evangelicalism-tm-who-owns-it-march-april-2001

THE DONALD DAYTON INTERVIEW: HAVE THE REFORMED TRIED TO STEAL EVANGELICALISM?

MODERN REFORMATION

EVANGELICALISM

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10, NUMBER 2, MARCH/APRIL 2001, $5.00

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EVANGELICALISMTM WHO OWNS IT?

15 The Battles Over the Label “Evangelical” Against a number of Wesleyans, many Reformed people insist that Evangelicalism has a Reformed past.

Are they right? And even if they are, does it matter? by Michael Horton Plus: The Perils of Definition

22 How Do Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms Differ from “Statements of Faith”?

Statements of faith are generally used to keep the “bad guys” from getting into evangelical institutions.

They have only a defensive purpose. Creeds and confessions do something very different. by Richard Lints

24 Unity and Diversity in the New Testament Some Christians think even preachers in pulpits can say whatever they want. Others think that they are personally called to police all speech, even public discourse on the town green. It’s time to start paying attention to context.

by Shane Rosenthal Plus: Evangelicalism—A Fantasy

32 Distinguishing Confessing Evangelicals from Generic Evangelicals A Round-Table Discussion R. C. Sproul, Mark Talbot, John Hannah, Ken Jones, and Michael Horton recently sat down to talk about the five “sola’s” (or “only’s”) of the Reformation.

Plus: Council Members Gene Edward Veith and Rod Rosenbladt on the tendency toward moralism

37 The Triumph of Charismatic Song COVER PHOTO BY TONY STONE

Is a certain style of worship an essential part of any definition of “Evangelicalism” today? Why has this particular style made such inroads into confessional churches? by Leonard R. Payton

In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Ex Auditu page 5 | Speaking of page 11 Between the Times page 12 | Resource Center page 28 | Free Space with Donald Dayton page 40 Reviews page 50 | On My Mind page 56 M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 1 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 1

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MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief

Dr. Michael Horton

Understanding “Evangelicalism”

Executive Editor

Benjamin E. Sasse Assistant Editor

Ann Henderson Hart

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here seem to be many different paths by which evangelicals first become enam-

Production Editor

Irene H. DeLong Book Review Editor

ored with the Reformation traditions, and by implication with all the fathers of

Dr. Mark R. Talbot Column Editors

Lisa Davis Brian Lee

the faith from Athanasius and Augustine to Anselm and Aquinas. For many,

the first awakening is prompted directly by justification, the doctrine by which the Church stands or falls. But for others, the initial contact with anything predating American revivalism is caused by a nagging uneasiness about Evangelicalism’s lack of interest in ecclesiology, the Sacraments, or vocation. For still others, it is the desire to understand the relationship between church and culture, or between saving grace and common grace, or between the Old and New Testaments.

Regardless of what prompts this first interest in church history, though, the next step for most people is often the same. They suddenly bark: “But wait, what now is my relationship to Evangelicalism? Am I still a ‘member’?

And where did this movement come from?”

(Most of MR’s editorial staff and regular contributors know this experience firsthand, as few of us were raised and catechized in confessional churches. Most of us are converts to the Reformation from—or through— Evangelicalism.)

MR’s writers have very different views on how these questions should be answered. Some think that Evangelicalism is a lineal descendent of the Reformation, and has simply fallen on hard times in the last two or three decades. For these folks, the answer is to call Evangelicalism back to its Reformation heritage.

For others, Evangelicalism is chiefly an outgrowth of the early nineteenth century’s “Second Great Awakening”—which means that the movement has been, from its very emergence, an attack on the regulated preaching of the Word, a serious attention to the Sacraments, and churchly discipline. To this group, the evangelical movement has no healthy founding constitution to which it can be recalled. Instead, the end of interacting with Next Issue Evangelicalism is simply Heresy and to call individual evanBoundaries gelicals out of that anti-

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churchly tradition, and into a particular churchly tradition.

This issue obviously won’t solve this debate. In fact, we may not even come to an agreement on how to define the word “evangelical.” But we think, nevertheless, that it is worth devoting one issue to something that many of you have asked for: a brief consideration of what exactly “Evan-gelicalism” is. Let us know how we did.

On an unrelated note, we are pleased to announce the hiring of D. G. Hart as the new executive editor of MR, effective next issue.

Dr. Hart, educated at Temple, Westminster Seminary, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins, is a past Director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicalism at Wheaton College. His current academic home is at Westminster Theological Seminary in California, where he is the academic dean and a professor of church history.

Everyone associated with MR believes that our readers will be incredibly well-served by Professor Hart’s experienced editorial hand. At the same time, there are some mixed feelings that our search is concluded. We have been exceedingly gratified by both the breadth and the depth of dozens of the applications we received—and we are disappointed to pass them over. We hope these expressions of interest in this work are a sign that MR is making a real contribution to the growing Reformation movement in our time.

Alyson S. Platt Contributing Editor

Diana S. Frazier Layout and Design

Lori A. Cook Proofreader

Celeste McGhee Production Assistant

Kathryn Baldino Marketing Assistant

John J. McClure Alliance Council

The Rev. Alistair Begg Dr. Mark E. Dever Dr. J. Ligon Duncan, III Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Dr. John D. Hannah Dr. Michael Horton Mrs. Rosemary Jensen The Rev. Ken Jones The Rev. John Nunes Dr. J. A. O. Preus Dr. Rod Rosenbladt Dr. R. C. Sproul Dr. Mark R. Talbot Dr. Gene E. Veith, Jr. Dr. Paul F. M. Zahl Contributing Scholars

Dr. Allen C. Guelzo Dr. D. G. Hart Dr. Carl F. H. Henry Dr. Arthur A. Just Dr. Robert Kolb The Rev. Donald Matzat Dr. John W. Montgomery Mr. John Muether Mr. Kenneth A. Myers Dr. Tom J. Nettles Dr. Leonard R. Payton Dr. Lawrence R. Rast Dr. Kim Riddlebarger Mr. Rick Ritchie Dr. David P. Scaer Dr. Rachel S. Stahle Dr. David F. Wells Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

© 2001 All rights reserved. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life.

For more information, call or write us at: 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 546-3696 ModRef@Alliance Net.org www.AllianceNet.org ISSN-1076-7169

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The First Mark: The Word Preached I thoroughly enjoyed your issue on preaching.

Though I grew up Roman Catholic, I became an evangelical Christian in a non-denominational church several years ago. Having only discovered the deep riches of God’s Word through the Reformed faith in the past three years, it is often difficult to articulate to others the differences. Your articles have greatly aided me in that endeavor.

Regarding Bergsma’s and Lee’s articles on preaching, I wonder if it is possible to be both redemptivehistorical and catechetical at the same time?

Within my church, only one or two adults grew up in the Reformed Faith. The majority of us came from Roman Catholicism and/or “No-Creed-ButChrist”-ism. Few grew up in a faithful covenant household where we were catechized in basic Christian doctrines. I think my church is reflective of a growing number of churches whose flocks have been graciously drawn back to the Reformed faith, but nonetheless lack a foundational grounding.

Four years ago, I had never really considered the character of God and how it would transform me.

It was only after I put on the glasses of Reformed theology that the Word of God came into focus.

As I was exposed to redemptive-historical preaching, I found it profoundly life-changing and applicable to all areas of my life.

That said, I also understand the frustration of others who cannot always make the connection and feel that such preaching doesn’t speak to where they live. Sheep don’t normally understand what we really need. Their problem is not that redemptive-historical preaching is not immediately lifeapplicable. Their problem is that they can’t see the

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applicability due to terminology or difficulty synthesizing the principles into attitudes.

As one who has come into the Reformed faith as an adult, it now grieves me to see Christians eating crackers every Sunday when they could be feasting at the banquet of God’s Word properly preached. While I thank God for faithful preachers of his Word, I pray that they do not forget that babes in Christ sometimes need help developing a taste for healthy food.

Rich Leino Murrieta, California

Thank you so much for the November/ December issue devoted to preaching.

I have long been persuaded of the crying need in my country and in yours for a return to expository biblical preaching. Michael Horton’s article on “Ministers Who Preach Not Themselves But Christ” was timely and effective.

I must admit, however, that Alistair Begg’s sidebar, “Where Did the Pulpit Go?” made me wonder.

I would heartily agree that the Bible and the preaching of it should be indeed central in the worship service. But I am at a loss to understand the necessity of the pulpit per se. Although in the churches I pastor (Baptist), the pulpit is central, I get out from behind it as often as I can, not so the people might see me, but that the communication of the Word might be personal in the best biblical sense of that word. Did Jesus have a pulpit? Did the Apostles? As long as the preaching is “on Christ, by Christ, to the praise of Christ” (William Perkins, 1592), I care not what type of building we are in. Indeed, perhaps the need of our time is not

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only a return to biblical preaching, but to open-air preaching—passionate, public, willing to take the risk that forum always entails. Then the pulpit might be a boat, a car, or a park bench.

At any rate, keep up the good work!

Pastor John Carroll Dipper Harbour, New Brunswick Canada

The Second and Third Marks: Sacraments and Discipline What your contributors have written about weekly communion in recent years has intrigued me.… After much prayer and study, I became convinced that my congregation’s practice of communion, once per month, was really an attack on the cross.… The change [to weekly communion] is being made because we have become convinced that the Lord’s Table must be practiced every Lord’s Day. This vitally important means of grace must not be “tacked on” at the end of one of our services. We must truly enter into the spirit of it.… Your articles were a great encouragement to our people.

A.S. Via Internet

I attend a Reformed church in California. Four years ago, I allowed my membership to lapse due to impenitence. I finally repented about two years ago, and have been faithfully attending Lord’s Day services for about a year now.

Recently, I was told that I should not be partaking of the Lord’s Supper, as I was not considered to be in “good standing.” I understand and agree with the Reformed perspective of fencing the Sacraments. But in this case, I am being barred not because of my persistence in sin, but because of a slow bureaucracy! The elders are aware of my situation, but have not yet made the motion to receive me back into the fold.

Honestly, it is not the case that I am leaving something out in this situation that would explain it. I am an adulterer and a thief and a liar. But it is for these exact things that my Lord Jesus Christ shed his blood on the cross, a perfect propitiation for my sins. I am in dire need of the Sacrament of communion, because I am of the Reformed opinion that it is a means of precious grace. But I must abstain because the consistory has not yet found the time to review and restore me.

I write to suggest to church officers: In these modern times, as the yearning soul comes to the church seeking solace and shelter from the world, will they be welcomed into the body and minis-

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tered to through the ministry of Word and Sacrament? Or will the weary be forced to wait for the church to find time to catechize them, to examine them, to schedule their baptism? Should a new convert sit and wait for one or two years (how frequently are new members classes offered?) to receive the fits of the Table?

The reformers protected the Sacraments because they prized them as Gods means of delivering grace and strength to his body. Today, we often do it only because of tradition. Because if we really believed as they did, we would bring people to the Table often and quickly—not when the Supper fit into our busy church schedule.

Anonymous California

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Luke 9:37–45

Miracles and the Cross

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hile everyone was marveling at all that Jesus did, he said to his disciples,

mount and there was revealed in all his heavenly glory.

“Listen carefully to what I am about to tell you: The Son of Man is going With him were Moses and Elijah “in glorious splendor, to be betrayed into the hands of men.” Luke 9:43–44 talking with Jesus” (Luke 9:31). Their topic was the The miracles of Christ focus us on Jesus and his cross, the destination that was work for the salvation of his people. I can hardly before Jesus. Peter and James From think of anything more important for us today than and John worshipped in awe, RICHARD D. this—to take our eyes off of the world, off of ourand they heard the voice from PHILLIPS selves, off of our works, and even off of our faith, heaven as it declared, “This is so that we may place them onto Jesus Christ. In my Son, whom I have chosen; the miracles we find that Jesus does the work needlisten to Him” (Luke 9:35). ed to deliver us from weakness and condemnation, Our passage begins at Associate Minister from danger and sickness, from death, and from the Luke 9:37, when in the mornTenth Presbyterian grip of the devil. We do not have power to save ing Jesus and the three came Church Philadelphia, PA down from the mountain ourselves, much less other people, but the miracles back into the valley, back point us to our only hope, the one who is mighty down into the world, as it to save.

