DEFINING EVANGELICALISM
IN THE LAST COUPLE OF decades a cottage industry has sprung up among social scientists. The new discipline centers around how to define evangelicals and evangelicalism. James Davison Hunter was one of the first sociologists to give sustained attention to the evangelical movement, in the early 1980s, but since that time scholars have flooded the bookshelves and magazine racks of libraries with so many studies that it would involve another cottage industry just to read them all.1 Alongside the sociological studies, historians of the church have attempted to position the evangelical movement within the stream of Christian heritage, particularly within the flow of Anglo-American church history. “Evangelical” historians have been the ones most interested in pursuing these studies, for obvious reasons. In 1982 Wheaton College established the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals. Two years later the Institute’s first book, Evangelicalism in Modern America, attempted to position the movement with respect to fundamentalism, as well as to earlier revivalism, the sort that is connected to the awakenings in America and Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 Evangelical theologians have also taken a stab at defining the movement, both as a matter of course in articulating their ideology as over against liberalism and/or fundamentalism, and in self-conscious reflections on the various issues that supposedly define evan-gelicalism. An example of the former would be such diverse works as Carl Henry’s Uneasy Conscience, a book that sets evangelicalism over against some of its fundamentalist predecessors, and the various systematic theology texts that have been produced by self-professed evangelical theologians in the last half-century.3 Evangelical works that are self-conscious reflections on the nature of evangelical theology include both monographs4 and symposia.5
There is a tendency among some recent analysts (and some not-so-recent) to question whether evangelicalism can be defined, or even whether there is such a thing at all. Donald Dayton argued that evangelicalism was prominent in America up to the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War, but that it slowly evaporated after that due to the rise of premillennialism, the Princeton theology, and the fundamentalist movement, and that it has yet to stage a comeback.6 His position is somewhat novel, but it shares with others the fact that evangelicalism is a phenomenon that dates back at least to the evangelical revivals. Donald Bloesch raised the question of the identity of the evangelicals. Are they the New Pietists, the Pentecostals, the evangelists, the “Young Evangelicals,” the theologians of the visible evangelical academies?7 David Wells noted that defining evangelicalism is difficult because its center has become elusive and hard to describe.8 He goes on to contend that evangelicals since World War II have seen themselves in three different ways: confessional, transconfessional, and charismatic.9 He then develops that typology and offers the conclusion that as long as we affirm the diversity of these three traditions it is still possible to speak intelligibly of “evangelicalism.” More recently D. G. Hart has offered the opinion that there really is no such thing as evangelicalism. “Evangelicalism needs to be relinquished as a religious identity because it does not exist.”10 Hart’s point is that evangelicalism was always something chimerical, and that in recent years the unraveling of coalitions in the “movement” simply makes clear that there was no such thing in the first place. He suggests a return to confessional identity and the abandonment of the notion of a transconfessional evangelical movement.11 While I am sympathetic to Hart’s concerns about “unraveling,” I am still persuaded that Wells is correct in his typology of distinctions and that the term “evangelical” is still of use in describing the broad coalition of conservative Christianity today.
THE ROOTS OF EVANGELICALISM
I am a Baptist. There is an old saying in the Baptist tradition that if you ask any two Baptists the same question you are liable to get three different answers. Likewise, when one asks about the roots of evangelicalism, one is likely to get different responses depending on whether the respondent is Methodist or Presbyterian, Pentecostal or Holiness. Our approach here will be to make the list of contributors to evangelicalism as broad as is feasible without simply listing a catch-all of every Protestant from A.D. 1600 onward. That is one of the difficulties in finding the genuine roots of the evangelical movement. There is another difficulty as well. Without a working definition of “evangelicalism,” how will we know just who are its forebears? The reader who has scanned over the outline of this chapter will have noted that we do not get around to defining evangelical theology per se until after we explore its roots. This is something like putting the historical cart before the ideological horse. How do you match the cart to the horse without first examining the animal? Since I believe it is important to get the historical survey down as a prelude to discussing theology, we will have to begin with an assumed and abbreviated definition of what evangelical theology is, and then we can refine it in the next section of this essay. By “evangelicalism” I am referring to a movement within generally North American and British circles that emphasizes the classic Protestant doctrines of the authority and reliability of Scripture, the triune God, and the historical second coming of Christ, and which promotes the need for fervent evangelism, a conversion experience, and a life of discipleship before God.
So, just what are the proximate roots of the evangelical movement? Out of what soil did it spring? Can we have any sense of confidence that our answers to this question are historically plausible?
Eighteenth-Century Awakenings
The evangelical revival that sprouted up around the ministries of John Wesley and George Whitefield in England was nothing if not unexpected. That such a revival would begin in the Arminian Church of England rather than among the Calvinist dissenters made it even more of a wonder, since these dissenters had long spoken of the need for such a renewal.12 The common threads that held together personalities (and theologies) as disparate as those of Wesley and Whitefield are significant for our study. One of the key factors that led to the revival was the threat of rationalism, seen by the participants in the revival as the enemy of revelation.13 In part this was an infidel rationalism, but Wesley was also the foe of the kind of Christian rationalism that substituted general revelation for the dogmas of Scripture.14 In the years after the failure of Cromwell’s attempt to reform the Church of England through the influence of Independent Calvinistic Puritans, a resurgent “liberalism”flooded the higher universities in England. These theologians were united in their opposition to the sort of Calvinism represented by John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, and even John Milton. Earlier Anglican Arminians, such as John Goodwin and Richard Hooker, were orthodox, but even they found some consolation in the rising Socinianism, since the new rationalists agreed with their anti-Calvinist stance. John Goodwin refused to condemn the Socinians as heretics, though he found Calvinist doctrine “ever and anon gravellish in my mouth and corroding and fretting to my bowels.”15 The move toward Socinianism took root in the work of John Bidle, John Knowles, and Henry Hedworth, and by the early eighteenth century luminaries such as John Locke and Isaac Newton would openly espouse not simply Socinianism but Unitarianism.16 As Unitarianism turned to deism, even the young John Wesley would be nearly caught in its snare. At Oxford one of his peers almost convinced Wesley to follow the new path, and in 1738 during a spiritual crisis he agonized over whether the Bible was “a cunningly devised fable.”17
The revival was an antidote, or, better, an apologetic in defense of scrip-tural Christianity over against all of that. “The world in which the Wesleyans flourished believed that [deist] criticism of Christianity was being refuted by a visible display of divine power in everyday life.”18 In addition, Wesley stood squarely in the tradition that affirmed the trustworthiness of the Bible. For Wesley, the Bible was “the only standard of truth, and the only model of pure religion.”19 Wesley further held that the Bible was free from all error. “Nay, if there be any mistakes in the Bible, there may as well be a thousand. If there be one falsehood in that book, it did not come from the God of truth.”20 He also maintained that every part of Scripture came from God. “Every part thereof is worthy of God; and all together are one entire body, wherein is no defect or excess.”21 Further, the Bible alone was the source for theological construction. Wesley referred to himself as a “man of one book.”22 Though the Wesleyan tradition would develop a system of theological formulation known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, for Wesley, Scripture was the source for theology, and all else was subordinate.23
A second factor that explains the rise of the revivals was the spiritual and moral malaise in church and society of that day, both in England and in the American colonies. In England drunkenness was epidemic. One house in four in London was a gin house. The sign that hung over one such house said, “Drunk, one shilling. Dead drunk, two shillings. Free straw.”24 There were over 160 crimes for which a person could be hanged, including pickpocket-ing more than five shillings or stealing a loaf of bread from a baker. Since poverty was extreme, lots of bread-thieves were hanged, including not a few under the age of twelve. Life was, truly, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Anglican priests were often paid less than fifty pounds a year salary (nowhere near subsistence), while high-ranking bishops often earned salaries of seven thousand pounds or more.25 This resulted in pastors neglecting their churches in order to make money to raise their families.
