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There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who do not. In his new book, Postmodernizing the Faith: Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism (Baker, 160 pp.; $14.99, paper), Millard J. Erickson divides contemporary evangelical theologians into two kinds of people: those who resist postmodernism and those who are more positive toward it.

In a recent article in these pages (CT, Feb. 9, 1998, p. 40), Roger Olson writes that he is willing to risk "gross oversimplification" in order to undertake a similar task. He argues that there are two kinds of contemporary evangelical theologians: traditionalists and reformists. The former are those who "value traditional interpretations and formulations as binding and normative and [look] with suspicion upon doctrinal revisions and new proposals." The latter are those who value "the continuing process of constructive theology seeking new light breaking forth from God's Word."

Olson says he means nothing pejorative by these labels; his concern, he insists, is to make peace between these two types. Erickson also writes with an evident desire to analyze his colleagues fairly and give credit where it may be due all round. His new book does present a spectrum of opinion on postmodernism. Still, the spectrum is divided into two discrete halves, and it is hard to see such dividing as anything other than divisive.

Erickson's new book follows his slim volume The Evangelical Left: Encountering Postconservative Evangelical Theology (Baker). Here again he is in harmony with a Roger Olson article, this one appearing in the Christian Century (May 3, 1995) on so-called postconservatives. The term is virtually synonymous with Olson's "reformist" label and carries an unhappy resonance, as "postconservative" sounds a lot like "postliberal."

Erickson compounds the terminological difficulties in the earlier book by lumping in Clark Pinnock, Stanley Grenz, Bernard Ramm, and Gregory Boyd, among others, into what he calls simply the evangelical Left. In the more recent book, Erickson discusses evangelicals who have responded negatively to postmodernism in contrast to those who have made a positive response. In both books, David Wells and Thomas Oden are cited as representative of those who have resisted the sirens of the Left and the blandishments of postmodernity.

The trouble with such typologies is that they presuppose a uniform conservative theology against which postconservatives can define themselves; a traditional theology that reformists want to alter; and an evangelical center or Right in comparison with which all of the theologians in question are definitely to the Left. It is this general assumption, as well as the questionable grouping of quite disparate theologians onto one side or the other of a divide, that mars such maps of contemporary evangelical thought.

Two crucial misunderstandings afflict such schemes. The first is a caricature of the Enlightenment and the modernity it is said to embody; the second is an ahistorical narrowing of the evangelical tradition.

According to this caricature, the Enlightenment placed reason above every other route to knowledge; believed that knowledge gained through reason was objective and certain; and held that the rational, free individual was ideally capable of coming to such truth.

Reformists/postmodernists, so the story goes, reject these convictions in favor of the following: a championing of experience as well as reason (and perhaps revelation as well); an appreciation of knowledge as personal, subjective, and provisional; and a recognition that we each do our investigating and thinking in communities, coming up with what one might call "tribal" narratives and ideologies to understand the world. Once we recognize our situation as postmoderns, we no longer should claim the status of absolute and comprehensive truth for our ideas.

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August 10 1998, Vol. 42, No. 9