Another thing the miracles do is instruct us on were. There seems to be an obvious parallelism at how Christianity works—that is, the pattern and work here, namely between Jesus’ descent from the dynamics of salvation as presented in the mountain where he stood in his glory down into the Scriptures. For one thing, we gain a biblical por- valley, and his descent from heaven into the world trait of our own condition. We are the ones pic- in the Incarnation. For one thing, where are Moses tured by lepers and paralytics, the sick and the and Elijah in the time after their death but in heavdead, and the demon-possessed. In the miracles we en? Jesus is here revealed before the disciples in all also observe Jesus in action. We see his compas- his heavenly glory. Just as he came down from sion, his willingness to heal and to touch and to heaven to earth, Jesus comes down now from the save—and most of all his ability to do so. Christ, mountain back into the world. we find, is willing and able for he is the God of our If that is the case, there are some valuable lessalvation. sons for us in this passage. For one thing, we see that the task Jesus came into the world to do was A Wide Perspective on Jesus’ Ministry his death upon the cross. That is what he was talkOur passage is very helpful in just this regard, ing about with Moses and Elijah—the mission he because it presents for us a progression for viewing was embarking upon. It is no surprise, then, that Christ’s saving work. This miracle account occurs after Jesus casts out the demon down in the valley upon Jesus’ descent from the Mount of he speaks again of the cross to his disciples. Jesus Transfiguration. After Peter’s great confession, the came into this world not just to give a moral examclimax of the whole Galilean phase of Jesus’ ministry, ple, not to establish a kingdom of worldly power our Lord took his three closest disciples up on the and glory and affluence, but to die for our sins at

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the hands of men and then call us to join him in that cross. That is the task or work for which he came into the world.

In our passage Jesus came down from the mountain to encounter two forces that must be overcome. We are going to examine both of these, first the devil and his spiritual powers, and second, the unbelief of his own disciples.

Finally, this miracle account, with its wide perspective on Jesus’ saving ministry, reveals that the task Jesus came to perform, dying on the cross, is also the source of his victory over all that opposes him. Perhaps the main purpose of this passage is to show us the two choices open to Jesus and his use of great power. There is the way of glory and the way of the cross. Jesus might well have employed his awesome power for worldly glory and might.

That is what Satan had tempted him to do in the desert, to take what had been promised him without the inconvenience of the cross. Instead he followed the path of obedience to the Father, a path that led him away from glory and to the cross. It is from that cross that his power for salvation flows into this world; it is by the cross that his Kingdom advances even today. Indeed, that is the theme of this entire chapter, the point he was making to his disciples in 9:23, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

relationship with the passage that precedes it, the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain. I. Howard Marshall explains what Luke is up to: It is the Jesus who has been transfigured who now appears to help men at the foot of the mountain; what the disciples cannot do, he can do.… The lesson of the transfig-uration—that the gloriously revealed Son of God must suffer—is reinforced: the Son of man who has power to heal must be betrayed by the unbelieving people whom he would gladly help.1 Jesus came down from heaven, down from the mount, to face two great battles. The first of these appears as this father cries out to Jesus. Luke tells us: A man in the crowd called out, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son, for he is my only child. A spirit seizes him and he suddenly screams; it throws him into convulsions so that he foams at the mouth. It scarcely ever leaves him and is destroying him.” (Luke 9:38–39)

Jesus’ ministry in the world requires him to battle the devil. This is a pattern that was established earlier at Jesus’ baptism. Then, like in the transfiguration, the voice from heaven pronounced him Jesus vs. the Devil God’s Son. Immediately after, Jesus went out into Luke is one of the Synoptic Gospels, along with the desert to be tempted by the devil. Given that Matthew and Mark, so called because of the strik- example and the one in our passage tonight, it is ing similarities between them. Nonetheless, the very clear that Jesus came to earth to overthrow the various writers have distinctive interests and devil and his work.

There are three points to notice from this encounter artin Luther often distinguished between the theology of the cross and the theology of between Jesus and the glory. The theologian of glory thinks that suffering is a mistake. But the theologian of demon, beginning with this: the devil’s work is to enslave and distort human beings. Man was the cross knows that in suffering we despair of all earthly power and glory and hope—and we made in God’s image, but the then look for and find the Good who is hidden in sorrow. devil would twist us into his own. That is what he did in emphases, just as we would expect. In the case of the garden when he tempted our first parents, and this miracle, Mark and Matthew emphasize the that is what the demons are found doing all importance of faith, but Luke has a different through the Gospels.

The symptoms presented in this case resemble emphasis altogether. Luke omits a great deal of material that is found in Mark’s Gospel, material epilepsy. The boy convulses and foams at the that must have been available to him. He present- mouth, falling to the ground. But there is far more ed this miracle in nine verses compared to Mark’s than that. Mark’s account tells us that he was also nineteen. The argument with the scribes, Jesus’ deaf and mute. He adds that the demon “has often conversation with the boy’s father, and the expla- thrown him into fire or water to kill him” (9:22). nation for the disciples’ failure are all missing here. This is an excellent picture of what the devil is The reason, it seems, that Luke compressed his doing to people in this world. We are not up account was to bring this miracle into the closest against a silly man in a red costume casting little

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darts our way. The devil’s powers work within us, within our hearts and minds, leading us to selfdestruction. They scar and destroy men and women made to bear God’s image in the world.

Do not think you are lucky to avoid such a fate because you do not show the symptoms this boy does. Many, even most, people today are firmly in the grip of a possession that is if anything stronger than this. Their minds have been captured by the demonic forces of materialism, sensual perversity, self-indulgent promiscuity, self-absorbed ambition.

If that describes you then God’s image is being just as efficiently warped in your case as in this boy’s.

Your destruction is all the more horrible for the ease with which it is accomplished and the economy of effort it affords the devil.

Second, we need to notice that the combat described in this passage is between Jesus and the devil. We are not direct participants in this fight; rather, we are its object. We do not lend military aid to Jesus, nor does he need it.

The situation between Jesus and the devil is very well portrayed by the battle between David and Goliath in the Old Testament (1 Sam. 17).

Goliath was the horrifying giant who threatened and humiliated the hosts of Israel. What Israel needed, what we need before so great a foe, is a Savior. Jesus, like David, is just that. It is Christ’s work to destroy the devil; ours is to stand firm and, as all the Bible teaches, “see the deliverance of the Lord” (Exod. 14:13). He is the Victor; we are the beneficiaries of his triumph.

Third, we see in this passage Christ’s absolute power to conquer the devil. In the presence of Jesus, the demon threw all his reserves into the fray.

“Even while the boy was coming, the demon threw him to the ground in a convulsion,” Luke writes (v.

42). “But Jesus rebuked the evil spirit, healed the boy and gave him back to his father.” Surely the emphasis here is on the ease with which Jesus succeeds in battle. The demon’s power over the boy is unchallenged, but so also is Christ’s over the demon. With just his word of rebuke, the devil’s servant is chased from the field.

From all this we should draw three important lessons. First, do not toy with the devil or with sin; their purpose is to destroy you. Second, do not mistake yourself for the Savior, but rather stand in faith, awaiting his mighty victory. Third, because this mighty God is for us we should not be afraid.

Martin Luther said it best in his great hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”: And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us, We will not fear, for God hath willed his truth

to triumph through us.

The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him; His rage we can endure, for lo! his doom is sure; One little word shall fell him.

Christ’s Lament Over Unbelief The devil, however, is only one of the forces opposed to Jesus’ work. The second force is the unbelief of his own disciples, and it was, if not stronger, certainly more distressing to our Lord.

This unbelief is highlighted when Jesus learns that the nine disciples he left in the valley were unable to cast out this demon from the boy. “O unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus replied, “how long shall I stay with you and put up with you?” (v.

41).

We need to be clear here that it was the disciples to whom Jesus was speaking. This is less clear in the other Gospel accounts, but it is very evident in Luke. The nine disciples had failed and the reason was their unbelief. Jesus had been gone from them for only a little time, perhaps just a night, and they had fallen apart. We are reminded of Moses’ similar departure to the mountaintop, leaving his followers alone. When Moses returned, Aaron and the Israelites were dancing around the golden calf.

Perhaps it is fortunate Jesus was only gone as long as he was! Clearly, he associates their failure to cast out the demon—a task they had been charged with and empowered to do by faith (see 9:1, 6)—with the unbelief of Israel. If this situation was lesser in magnitude to what Moses discovered below Mt. Sinai, it was cut from the same cloth. Therefore, Jesus, having just rebuked the devil, now rebukes his other great foe, the unbelief of his own disciples.

“O unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus laments. He does not mean by this that the disciples had no faith at all, but that it was so enfeebled by their unbelief that it was unable to bear fruit.

Compared with the mass of their unbelief, what faith they had was imperceptible. The term “perverse” indicates a twisted and distorted state that is the result of unbelief. These two always go together—an unbelieving generation will as a matter of course become a twisted one.

How are we to view this singular outburst by our Lord? Is this an unholy frustration, of the kind you and I experience? Is this sinful anger bursting forth with venom?

Certainly there is frustration and anguish in Jesus’ words, but not sinfully or maliciously so.

They are words like those spoken by a schoolteacher faced with students who won’t do their homework. “O perverse generation! How long

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must I put up with you,” she says, when she intends to give at least a whole year of her life to their patient instruction. Pastors feel this way with congregations who never absorb what is preached. “O unbelieving generation! How long shall I stay with you?” he laments, knowing that he will give the whole of his life to their spiritual care. This is what parents say to their wayward children, an impatience for growth that flows out of boundless love.

This is the kind of things wives say to husbands

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yet we are so unwilling to employ it. How many times has Jesus looked for faith in you and me, faith he has labored for and earned, faith he would use to reveal himself to many and bring true blessing to our lives, and yet has found an unbelief that will not receive him. Surely he cries out now, “O unbelieving and perverse generation! How long shall I stay with you and put up with you?”

Undoubtedly, this opposing force, the unbelief of his own disciples, scored wounds against Jesus far deeper than any demon could ever inflict. Jesus overou will often hear it said that the cross wins our hearts by the fine example of love that it came the demon by a rebuke.

Will he overcome this foe, sets. That is not true. and if so, how? The answer is, I think, found within his very lament! “How long who seem constitutionally unable to come home shall I endure you?” Jesus cried. He said that in from work in time for dinner. “O perverse hus- response to their weakness of faith, their immaturiband!” she cries. “How long will I put up with you?” ty, their worldly attitudes—and it is by enduring Yet she has every intention of putting up with him that he will overcome them. “How long?” He laments. The rest of Luke’s Gospel gives the for the rest of her life.

The great Scottish preacher, Alexander answer—“As long as it takes.”

Jesus did not cast the disciples aside and he will Maclaren, describes Jesus’ lament as “a little window into a great matter.” It is a little window not cast you out either, if you have genuine faith, because it shows only briefly a small portion of the however small or weak. These disciples had shown great burden Jesus bore in his humanity. Jesus they could not be trusted alone, so Jesus does not offered so great a treasure, invested so colossal an yet leave them. Their root was not yet established, effort, poured out such love and sacrifice for the so he would continue to tend and water them. disciples, only to encounter persistent unbelief in How impatient Jesus must have been to climb back their hearts. Maclaren writes: up to the mountain of heaven, to ascend back to his place of glory. Yet, he stayed among his needy litBecause of their unbelief He knew that they tle flock; he took them with him, to teach and procould not receive what He desired to give tect them. them.… He has to turn from them, bearing it That was true in his days on earth and his presaway unbestowed, like some man who goes ent ministry is no different in character. How will out in the morning with his seed-basket full, Jesus overcome the problem of your unbelief? By and finds the whole field where he would fain that same long-suffering love. Paul writes, “He have sown covered already with springing who began a good work in you will carry it on to weeds or encumbered with hard rock, and completion” (Phil. 1:6). Jesus will preserve all who has to bring back the germs of possible life to trust in him, and he will bear with us until we are bless and fertilize some other soil.… It is safely home. wonderfully pathetic and beautiful, I think, to The Way of the Cross see how Jesus Christ knew the pains of wounded love that cannot get expressed The passage concludes with Jesus turning to his because there is no heart to receive it.2 disciples while the crowd marveled at the miracle he had performed. Verses 43–44 tell us, “While Do not think that Jesus bears any less sorrow everyone was marveling at all that Jesus did, he said now that he is ascended into heaven, for it is in his to his disciples, ‘Listen carefully to what I am about humanity that he ministers there. He is in heaven to tell you: The Son of Man is going to be betrayed now as God and man, with the same tender heart so into the hands of men.’” This is obviously the cliwounded by the disciples’ unbelief. How often he max to the whole account, and a matter of great must look on us who are no different from these importance. Whenever Jesus says, “Listen carefulnine, upon a generation in the church that is no bet- ly,” we need to do that or we will miss something ter and may be quite a lot worse than this fledgling essential. group. He has given us faith so that we are his, and What the disciples were to know, and what they

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still failed to grasp, was that Jesus would not ascend an earthly throne but would instead ascend a cross to die. Luke tells us they just could not absorb or assimilate this. It was hidden from them, we read, apparently because the time was not yet right.