The situation was similar in America. The once-vibrant Puritan Congregationalists of New England had slipped into a cycle of legalism to such a degree that the patriarch, Increase Mather, penned a critique in 1702, The Glory Departing from New England. Jonathan Edwards would discover after taking the pulpit in Northampton from his deceased grandfather that he had many “Mr. And Mrs. Goodman’s” in his church, but few “Mr. And Mrs. Gospel’s.”26 The situation on the American frontier was even worse. One Anglican survey of frontier life in the mid-1700s indicated that over 90 percent of young women were pregnant on their wedding day.27 Alcoholism was rife; life on the frontier was brutal. Whether we are talking about the situation in the cultured eastern cities or on the uncouth frontier, there was a decided need for spiritual renewal.
Such renewal did not seem likely to break forth from the prevailing Protestant establishments in either England or the colonies. The Anglican colonies were in a spiritual malaise and New England was, as Increase Mather noted, at a low spiritual ebb. The fact that First Church in Boston was pastored by the Arminian Charles Chauncy, whatever one’s opinion on Arminianism, is an indication of the shift that had taken place since staunch Calvinists John Cotton and Richard Mather had arrived in Massachusetts nearly a century earlier. “By 1750 Boston was a vastly different place than it had been in 1640. Theologically, no one was in charge.”28 The awakening that took place under Jonathan Edwards in the Connecticut River valley in 1734–1737 centered around a return to preaching on justification by grace through faith as over against the moralistic preaching that had arisen in the context of emphasizing the corporate covenant of the New England settlers.29 Much the same can be said of the preaching of Whitefield, especially in his first tour in the colonies, 1739–1741.
For Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield the source of theology is divine revelation, and the purpose of preaching that revelation is the glorification of God and the salvation of sinners. Edwards’s view of Scripture is clearly seen in his opposition to the rationalistic spirit that came with the rising anti-Calvinist trend in the middle of the eighteenth century. Edwards opposed both the theological aberrations of the rationalists and their doubts about the authority of Scripture.30 For him, theology was to be constructed on Scripture and Scripture alone.31 Edwards argued for a unity between Spirit and Word in the construction of theology, but never of Spirit over or against the Word.32
Liberalism and the Conservative Response
The new rationalism that followed on the heels of the Reformation and that is best seen in figures such as Faustus Socinus and Michael Servetus settled quickly, as we have seen, into the intellectual centers of England. This deism served as a challenge to the Church of England and called forth, as we have also seen, a response on the part of the evangelicals. But this rationalistic spirit, with its opposition to that which could not be established by reason itself, could only assault the faith with doubts about its truth claims in non-testable areas. That was nothing new. The arrival of liberalism constituted a much greater threat than that. Liberalism actually transformed the nature and the foundations of the faith into something entirely new.33 Such a transformation could never have come about without a revolution in the arena of epistemology. That assistance was provided by Immanuel Kant.
Kant’s goal was to subject all knowledge claims to critique. “Our age is the authentic age of criticism, to which everything must submit.”34 The Prussian philosopher argued that humans can only know that arena of reality that they have been hardwired to know. That arena of reality is the phenomenal world around us. Further, they do not even know those things in themselves, but instead know them only as they are capable of knowing them, according to the human categories of cognition.35 Two entailments from this reasoning are important to our present concern. First, this means that any-thing that is outside the phenomenal realm can never be an object of knowledge. 36 No one can know God, for instance, nor can anyone know truth, if such claims to truth concern that which is beyond the phenomenal realm. If that is so, then the claims of the biblical writers that they have received revealed truths from God can no longer be accepted at face value. “Truth” itself must now be reinterpreted. The second entailment is that since even in the phenomenal realm we cannot know the thing in itself (the Ding an Sich), we do not even have certain or true knowledge of the phenomenal world. We only know the world as we are constructed to know it. This is Kant’s so-called Copernican Revolution in epistemology. The world “out there” does not correspond to my ability mentally to perceive it; rather I perceive what it is I am capable of perceiving. That is all. The world does not correspond to my cognition, but instead my mind parses the world as it is able to do so.
This Kantian revolution in epistemology set the stage for a plethora of liberal theologies that would come to dominate first Continental, then British and American academic theology well into the twentieth century. Kant’s approach allowed theologians to reject claims to divine revelation on the part of biblical authors and yet still maintain that the Bible is a special book for faith. It gave them what they considered to be sound epistemological ground-ing for rejecting as factual many of the historical accounts presented in Scripture, even those regarding the uniqueness of Jesus while still consider-ing themselves to be Christian believers.37 It also enabled them to question or even to repudiate doctrines long considered to be at the heart of orthodoxy, such as the Trinity and the deity of Christ, without ceasing to be theologians in the Christian tradition. Socinian rationalism and deism had been little more than harbingers of the flood of reconstruction that now swept through traditional Christian orthodox theology.
British scholars responded primarily to the liberal criticism concerning the New Testament. F. C. Baur had alleged that the New Testament portrayal of an essentially united church in the first century was fraudulent, and that instead there were two major factions, factions that were virtually at war with each other over the true meaning of Christianity. In the face of the threat from Gnosticism at the end of the second century, however, the two factions decided to patch up their differences and join together to battle a new enemy.38 Several new documents were written that showed the early Christians as unified (e.g., Acts, 2 Peter, the Pastoral Epistles) in order to convince friend and foe alike that “traditional Christians” had more in common with each other than they did with the Gnostics.39 Baur’s thesis thus consti-tuted a revisioning of the history of early Christianity and the rejecting of the authenticity of a number of New Testament documents. Cambridge scholar J. B. Lightfoot subjected this allegation to a withering criticism, demonstrating linguistically, and to the satisfaction of virtually the entire academy, that Luke—Acts was a first century document, and so could not be used to sup-port Baur’s radical claims.40 Lightfoot had done a great service in using schol-arship to support traditional claims about the Bible’s trustworthiness, but he was not an inerrantist, and his defense of Scripture did not extend to some of the allegations against the historicity of the Hebrew Scriptures being made at the same time.41 That task would fall mainly to American scholars.
