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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.

During the course of some recent travels I carried the Evangelical Futures volume around as my "heavy" reading. For a change of pace I would switch over to Ben Rogers's fascinating recent biography of A.J. Ayer. At one point Rogers quotes a few lines from a 1956 review that Stuart Hampshire wrote of Ayer's The Problem of Knowledge. Hampshire saw "a certain tameness" in the book: "one can see from the beginning," he reported, "that none of the sceptical arguments are going to get out of hand; they are on a tight, light rein, familiar, domesticated animals which are taken out for a short run."

It struck me that Hampshire's characterization of Ayer's approach nicely captured my own sense of what was going on in the evangelical essays. To be sure, Hampshire did not intend his remarks to be words of praise; Ayer's book, he said, had "a lack of impulse, as in a school work." In my reading of Evangelical Futures, on the other hand, I actually found the taming patterns to be refreshing. While some of the familiar themes that we associate with postmodernity were taken out for a walk—communities of interpretation, the importance of narrative, language games, coherentist understandings of truth, and so on—they were kept on a leash. And the writers were not reluctant to tug on that theological leash at many points as they frequently introduced appropriate qualifications and identified genuine dangers.

Nothing in these kinds of discussions causes me to have deep worries about the future of evangelical thought. But I must confess that I do get a little nervous at times, especially when too much is made of the need for some sort of basic epistemological shift in our thinking. For example, I do not find the label "postconservative" at all attractive, mainly because I do not see myself as deviating all that significantly from previous generations of thinkers who thought of themselves as theological conservatives.

Frankly, I am not convinced that past generations of evangelical thinkers were quite as misguided as some folks seem to suggest in these discussions. In my own experience, many of the good emphases that I find in these "new" methodological approaches simply confirm for me lessons that I learned—long before I heard of postmodernism—from the likes of Cornelius Van Til, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, E.J. Carnell, Francis Schaeffer, and others. These evangelicals insisted that reason was not "neutral," and that all of our thinking is fundamentally guided by pre-cognitive commitments. They also argued convincingly that we cannot adequately interpret specific biblical passages without seeing them in the context of the overall drama of creation-fall-redemption-eschaton. To be sure, they would have been deeply offended by the contemporary rejection of a "metanarrative." But so am I. Nor would they have looked favorably on the notion that what drives all of our attempts to define our shared humanness is the desire to exercise power over others. But neither do I.

Past generations of evangelical thinkers paid considerable attention to some distinctions that I think are still important for our explorations of these matters—more important than is evident in the Evangelical Futures essays. Take, for example, the distinction between divine and human knowledge. What is going on when we talk in unqualified ways about how all efforts to know are constrained by cultural location? Or that a "foundationalist" account of certainty is simply wrong? Do we mean to be implying that God's own knowledge of things is "non-foundationalist"? Or that the Creator himself is obliged to be tentative in his claims to certainty? If we do think—as I think we ought—that God's grasp of reality is not susceptible to the limitations that the postmodern types insist on emphasizing, then we would do well to introduce some significant nuances into our epistemological formulations.

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