From the human perspective the next passage shows us why (vv. 46–48), for there the disciples are seen arguing over their own relative supremacy.

Seeking their own victory and glory, it is no wonder they could not accept the cross.

There is a contrast here that makes this point abundantly clear—a contrast between the applause of the world and the cross of Christ. This is, if anything, the key point of this passage. It is to highlight this contrast that Luke has compressed this miracle account toward the transfiguration. Jesus came down into the world where he was confronted by the devil and by unbelief. By which route will he conquer? Will it be the way of worldly glory and power—the way the crowd desires him to go—or the way of death and weakness and humiliation?

Jesus makes it very plain that his way and the way for all who follow him is not the way of glory but the way of the cross.

All of Jesus’ victories were achieved by way of the cross. It was there that he defeated and disarmed the devil. He did so by paying the penalty for our sin, so that Satan can no longer accuse us or torment us with fear. Jesus’ death undermined the whole of Satan’s empire, because his atoning work sets us free and reconciles us to God. It is also by way of the cross that Jesus overcomes our unbelief. You will often hear it said that the cross wins our hearts by the fine example of love that it sets. That is not true. Certainly, Christ’s great sacrifice ought to win the love of all the world, but it does not and has not because of our wickedness. It is not by moral influence that Jesus overcomes unbelief but by the Holy Spirit he earned the right to send. Because of the Spirit’s work Christ’s elect are born again, so that with enlivened hearts we receive what otherwise we loathed and despised. All through our lives that enlivening work goes on, our unbelief more and more driven out and replaced by willing faith.

The cross alone is Christ’s banner in this world, quite in contrast to the way of glory. This difference was very important to Martin Luther, who spoke of theologians of glory versus theologians of the cross. One way to tell the difference, he said, was through their opinion of suffering. To theologians of glory, suffering is a mistake, a problem, something to be explained and escaped. They expect to know and serve God apart from the suffering.

Not so the theologian of the cross. He regards

suffering as the way to the knowledge of God. Not because suffering has any existential value in itself.

No, the point is that in suffering we despair of all earthly power and glory and hope, looking for and finding the God who is hidden in sorrow. Luther wrote of suffering that “in so far as it takes everything away from us, [it] leaves us nothing but God: it cannot take God away from us, and actually brings him closer to us.”3 Surely that is what Paul was getting at in Philippians 3:10–11, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.”

How little of this we find today, and its absence explains the weakness of the church. This, for instance, is what is wrong with today’s seeker-sensitive movement. Despite good intentions to reach the unchurched, this movement has pursued not the cross but the way of glory. This is what we are told to do today, to focus on pleasing the target audience, to seek their applause and approval, to cater to the tastes of the crowd. We have forgotten what Jesus did here, turning away from the consumer audience to face the cross.

You cannot accuse Jesus of lacking compassion, and yet he turned away from the consumers and the praise of men. Christ was given over into the hands of men and put to death. Today’s theologians of glory are giving over the church into those same hands, and they will put it to death as once they did Jesus.

Disturbing News In 1988, a tumor appeared in Dave Dravecky’s left arm. He was a major-league baseball player, a left-handed pitcher. When a majority of his deltoid muscle was removed the doctor told him, “Outside of a miracle you will never pitch again.” Being a Christian, Dravecky began praying for just that, and in August of the next year he was scheduled to pitch his comeback game. “I don’t care what anybody says to me,” he recalls, “It was a miracle.”

We can imagine what went through his mind before that game: dreams of triumph, the camera then drawing close. He smiles and says, “First, I want to give all the glory to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” That is how we plan things—the way of glory, giving praise to Jesus out of our earthly victory. It is not a bad thing to praise Christ should we achieve great things, but we should not think that this is the way to know or serve Jesus in the world.

It is through the cross that Christ’s power shines into this world, because his is a resurrection power and comes only by death and the cross.

Things did not turn out the way Dravecky had

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hoped. In the sixth inning of that comeback game, his arm shattered as he threw a fastball. He lay in agony on the grass, and as they wheeled him off, he remembered the words a Christian friend had told him just that afternoon, that the miracles of God come by the cross and not by baseball glory.

During long treatments, multiple surgeries, and ultimately the amputation of his arm, Dravecky and his wife battled depression, fear, and pain. He found it quite a bit harder to praise God from his hospital bed than from the mount of glory that is the pitcher’s mound. But he learned to praise God there, for in tribulation he had sought God and learned of his great goodness. He writes, “What God does through the valleys of life is he shapes and molds us into the image that he wants us to be.

He gives us strength to endure.” That is something he learned not on the mount but in the valley, not by way of glory but by way of the cross.

Dravecky never got to tell the world how happy God made him by making him a superstar and a millionaire and a comeback miracle. But out of his trials, his testimony impacted literally thousands of people who heard him praise a God who sustained him in loss.

It will be the same for you if you are a Christian. It is not by the way you rise to the top of the corporate ladder that you will reveal the glory of Christ to this world, but by the way you trust him with joy when you are downsized out of your position, when rivals attack you, when people have turned against you, and your security is threatened. You do not have to become rich, have perfect, smiling children, or become famous in this world to serve the Kingdom of Christ. He calls his own to the cross, rich and poor, and there we find and follow him.

That was the message of the transfiguration— that Christ’s glory is revealed by way of the cross.

In the same way, it will not be the glare of camera lights that produces our own transfiguration, our own opportunity to reflect the glory of Christ out into the world. It is the light of the open tomb, the resurrection power of the new creation, shining through the cross. By faith in sorrow, by joy in darkness, by calmness of spirit and forgiving love in the midst of tribulation, it is by the cross that we reveal to others a Kingdom and a Christ that are not of this world.

Does this news dismay you, the way it did the disciples? “I tell you the truth,” Jesus said, “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). If you have success and glory, yes, go ahead and give glory to God. But understand that heartache and pain will come to you; they are always with us. In them, and

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not in our glory, is where our transfiguration takes place. “May I never boast,” Paul declared, “except in the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14).

For there alone the salvation of God is revealed to us and through us to the world.

Richard D. Phillips (M. Div., Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia) is associate minister of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, and heads the Reformation Societies of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. He is also the author of The Heart of an Executive: Lessons in Leadership from the Life of King David (New York: Doubleday, 1999).

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Speaking of...

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o longer is it possible for an evangelical

to write or speak as if Reformed theology is synonymous with biblical truth without provoking a withering challenge from representatives of the “Pentecostal paradigm” in evangelical thought.

Roger Olson, Christian Century (May 3, 1995): 482.

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ot surprisingly] the very first meeting of the Society for Promoting Christian Union … ended in disunion. The meeting was addressed by the Rev. Mr. Dowling, of the Baptist church, and by President Mahan and Dr. Skinner, of the Presbyterian church. The two latter gentlemen expressed sentiments, which convinced the former, that he, as a conscientious Baptist, could have nothing to do with them. Thus ended the vision. We shall see what will come of the anti-sectarian theology.

Biblical Repertory (January 1837): 151.

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uring the 1950s and 1960s the simplest … definition of an evangelical in the broad sense was “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” Moreover, in the narrow card-carrying sense, most of those who called themselves evangelicals during that period were affiliated with organizations that had some connection with Graham.

George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 6.

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he cause of the Reformation was endangered more by its own caricature, namely the wild fanaticism of the Anabaptists, than the opposition of Rome. Luther saved it, not by truckling compromise, but by boldly facing and unmasking the false spirit, so that all the world might see that Lutheran Christianity was one thing, and wild Phrygian Montanism, with its pretended inspiration, quite another.

John Williamson Nevin, The Anxious Bench, 31.

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The Subtle Sides of the Abortion Struggle he Senate confi-rmation hearings in January on John Ashcroft’s nomination to be U.S. Attorney General offered the national media multiple opportunities to broadcast and publish again the two most common images associated with America’s abortion battles: finger-pointing politicians shouting, placard-waving citizens on Capitol Hill sidewalks. Clearly these pictures reveal important aspects of one of the greatest moral conflicts in American history. But just as clearly, an exclusive focus on such easy, political images obscures many of the variables that drive how many unborn babies will actually be aborted in any given year.

Though the political conflict is the simplest dimension to highlight, the economic, cultural, and medical factors may be more immediately relevant to reducing the number of annual abortions in the United States from

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one and a half million.

Depending on how the question is asked—and on which special interest group then interprets the data—it is possible to claim either that two-thirds of Americans are “pro-choice” or that twothirds of Americans want to “protect the life of the unborn.”

While there appears to be some slight movement toward the prolife position (for instance, socalled “Gen X’ers” typically have more qualms about abortion than do their “Baby Boomer” parents), a solid majority of Americans seems to believe that most abortion procedures should remain legal. Given this reality, a few spokespeople in the antiabortion movement have begun to urge that some resources be shifted from allor-nothing political battles, and toward campaigns to promote adoption and to educate the public about stages of a baby’s development in utero, and toward more sophisticated analysis of the economic factors that affect the decision to abort.

7,000

Number of London residents per year who join churches after taking the Alpha Course, a ten week curriculum which seeks to explain the Gospel through a once-a-week class and meal.

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Many evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and other cultural conservatives have long praised the television ad campaign, “Life: What a Beautiful Choice”—sponsored by the Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation. (DeMoss, an evangelical Pennsylvania insurance executive who died in 1979, left over half of his fortune to the foundation; current foundation assets are reported at approximately $450 million.) The ads don’t suggest any immediate political solution, but instead aim to persuade young women and the general populace that fetuses are indeed living human beings, and should be valued as such. Groups like Life Education Fund of Colorado claim that the airing of the DeMoss ads has been a major factor in the 35 percent decline in the abortion rate in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Missouri.

Pro-life groups have also started to focus attention on abortion provision, rather than merely the abortion demand side of the equation.

As recently as 1992, only 12 percent of Ob/Gyn residency programs taught abortion procedures in their required (as opposed to elective) curriculum. In 1996, however, following pressure by groups such as the National Abortion Federation (whose publications lament the current “shortage of abortion providers” in rural areas), the Accreditation Council

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for Graduate Medical Education began recommending that all of the nation’s 261 Ob/Gyn residency programs mandate abortion training.

Consequently, by 1998, first trimester abortion procedure training was routinely offered by 46 percent of the nation’s programs. Catholic hospitals have tended to resist this change, and some cultural conservatives have suggested that anti-abortion families should patronize hospitals that do not promote such training of young doctors.

Some of the more politically-minded pro-life leaders wonder what the point is of understanding these structural factors—or of understanding economic factors such as the fact that first trimester abortions now cost as little as $200 in many urban centers.

Groups like Feminists for Life (FFL) respond that unless the pro-life movement devotes resources to researching where and when most abortions occur, it won’t be possible to offer these women alternatives at

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the point where the decision to abort a baby is made. For example, FFL notes that at least 20 percent of American abortions are performed on college age women.

University health plans typically offer and pay for the procedure, so it seems “normal.”

The alternative— delivering a baby while in college—almost always leads to the woman dropping out of school. Consequently, FFL has initiated a “College Outreach Program” on a number of campuses to urge the establishment of housing for pregnant and parenting students—thereby rendering the decision to keep the baby from an unplanned pregnancy less bizarre. FFL insists that the pro-life movement must find ways to undermine the rhetorical

ÍThe North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council (NAPARC) has postponed for one year a motion that the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) be expelled from NAPARC. The CRC, which decided in 1995 that women could be ordained as elders and ministers, was suspended from NAPARC in 1997. The current motion to change that body’s status from suspended to expelled was delayed because the CRC has requested a clarification of grounds on which it can be suspended. NAPARC membership requires “full commitment to the Bible in

arguments of pro-abortion forces in which women are constantly pitted against children. FFL also urges that the culture should hold men responsible for the children they father, and that universities funding abortions should also, at the very least, fund paternity establishment.