Princeton Seminary provided much of the intellectual power in defend-ing a traditional reading of the historicity of Scripture against its critics as well as in calling to task the new theologies associated with Schleiermacher, Hegel, Ritschl, and others who were redefining the Christian faith. What were the Princetonians’ ideas about preaching for conversion and about revivals and religious experience in general? In some circles these men are viewed as academic theologians for whom the work of the Spirit is irrelevant or secondary. At times their own language about revivals might be taken as proof that they would not have supported the advocates of the Great Awakening. Samuel Miller, writing in 1833, offered this assessment of revivals: “I will not say that such revivals are never connected with sound conversions; but I will be bold to repeat, that the religion which they are fitted to cherish, is altogether a different one from that of the Gospel.”42 One must understand that Miller intended these words not for revivals as a whole, but for Finney’s New Measures. The Princetonians were in favor of the work of Whitefield and Edwards in the Great Awakening. They placed a large emphasis on the place of religious experience and the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of believers, and so showed themselves to be the heirs of Reformed piety in general, especially as mediated through the Puritans and the Calvinists of the Awakening.43 Ashbel Green, a member of the board of directors and a founder of the Seminary, addressed the students in May 1831 and enjoined, “We hope that there is no student in this seminary who is not a cordial friend to such a display of divine grace, as is commonly called a revival of reli- gion.”44 Princeton was founded on the conviction that piety of the heart and solid learning go hand-in-hand, and that students ought to cultivate a mis-sionary spirit as well as a “wholehearted support of revivals.”45 That does not mean that the campus of Princeton exhibited a continuous spirit of revival-istic “enthusiasm,” or that there was a common consensus on the theology of religious experience.46 It does mean that there was a fundamental similar-ity between Princeton and the Evangelical Awakenings of the previous cen-tury both in commitment to defending the faith against biblical criticism and in its emphasis on evangelism and godly living.
The 1920s turned out to be a truly “roaring” decade in the battle between conservatives and liberals in several major American denominations, especially the Northern Baptist Convention and the (northern) Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.47 Conservatives launched campaigns to rescue these denominations from the influence of encroaching modernism. Northern Baptists had already been at war over liberalism—in 1913 conservatives in that denomination had founded Northern Baptist Seminary in Chicago to counter the influence of the University of Chicago Divinity School, the Northern Baptist school where liberal Shailer Mathews was an influential professor.48
The key years for both denominations were 1922 through 1925. At the 1924 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, Clarence Macartney was elected as moderator by a narrow margin over Charles Erdman. Both men were conservatives, but Erdman was more tolerant of diversity. It seemed, then, that the Assembly was siding with the conservatives. Macartney and the conservatives did not, however, challenge the Assembly to deal with several major issues that had been raised by the liberals. “This failure would later come back to haunt the fundamentalist forces.”49 The next year Erdman was elected, in part because many in the church perceived him to be a voice of moderation between the warring factions of liberals and conservatives. J. Gresham Machen was seen increasingly as representing a serious problem in the church—a threat to its unity—while Erdman represented the best hope to hold the denomination together.50 At issue was the ordination of Henry P. Van Dusen by the New York presbytery. Van Dusen did not believe in the virginal conception of Christ. Liberals threatened to secede if the ordination was withdrawn. It was not. It seemed clear that the liberals and moderates in the denomination had won the day.51
Shailer Mathews and Harry Emerson Fosdick were at the heart of the Northern Baptist controversy. Mathews argued that at its heart, Christianity was not about doctrine, but life. “It is a moral and spiritual movement, born of the experiences of God known through Jesus Christ as Savior.”52 Mathews argued that because “modernists” placed their emphasis on Jesus Christ as a revelation of a “Savior God,” they were, therefore, evangelicals.53 Yet, he denied the historical nature of the miracles of Elijah and Elisha, the accounts of providence in Joshua, and the monotheistic nature of Moses’ religion.54 Fosdick, like Mathews, questioned the miracle accounts in Scripture and denied that they ought to be taken as literal fact.55 In addition, he argued that “the incarnation in Christ is the prophecy and hope of God’s indwelling in every one of us.”56 Other theologians teaching in the seminaries, such as William Newton Clarke, had also adopted the modernist conclusions.57 Throughout the twenties there had been concerns about the orthodoxy of some Northern Baptist missionaries. In 1922 William Bell Riley moved that the denomination adopt the New Hampshire Confession of Faith, as hereto-fore Northern Baptists had no official confession. Cornelius Woelfkin, rep-resenting the liberals in the convention, offered a counter-motion, that “the New Testament is an all-sufficient ground for faith and practice.”58 Woelfkin’s motion passed.
