THE CITY
tional eschatology has obscured this dynamic. We have separated the church militant from the church triumphant to our own detriment. That is, at least, my observation. I am happy to be proved wrong. All this leads me to the generous critique by Dr. Reynolds. He rightly suggests that I did not address the core problem of the new evangelicalism, and correctly identifies my timidity in articulating a cure. Reynolds’ proposal is that the core problem is the rejection of Christendom, the marriage of Athens and Jerusalem, and that rejection stems from evangelicals being co-opted by the Scylla of intellectualism (carefully defined) or the Charybdis of anti-intellectualism. Reynolds’ credentials on this issue are impeccable. He speaks as one who has navigated both of these extremes, and sacrificed the prestige that comes from embracing the prevailing intellectualist winds. Reynolds writes not from the standpoint of an intellectualist commenting on some abstract social trend, but from someone who has confronted the very difficulty he articulates all his life. Not surprisingly, Reynolds’ analysis of the disease is exactly right, insofar as it goes. The only problem with it is that his insistence on finding a cause for the evangelical malaise has prompted him to too quickly settle on one cause. While I find myself in agreement with his analysis, I believe it suffers from being too one-dimensional.
A
llow me to tease out one additional reason why evangelicals have rejected Christendom: our understanding of the relationship between Church and culture will not allow it. Evangelicals have made the dualism between Church and culture fundamental. They are two separate worlds that may or may not overlap. The escapist mindset of traditional evangelicals was replaced by the notion that the Church is to ‘engage’ culture or ‘create’ or ‘transform’ culture. Both, however, presume that the Church is not itself a culture that comes into contact with an alternative culture that may or may not agree with it. What’s more, the insistence on ‘engaging culture’ by young evangelicals is nothing more than a tacit admission that secular culture is the fundamental ground of human existence, and that the Church exists as something above and beyond that secular culture. In his famous Regensberg address, Pope Benedict writes, “A reason which is deaf to the 38