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Until recently, evangelical scholars were rarely comfortable in the university, and the few in it usually assumed a prophetic stance—analyzing what had gone wrong in scholarship and defending evangelical orthodoxy. Standing outside the mainstream, they rarely received much attention beyond their own circles.

Recently, though, a handful of orthodox Protestant scholars has gained a wider voice, speaking with a different tone and articulating a different vision. Especially in the fields of philosophy and American church history, outspoken believers like Nicholas Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga, Mark Noll, George Marsden, and Timothy Smith, to name a few, have achieved sterling reputations. In this section, however, I have chosen to focus on believing scholars doing their work in theology and Bible, because these studies are closest to the evangelical heart and are thus charged with more difficulties.

In meeting with each of the five scholars and their peers, I quickly discovered that the word evangelical makes academics nervous. The term can be confused with both the Religious Right and with fundamentalism, to which the world of scholars has a serious allergy. But they all agreed that the intellectual world is no longer dominated by a liberal-conservative polarity, with liberalism holding all the intellectual forts and conservatives shooting arrows from the outside. These scholars don't experience a rigid, anti-evangelical consensus. Rather, they see open space. The demise of modernism has knocked down most of the forts.

What does the future hold for theology? Not one person I talked with claimed to have any sure answer to that. Current methodologies and perspectives are radically diverse, and there are challenges and problems on all sides. No voices dominate the conversation.

But if it is true that the end of modernism has left a wide-open space and that the old polarities no longer dominate the field, new voices can be heard.

I heard some of those new voices. They seem quite at home in a pluralistic world, confident without being cocky, distinctive without being defensive. They don't aim to attack an orthodox liberalism—for they say there is no longer such a thing. They aim, rather, to witness—to witness publicly, in the church and in the world and even in academia, to Jesus Christ. These thinkers bear watching.

Richard Hays
Professor of New
Testament

The Divinity School,
Duke University

32

Miroslav Volf
Henry B. Wright Professor
of Theology

Yale Divinity School

35

Kevin Vanhoozer
Research Professor of
Systematic Theology

Trinity Evangelical Divinity
School

38

N. T. Wright
Dean

Lichfield Cathedral
Staffordshire, England

42

Ellen Charry
Margaret W. Harmon
Associate Professor
of Systematic Theology

Princeton Theological
Seminary

46

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February 8 1999, Vol. 43, No. 2