In both denominations the conservatives failed to win the day. This resulted in several denominational splits, with two new Presbyterian denom inations forming (the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Bible Presbyterian Church), and, over the next two decades, two new Baptist denominations (General Association of Regular Baptists and Conservative Baptist Association). Many conservative Presbyterians saw their last hope for victory sliding away when the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1927 addressed the issue of reorganizing Princeton Seminary. Two years later the Assembly voted to do just that. This reorganization meant that the traditional Presbyterian theology of Hodge, Machen, and Warfield would soon become a thing of the past in that institution.59
The American South had little sympathy for liberalism in the late-1800s.Alexander Winchell was expelled from the Southern Methodist church in 1878 for teaching higher-critical views at Vanderbilt.60 Crawford Toy was fired by the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville the next year for advocating Darwinism and the KuenenWellhausen theory of Pentateuchal criticism.61 Southern scholars had been raising the battle cry for some time before the beginning of the twentieth cen-tury that a religious and culture war was in the offing.62 When the battles were raging over modernism in northern denominations in the 1920s, for the most part southern churches and institutions were not affected.63 It is impor-tant to note, however, that southern rejection of liberalism differed in some ways from the same rejection found in northern circles. Southerners had a tendency to be more conservative than those in the north, as a matter of course.64 One of the major differences between southern conservatives and those in the North in the early twentieth century was that the Southerners were not prone to be premillennial, and the ones who were generally were not dispensational.65 The major exceptions would be the more visible and often the more controversial figures, such as J. Frank Norris of Texas. Within a generation the South would be rocked by encroaching modernism, and the southern churches would offer the same set of responses as had been seen in the North. Some would capitulate, but others, such as the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), would slowly gear up for a significant response to the liberal threat. Successively in 1958, 1963, 1971, and 1979 conservatives responded to the moderates by firing professors, offering resolutions, and finally by electing a series of conservative presidents that enabled the SBC to restore evangelical voices to its faculties and agencies.66 For Southern Baptist conservatives, the issues were theological and pragmatic—inerrancy and evangelism. They had learned from observing the Northern Baptist Convention that moderates and liberals would often use the cry of “evangelism and missions” to distract attention from the theological conflict over modernism.67 But they had also learned that those things can become a smokescreen, and that eventually, when one capitulates on the authority of Scripture, most of the evangelism and missions is dramatically affected as well.68
Fundamentalism was more than just a battle over theological orthodoxy. In its thought patterns it was anti-modernist and willing to fight over the mat-ter. But at its heart it was evangelistic, revivalistic, and committed to a strong notion of Christian sanctification. This commitment to a warm-hearted faith as well as a hard-headed orthodoxy can be seen in such figures as R. A. Torrey and Lewis Sperry Chafer. Torrey was “one of the principal architects of fundamentalist thought.”69 Torrey contributed to many works that were theo-logical in nature, but he is probably best known for volumes he wrote on evangelism and Christian devotion. Torrey was always ready to combat liberalism (and Pentecostalism), but often spoke of the need for a work of the Holy Spirit in the life of believers.70
Chafer was a Congregationalist pastor when he met C. I. Scofield in 1901. Scofield encouraged him to become an effective preacher and defender of God’s Word.71 In 1924 Chafer founded Dallas Theological Seminary, with an emphasis on “defending the fundamentals through expository preaching of the Bible.”72 Chafer was convinced that both the Bible colleges and the seminaries of his time were failures. The Bible colleges had the “right spirit, but did not have the rigorous curriculum necessary for training a new generation of pastors capable of teaching the Bible with authority.”73 Most of the seminaries, on the other hand, produced little more than a “floodtide of edu-cated unbelief.”74 Chafer’s goal was to produce evangelistic, church-building expositors who would preach the Bible with authority because they believed it implicitly. Along with this Chafer was firmly committed to helping his students develop their spiritual lives. One of his most endearing books promoted a Keswick approach to spirituality, an approach that has been shared by a number of other dispensationalist fundamentalists, such as Robertson McQuilkin, R. A. Torrey, and C. I. Scofield.75
Fundamentalism was and is a complex phenomenon. There is no way to gather all of its elements into a simple and uniform model. But the majority of fundamentalists have been committed to at least the three values of defending orthodoxy, spreading the gospel through passionate preaching, and emphasizing the importance of the godly life.
From Fundamentalism to Evangelicalism
The Scopes trial of 1925 brought a significant amount of public opprobrium to the fundamentalist cause. Some of this criticism was well-deserved, since William Jennings Bryan used the trial as a means for grandstanding for his causes. But the liberal bias of media moguls such as H. L. Mencken painted the fundamentalists in Dayton, Tennessee, as nothing more than ignorant hacks. Such an assessment says perhaps as much about Mencken as it does about the people of Dayton.76 Regardless, after that event the “strength of the movement in the centers of national life waned precipitously.”77 But that is not to say that the movement itself weakened or fell into disarray. Though Christian Century did write fundamentalism’s obituary in 1925, the story of the movement’s demise was premature.78 What actually did happen was that the leaders of the movement accepted their rejection, and saw in it a parallel with the way in which Christ accepted his. Fundamentalism turned more inward, more in the direction of separation from all compromisers, and focused on building the infrastructure of the movement itself. In a sense, the years 1925 to 1950 witnessed the largest growth of fundamentalism, especially in regard to its institutions.79
This period also witnessed the rise of a new direction. There were many who were sympathetic with the theology of the “fundamentals,” but who were dissatisfied with much of the spirit of fundamentalism, especially what they perceived to be its isolationism, its exclusive commitment to a dispensational system of theology, and its lack of commitment to social con-cerns. 80 Carl F. H. Henry, along with Harold John Ockenga, Bernard Ramm, Wilbur Smith, and others, had been seeking to encourage nonseparationist conservatives to develop ways to impact their churches and to work together to further conservative scholarship. Henry’s book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism called evangelicals to work out a comprehensive worldview that would do more than simply emphasize personal piety and evangelism.81 The year 1943 witnessed the creation of the National Association of Evangelicals. This gave these “questioning conservatives” a forum for cooperation.82 Christianity Today was founded in 1956 as a journal of conservative theological thought, with Henry as founding editor.
The new evangelicalism was clear in its commitment to the “fundamentals” that had been adopted in 1910 by the Presbyterian General Assembly, though it may not have listed the issues in quite the same order and might not have considered all of them as under the same level of assault as they had been early in the century. Harold John Ockenga affirmed, “Doctrinally, the fundamentalists are right, and I wish always to be classified as one.”83 These heirs of fundamentalism were unambiguous in their affirmation of the full reliability of the Bible and of its role as the sole “norming norm” for Christian theology. This belief in a fully trustworthy Bible “represents a basic unifying factor throughout the whole of contemporary evangelicalism.”84
EVANGELICAL IDENTITY: ARE POSTCONSERVATIVES FAITHFUL
TO THE TRADITION?
Evangelicals have not always walked lock-step. They have disagreed on matters such as free will versus sovereignty in salvation and exclusivism versus inclusivism, and on matters of ecclesiology and eschatology. Some have had a greater social conscience than others. Some have been more passionate about evangelism and missions, some less passionate, though part of the definition of “evangelical” is a commitment to the “evangel.” Until the middle of the twentieth century, though, “evangelicals” have been committed to certain core beliefs, such as the sole sufficiency of Scripture as the source of our theological knowledge, the complete and utter reliability of God’s Word, and the nature of theology as a study of what God has said to us. In the current discussion, though, some who call themselves “evangelicals” have questioned those core beliefs. In this section we will examine some of these statements and ask some pertinent questions about the views of these thinkers.
The Sources for Theology
Evangelicals have historically contended that the source for theological con-struction is the Bible. They have recognized the importance of tradition but do not see it as the source for theological construction. Similarly, contemporary culture is not a source for theology but is the context in which theo-logical constructions are offered. Theology is to be “ex positional” in that it “expounds the abiding truth of God’s Word in Holy Scripture and then relates it to the contemporary situation.”85 The source, though, is the Word of God.
Some thinkers in the postconservative camp offer a different perspective.Stanley Grenz proposes three norms or sources for theology: “Our task moves from the biblical message, through the theological heritage of the church, to the thought forms and issues of the cultural context in which we live.”86 For Grenz, the community produced the Bible, and now, with the community in a different cultural context, the culture of this time plays a role in the sources of truth. The difficulty, of course, is that culture is constantly shifting and is generally in rebellion against God. Finding those elements within any prevailing culture that might be deemed as authoritative is, there-fore, an ambiguous task at best, a fruitless one more likely.
