Climb One Doctrine at a Time

Liberal theologians at least know the difficulties and can help us map the terrain.

Evangelicals face an intellectual challenge: How is it possible to be faithful to the Bible without being irrelevant to modern hearers? How do they explain a traditional understanding of the gospel that originated in the premodern situation to people who think in modern ways?

Evangelical theology almost by definition identifies with the doctrinal substance of classical and Reformational Christianity. It places enormous stress Upon the objective, infallible authority of God’s written Word and reiterates belief in the scriptural teachings of Protestant confessions of faith.

Evangelical theology thus was formulated essentially in the period that preceded a set of assumptions about reality that came in with the Enlightenment in Europe. We are even proud to declare it: evangelical theology is rooted in the Bible and in the history of Christian thought that was before Kant, Darwin, Strauss, Marx, and Freud—before those ideas that now present such a challenge to it became prominent. But besides being proud, we need to be sober and realistic about the task we have implicitly set ourselves: By choosing to be evangelical we are in effect claiming to be able to make a case for these antique beliefs in the modern setting.

It is insufficient just to offer an account of why evangelical theology is popular today. We might say the classical faith is proving its richness and power and people prefer it to the bare bones of liberal, fictive religion. We might claim it offers the strong meaning and straightforward beliefs they are seeking. But this says nothing about its being true. Of course it meets people’s needs—but so do some strange myths and cults. We must offer something more than a social account of why orthodox religion is becoming popular again—it could go out of style just as fast as it came in.

It is a painful challenge I am asking us to face. Some forms of what Peter Berger calls deductive orthodoxy have decided not to try. Belief cannot argue with unbelief, they say; faith has credentials the world knows nothing of. But this retreat into the citadel of faith can be a fig leaf to cover up intellectual shortcomings and is sure to discourage the person considering the claims of Christianity. It is a painful thing to seek to be faithful to the Word of God and also be deeply honest and sensitive with what we as modern people feel and know about things like the human side of Scripture, the dynamics of society, the development of life on earth, and human psychology. Our great intellectual challenge is to present our premodern faith intelligently in the modern situation. Liberal theologians do not think we can, which is why most of them became liberal theologians. Our job is to show them we can.

Donald Bloesch in his otherwise excellent Essentials of Evangelical Theology does not help us greatly here. His stress upon the Spirit and his confidence in the inherent power of the gospel to accredit itself without our assistance translate into a slight indifference toward meeting this intellectual challenge. He will make an allusion to a legendary element in the Bible without telling us how he avoids Bultmann’s approach, or to the authority of the Bible’s central message without saying whether or not this implies a “canon within the canon.” For the liberal observer anxious to see if evangelicals can achieve a meaningfulness for their ancient faith in today’s world, Bloesch would not seem sufficiently rigorous intellectually.

On the other hand, in his exhaustive God, Revelation, and Authority (soon to be six volumes), Carl Henry aims to establish once and for all the rational superiority of biblical faith. He intends to prove the cogency and necessity of taking the Christian propositional revelation as a primary axiom in consistent and coherent philosophy of religion. One is thereby either convinced of Christianity as a whole and accepts it, or finds it unpersuasive and rejects the whole sustem. The liberal critic would reply that Henry certainly takes the intellectual challenge seriously but wonder if Christianity is a tight, coherent system in the first place, and if a deductively rational argument for it carries much weight.

I believe we ought to go at it piece by piece, doctrine by doctrine, theme by theme. Modern people will grasp the beauty of classical thinking in theology as the result of a team effort by many thinkers and teachers in the church who explicate the orthodox themes one by one in conscious correlation with the experience we all share in the modern world. They will diligently relate Scripture to everyday realities, and strive to show how these doctrines illumine and clarify human existence.

For example, Reinhold Neibuhr’s penetrating analysis of human behavior exposed the desperate sinfulness of sin and restored to credibility the fallenness of man. This is what we need to do if our faithfulness to the Bible is to be seen as relevant to the modern situation.

Both liberal and conservative theologians have an intellectual challenge peculiar to them. The liberal theologian has to explain how he achieves relevance without accommodating to the culture and proving unfaithful to the gospel. The conservative has to explain how he can remain faithful to the Bible without espousing apparent absurdities and appearing irrelevant. It boils down to the difficulty of being conservative and contemporary at the same time.

Perhaps if we would realize that we both have a serious problem, a little empathy might arise in our hearts for one another. Not that we evangelicals give up for a moment the conviction that it matters eternally what people believe in regard to the gospel of Christ, or that liberal theology represents a serious threat to the truth. It is simply recognizing that explaining the traditional faith in the modern world is a tough mountain to climb and that liberal theologians at least know how difficult it is and can help us indirectly in mapping some of the terrain. I doubt that we shall reach the summit without looking back and admitting we wouldn’t have done it without the prodding.

Dr. Pinnock is professor of systematic theology at McMaster Divinity College, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.