Finally, some evangelicals have begun to acknowledge the more nuanced and multifaceted programs of Roman Catholics in offering alternatives to abortion. Again, these matters are not only individual, but also structural. Last August, during a congressional recess, President Clinton authorized the use of public funds in human embryo experimentation both by the National Institutes of Health and by private organizations. He

its entirety as the Word of God…and to its teaching as set forth in the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, the Canons of Dordt, the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms.” CRC representatives argued that the Three Forms of Unity (Heidelberg, Belgic, and Dordt) to which they subscribe contain only one reference to the gender of ministers (“faithful men” in Belgic Article 30). The CRC argues that this “men” is a generic term.

NAPARC is taking one year to reply to the CRC’s

recognized that many Americans had moral objections to such research, but suggested that the “staggering benefits” of stem cell research, especially in seeking solutions for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, outweighed these moral concerns.

Roman Catholic Bishop Elio Sgreccia, vice president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, quickly pointed out that Clinton’s proposed trade-off was not altogether accurate.

While acknowledging the enor-mous up-side of stem cell research, Sgreccia insisted that embryos are not the only source of stem cells; blood drawn from umbilical cords apparently offers the same benefits. Only five months later—this January— the Catholic University of Rome opened a stem cell

argument. ÍWhen the 535 members of the 107th U.S. Congress took their oaths of office January 3, Roman Catholics remained the most represented religious bloc—as they have been since 1964.

150 members are Catholic (91 Democrats, 59 Republicans). The next most represented groups are Baptists with 72 (37 Republicans, 34 Democrats, 1 independent); Methodists with 65 (39 Republicans, 26 Democrats); Presbyterians with 49 (32 Republicans, 17 Democrats); Episcopalians with 41 (30 Republicans, 11 Democrats); Jews with 37 (33 Democrats, 3 Repub-

bank, to which donors can contribute umbilical cord blood.

Sgreccia acknowledged that the umbilical process is “more expensive and compromising,” but the existence of the Roman bank at least demonstrates that all of the medical benefits can be realized without “the un-restricted use of the human being.”

If governments continue to insist on embryo research, it is only because they are interested in mar-ginalizing unborn life and furthering established com-mercial interests. “This makes us understand,” Sgreccia noted, “that money is the real reason, not human health.”

licans, 1 independent); “nondenominational Protestants” with 29 (19 Republicans, 10 Democrats); Lutherans with 20 (11 Democrats, 9 Republicans); and Mormons with 15 (12 Republicans, 3 Democrats).

All other religious groups have fewer than ten adherents in Congress. There are currently no Muslims in Congress. Seven members claim no religious tradition. ÍThe complete USB text of the New Testament in Greek is available, parsed, at www.ozemail.com.au/ ~pballard/gnt_hidden123/.

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EVANGELICALISM TM | Who Owns It?

The

Battles Over the

Label “Evangelical” ho owns this thing called “Evangelicalism”? On one hand, we speak as if we all know what we are talking about when we use the term. This is especially true for those of us who were raised in the subculture. On other occasions, we speak as if there is no coherent conception of what it means to be an evangelical and that there doesn’t appear to be a theological consensus. This discrepancy has contributed to the confusion over what should be done in the face of increasing diversity. Should we view the movement of some evangelicals toward Arminian or even more radical positions regarding God, sin, salvation, and the future judgment as apostasy or, as a recent cover story of the Atlantic Monthly suggested, a coming of age?

Although their guild encourages them to strive for “objective detachment,” historians of American religious movements—particularly of Evangelicalism, have been about as locked in battle over these questions as the theologians. Representative is the running debate between Notre Dame’s George Marsden and Drew University’s Donald Dayton. Marsden, with close personal historical ties to Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian church, is accused by Dayton, a Wesleyan, of adopting a “Presbyterian paradigm.” According to Dayton, this is the paradigm not only adopted by historians such as Marsden, but by folks like us at Modern Reformation and our publisher, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The way Dayton sees it, Evangelicalism is essentially an Arminian and quasi-Anabaptist phenomenon deriving more from movements critical of the Reformation tradition

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(viz., pietism and revivalism) than from the Reformation’s confessional traditions themselves.

But then came the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early twentieth century, and an unlikely union was forged. With issues now defined by the conservative-liberal poles, the differences between, say, a Calvinist and an Arminian were seen by many as fairly inconsequential. But this fundamentalist or conservative movement was often intellectually shallow. Embarrassed by this anti-intellectualism and yet defending the fundamentals, a group of post-World War II “neo-evangelicals” looked to Old Princeton seminary (Charles Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield) and the new Westminster Seminary for theological depth. Fuller Seminary in California saw itself as a new Princeton. Neo-evangelical leader Carl Henry said that his group was building Fuller to accomplish on the West Coast what Westminster had done on the East.

Nonetheless, Dayton argues, most of these neoevangelicals never were themselves Reformed.

Many if not most came from Wesleyan or Pentecostal traditions that had always been hostile to Reformed theology and liturgy. The bottom line: as this neo-evangelical portion of the nineteenth-century’s pietist-revivalist Evangelicalism longed for cultural clout and social respectability, they tended to become “Presbyterians” even though they really were not Presbyterian in theology. And thus today, institutions founded by Wesleyan, Pentecostal, Arminian Baptist, and similar groups often have a quasi-formal commitment to the theology of Hodge and Warfield.

“Evangelical orthodoxy” equals “Reformed ortho-

Calvinism as normative. In fact, American Evangelicalism in the nineteenth century was decidedly anti-Calvinistic. Although Dayton may overstate the case a bit, he does seem justified in his assertion that Charles Finney, not the Protestant reformers, is the guiding light of the movement over the last century and a half. Although the intellectual leadership edge went to Princeton in its defense not only of Reformed orthodoxy but of more generally agreed-upon tenets among theological conservatives, it was almost entirely in the realm of the latter rather than the former that neoevangelicals were its heirs.

Founders of the neo-evangelical coalition such as Harold Ockenga, who attended Princeton or Westminster, were basically upwardly mobile Wesleyans moving toward the Protestant mainstream, Dayton surmises—a point that is lost on most of us presently associated with Westminster.1 Before readers conclude that this is an interesting debate perhaps for historians, but otherwise irrelevant, I should turn from this rather in-house debate to its very practical implications for today.

The Triumphalist Impulse asically, I would argue that despite differing over significant details, Dayton’s criticisms are probably a lot more valid than many of us would like to admit. The tie that has bound Americans, whether Presbyterians (yes, even at Princeton) or Wesleyans, is triumphalism. Fueled by a postmillennial eschatology that dominated American religion from the very beginning (unlike Reformed theology on the Continent), both “New School” Finneyites and “Old School” Calvinists anticipatIf we were willing to distinguish between Evangelicalism as a socio-historical phenomenon ed a day in the not-too-distant future when finally the City of God and the cities of (what it has been), and Evangelicalism as a theologically-defined body of conviction (what this world would merge into it should be), we might be able to make some headway. We could admit that where we a Christian civilization. I would argue that this vision is think the movement should go is not necessarily the exact place it came from. the glue that held together American Protestantism in the nineteenth century and doxy.” This is why the revival of Arminian and that still holds it together, despite its division into Finneyite streams of Evangelicalism in our day are “more-or-less conservative” and “more-or-less liberal” treated by Reformed folks as heretical departures trajectories. In other words, the older divisions had from the evangelical faith. (For a more exhaustive to do with theology—more specifically, with statement of Dayton’s view, see the Free Space Church theology; that is, with what churches and their adherents confessed together. The American interview in this issue.)

Much like debates over the ownership of Religion, conversely, required a common experience America, quarrels over the evangelical trademark of conversion and the moral resolve to make are probably a profound waste of time and precious America a Christian nation.

Imagine that day in Cleveland, November 28, energy. As Marsden has noted as fully as Dayton, prewar Evangelicalism would never have regarded 1950, when a church council was born, and the

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banner proclaimed, “This Nation Under God.”2 “And,” as Mark Noll reports, “Henry Knox Sherill, the council’s first president, stated that the council’s formation marks a new and great determination that the American way will be increasingly the Christian way, for such is our heritage.… Together the churches can move forward to the goal—a Christian America in a Christian world.”3 This council could well have been the National Association of Evangelicals, but in fact it was the National Council of Churches.

As had occurred in New School Presbyterianism in the nineteenth century, postwar neo-evangelicals could push theological differences into the background as long as there was a minimialistic agreement on “fundamentals.” The further corollary with the New School was that the paradigm wasn’t particularly Presbyterian or Wesleyan, but a movement paradigm rather than a churchly paradigm. In fact, Henry urged, The most promising steps in a new direction may best be ventured not in national or regional conventions but in local fellowships where (even if they must first meet in homes to overcome ecclesiastical prejudices or structural animosities) neighbors and townspeople affirm their oneness in Christ as those whose lives are scripturally controlled by the Spirit. Much of American Christianity is moving into a postdenominational, contraconciliar and non-institutional era.4 Just as other subgroups in the evangelical family express awkwardness in the genealogy of the movement, Mark Noll and Cassandra Niemczyk provide some insight into the uneasy relationship of what they term “Evangelicals and the SelfConsciously Reformed”: Dutch Calvinist immigrants to America’s heartland in the nineteenth century had a word for the burgeoning evangelicalism of their new land: “Methodistic.” … Transplanted Europeans of Reformed commitment, or Americans who aspired to the doctrinal purity of sixteenth-century Geneva or Scotland, used these words to set themselves apart from what one Christian Reformed commentator has recently described, with self-conscious overstatement, as “intellectually slovenly, heart-onthe-sleeve American revivalism.”5 These self-consciously Reformed types tended to regard Evangelicalism as the unofficial American

religion and they saw themselves very much as outsiders—as nonevangelicals. Noll and Niemczyk point up “the common Reformed resistance to the American definitions of Christianity in terms of personal piety and individual ethics.”6 These Reformed immigrants were often astonished at how far revivalists were willing to go in order to appeal to mass emotion. They disagreed with what they regarded as an emphasis on conversion that appeared to marginalize nearly every other important aspect of Christian faith and praxis.

Revivalism, they believed, “fragmented the major denominations into sects, demonstrated an exaggerated hostility toward form and tradition in religion, encouraged interdenominational animosity, supported a morbid cultural asceticism, and replaced ancient Christian creeds with modern, ad hoc summaries of personal and capricious opinion.”7 So there does seem to be something wrong with that neo-evangelical paradigm, whatever we wish to call it. First, it fails to do justice to the Wesleyan-Finneyite narrative that Dayton helpfully brings to the table. Second, it fails to do justice to the Reformed and Presbyterian traditions that it claims to represent.

The conservative-liberal divide of the modernist controversy and postwar Protestantism has obscured the fundamental differences and, thus, integrity of both Wesleyanism and confessional churches of the Reformation.

Often, Evangelicalism has failed to recognize itself as a subgroup—its own tradition, and has—perhaps unintentionally—exerted an imperialistic hegemony that it has confused with genuine unity. The two-party model of American Protestantism is, as D. G. Hart argues, “the direct result of a consensus approach to American religious history.… The failure of religious historians to take seriously the peculiar views of groups like confessional Protestants stems in part from the desire to see religious hostilities minimized.…This was the reason why Walter Lippman said that the liberal plea for tolerance and goodwill was the equivalent of telling conservatives to ‘smile and commit suicide.’”8 Couldn’t the same fate befall both confessional Protestants and the evangelical heirs of the Radical Reformation and revivalism? Surely Dayton is correct when he writes, From the strictly Reformational stand-point such “evangelical” traditions have often seemed to be “semi-heretical”—in their perfectionist tendencies, in a sometimes perceived Pelagianism, in their ethical “activism” that sometimes appears to be a form of “works-righteousness,” and so on. Indeed, I

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would largely accept this “Reformed” judgment and be inclined to see in this line a rather consistent pattern of the rejection of “orthodox Protestant” forms of thinking (especially if one means technically the postReformation orthodoxy, whether Lutheran or Reformed).9 So What? ow one comes down on this historical business largely determines whether one approaches the current crisis in Evangelicalism as a political or a theological problem. In other words, if the heirs of Old Princeton really do “own” Evangelicalism, the goal will be to get it back and to drive out the interloping Canaanites. If, on the other hand, American Evangelicalism has always been closer to pietistic, revivalistic, and Arminian streams, then the appearance of the church growth movement, seeker-driven worship, and the growing attractiveness of alternatives to classical (i.e., Protestant scholastic) views of God, sin, salvation, and judgment may be seen as a resurgence rather than a significant departure.