Nancey Murphy offers an even more sophisticated approach to the question of the sources for theology. Since she rejects any form of foundational-ism, including what she calls “biblical foundationalism,” and opts rather for a Quinean understanding of knowledge as a “web,” for her there are a variety of sources that stand alongside the Bible in the task of theological con-struction. Murphy addresses the question of the nature of the human person and the problem of the “soul,” for instance. Murphy rejects the notion of the soul as a substance separate from the body.87 She notes, correctly, that in Scripture, “soul” is not spoken of in terms consistent with Platonism. Rather, the biblical terms nephesh and psyche have a range of meanings that some-times includes the physical body itself, and at other times includes states of emotional euphoria or distress.88 She concludes from her brief excursion into the biblical doctrine of the soul that the New Testament does not present a clear picture, and that the reader will “end up frustrated and confused.”89 She concludes, though, that two possible solutions arise out of the biblical data. Christians can be faithful to Scripture while holding either to holistic dual-ism or to nonreductive physicalism. These are the two centrist positions, with eternal, metaphysical dualism (Plato) at the one extreme and reductive physicalism (committed naturalists) at the other.90
Since the biblical material is inconsistent and confusing, how might one make a decision between these two apparently viable options? Murphy appeals to modern examinations in the field of neuroscience and to models of psychology that are compatible with those new studies. While most Christian theologians have held to a form of holistic dualism or substance dualism, Murphy believes this is no longer defensible: “I argue that what neuroscience shows is that such an organism [the human person] is indeed capable of all those higher human capacities that have been attributed to the soul.”91 Further, “Our brain, with its large neo-cortex, is what enables us to recognize God’s holiness, to recognize a still small voice as the word of God.”92 The “soul,” traditionally understood, is nothing more than the mate-rial substance of the human person.93
For Murphy, studies in neuroscience, philosophical speculation, new directions in human cultural convictions, and Christian tradition all share an equal role with Scripture in the process of theological formulation. The Quinean web is very democratic. But of course this is contrary both to the Bible’s own approach to knowledge and the approach of generations of evanghelical theology. The human sciences may be used to provide a context in which discussions are held, but they ought never to be used to solve an “ambiguity” in Scripture or to provide the answer to a question raised by an inter-pretation of a biblical text. One thinks here of Origen appealing to the Platonic doctrine of the preexistence of the soul to solve the “problem” of the statement in Scripture, “Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated.”94 These “solutions” create more problems than they solve.
The Full Reliability of Scripture
In a recent essay, Grenz argues that two approaches to the role of Scripture have prevailed among evangelicals since the Reformation. On the one hand, some in the tradition of Turretin have held that the Bible is “source of correct doctrine.”95 Others, characterized more by Pietism and Puritanism, see the Bible as a “source of spiritual sustenance.”96 By the end of the article, Grenz identifies himself as one who wishes to bridge this gap. It seems to me that this typology is overly simplistic. Most of the people to whom he appeals as being polarized (Wayne Grudem, Charles Hodge, and Francis Schaeffer, for example) would consider themselves as being examples of a balance between these two principles. Grudem’s commitment to charismatic renewal and Schaeffer’s passion for evangelism would certainly seem to stand as witness of their balanced perspectives. On the other hand, it is interesting that Grenz never identifies the potential for imbalance in the other direction—those who focused on “spiritual sustenance” to the exclusion of correct doctrine. Nor did he note that it was the Pietist tradition that produced a Schleiermacher—as one who sought spiritual sustenance but eschewed correct doctrine.
Of even more concern is the approach taken to biblical authority and reliability by Nancey Murphy. Murphy is opposed to all types of “founddationalism” in theological construction. Her concern is certainly understandable when the culprits are Cartesian or positivist forms of foundationalism. One has to wonder, though, when she turns her criticism against those she calls “biblical foundationalists,” such as Donald Bloesch. Bloesch is a “biblical foundationalist,” according to Murphy, and “explicitly” 97 so, since he even employs the designation “foundations” as the title for his new seven-volume project in systematic theology.98 Further, while Bloesch does not consider biblical words as the ground for erecting a the-ological edifice, he does distinguish between historical events and their “revelational meaning,” so apparently resorting to the fact-value distinc-tion; and, more significantly, he believes the authority of the Bible is unquestionable:
So we see here a softening of the original foundationalist demand for universally accessible truth based on indubitable foundations. Yet despite the hesitancy regarding inerrancy (and the absolute certitude such a doctrine provides), it is still the case that the authority of Scripture [for Bloesch] is unchallengeable. There is no other norm by which it can be called into question, not religious experience, church teaching, or culture.99
Bloesch fails the test of being a postmodern theologian since he maintains a commitment to biblical factuality and inerrancy, even though his is a guarded and highly qualified affirmation of inerrancy.100 It seems quite clear from these statements that Murphy is unwilling to grant the words of the Bible the status of final and reliable authority in matters of faith and practice, as we have already seen in the discussion of sources for theology. This is even more clearly the case when one considers that Murphy’s criticism is leveled against Donald Bloesch, a theologian whom no one would consider to be on the far “right” of the evangelical tradition.
Murphy extends her application of “foundationalist” to the hermeneutics of Alister McGrath. McGrath, in her opinion, is a “narrative foundationalist, rather than a scriptural foundationalist.”101 He “gives biblical revelation an unchallenged role in theology,”102 by arguing that the Bible is “the ultimate source of Christian theology.”103 McGrath goes on to affirm that Scripture serves this role in its historical witness to Israel and Christ.104 Further, he notes, “The narrative of Jesus Christ, mediated through Scripture and eucharistic celebration, is presented, proclaimed, and accepted as the foundational and controlling narrative of the community of faith.”105 Murphy comments on McGrath,
Doctrine provides a conceptual structure by which scriptural narrative is interpreted. McGrath recognizes that doctrinal formulations can lead us to reread the narrative in a different light, and so there is a sense of two-way interchange between the foundation and the superstructure. Thus we can see that McGrath is chafing against the foundationalist model, even while he uses especially vivid foundationalist imagery in describing the relation between the scriptural narrative and the doctrinal superstructure.106
Murphy seems convinced that moving from narrative to conceptual formulation is itself a foundationalist and hence an Enlightenment move.
