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If postconservative theology isn't postconservative, what is it? Olson is right about its Arminian and postmodern qualities. Yet more is going on. Olson senses this when he justifies the label "post-" as retaining a thing's best features while leaving behind its problems. Olson, meanwhile, portrays conservatism as tending to defend a status quo. His comment suggests both the heart of the postconservative approach and the reason it is misnamed.

Theologians commonly distinguish several degrees of authority in Christian teaching. Elsewhere Olson designates these as dogma, doctrine, and opinion. Dogma represents our most solemn formulation of the apostolic faith: for instance, the Nicene Creed. Doctrine teaches the faith in a more local form and so has a more local authority: for instance, Lutheran Pietism. Opinion comes from individual voices and schools who articulate the faith constructively, critically, and creatively: for instance, Roger Olson's Reformed and Always Reforming.

Each of these tests the others. New proposals lead eyes back to hallowed traditions to see whether they adequately represent biblical faith. Hallowed traditions guide our judgments of whether new proposals have discovered things or distorted them.

This process of discerning living tradition through living tradition only works when all these organs of discernment are healthy. Guardians embalm tradition when they treat their doctrines as dogma. Adventurers disrupt it when they treat either dogma or their own opinions as doctrine. Conflict dismembers it as each group comes to regard the other as a foe.

Olson's Arminianism, postmodernism, and adventurousness do not trouble me. After all, though I reject the label, I myself am postconservative in almost every way Olson describes. I am a friend and a fan of many of the theologians he champions. As I said in my blurb on the book's back cover, they are worthy of respectful engagement. But I worry that Olson is setting opinion against dogma in ways harmful to both.

Olson tries to be fair to conservatives, but frustration and even bitterness repeatedly surface in stereotypes, swipes, and straw men. Olson is an adventurer from one evangelical stream who has lost his patience with the guardians of another.

I sympathize with Olson's frustration. How many ex-fundamentalists, ex-conservatives, ex-evangelicals, and ex-Christians are casualties of misdirected criticism? Indeed, here postconservatism is a fitting term. It proves that some conservative evangelicals will take only so much inquisition and abuse before they leave. Yet I do not share Olson's confidence that postconservatives have really transcended modern habits. Our pluralist culture has trained us so well that we find them easier to disavow than to discard. From political activism to the church-growth movement to the allegedly postmodern "emerging church," evangelicals are borrowing more than ever from late modern liberalism. We need the scrutiny of both postliberals and traditional conservatives.

Evangelicals cannot afford this battle. Our movement does not need postconservative converts or apostates. We need thinkers who appreciate conservatism's and evangelicalism's multiple streams, our new cultural situation, theology's guardians as well as its adventurers, and the call to face one another's scrutiny with inextinguishable hope.

Telford Work (telfordwork.net), associate professor of theology, Westmont College.

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Reformed and Always Reforming and an excerpt are available from ChristianBook.com and other retailers.

Telford Work's articles are available on his website.

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February 2008, Vol. 52, No. 2