I have increasingly come to adopt the latter view, which places me in the company of Don Dayton, at least on this subject. I do believe that it frees us to debate the exegetical and systematic issues rather than being forever stalled by political maneuvers and heated rhetoric over “the stealing of Evangelicalism.”

The real question is not whether Evangelicalism is Reformed or Wesleyan, but whether this belief or that position is soundly biblical. To tell you the truth, I’m not always sure what it is to be Reformed.

I know what I mean by Reformed, which empha-

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sizes continuity with a concrete existence of various Church bodies, but the way many use the term these days (including a lot of “Reformed” people), it seems to have more to do with Evangelicalism—a movement posing as a church.

The Presbyterian church—in the interest of consolidating Protestant hegemony in America at the turn of the twentieth century, participated in a variety of plans to forge an evangelical movement in the spirit of the New School. B. B. Warfield, no less an ecumenist than a polemicist, warned against an approach to unity that smothered genuine diversity. He wrote, A story is told of a man who, wishing a swarm of bees, caught every bee that visited his flowers and enclosed them together in a box, only to find the difference between an aggregation and a hive. We cannot produce unity by building a great house over a divided family. Different denominations have a similar right to exist with separate congregations, and may be justified on like grounds. … Least of all, are we to seek unity by surrendering all public or organized testimony to all truth except that minimum which— just because it is the minimum, less than which no man can believe and be a Christian—all Christians of all names can unite in confessing…and this course can mean nothing other than—“Let him that believes least among you be your lawgiver.”10 Similarly, German Reformed theologian John Williamson Nevin, in his criticism of Charles

The Perils o wo extremes can be found in the project of defining Evangelicalism. On the one hand, there is the infinitely elastic approach that treats this task as if it were a matter of defining cyberspace—far too diverse to characterize. On the other hand, there are those who are ready to reduce Evangelicalism to one of its component parts. For our quite limited purposes, I will simply state rather than demonstrate my own operating definition. We must first distinguish between evangelical Christianity as a common set of convictions (i.e., the term

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used adjectivally) and Evangelicalism as a network of churches and especially parachurch institutions in the United States. The one we could call the theological definition, the other a sociohistorical one. According to the former, “evangelical” refers to the familiar distinctives of the magisterial Reformation in the sixteenth century, as they are reflected also before that movement and since. According to the socio-historical definition, one is regarded as an evangelical if he or she stands in the tradition of pietism and revivalism. Undoubtedly, these two definitions already point up the tensions between

Finney’s theology and methods, wrote, The system of New Measures has no affinity whatever with the life of the Reformation, as embodied in the Augsburg Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism.… The system in question is in its principle and soul neither Calvinism nor Lutheranism, but Wesleyan Methodism. Those who are urging it upon the old German Churches are in fact doing as much as they can to turn them over into the arms of Methodism. This may be done without any change of denominational name. Already the life of Methodism, in this country, is actively at work among other sects, which owe no fellowship with it in form.… If we must have Methodism, let us have it under its own proper title, and in its own proper shape.11 Making Dayton’s point (on the history of American Evangelicalism) from the other side of the theological aisle, Nevin challenges us today to be something more than evangelical. And that brings us to our concluding proposal for a way forward in these tense moments where so much more than trademarks are at stake.

A New Paradigm for Evangelical Ecumenism? ore than historical curiosity is at stake in this debate. What options emerge if we accept this analysis? The first would be to attempt to fortify the pregnant paradigm of evangelical unity with new minimalist statements of faith and then, if possible, “excommunicate” offenders.

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Paradigm One wo decades ago Lewis Smedes (see the sidebar on page 26) parodied this “political” model of Evangelicalism in the Reformed Journal, responding to an article by Harold O. J. Brown in Christianity Today (December 21, 1979) that argued for the importance of removing unfaithful leaders.12 The title of Brown’s article was “The Church of the 1970s.” “What struck me about the piece,” Smedes said, “was that, while it was about the 1970s, it was not at all about the Church. What Brown talked about instead was something called evangelicalism.” For many who think this way, “Belonging to a church comes down pretty much to espousing the right ism.

Evangelicalism, as Brown writes about it, is not just a system of evangelical beliefs. The ism is a kind of power structure.” Smedes asks us to imagine the following scenario:

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I see a grim theologian, in a vested pin-striped suit, armed with a bulging initialed briefcase heavy with the latest Carl Henry volumes, arriving alone (via Ozark Airlines) at O’Hare Airport.… From there the small group is driven in a donated microbus to Wheaton, Illinois. After checking in at the desk and washing up, they are brought to evangelicalism’s rented curial chamber in the local Holiday Inn, where about fifteen more members of the ruling circle are waiting. After an opening litany the evangelical College of Cardinals begins to discuss, in alphabetical order, this year’s doubtful leaders.13

f Definition Reformed/Lutheran and Wesleyan accounts, the former reading pietism and revivalism as declensions and the latter reading them as improvements.

A more socio-historical interpretation might regard Evangelicalism as a sympathetic critique of the Reformation and its aftermath. David Lim, summarizing other scholars, describes Evangelicalism as the form of Protestantism “modified after the Reformation by European movements (such as Pietism, Puritanism, and Wesleyan Methodism) and North American ones (such as Revivalism, Fundamentalism, and Pentecostalism).”1

From this perspective, Evangelicalism encompasses those movements that, while acknowledging some essential continuity, in one way or another regarded the Reformation and its confessions as deficient—either in practice (pietism) or in doctrine as well (anabaptism and, later, revivalism).

The debate over Pentecostalism’s place in the taxonomy of evangelical movements only highlights the question as to whether Evangelicalism actually exists or whether it is merely a construct that generates dangerous and wasteful power plays over the copyright.

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Smedes wonders what will happen to these leaders thus solemnly deposed. “Will their articles now always be rejected by Christianity Today? Will they be taken to court if they continue to use the word ‘evangelical’ in resumes? I just don’t know. I know what it used to mean for the Church to excommunicate people: to bar them from the sacraments. But when Evangelicalism excommunicates a person from its fellowship or removes him from leadership, the effects must be more subtle and more spiritual” (see page 27 in this issue). From a confessional perspective, even if Evangelicalism were dominated by Reformation soteriology, it has increasingly demanded of its confessional participants the abandonment, or at least modification, of that tradition’s ecclesiology. C. Norman Kraus notes, “Present-day evangelicalism remains heavily influenced by the pietist tradition, as it was modified by dispensationalist teaching. It is this spiritualistic concept of the Church as a faith reality within the heart of the individual that continues to furnish the theological rationale for the non-denominational, parachurch network of the evangelical movement.”14 Kraus avers that contemporary Evangelicalism is weakened by its nationalism and “its capitulation to the spirit of individualism, which results in an inadequate theology of the church.”15 That Kraus, a descendant of the Anabaptist tradition, could give such eloquent expression to the concern shared by Lutheran and Reformed communities marks the distance of both from the movement’s dominant ethos.

a truly evangelical theology because we are too busy wasting energies on trying to control the evangelical movement. That may be because we ourselves too often are seduced by the lure of cultural triumphalism into substituting the extraordinary “impact” of movements for the rather ordinary effect of a Word-and-Sacrament ministry.

Paradigm Two n contrast to the first paradigm, Paradigm Two distinguishes between the fact of Evangelicalism as a sociohistorical phenomenon—the sort of thing that David Bebbington, Marsden and Dayton describe—and evangelical faith as a theologically defined body of conviction. By confusing the two, Paradigm One has spent untold resources on copyright questions, consensus management, and minimalist approaches to theological agreement. Paradigm One’s adherents, whether Reformed or Wesleyan, think of Evangelicalism as their movement and their counterparts as interlopers.

I would expect Paradigm Two’s advocates not only to accept the empirical reality of diversity but to encourage open exchanges that take such diversity seriously in all of its depth. Ethicist Stanley Hauwerwas has complimented the Southern Baptists for at least having had a fight in public. I don’t know how public it needs to be, but evangelicals of various stripes desperately need to have an open debate about what it means to be faithful to the evangelical message and this needs to happen without the consensusenforcing politics of Paradigm One.17 If American Evangelicalism has always been fairly pietistic, revivalistic, and Our churches are spheres of discipline, but EvangelArminian, then the appearance of seeker worship, open conceptions of God, etc., icalism is a village green where common causes are might be better understood as a resurgence than as a significant departure. made and discussions occur.

That frees us up to interact Judging by my experience, Evangelicalism with and, where possible, seek agreement and may be changing its theological direction but its cooperation in common tasks. There is no power sine qua non appears still to be this paradigm in of excommunication on the village green, but that which consensus and control for the movement should ensure protection for irascible Calvinists and makers and marginalization for the rest become the Lutherans as well as tenderhearted Arminians, as the order of the day. In Paradigm One, the free caricature has it. In other words, I want to be able exchange of ideas and frank disagreement cannot to say to my Arminian brothers and sisters that they help but be stifled. An environment of political are wrong, that their theology is subevangelical in rancor over the title to evangelical hegemony will the theological sense, even though I can acknowlinevitably forestall the debate that Evangelicalism edge absolutely no basis for excluding them from desperately needs for any surviving unity.16 the green. It is in the churches around the green Ironically, the very label “evangelical” stands in the where such discipline takes place. We can debate way of both clarity and unity among so-called whether Charles Finney was “evangelical,” but we evangelicals. We are kept from having a good cannot debate whether he was an evangelical. argument and perhaps even finding greater agreeThis is the vision that many of us are following ment over the content of what we would regard as in what has come to be called the Alliance of

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Confessing Evangelicals. By lowering the political stakes inherent in the big tent model, we are in a better position to do theology for the Church and not just for a movement. Governed by doctrinal maximalism (see Richard Lints’s article on page 22), this paradigm invites deeper projects that are in perpetual conversation with, but not subservient to, a subtradition posing as the Big Tent. The leadership of the Alliance represents a denominational spectrum that is not typical of conservative evangelical theological alliances.

Conscious that it is not a church or tribunal, this alliance exists to call attention to the resources of Reformation theology while interacting with current evangelical and nonevangelical trends and proposals. It’s a lemonade stand on the green where a particular product is pushed while people gather to debate and, hopefully, enjoy its merits.

Instead of seeking political-ecclesial unity and power in the culture, it seeks to revive an interest in our shared resources precisely by encouraging the distinctive contributions of each tradition.

Sometimes onlookers forget just how broad the Alliance’s representation is these days. Hardly dominated by one denomination, its Council includes several Lutherans, two mainline Episcopalians, Southern Baptists, independents, as well as Reformed and Presbyterian folks. Our strength, we find, lies in the deep pools of our own distinctive traditions, not in a vague “fundamentalism” that, as we are now seeing, cannot sustain succeeding generations.

It is perhaps time to consider that assessment offered by Lewis Smedes: “Evangelicalism is a fantasy—acted out, perhaps, but still a fantasy. The church is still real.”18

I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable.… And above all, you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling.19 Unlike the big tent analogy typical of Paradigm One, here there are no political battles to be won over who is admitted and there is no minimalist and allegedly centrist creed that must be embraced.

There are no copyright suits over who gets to use the label “evangelical” and, conversely, free and open debates can emerge over what it means to be truly evangelical in faith and practice. In the meantime, churches can take a new initiative in assuming the missional responsibilities that have been too often surrendered to Evangelicalism’s parachurch network. ■ Michael Horton (Ph.D., Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and the University of Coventry) is associate professor of historical theology and apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in California, and is president of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Lowest Common Denominator Minimalism Versus Principled Pluralism ronically, one of the enduring analogies for Paradigm OnehasbeenC.S.Lewis’s “mereChristianity,”inwhich Christiansofdifferentcommunionsleavetheirown living spaces for a while to enter into the hallway.

Here in the hallway discussions ensue—with each other and in a common witness to non-Christians who may be brought there.

Many evangelicals, especially in the United States, have taken this to mean that what goes on in the hallway is what is really important and, therefore, the real ministry to be done takes place under the auspices of parachurch agencies.

But this neo-evangelical model appears to have missed Lewis’s point in using this analogy when he himself writes in the introduction to Mere Christianity something that fits more with what we are calling Paradigm Two:

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How Do Creeds, Confe Y

ou may have heard Lutherans, Reformed, and other confessional Protestants criticize parachurch “statements of faith,” while simultaneously celebrating the creeds of the early Church, and the confessions and catechisms flowing from the Reformation. Why this distinction? Is it simply a function of a nostalgic attachment to the past, a naive yearning for a lost golden age?

