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Papers and responses from the first annual Theology Conference at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, in October 1999 have been gathered in a volume edited by John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Evangelical Futures: A Conversation About Theological Method (Baker Books), with contributions by Stanley J. Grenz, Trevor Hart, Alister E. McGrath, Roger E. Olson, J.I. Packer, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, and Stephen Williams. Books & Culture asked Harriet Harris and Richard Mouw to respond to this volume, with an eye to what it says about the current state of evangelical theology.
As a student, I was booed in an evangelical church in Oxford for saying that I studied theology. In Evangelical Futures, Kevin Vanhoozer reminds us of Bernard Ramm's alarm when he realized that instead of a theology he had a rag-bag collection of doctrines. These anecdotes suggest that in recent times evangelicals have weakened their own theological awareness and practice.
Two factors help to explain how this happened. First, evangelicals became preoccupied with the nature and interpretation of Scripture and their concern to be "Bible people" (cf. Evangelical Futures, pp. 9, 46). Second, they developed a narrow conception of the theological task, understanding it in terms of "biblical induction." According to this conception, the systematician collects relevant biblical texts on a given topic and develops from them general conclusions. Insights from the Christian community down the ages are not integral to this task, and the purpose of systematic theology is hard to imagine other than that it enables us to teach ourselves and others what the whole Bible says. In other words, theology is deemed worthwhile because it helps us to know the Bible better. This view of theology resulted in the doctrinal rag-bag that so appalled Ramm.
Contributors to Evangelical Futures seek to enrich evangelicalism for the future by attending to theological method. They take us beyond biblical induction, though still a key issue between them is whether theology does more than enhance Bible-reading. Kevin Vanhoozer says theology need not always begin from scratch, with the collecting and arranging of biblical verses into given topics (p. 62). For theology to be more than a doctrinal hodge-podge, he argues that it must look for connections among doctrines and develop a cumulative understanding, drawing on the past.
His proposal involves giving a greater role to reason and tradition than some evangelicals would accept. For example, Vanhoozer happily locates "the ultimate authority in theology" in the Triune God and in Scripture as God's "communicative act" (p. 105). Similarly, Stanley Grenz writes, "At its core the content of Christian theology consists of a witness to, as well as participation in, the narrative of the being and act of the Triune God" (p. 131). But John Stackhouse holds that we should take more explicit biblical guidance in addressing issues, rather than beginning with an almost scholastic set of presuppositions regarding the Trinity (p. 49).
At issue is the old question of whether one can look beyond Scripture for sources of theological reflection. Of all the contributors, Grenz comes closest to giving theological authority to the church. He takes what he calls a communitarian approach, seeing theology as a conversation in which the primary voice is Scripture, but the participants are the entire faith community, past and present (pp. 121ff). He criticizes the way in which Luther's sola scriptura principle became distorted so that Scripture was transformed from a living text into the object of exegetical and systematizing scholarship (p. 124). He makes tradition basic, not in the medieval Roman Catholic sense of treating it as a second source of truth, but rather by seeing tradition as the whole enterprise by which the Christian community interprets Scripture (p. 126).
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