In Murphy’s view, “liberals” and “fundamentalists” must start over if they are to engage in relevant theological discourse. There are at least three components to this new strategy. First, theologians must employ new read-ing strategies with regard to the biblical text. They ought to take the Bible literally, “so long as they begin with the Sermon on the Mount,”107 and so long as they utilize a narrative hermeneutic, even in the didactic texts.108 Second, they must abandon the attempt to justify Scripture as being authoritative “since to do so is what it means to be a Christian theologian.”109 Instead they ought to take note of David Kelsey’s claim that the statement “Christian Scripture is authoritative for Christian theology” is analytic.110 That is, theologians already treat Scripture as the context for their web of reality. There is no need to articulate a theory for just how Scripture functions. That would, in fact, be counterproductive, for the root of the lib eral/fundamentalist debate lies in the failure of foundationalists to find a “single set of indubitable foundations.”111 Third, theologians must recognize that traditions always begin with some finite starting point. “A tradition is a historically extended, socially embodied argument about how best to interpret and apply the formative texts.”112 This means that all systems are socially constructed, and, while Murphy does not wish to be aligned with the radical postmodernists, she urges at least a mild sort of deconstruction-ism of the inherited traditions so that theologians can clear the ground and move forward with the new project.113
What is the basis for the hermeneutical move that claims that all theo-logical reflection should begin with the Sermon on the Mount? Ritschl, of course, held a similar view. Is this the recrudescence of classical liberalism? In addition, why must one utilize a narrative hermeneutic in interpreting didactic texts? Is Murphy concerned to battle the specter of grounding of the Christian faith in an alien philosophical system, or is she opposed to the obvious teachings found in some of the apostolic writings? One wishes to give the benefit of the doubt, but this reconstruction is so radical that it is difficult to do so.
The Nature of the Theological Task
Evangelicals have generally seen the task of theology first of all as an examination of what God has said to us in Holy Scripture, since Scripture is the norming norm for all theological endeavor. This means that, while theological construction is certainly a human act, it begins with something that does not have a human origin, Scripture, and allows that divine Word to make its impact on the heart and mind as a preliminary act to any kind of theologiz-ing. Grenz, on the other hand, writes that the “central task” of evangelical theology is “the intellectual reflection on the faith we share as the believing community within a specific cultural context.”114 For him, theology is essentially an act of the community in reflecting on itself and its beliefs in the light of Scripture. “Theology systematizes, explores and orders the community symbols and concepts into a unified whole.”115 This is partly because Grenz believes that the imago dei lies specifically in the “relationality of persons in community.”116 This irrationality is part of the matrix out of which theological construction is done, and stands alongside biblical exegesis as one com-ponent of the theological task. “Our cherished theological commitments, in turn, are important insofar as they serve and facilitate this shared life-orientation.” 117 Rather than beginning, then, with God and the text of Scripture, the community begins with itself, and one aspect of the task of exegesis is the exegesis of the believing community.
Part of the difficulty here may lie in Grenz’s understanding of Scripture:“Scripture is the foundational record of how the ancient faith community responded in the context of a trajectory of historical situations to the awareness that God has acted to constitute this people as a covenant commu-nity.” 118 This is surely an inadequate understanding of the nature of Scripture. Certainly Scripture contains a record (or “records”) of God’s dealings with humanity. But Scripture is not ultimately about us, but about God and his redemptive work to rescue human beings from their lost condition. One of the major differences between conservatives and postconservatives lies in this very point of controversy—what exactly is the Bible all about?
Communitarianism is also at the heart of John Franke’s essay on sola Scriptura.119 Franke traces the development of the concept of the authority of tradition from the time of Basil through the Reformation, noting Heiko Oberman’s helpful distinction between “Tradition I,” which notes the development of church tradition but grants it no self-supporting authority, and “Tradition II,” which sees tradition as an authority alongside the Bible.120 Franke argues that the Reformers saw the Bible as authoritative since it was produced by the Spirit of God as he moved upon prophets and apostles. These persons, though, were part of a community formed by the Spirit even before the production of such texts: “The same Spirit whose work accounts for the formation of the Christian community also guides that community in the pro-duction and authorization of biblical texts.”121 Therefore, the Bible is “the product of the community of faith that produced it.”122 These documents, then, “represent the self-understanding of the community in which they were developed.”123 This leads Franke to deny to either Scripture or tradition the ability to enable us to construct theological assertions in any non-inferential or incorrigible fashion, and to assert that “nonfoundational understanding of Scripture and tradition locates ultimate authority only in the action of the triune God.”124 He further notes that the Spirit has guided the church through the centuries in eschewing theological nonsense and in developing a great tradition of orthodoxy, and that this must be seen as a component of the work of the Spirit’s guiding the church into truth along with the gift of the text of Scripture itself. Then, after noting that “all theological formulations are culturally embedded,”125 Franke proposes that the task confronting us today is something like a Shakespearean play in five acts, of which only four have sur-vived, with the task of reconstructing the fifth act lying in the hands of highly trained and sensitive Shakespearean actors.126
Franke is correct that tradition is a valuable asset in the hands of the theologian, and that we ought not to see ourselves as insulated from the context of what has gone on before in theological construction. The great councils, the debates over soteriology and ecclesiology in the Reformation, and the recent rash of pneumatological work that has come in the aftermath of Pentecostal/Charismatic renewal all contribute to our understanding of the Christian faith. But the notion that the Bible is essentially the self-understanding of the community of faith is a purely reductionistic notion. Locating authority in the “triune God” over against Scripture simply makes a distinction that the Bible itself does not make. The New Testament writers and teachers, when appealing to the Old Testament text to establish a point, can say either “God says” or “the Scripture says” with no sense of the need to offer Franke’s distinction. Further, the notion that Scripture does not allow us to make non-inferential theological statements is simply absurd. “Jesus died for our sins according to the Scriptures” is a non-inferential theological asseveration in anyone’s book. While we would agree with Franke that the Spirit has guided the church through dangerous waters, in the sense of Tradition I, that tradition is always subject to and under the authority of the text of the Bible, and not in dialectical relationship with it. Finally, the notion that the Bible is like a play missing the final act, one which we must write, is both a bad analogy and a dangerous one. In all of Franke’s essay on how the Spirit is guiding the church into new understandings, he never offers any warnings about the limits of such “guidance.” By Franke’s standards, one could argue that the Spirit is now guiding the church into an acceptance of homosexuality, an argument that has been made by defenders of the gay lifestyle. Perhaps in a later essay he will set some limitations on what he thinks this “trajectory” might entail.
THE FUTURE OF EVANGELICALISM
In this essay I have attempted to lay out a minimalist perspective on what it means to be an evangelical in the North American tradition. I have focused on three issues: a commitment to biblical reliability that results in a stand for Scripture against the prevailing trends of assault; an emphasis on evangelism and the need for a conversion experience; and the importance of the life of discipleship. Virtually all evangelicals in the great awakenings held these views, as did the champions of orthodoxy in combat with liberalism, the fun-damentalists of the early twentieth century, and the neo-evangelicals. I have also pointed out that the entailment of this has been a commitment to the reliability of Scripture, a commitment to the Bible as the source of theological construction, and the nature of the theological task being one of reflecting first on Scripture as the grounds for both theology and life. More could certainly be said, but at the very least this has been the evangelical heritage.
