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Webber briefly sketches a history of evangelicalism and boils down the essence of each generation's modus operandi. His reading of the current generation is closely akin to Carroll's, and he notes the attraction of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and higher-church Protestantism for many younger evangelicals. Webber surveys both "younger evangelical thinkers" (where he considers characteristic approaches to apologetics, ecclesiology, and so on) and "younger evangelical practitioners" (youth ministers, worship leaders, and the like). This combination of theological and historical depth with on-the-ground familiarity makes Webber's book as unusual as it is welcome.
Still, "younger evangelicals" is an awfully slippery category. To begin with, many evangelicals in their twenties, say, are drawn to the "pragmatic" evangelicalism represented by Bill Hybels and Willow Creek. At several points Webber seems to suggest that an unstoppable historical momentum will bring the younger evangelicals (who make up "the first cycle of new evangelicals in the twenty-first century") to the fore, as they take over from the pragmatic evangelicals (a "transitional group," Webber says, "shaped by the great disruption of 1960-1990"). But persuasive empirical evidence for such assertions just isn't presented. Nor does it seem likely that the influence of what Webber calls "traditional" evangelicals will wane so quickly; when we look over the intellectual landscape of younger evangelicalism, we are seeing the fruit of Francis Schaeffer and Mark Noll, among others.
Moreover, Webber's account of the distinctive orientation of the younger evangelicals—quintessentially "postmodern," he tells us—calls out for further analysis. It's clear that for many of the younger evangelicals, the path is the ancient road, rediscovered. Here we see the harvest of the work of people like Dallas Willard and Richard Foster, who have sought to reclaim for evangelical Protestants spiritual disciplines that were once considered tainted by association with Rome. But Willard, for example, is hardly a champion of "the postmodern." (The problem is even more acute when Webber tries to reinforce his thesis with reference to 9/11.) A movement influenced variously by Willard and Foster and Schaeffer and Noll, as well as by Stanley Hauerwas, Miroslav Volf, and John Milbank, not to mention the current pope, resists reduction to any one narrative—even the narrative of postmodernism, which supposedly does away with metanarratives.
But something important is happening, it's clear. A new ecumenism with integrity has made younger evangelicals and the new faithful of Catholics and Orthodox cobelligerents in the postmodern world, and each has influenced the others. To Carroll and Webber we owe thanks for these dispatches from the front.
Laura Merzig Fabrycky is a research associate at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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