In some of our circles, this could be a danger; it is possible to revere tradition simply for tradition’s sake. But there is, nevertheless, a legitimate reason to subscribe to the confessional standards of the Church that have endured, while remaining skeptical of twentieth-century evangelical statements of faith. The reason is this: many American “statements,” unlike the older churchly catechisms, make an unwarranted distinction between “essential” and “nonessential” elements of the faith. Emerging from a sociopolitical context (the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early twentieth century), these statements aim to identify a minimum set of beliefs (typically centering on the miraculous: Jesus’ virgin birth, bodily resurrection, etc.) one must affirm to be counted a “good guy.” Those who accept our list are labeled “conservatives,” and all others “liberals.” The statements of faith are intended to be the boundary markers in the culture wars.

But don’t miss what sneaks in through the back door when this particular sociopolitical battle (over the obviously important matter of the miraculous) is allowed to draw the key line in the sand: Among those of us who agree on the historicity of these miracles, no further disagreements are to be allowed. As the story goes, we have liberals to fight, so let’s not waste our time and energy debating theological

issues amongst ourselves. We have a common enemy, and therefore we must minimize anything than could potentially be divisive inside our camp.

Though this plea for evangelical unity sounds prudent upon first hearing, we should recall that it places many important biblical topics beyond the arena of acceptable discussion. Doctrine is being used only defensively (to distinguish “good guys” from “bad guys”) rather than constructively and positively. In practice, the Bible can actually become as insignificant in the conservative or evangelical tradition as in the liberal tradition.

Consider, for example, the various evangelical Bible study materials that refuse to discuss doctrine.

Odd, isn’t it, that the Bible isn’t permitted to speak to other issues than the ones we’ve defined?

Consider all of the places where evangelicals, given this type of minimalist consensus, cannot speak: the nature of worship, the Sacraments, the relationship of faith to the public realm, eschatology, Church authority, early Genesis and the relation of Christianity and science, hermeneutics, the linkage of Word and Spirit, art and aesthetics, gender and office, sovereignty and free will, etc. If one’s faith is devoid of Scripture’s teaching on all of these matters, one might reasonably ask what the point of preserving the miraculous was!

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essions, and Catechisms “Essentialist” statements of faith reject all that isn’t immediately relevant to the battle at hand as unimportant. So-called controversial points—however important in the biblical narrative—are to be passed over for the sake of a superficial unity. Historic creeds and confessions, by contrast, have an entirely different purpose: They are guides to the Text, rather than guards against the Text. Creeds and confessions are aids to reading the Bible, helping readers identify the main themes and categories of the biblical narrative; they urge the believing community to go deeper into the Text. Statements of faith, on the other hand, are basically alternatives to reading. These statements claim to highlight all that matters. The faithful are then counseled to cease their inquiries lest we read deeper into the Bible and arrive at a coalition-dividing dispute.

It might even be fair to say—as Mark Noll has— that evangelical attachment to Scripture is often more totemic than intellectual. But the fact of this tradition’s attachment to redemptive history is at least the place for confessional Protestants to start when we urge evangelicals to begin to think and read more theologically. Moving from a shallow to a deep reading of the Bible may be difficult, but picking the Book up is probably a more difficult step. ■ Richard Lints (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) is professor of theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. His most recent book, coauthored with Kevin Vanhoozer, is The Way of Wisdom: Biblical Theology, Theological Education and Postmodernism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001).

tements of Faith”?

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Unity and Diversity in the

New Testament: Distinguishing Between Bounded Confessional Communities and the Open Public Square n John 17 Jesus prays for his flock to “be brought to complete unity” (v. 23). Yet in Luke 12, he tells his disciples that he did not come to bring peace on earth, but division (v. 51). While often seen as two completely different and contradictory statements, they actually provide a window to explore the broader issues relating to unity and diversity in the New Testament. And this inquiry sheds light particularly on equipping modern Christians in their quest for biblical unity and

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for a more effective witness in the postmodern world.

First of all, it has to be said from the outset that Christianity is always going to be divisive, because the Gospel itself is an offensive message and a stumbling block to those who are perishing. This is, I think, Jesus’ point about bringing not peace on earth but division.

“From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three” (Luke 12:52). Their acceptance or rejection of the claims of Christ will divide mem-

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bers of a single household. Here the division is between believers and unbelievers. This type of division is a natural outcome of Christian proclamation and cannot be avoided simply because there will always be “enemies of the cross of Christ” (Phil. 3:18).

However, those who do accept the Christian faith are called to live together in unity. The way to resolve the two conflicting passages, then, is to recognize the two different subjects that Jesus was addressing. On the one hand, he was speaking about the Church, and on the other hand, he was speaking about the effect of Christian proclamation on the world. The failure to understand these different contexts often results in confusion, not only in biblical exegesis, but also in the way we live out our Christian lives.

The Call to Unity ontemporary Christians in my opinion have not given enough attention to the character of the Scriptural call to unity. For example, notice what Paul emphasizes in his letter to the Corinthians, “I appeal to you, brothers … that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought”(1 Cor. 1:10). These are some very difficult words.

Though we will never see absolute perfection either in our personal sanctification or in our unity together, perfection is nevertheless our attempted goal and aim for Christian unity. But notice how Paul says we are to be united. It is not a call to unity in emotions or feelings, nor merely in service, but rather, we are called to be perfectly united in our minds and our thoughts about God. Too often Christians of our age push aside all doctrinal differences in their quest for a “unity of the spirit.” But true spiritual unity is one that is based on the teaching of Scripture, and is therefore doctrinal.

When Paul tells us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices as a spiritual act of worship in Romans 12, the first directive he gives is that we should no longer be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds (v. 2). One hardly thinks today that the first thing to do in order to become a living sacrifice is to work through a catechism or book of theology, but these are exactly the kinds of tools that were designed to transform our minds into Christian ways of thinking. And we are to think about the faith, not as isolated individuals, but as one body of believers. In the book of Ephesians Paul describes this as a “unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God,” and with this content-oriented unity comes maturity and stability, “Then we will no

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longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming” (Eph. 4:13–14). Being united together in the faith is what prevents us from being divided by crafty or deceitful men. And it also protects us from ourselves. If, for example, we neglect mind renewal as a part of our spiritual act of worship and service to God, we will often remain in ignorance of much that God has revealed in his Word.

Peter warns us of this in his second letter, saying that Paul’s letters “contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”(2 Pet. 3:16) A number of things need to be pointed out here. Peter admits that some sections of Scripture are “hard to understand,” but we are not to be like the ignorant who want everything to be simple and easy (see for example the complaint recorded in Heb. 5:11–12). Christian mind renewal is sometimes hard, challenging, and difficult, but not impossible. This is why Peter continues, “Therefore…be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of lawless men and fall from your secure position. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:17–18). Peter’s antidote to ignorance is for us all to grow in grace and knowledge.

This is what will prevent us from being carried away by lawless and divisive men. Jude in his epistle makes a similar point when he warns of “men who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit. But you, dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith.…” (Jude: 19–20). The point is simply this: Ignorance leads to distortion and division; growing in faith and knowledge leads to maturity and unity.

Pursuing Unity in a Divided Church o how are we to deal with the world in which we find ourselves given the fact that there are so many divided churches and denominations in Christendom? Where do we even begin?

The first issue is to recognize that not every church that claims to be a church is a true Church. Or, to put it another way, there will always be some kind of division or another because there will always be lawless and divisive men, heretics, and distorters of the truth up until the day of consummation. In his second letter to Timothy, Paul warns of men such as “Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have wandered away from the truth. They say that the resurrection has already taken place, and they destroy the faith of some” (2 Tim. 2:17–18). Notice that these men were not irreligious. They believed in the resur-

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rection, for example, but according to Paul, they were to be rejected as heretics because they believed it had already happened. This is an important lesson. Paul, who tells us in many passages to pursue unity, here prefers division. Why? Because of very specific doctrinal issues.

Sometimes, therefore, division is to be welcomed.

There are many so-called churches in our own day that fall into this category. Whether Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon, Unitarian, or United Pentecostal, groups such as these by all accounts have so distorted the essentials of Christianity that as Paul says, they have given up the faith entirely.

The second thing one needs to keep in mind is that there are different kinds of true Christians.

There are some who are wise in the faith and others who are infantile. Those weak in the faith include the newly converted (1 Cor. 3:1–2), those who are spiritually malnourished (Heb. 5:12–14), and those who are willfully ignorant (1 Cor. 15:34).

These types of Christians are often “blown here

and there by every wind of teaching” (Eph. 4:14) because of their shallowness, instability, and immaturity, and this is often the cause of many church splits, factions, and the formation of various kinds of sects. Though many such churches are founded out of zeal for God, too often it is zeal apart from knowledge (Rom. 10:2).

Given this context, it is no wonder that we have thousands of different kinds of Christian churches in this country and around the world. Nevertheless, we must always remember what our goal is. We are called as a Church to be perfectly united in mind and thought. Christian dialogue and interaction from across denominational lines on substantive doctrinal issues is a very clear Scriptural command.

A Case for Denominationalism ne problem that many contemporary churches face is that they have neglected creeds, confessions, and the importance of doctrinal standards. But these are very useful

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mong the “end-of-the-1970s” wrap-up articles filling the pages of periodicals a few months ago was one by Harold O. J. Brown in Christianity Today (December 21, 1979), called “The Church of the 1970s.” What struck me about this piece is that, while it was about the 1970s, it was not at all about the Church. What Brown talked about instead was something called Evangelicalism.

Maybe for Brown—and for others who see things the way he does—Evangelicalism is the Church. When he speaks of Church divisions, for instance, he does not talk about a divided body; he talks about competing ism’s: liberalism, conservatism, and of course evangelicalism. Belonging to a church comes down pretty much to espousing the right ism.

Evangelicalism, as Brown writes about it, is not just a system of evangelical beliefs. The ism is a kind of power structure. It has a hierarchy—somewhere—that can say to the faithful “Go,” and expect them to go. There are evidently people in the top offices of Evangelicalism who can depose leaders and excommunicate followers. No one has ever told me who these powerful folk are by name, though I have some hunches.

Francis Schaeffer knows, and he is not satisfied. Brown reports that Schaeffer, winding up one of his current rallies, calls his audi-

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ence to a radical curial reform—including, “if necessary, even removing our leaders.” He also wonders whether “Evangelicalism can tolerate in its fellowship” people who will not condemn abortion. Schaeffer must then see Evangelicalism as a kind of authoritarian church, which can remove leaders and decide no longer even to tolerate people “in its fellowship.” Schaeffer is not alone.

Brown says that the “inerrancy group” is “asking whether [Evangelicalism] can tolerate within its leadership those who will not affirm inerrancy.” Here, again, somebody must have power to determine the limits of evangelical tolerance for dissenters.

But leaving abortion and inerrancy to the side, let us focus on this image of Evangelicalism as a kind of hierarchical church.

How does it make its decisions? When does its quasi-papal curia meet? Where? Who gets to participate?

I can imagine a scenario. I see a grim theologian, in a vested pin-striped suit, armed with a bulging initialled briefcase heavy with the latest Carl Henry volumes, arriving alone (via Ozark Airlines) at O’Hare Airport. Fighting his way past the Moonies, he joins a few other theologians, identically uniformed, at a hot dog stand. From there the small group is driven in a donated microbus to Wheaton, Illinois. After checking in at the desk and washing up, they are brought to Evangelicalism’s rented curial chamber in the local Holiday Inn, where about fifteen more

tools that help Christians to see, with the wisdom of the ages, which doctrines are essential to the fabric of the faith, and which are not. The error of the Judiazers recorded in Galatians was so significant that Paul calls their message another gospel.

But can perverted teachings about angels, for example, ever amount to this kind of condemnation? Probably not. It might be sinful, but it probably wouldn’t amount to an abandoning of the main articles of the faith.

The great thing about denominations with clear doctrinal standards is that you can know from the outset what are determined to be the essentials of the faith as they see it. If, for example, you commit yourself to a particular denomination with a confession of faith (such as the Three Forms of Unity, the Book of Concord, etc.), and a particular person begins teaching doctrine contrary to that standard at your local parish, you have an obvious solution. You can confront the individual by showing him that what he is teaching does not reflect

the standards of your tradition, and if he is not receptive to you, your elders, or your pastor, the church should have the authority to discipline him by removing him from his teaching position and possibly face (if the issues are serious enough) excommunication.