My concern is that the postconservative movement is mobilizing against these convictions. In the interest of defending relational theology, the post-conservatives are turning a blind eye to the need to uphold the authority and reliability of Scripture. In the interest of anti-foundationalism they are employing a democratic set of ideologies and methodologies for doing theo-logical construction, methodologies that place Scripture only on the level of equal partner. In the interest of contextualizing Scripture and emphasizing the importance of tradition, they are in danger of seeking the “Spirit’s guidance”in an uncontrolled epistemological environment. While the postconservatives have offered some helpful insights, there must be some kind of reining in of the speculation. My concern is that some postconservatives are motivated by a sort of theological seeker-sensitivity that compels them to a sort of theological worldliness that is antithetical to Scripture and the faith once delivered to the saints. I hope I am wrong.
1 James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983). Hunter followed this volume with a second book four years later: idem, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Other important studies include John C. Green, James L. Guth, Corwin E. Smidt, and Lyman A. Kellstedt, Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches from the Front (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Christian Smith, Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and James M. Penning and Corwin E. Smidt, Evangelicalism: The Next Generation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2002).
2 George M. Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism in Modern America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984).
3 Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.:Eerdmans, 1947); see also the systematic theologies by Wayne Grudem, Millard Erickson, J. Oliver Buswell, James Leo Garrett.
4 Millard Erickson, The New Evangelical Theology (Westwood, N.J.: Revell, 1968); and David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids, Mich.:Eerdmans, 1994).
5 See, for instance, David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge, eds., The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Who They Are, Where They Are Changing (Nashville: Abingdon, 1975); Kenneth Kantzer, ed.,Evangelical Roots: A Tribute to Wilbur Smith (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1978); and Robert Webber and Donald Bloesch, eds., The Orthodox Evangelicals: Who They Are and What They Are Saying (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1978).
6 Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 121-135.
7 Donald G. Bloesch, The Future of Evangelical Christianity: A Call for Unity amid Diversity (New York:Doubleday, 1983), 8-22.
8 David Wells, “On Being Evangelical: Some Theological Differences and Similarities,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 389.
9 Ibid., 391.
10 D. G. Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2004), 16.
11 Ibid., 32.
12 John Walsh, “‘Methodism’ and the Origins of English-Speaking Evangelicalism,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990, 22.
13 Ibid., 23.
14 I am focusing more on Wesley than on Edwards or Whitefield in this section since Wesley is sometimes co-opted by postconservatives as their ally over against the more Calvinistic strain in the revival.
15 John Goodwin, Redemption Redeemed, quoted in H. John McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 52.
16 Ibid., 163-339.
17 Vivian H. H. Green, The Young Mr. Wesley (London: Arnold, 1961), 147-148.
18 John Kent, Wesley and the Wesleyans: Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 49.
19 John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, vol. 11 in The Works of John Wesley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1959), 367.
20 John Wesley, The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A. M. , ed. Nehemiah Curnock, 7 vols. (London: Epworth Press, 1909), 6:117.
21 John Wesley, “Preface” to his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, quoted in Wilbur T. Dayton, “Infallibility, Wesley, and British Wesleyanism,” in Inerrancy and the Church, ed. John Hannah (Chicago: Moody Press, 1984), 229.
22 R. P. Heitzenrater, John Wesley, His Own Biographer, vol. 1 of The Elusive Mr. Wesley (Nashville: Abingdon, 1984), 149.
23 Dayton, “Infallibility, Wesley, and British Wesleyanism,” 236-246.
24 Earle E. Cairns, An Endless Line of Splendor (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 1986), 52.
25 Of the 10,000 parishes in England, 6,000 paid less than fifty shillings a year (ibid., 53).
26 Iain Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987), 97-112.
27 For the preceding statistics, see Cairns, An Endless Line of Splendor, 39-41, 52-55.
28 George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 436.
29 Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 150-169; Allen Carden, Puritan Christianity in America: Religion and Life in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1990), 33-46, 71-98.
30 Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 430-436.
31 Peter Gay, “The Obsolete Puritanism of Jonathan Edwards,” in Jonathan Edwards and the Enlightenment, ed. John Opie (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1969), 101-106.
32 Stephen J. Stein, “The Spirit and the Word: Jonathan Edwards and Scriptural Exegesis,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 127-128.
33 J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1957).
34 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), 9.
35 Jeffery Hopper, Understanding Modern Theology I: Cultural Revolutions and New Worlds (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 46-54.
36 Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century: Volume I, 1799–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 45.
37 Wilhelm Herrmann, writing in the early twentieth century from the liberal position on Scripture, argued that religious assurance could not be found in the Bible, but only in experience. Since the Bible had to be subjected to the canons of historical analysis, it could not be trusted as the foundation for faith (Wilhelm Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, ed. Robert Voelkel, trans. J. Sandys Stanton [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971], 74-79).
38 Horton Harris, The Tübingen School: A Historical Investigation of the School of F. C. Baur (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1975), 181-182.
39 Peter C. Hodgson, The Formation of Historical Theology: A Study of Ferdinand Christian Baur, Makers of the Modern Theological Mind, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 221-236.
40 Lightfoot accomplished this in part through a critical analysis of the Letters of Ignatius (J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, part 2, vol. 1 [London: Macmillan, 1889]). He also critiqued a book by J. A. Cassels which had created quite a stir in alleging that the Gospels were not trustworthy. Again, by careful scholarship Lightfoot showed that Cassels’s arguments were spurious. As a result of Lightfoot’s response, publishers were forced to dump large amounts of Cassels’s book into the remainder market (Stephen Neill, Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1961 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964], 37).
41 Mark A. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 71.
42 Quoted in David B. Calhoun, Princeton Seminary: Faith and Learning, 1812–1868 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994), 228, emphasis his.
43 Andrew Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians: Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and Benjamin Warfield (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1981).
44 Calhoun, Princeton Seminary, 187.
45 Ibid., 188.
46 Mark A. Noll, “The Princeton Theology,” in Reformed Theology in America: A History of Its Modern Development, ed. David F. Wells (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1997), 24.
47 On the Northern Baptists, see, for instance, William Vance Trollinger, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). On the Presbyterian crisis, see especially Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
48 In 1924 Mathews wrote the book, The Faith of Modernism (New York: Macmillan, 1924). This would become liberalism’s most widely read book in that decade (T. P. Weber, “Shailer Mathews,” in Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid, Robert D, Linder, Bruce L. Shelley, Harry S.Stout [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1990], 717).
49 Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, 125. Longfield’s statement relates specifically to the failure to address the Auburn Affirmation, a statement of protest from key liberal leaders; but the Assembly also did not call for a vote to censure Harry Emerson Fosdick, though many conservative leaders had called for such a move.
50 D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 117. See also Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1954), 364-381.
