,” in The Use of the Bible in Theology: Evangelical Options, ed. Robert K. Johnston (Atlanta: John Knox, 1985), 150-158.

141 Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 30. Despite his contention that postconservative evangelicalism is altogether different from the pragmatic evangelicalism of the twentieth century (cf. Younger Evangelicals, 17-18, 54, 91-92), Webber’s formulation of postconservatism reduces to pragmatism in at least two senses: Not only does his functional understanding of truth reduce to pragmatism—doctrines are true if they work, i.e., if they form what is thought to be a Christian perspective on life—but his version ofembodied apologetics does so as well. In short, it is difficult to imagine how inviting “seekers” to participate in the life of the believing community could take place in anything other than pragmatic terms when important questions about the extratextual truthfulness of Christianity are either begged or ignored at the start. Why, realistic “seekers” will likely ask, should we look for “authentic spirituality” (cf. ibid., 222) in the Christian community, and not in the Buddhist, Baha’i, or even homosexual communities, to name a few? The answer, it seems, demands something more than what is offered in an embodied approach.

142 Shults, “Truth Happens?” 35.

143 Ibid., 36.

144 Cf. Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 93-115; see note 141 above.

145 For a brief explanation of how the word “fundamentalism” is being used in this chapter, please see note 13 above.

146 Olson, “Future of Evangelical Theology,” 47; cf. note 13 above. According to Nichols, “by rejecting the possibility of asserting objective truth, one necessarily comments against the objective reality of the historical event that forms the basis of the faith and against the objective truths recorded about that event. The result of rejecting objective truth is that one cannot escape subjectivity in apologetics. In an increasingly pluralistic society, evangelicalism has no right to assert claims to exclusivity given this framework, and such may not be the healthiest for evangelical apologetics in any case” (“Contemporary Apologetics and the Nature of Truth,” 6).

147 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 202-203.

148 Ibid., 205.

149Millard J. Erickson, The Evangelical Left: Encountering Postconservative Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1997), 84.