Apart from this type of ecclesiastical affiliation it is very difficult to protect one from being “tossed here and there by every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14, 1 Tim. 4:16). The simple truth is that it’s not enough to “just believe the Bible.” We need to understand the essential character of certain doctrines over against others. In many churches that have minimal statements of faith, often there is some kind of stand on, say premillenial eschatology, while at the same time there is nothing about an essential doctrine, such as justification by faith alone on account of Christ alone (the heart of the Gospel). However, in choosing a church tied to a confessional standard, care must still be given to make sure the standards are in accord with Holy Scripture (Acts 17:11).

m—A Fantasy members of the ruling circle are waiting.

After an opening litany the evangelical College of Cardinals begins to discuss, in alphabetical order, this year’s doubtful leaders.

The discussion is somber, frank, and manifestly painful for everyone. Finally, as things must, it comes to a vote. Each ballot has one name at the top, and two squares—one labeled “Tolerated,” the other “Not Tolerated.” The ballots are collected and counted, and only the names of the nontolerated are announced. The secretary first declares—with a trace of unction—“non est tolerandus,” and then gives the name of the fallen leader.

Their solemn work done, the cardinals bow for a “word of prayer,” shake hands, wish each other God’s blessing, pick up their briefcases, sign out, climb back into the shuttle bus to O’Hare, arriving in time to catch their flights back to their respective headquarters.

What will happen to the persons whose heads fall under the sharpedged sword of Evangelicalism’s official Non est tolerandus? Will they be fired from their jobs at the seminary? Will their articles now always be rejected by Christianity Today? Will they be taken to court if they continue to use the word “evangelical” in resumes? I just don’t know.

I know what it used to mean for the church to excommunicate a people: to bar them from the sacraments. But when Evangelicalism excommunicates a person from its fellowship or removes him from leadership, the effect must be more subtle and more spiritual.

Evangelicalism as a power structure, with hierarchy and all, is probably a fantasy. I suspect that people like Brown tend to imagine the Christian enterprise in terms of a kind of political party in which people jockey for position and power—and to see this party as the real church. This is a dangerous fantasy because it leads evangelicals to act it out, and this means that they ignore the real church and invest their energy only in the quasi-church called evangelicalism. Such a portrait of the Body of Christ is illicit from the point of view of biblical Christianity.

Evangelical people need to be protected from evangelicalism and its hierarchy. Evangelical theology needs to be free from power plays called by party leaders. Evangelical theology needs to be the theology of and for the Church. All the cracks in the earthen vessel notwithstanding, it is the Church—and not an ism—which Jesus Christ founded to be the carrier of his great treasure. And it is in the Church, not an ism, where the evangel, evangelists, and evangelicals find their true home. Evangelicalism is a fantasy—acted out perhaps, but still a fantasy. The church is still real.

by L E W I S S M E D E S Used by permission of Eerdmans Publishing. First published in The Reformed Journal 30:2 (February 1980), pages 2–3.

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In Print March/April Book Recommendations Fundamentalism and American Culture George Marsden Remarkable for the range, richness, and balance of its interpretations,…Marsden’s work on fundamentalism represents the very best in this genre. It will not, for a very long time, be surpassed or superseded.

B-MARS-2 PAPERBACK, $15.00 The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind Mark A. Noll This critical yet constructive book explains the decline of evangelical thought in North America and seeks to find, within Evangelicalism itself, resources for turning the situation around. Written to encourage reform as well as to inform, this book ends with an outline of some preliminary steps by which evangelicals might yet come to love the Lord more thoroughly with the mind.

B-NOL-1 PAPERBACK, $18.00 No Place for Truth David F. Wells This is the book that crystallized the issues of our day for many evangelicals. It argues that the evangelical church is either dead or dying as a significant religious force because it has forgotten its theology.

B-WE-6 PAPERBACK, $18.00 A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada Mark A. Noll Broad in scope yet written from a well-defined perspective, this book provides a superb narrative survey of Christian churches, institutions, and interactions with culture in the United States and Canada from the colonial period to the present.

B-NOL-3 PAPERBACK, $32.00 The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology Richard Lints After showing that today’s evangelicals have not fared well in the crucible of modern pluralism, Lints argues that in order to regain spiritual wholeness, evangelicals must relearn how to think and live theologically. He provides a provocative new outline for the construction of a truly transformative evangelical theology in the modern age.

B-LIN-1 PAPERBACK, $32.00 The Variety of Evangelicalism Donald W. Dayton and Robert K. Johnston Contributors address the significance of a range of movements and currents outside the “mainstream” of American religious life.

B-DAY-1 PAPERBACK, $25.00 To order, complete and mail the order form in the envelope provided. Or, use our secure e-commerce catalog at www.AllianceNet.org. For phone orders call 215-546-3696 between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. ET (credit card orders only).

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On Tape From the Alliance Archives Made In America: The Shaping of Modern Evangelicalism Michael Horton Is American Christianity more American than it is Christian?

How have the secular ideals of consumerism and pragmatism shaped evangelical thinking and practice? In this six-tape series, Dr. Michael Horton gives us insight into the shaping of modern American Evangelicalism—and sounds a call to a revival of biblical faith.

C-MA-S 6 TAPES IN AN ALBUM, $33.00

thing okay that is spiritual in nature—or are there biblical guidelines we should follow? This six-message conference addresses candidly these issues and more. Speakers include the Reverend Eric Alexander, Dr. James M. Boice, Dr. Michael Horton, and the Reverend Don Matzat. You may not agree with all the views expressed—but you'll be challenged to think what it means to worship a holy God. C-98-F0A 6 PLENARY SESSION TAPES IN AN ALBUM, $33.00

Two Cities, Two Loves A White Horse Inn series Church and state are two wonderful gifts. Both are spheres where Christians can faithfully serve God and neighbor. But we best not confuse the two. In this three-tape series White Horse Inn hosts Michael Horton, Ken Jones, Kim Riddlebarger, and Rod Rosenbladt deal with the crucial question of the identity of the Church. And they challenge us by asking “if the Gospel is the ultimate concern for the Church, how should we live as Christians who take our citizenship and role in the world seriously?” This is the same “What does it mean to be salt and light?” question that each generation of Christians must face. You'll learn and develop your own answers from this lively discussion.

C-TCTL-S 3 TAPES IN AN ALBUM, $18.00

Cambridge Summit Plenary Sessions This eight-part series of addresses helped to frame and shape the debate that resulted in the historic April 1996 Cambridge Declaration. Led by evangelical statesman and leader of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Dr. James M. Boice, these messages deal with four critical issues facing the church today: Our Dying Culture; The Truths of God’s Word; Repentance, Recovery, and Confession; and Doctrine, Worship, Life. More than a critique or merely a call for change, these men speak with tender hearts to the church they love and serve. Speakers include Reformed thinkers Dr. David F. Wells, Mr. Irvin S. Duggan, Dr. Al Mohler, Dr. Gene Veith, Dr. Michael Horton, Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, Dr. W. Robert Godfrey, and Dr. James M. Boice.

C-ACE-P0A 8 TAPES IN AN ALBUM, $43.00

Worship God! 25th Annual Conference on Reformed Theology Disagreements are often fierce and the battles lines are sharply drawn when it comes to what are now called the “worship wars.” What kind of worship pleases God—Formal?

Informal? Who should be in charge of the service—Ministers of the Word? Trained musicians? What sort of music should be used?—Traditional hymns? Contemporary choruses?

What about drama? The role of the choir? A soloist? Is any-

Live from Washington, D.C. A White Horse Inn Program Theological discussion does not have to be stuffy. And a political discussion that involves religion does not have to have a foregone conclusion. Join hosts Michael Horton, Ken Jones, and Rod Rosenbladt as they talk with Pastor Mark Dever live at Capitol Hill Baptist Church about the pros and cons of the Religious Right and its impact on the political process.

C-W463 1 TAPE, $5.00

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Circles and Squares t this point an important distinction should be introduced, a distinction that is as simple to grasp as the difference between circles and squares. And that is that Christians need to be cognizant of the fact that how they approach issues of unity and diversity depends largely on the particular setting in which they are. As you live and move in your own circle or confessional tradition, you are allowed to act in very concrete and dogmatic ways. As in the example previously

great Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield complained over a century ago, “Nobody any longer seems to know what [evangelical] means. Even our dictionaries no longer know.”1 The term in our day, even more so than in Warfield’s, has been emptied of its meaning because it has been used in too many different ways by too many different groups.

There is simply no doctrinal core or binding center. How, then, can we evaluate whether or not someone is evangelical? Rather than answering this question, we should simply inquire whether or not a person is in good standing with his or her confessing Some churches only doctrinal test for membership is Joe’s claim to be a “Bible tradition. If professed evangelicals teach or write somebeliever.” The inescapable problem with this is that Hymenaeus and Philetus were thing classically unorthodox, we should let such persons be responsible to their own Bible believers too—as were the Pharisees, the Judaizers, the… church authorities and doctrinal standards rather than cited, if a person teaches something contrary to attempt to revoke the use of the word evangelical what is expressly stated in your standards, that per- from their biographies. If a church body fails to son can be disciplined. However, as you live and discipline one of its members for teaching heresy in move outside the church walls and encounter peo- the public square, this will speak poorly of that parple from other faiths and denominations, you are ticular circle.

So Christians have work to do to help their now in the arena of the public square. Here there is no such thing as a heresy trial or disciplinary churches do a better job of defining their circles, charges. It is a place for Christians to talk openly and, at the same time, they need to understand that and candidly about their faith with believers and any work done outside those circles is in the public unbelievers alike without threats or restrictions. In square. A big part of grasping this distinction is the circle, however, there are restrictions; one can understanding the attitudes that characterize each be thrown out. But in the square, there is no “who’s forum. Jesus’ attitude toward the Pharisees, for in, who’s out”; one is always welcome for dialogue. example, was sometimes harsh and dogmatic (Matt.

At first this may seem rather basic and obvious, 15:12–14), but we must remember that he was but confusion over these things has been the source speaking from within the circle, and his concern of numerous problems in the evangelical world. For was the protection of the sheep. Paul gives similar example, because of their rejection of creeds and instructions to pastors, writing that an overseer, confessions, many evangelical churches as a result must hold firmly to the trustworthy message have little or no doctrinal standards by which to as it has been taught, so that he can encourdefine the borders of their own circle. Often one is age others by sound doctrine and refute those accepted at such churches if he or she qualifies who oppose it. For there are many rebellious merely as a “Bible believer.” The inescapable probpeople, mere talkers and deceivers, especially lem with this is that Hymenaeus and Philetus were those of the circumcision group. They must Bible believers, along with the Pharisees and the be silenced, because they are ruining whole Judiazers. Controversy erupted regarding what households by teaching things they ought these men believed about the Bible, especially on the not to teach (Titus 1:9–11). essential matters of the faith. So many evangelical Christians are left unprotected either from their Those in the Church who are teaching own distortions of Scripture or from those who “unsound” doctrine must be refuted and silenced. come to deceive and divide from the outside.

And while there is great confusion about what Here the attitude is serious and inflexible. But this defines the circle at individual evangelical church- same apostle has completely different instructions es, at this same time there seems to be a lack of for dealing with those outside the Church: “Be wise clarity about what defines Evangelicalism itself. Is in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most it Reformed or Arminian, Lutheran or Wesleyan, of every opportunity. Let your conversation be Baptist or Pentecostal? Interestingly enough, the always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you

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may know how to answer everyone” (Col. 4:5–6).

A good example of this is Paul’s sermon on Mars Hill in Acts 17. He does not merely say, as John the Baptist did from within the circle, “Repent, for the Kingdom is at hand,” but is much more subtle in his approach; he quotes their own poetry, interacts with their culture, and then proceeds to argue that the God of Israel has given proof to all men of his coming judgment by raising Jesus from the dead. This was a sermon in the public square. His goal was to win converts, not to silence heretics.

Paul makes this distinction crystal clear in his first letter to the Corinthians, I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people — not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked man from among you” (1 Cor. 5:9–13).

Inside the circle, there are times when people need to be judged, and even expelled. But not in the public square. We are not to judge those outside the Church. This point was obviously lost on those picketing the funeral of Matthew Shepard.

Shepard was murdered because of his homosexuality, and many protesters carried signs among the grieving with slogans such as “Burn in Hell Fagot!”

