1 of 3
The reflowering of evangelical intellectual life has justifiably received much comment in the past two decades. That reflowering, however, has focused largely on the disciplines of philosophy and history. Whither theology, once known as the queen of the sciences and presumably a key discipline for colleges devoted to scholarship in an explicitly Christian mode?
It is a not-so-well-kept secret that a couple of generations of evangelicalism's brightest thinkers chose history or philosophy as their fields of study partly because evangelical institutions have crimped and cramped their theology departments. Exactly because theology (and biblical studies) most specifically address doctrinal issues, the work of theologians has been largely conservationist. While evangelical historians, philosophers, and others have intrepidly addressed current issues and debates within their disciplines—and in some cases ascended to the top ranks of those disciplines—evangelical theologians have had to try and make do with conceptualizations and positions essentially set forth a century ago by the Princetonian Hodges and B. B. Warfield.
Now, suggests a sympathetic outsider taking measure from beyond the evangelical camp, that is changing. Gary Dorrien is a self-professed "Anglican social-gospeler and dialectical theologian." But he has been paying serious attention to evangelicalism for some time, as is obvious from his detailed and clear-eyed reading of the tradition in The Remaking of Evangelical Theology.
Dorrien singles out three main branches in the evangelical family tree: classical evangelicalism, rooted in the Reformation and Radical Reformation; pietistic evangelicalism, based in the eighteenth-century German and English pietistic movements and the Great Awakenings in America; and fundamentalist evangelicalism, derived from the fundamentalist-modernist conflict of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But as the title of his book suggests, the focus is on contemporary evangelicalism. Consequently, Dorrien devotes his pages to a recounting of twentieth-century evangelicalism, dominated by fundamentalist-evangelicalism, and concludes with the detection of an emerging fourth branch in the tree: postconservative evangelicalism. (Full disclosure: the present writer is included among favorably discussed postconservative thinkers.)
Dorrien's account includes close readings of founding fundamentalist evangelicals (the Hodges, Warfield, J. Gresham Machen), reformers of fundamentalism (Gordon Clark, Cornelius Van Til, E. J. Carnell, Carl Henry), and innovators who most immediately paved the way for incipient postconservative evangelicalism, both in terms of more supple renderings of biblical authority (the later Bernard Ramm and Clark Pinnock) and openness to salutary Arminian, Catholic, and neo-orthodox emphases (William Abraham, Robert Webber, Donald Bloesch).
Dorrien's perspective helps map out crucial potential directions in the intellectual development of current evangelicalism. Again, the evangelicalism of twentieth-century America has been dominated by fundamentalist evangelicals. Institutions are essential to the endurance and prospering of any tradition, and all of us, whether or not we identify ourselves as fundamentalist evangelicals, owe an ongoing debt to that wing of the evangelical tradition. Its schools, publishing houses, and mission agencies formed the infrastructure on which we traffic to this day. Yet I think Dorrien is generally correct that fundamentalist evangelicalism is based on an "antimodernist modernism." That is, it forged its identity by responding negatively to modern (evolutionary) biology, modern (higher) criticism of the Bible, and many aspects of modern culture. In these respects it was antimodern. But it responded to modernism on the basis of a modern evidentialist and rationalist epistemology, exemplifed by strict biblical inerrancy. In that respect it was and is itself markedly modern.
share this page
RSS Feed