51 Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, 147-153.
52 Mathews, Faith of Modernism, 12.
53 Ibid., 9.
54 Ibid., 51.
55 Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Modern Use of the Bible (New York: Harper & Row, 1924), 22-30.
56 Ibid., 270-272.
57 L. Russ Bush and Tom J. Nettles, Baptists and the Bible (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1999), 300 305.
58 Trollinger, God’s Empire, 55-56.
59 David B. Calhoun, Princeton Seminary: The Majestic Testimony, 1869–1929 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1996), 378-398.
60 See the discussion of these issues in Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1977).
61 William A. Mueller, A History of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Nashville: Broadman, 1959), 137.
62 Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1885).
63 This is not universally the case. Some Southerners, such as Wake Forest University’s president, William Louis Poteat, were agitating for liberal theological and social ideals in the 1920s (Randall L. Hall, William Louis Poteat: A Leader in the Progressive-Era South [Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000]).
64 Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Recreation and Manhood in the Rural South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), chapter 1.
65 William R. Glass, Strangers in Zion: Fundamentalists in the South, 1900–1950 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001), 45.
66 For details see Jerry Sutton, The Baptist Reformation: The Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2000).
67 Trollinger, God’s Empire, 133-150.
68 Paul Pressler, A Hill on Which to Die (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1999), 149-160.
69 George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 47.
70 Ibid., 48.
71 John A. Witmer, “‘What Hath God Wrought’—Fifty Years of Dallas Theological Seminary; Part I: God’s Man and His Dream,” Bibliotheca Sacra 130 (October 1973): 292-295.
72 Glass, Strangers in Zion, 110-111.
73 Ibid., 111.
74 Letter from Chafer to James Bowron, quoted in Glass, Strangers in Zion, 111.
75 Lewis Sperry Chafer, He That Is Spiritual (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1952).
76 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 184-188.
77 Ibid., 185.
78 “Vanishing Fundamentalism,” Christian Century 24 (June 1926): 799.
79 Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13-32.
80 Daniel B. Stevick, Beyond Fundamentalism (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1964), 28.
81 Henry, Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, chapters 1–2.
82 Bruce Shelley, “Evangelicalism,” in Dictionary of Christianity in America, 416.
83 Harold John Ockenga, “From Fundamentalism, Through New Evangelicalism, to Evangelicalism,” in Evangelical Roots: A Tribute to Wilbur Smith, 40.
84 Kenneth Kantzer, “Unity and Diversity in Evangelical Faith,” in The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Who They Are, Where They Are Changing, 73.
85 Donald G. Bloesch, God the Almighty (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 28.
86 Stanley J. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology: A Fresh Agenda for the Twentieth Century (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 18.
87 She is not alone in this. A fairly large group of theistic philosophers now advocate a complementarian approach to the relationship between religion and the sciences. “There is a strong prima facie case for re-examining the claimed cognitive content of Christian theology in the light of the new knowledge derivable from the sciences. . . . If such an exercise is not continually undertaken, theology will operate in a cultural ghetto” (Arthur R. Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993], 6, 7). Murphy regularly cites the work of Peacocke as being consistent with her own, and is engaged in a large project on such issues in collaboration with Peacocke.
88 Nancey Murphy, Reconciling Theology and Science: A Radical Reformation Perspective (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora, 1997), 56-58.
89 Ibid., 57.
90 Ibid., 58-59.
91 Ibid., 59.
92 Ibid.
93 Grenz moves in a similar direction in his employment of information from the social sciences as a source for anthropological understanding in the first volume of his new systematic theology (Stanley J. Grenz, The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei, The Matrix of Christian Theology [Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001], 58-97).
94 I am of the opinion that the Bible does offer a consistent and understandable theology of “soul.” See Chad Brand and Fred Smith, “Soul,” in Holman Illustrated Dictionary of the Bible, ed. Chad Brand, Charles Draper, and Archie England (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003), 1522-1523.
95 Stanley J. Grenz, “Nurturing the Soul, Informing the Mind: The Genesis of the Evangelical Scripture Principle,” in Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority, and Hermeneutics, ed. Vincent E. Bacote et al. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 23.
96 Ibid.
97 Nancey Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), 92.
98 Nancey Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity, 1996), 17.
99 Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity, 93, italics in original. Virtually the same statement can be found in Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, 17-18.
100 While Scripture is “without error in its matter, i. e., in its basic teaching and witness, . . . this does not imply perfect factual accuracy in all details” (Donald Bloesch, Evangelical Renaissance [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1973], 56). He further resists defending a “naive biblical literalism” in which the “credibility of the Bible rests upon the edibility of Jonah” (Bloesch, Future of Evangelical Christianity, 119). In the volume on Scripture in his new work on systematic theology, Bloesch articulates a position he calls “derivative inerrancy”: “I see the truth of the Bible lying in the revealed mystery of God’s self-condescension in Jesus Christ, and by the inspiring work of the Spirit this truth is reflected in every part of the Bible” (Bloesch, Holy Scripture, Christian Foundations [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1994], 307 n. 21). He rejects as rationalistic the type of inerrancy found in writers such as Henry, Schaeffer, Warfield, and especially Lindsell.
101 Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, 19.
102 Ibid., 18.
103 Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 119, quoted in Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, 19. (This is a reference to the first edition of this work by McGrath.)
104 McGrath, Christian Theology, 119.
105 Alister E. McGrath, The Genesis of Doctrine: A Study in the Foundations of Doctrinal Criticism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 55.
106 Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, 19. She is especially concerned about this passage in McGrath’s Genesis of Doctrine: “The transition from a narrative to a conceptual framework of thinking would have potentially destructive effects for Christian theology if the narrative concerning Jesus of Nazareth, having been allowed to generate a specific framework of conceptualities, were forgotten”(McGrath, Genesis of Doctrine, 64).
107 Murphy, Reconciling Theology and Science, xi.
108 Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, 105; idem, Anglo-American Postmodernity, 122.
109 Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, 104.
110 Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity, 120.
111 Murphy, “Textual Relativism, Philosophy of Language, and the Baptist Vision,” in Stanley Hauerwas, Nancey Murphy, and Mark Nation, Theology Without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future of Theological Truth (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), 268.
112 Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, 103.
113 Murphy, “Textual Relativism,” 254.
114 Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 18.
115 Ibid., 78.
116 Grenz, Social God and the Relational Self, 305.
117 Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 35.
118 Ibid., 77.
119 John R. Franke, “Scripture, Tradition, and Authority: Reconstructing the Evangelical Conception of Sola Scriptura,” in Evangelicals and Scripture, 192-210.
120 Ibid., 195. See Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1967).
121 Franke, “Scripture, Tradition, and Authority,” 202.
122 Ibid.
123 Ibid., 202-203.
124 Ibid., 205.
125 Ibid., 206.
126 Ibid., 209.