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Alister McGrath has a slightly different attitude toward tradition. His stress is not on learning from the understanding of past theologians but rather on observing how their cultural and philosophical assumptions affected their reading of Scripture. The image one gets from McGrath is that Scripture is basic, and perhaps somehow solid, while culture and philosophy are shifting. By contrast, the image one gets from Grenz is that theology is shifting, because its very basis is not a solid Bible but the biblically informed understanding of the Christian community.
This book is about the future of evangelical theology. Those who are ringing the changes are Grenz, Vanhoozer, and Trevor Hart, who writes a final response promoting theological imagination. They best fit Roger Olson's claim that this volume is "postconservative," a characterization that the editor John Stackhouse resists. Postconservatism is a trend among some evangelicals that transcends conservative-liberal disagreements over the place of Scripture and experience. Vanhoozer defines postconservatives as canonical-linguistic. This distinguishes them from postliberals who, following George Lindbeck, posit a cultural-linguistic understanding of the context of faith (p. 77). A canonical-linguistic approach looks to the canon of Scripture for the shaping of our norms, whereas postliberals see all our norms, including the acceptance of an authoritative Scripture, as culturally shaped.
Both postliberals and postconservatives see that neither Scripture nor experience can be isolated and used as primary raw data, and so both set about dismantling foundationalism in modern theology. Foundationalism in liberal theology treats human experience as basic. Foundationalism in evangelical theology looks like this: it requires an authoritative Bible at the base of its system; otherwise, it says, there is no sure ground for faith. It then infers doctrines from Scripture, seeking first to interpret the meaning of the text, and then apply that meaning to our own cultural context.
Some contributors to Evangelical Futures remain within this mindset. Stackhouse points out that J.I. Packer is hardly a postconservative. Hardly, indeed. Packer is still fighting an evangelical-liberal battle (pp. 183, 186) and working with a model whereby meaning and understanding precede application. He holds that we need to "move on from knowing about God to a relational acquaintance with God himself" (quoted by McGrath, p. 19), as though our knowledge about God were not already shaped by our affections. He also calls for "surefooted application of Bible teaching to the life of today's church" (p. 187). He must feel uncomfortable with postconservative attempts to wean us away from sure-footedness, but he will not argue the point. He contributes to the volume more as an elder statesman than as a significant participant in debate.
Similarly to Packer, McGrath and Stackhouse treat theology and piety as separate activities which we somehow need to unite (e.g. pp. 26, 51). One wonders how wisdom will ever develop in such a world, where the discernment of meaning is held separate from spiritual attunement and our development as disciples of Christ.
Vanhoozer and Grenz are more conscious of the role of the affections in shaping our understanding. They draw on the Reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff and extend the notion of properly functioning cognitive faculties to the idea of interpretive virtues that enable us to read Scripture aright. Grenz understands this in terms of being nurtured within a Christian community. He identifies "the specifically Christian experience-facilitating interpretive framework" as basic for theology (p. 131). Vanhoozer is more individualistic: we are to pray for the interpretive virtues and to curb our sinful will- fulness to go against the grain of the text (pp. 87-88). He emphasizes God's calling on the individual as prior to our entry into the church (p. 86).
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