Contrast this approach with Paul’s instruction for the lifestyle of believers: “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders” (1 Thes. 4:11–12). In fact, so concerned was this apostle about having a good reputation with outsiders that he even lists this as one of the qualifications of an overseer (1 Tim. 3:6–7).

focusing on the underlying doctrinal issues at the core of the division. Churches clinging to clear doctrinal standards and confessions have an obvious advantage because they already have defined what is and what is not essential. Churches without such standards should put time and energy into ironing out what doctrines they believe are most important in Scripture. Only when all these “cards” are on the table will discussions about doctrinal unity be fruitful.

Christians, especially evangelicals, need to give more attention to the text and context of their message. If the context is their own church/denomination, they need to “correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction” (2 Tim. 4:2) because the ultimate concern of this sphere is the care of the sheep (protection from division, and encouraging them toward unity in sound doctrine). But if the context is the public square, evangelism is the first concern. Here, one’s conversation should always be “full of grace,” not judgment, and individuals should prepare themselves to “know how to answer everyone” (Col. 4:6). I am convinced that if this biblical distinction is recovered, we will begin to see greater progress toward Christian unity, and at the same time, greater effectiveness in evangelism. It is my prayer that God would grant us the grace and wisdom to achieve these ends in our time. ■ Shane Rosenthal (M.A. candidate, Westminster Theological Seminary in California) is a freelance writer and producer.

Conclusion f we are to follow the instructions of the New Testament, we must be concerned about Christian unity. There will always be some kind of division or another, but our goal is to be perfectly united in mind and thought with other believers. This requires a lot of hard work, and more attention, not less, needs to be given to

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EVANGELICALISM TM | Who Owns It?

Distinguishing Confessing Evangelicals from

Generic Evangelicals MR is published by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. MR’s editor-in-chief, Michael Horton, recently sat down in Atlanta with a few members of the Council that directs the Alliance, and asked them to explain what the Alliance is and why it exists. Joining him for the conversation were council members R. C. Sproul, chairman of Ligonier Ministries; John Hannah, professor of historical theology at Dallas Theological Seminary; Ken Jones, pastor of Greater Union Baptist Church in Compton, California; and Mark Talbot, professor of philosophy at Wheaton College. —EDS. Horton: Besides being an extended family that exists to keep R. C. in line, what is the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals?

Sproul: That’s a great question, Mike. Do you have any others?

Horton: This is going to be a long interview— Hannah: The Alliance is a gathering of concerned churchmen and churchwomen from a wide spectrum of the evangelical world, who are concerned collectively about the direction—or misdirection—of the evangelical community in our country. We are an alliance; we are not

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a church. We are evangelicals in the Reformation sense of that term. We are confessional in that we embrace collectively the great creeds of the faith, particularly those of the Reformation. And we believe that a return to the great doctrines of the Gospel as expressed by the reformers would bring a significant awakening and return to a bibliocentricty within our country. What binds us together then is a commitment to the five great solas of reformational Christianity.

Horton: What are those five solas—or “only’s” of the Reformation?

Sproul: The first is sola Scriptura: By the Scripture alone. Only the Scripture has the authority to bind our consciences absolutely because only God has the authority to impose obligations upon us absolutely. And since the Scriptures are his Word, they carry this singular authority.

Hannah: Then you have sola gratia: the fundamental notion that we as human, fallen creatures can offer and contribute to God absolutely nothing but our degradation. When it comes to redemption in Christ Jesus, that salvation is a work of God, based upon the discriminatory, uncaused nature of his grace.

Jones: Sola fide follows that. And that is the idea that man is justified before God not on the basis of his own works. Rather, he appropriates God’s grace by faith, and so faith itself is not a power but it is the instrument by which we embrace the free, unmerited grace of God. Talbot: We have solus Christus, which says that everything that we receive from God in the way of grace comes through the work of Christ, both the work that he did for us on the cross in atoning for our sins, and his righteousness as it is imputed to us. Our sins were imputed to him, so that he could atone for them, and his righteousness is imputed to us.

Horton: If we listen to all of that, we can only conclude, “Of Him, to Him and through Him are all things”—which is what the last sola does. Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone be glory. And that really does put a capstone on everything that all of you have mentioned. God does all the work; he gets all the glory.

When it comes to the question that you raised, John, about the state of the evangelical community, what particularly are you talking about? Are we as an alliance saying that evangelicals don’t believe in Scripture, Grace, Christ, Faith? Or are we saying that they aren’t viewed as sufficient by evangelicals?

Hannah: They are clearly not viewed as central.

The central proclamation of the Church is Christ crucified. But when I go about my country and listen to what I hear, my deduction is that we are so caught up with the immediate challenge of helping people and caring for them in a generic sense, that we have cut the root which makes all that possible.

Sproul: Mike, we saw a crisis emerge in the second half of the twentieth century in the so-called evangelical community. We saw the advent of what was called neo-Evangelicalism after World War II. This new Evangelicalism which I believe was guided by

honest, earnest, godly people who wanted to make a difference in the culture, who wanted to become active participants in the academic arena, and to be more mainstream than separatistic. But out of this movement we’ve seen, sadly, an erosion of commitment to the central content of historical Evangelicalism, as well as a new kind of syncretism.

And the established leadership of American Evangelicalism has so changed its complexion that I hardly recognize it anymore as being evangelical.

That’s why we have to qualify that word in our selfdefinition, by saying that we are “confessing” or “confessional” evangelicals. What we’re saying is that we are trying to maintain historic Evangelicalism over against these significant shifts in the so-called evangelical establishment.

Horton: Jim Boice, who took the lead in pulling us all together, used to emphasize that there was at least a minimal level of creedal agreement that all “evangelicals” had to sign on to. Those of us from confessional churches had creeds and confessions, but evangelical organizations would adopt some minimalist statement so that there were at least some boundaries. Jim would say that this worked in the first couple of decades after World War II, but gradually that agreement was eroded— Sproul: Yes, but the real glue that brought some unity across that wide evangelical spectrum was the two solas: sola Scriptura and sola fide. No matter where else we might have disagreed doctrinally, we all agreed that the Bible was our authority, that it was the inspired, inerrant Word of God—and we all agreed on justification by faith alone. That was the basis of cohesion. What’s happened since is that we’ve seen the loss of that unity on the authority of the Bible, and thus in the last fifteen years or so, we’ve seen the crumbling and disintegration of our firm commitment to the Reformation doctrine of sola fide.

Jones: This relates to what John mentioned earlier when he referred to preaching Christ. That is more than just mentioning the name of Christ; it’s more than just saying you “love Jesus.” Professor Hannah said specifically “Christ and him crucified!”

We hear a great deal about Christ, and there is one sense in which the person of Jesus has never been more famous or well-known than he is today. But what we are hearing is “Jesus as role model.” It used to be just Jesus as a good teacher, but he’s no longer just a good teacher; now he is a moral example.

We have the WWJD, we have Jesus as a young adult single, we have Jesus as a young revolutionary, Jesus as a radical—Jesus is everything but

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Gene Edward Veith We have lost the connection between Law and Gospel. We think we can make Christians into better people without the Gospel, and we think we can make unbelievers into believers without mentioning the Law. I often hear sermons—even intentionally evangelistic sermons—where people are urged to “accept Jesus as your Lord and personal Savior.” But they haven’t been told why they need him, and they haven’t been told what he’s done for them actively (in his righteous life) or passively (in his atoning death). There isn’t any Gospel here in many of these sermons, and there isn’t any compelling Law either.

The Reformation talked about three uses of the Law. The first is the civil use: God gives us moral law to have a society so we can have a culture where we don’t just tear each other apart. The third use (skipping the second one for a moment) is as a guide to show Christians how we should live, to help us see what is a God-pleasing lifestyle. The first use and the third use of the Law are worthy of study. I would suggest, though, that for a sermon what you need to be doing primarily is to apply the second, or evangelical, use of the Law. Preach the Law so that it creates repentance, so that people wake up to their need of Christ.

People tend to be self-righteous, and that’s the big obstacle to the Gospel. “I’m OK, I don’t need anyone, I haven’t done anything wrong anyway.” That’s the attitude that needs to be crushed and slain, and it is slain when people hear the rigor of the Law and how desperate their condition is as they stand before a holy God. Once they realize that, then they can hear the message of free forgiveness in Christ, of his atonement, of how he paid the penalty and grants us his perfection. Only then does that become good news that people seize on with life-changing faith.

Our tendency a lot of times is to soften the Law, to make it something that we can fulfill. Preachers mustn’t make the Law sound easy to fulfill. They need to make people realize that they are not fulfilling the Law. If a sermon just extracts principles from the Bible that people are already doing, or that they can do with a few little adjustments, you’re not really preaching the Law in this sense. What you’re doing is preaching moralism, and a lot of sermons and Sunday school materials are just moralism. They imply that you can live a good life, and that if you just do the right things, then God will be happy with you, and you’ll have a happy middleclass lifestyle, and everything will go fine and you’re really a good person. The irony is that if people are left in moralism, you’re leaving them in their sins; you’re creating complacency, and worse, you’re creating self-righteousness. Yet it’s self-righteousness that is the obstacle to the Gospel, the obstacle to justification, and it’s the obstacle to sanctification. Only the Law can awaken us to our need of the Gospel. And only the Gospel can ever give us the genuine desire to grow in holiness.

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Savior. And, one of the things that I think the evangelical community needs to confess is the person and work of Jesus Christ. He is the God-man; he hasn’t come solely as our “good example,” but he came to live and obey the Law of God for us. He didn’t live first to point the way for us; he lived for us. His righteousness, his thirty-three years of obedience is for us; it is credited to us just as is his death. We need to really recapture the person and work of Christ, we need to confess that as a Church, because everyone who calls the name of Christ doesn’t necessarily know him as Lord and Savior.

Horton: But is that practical, Mark? All this talk about doctrine. We have these people walking in off the street and they want to know how their lives can be better. And don’t we miss a great opportunity if we’re stuck on these things that really take a long time for people to understand anyway?

Talbot: We have to remember that the Gospel is believed only by God’s supernatural work within the heart of those who hear his Word as the Holy Spirit runs along the pathway of that Word. God regenerates hearts. I’d say that is practical. It’s practical in the sense that the Gospel cannot be believed by human effort alone: There’s no amount of dressing it up that can bring people to God and Christ. It is always a work of God and what we are to do is to proclaim faithfully God’s Word, to make these confessions fearlessly and clearly day in and day out while praying that God himself, by his Spirit will so touch the hearts of our hearers that they will accept it. And if we try anything less, if we say, “Well, we’re going to lure them in by means of telling them how they can have better marriages or how their families can be better,”—no matter how much that brings people in, it does not bring them to the Gospel. Bringing them to the Gospel is a matter of our just faithfully proclaiming the Word and then God being the one who gives the increase and the fruit through his Spirit.

Horton: I have a friend who started to attend this Bible study where they began by saying, “Now, whatever we do in this Bible study, just realize that we’re not going to talk about doctrine. This is just inductive Bible study.” Can you imagine reading the Bible for more than five minutes— Sproul: If you’re going to read the Bible without paying attention to doctrine, it’s over after you read the name of the company that published it!

Talbot: There’s another reason why we’ve lost confidence in the Word of God, that is, that we

have forgotten that words are necessary for distinctively human living. Human beings are spiritual beings even before they’re Christians, because their psychology cannot be nailed down simply to their physiology. Human beings cannot make sense of life without hearing words. Stories, histories, commands, announcements—these give the space within which we live, and so words are necessary for everyone. Long before we get to the Christian faith, words are necessary for people to live distinctively human lives. Then part of the great news of Christianity is that God has given us his very words. We are “verb-ivores”—word eaters.

Essentially, by our nature, Psalm 32:8–9 says, that’s just the difference between human beings and everything else in creation. By means of those words we become human; by means of God’s words we become what we are supposed to be.

Hannah: I’m writing a history of Evangelicalism in the twentieth century now, and my thesis is that where liberalism was 100 years ago, Evangelicalism is today. They took Christ out of the Gospel and reduced it to a moralism without root and proclaimed it to the death of their churches.

Horton: H. Richard Niebuhr characterized liberalism as “a God without wrath, brought men without sin, into a kingdom without judgment, through a Christ without a cross.” That could also describe what you hear in a lot of evangelical churches today.

Hannah: It’s just striking to me that we battled the Enlightenment for nearly three hundred years.

Now the Enlightenment has dissolved by its own inconsistencies into the nothingness of post-modernism. But at the very time that our greatest adversary—rationalism—is defeated, we decide to adopt it to our own death, if we’re not careful.

Sproul: And you have to say too that the relativism of the secular culture has so infiltrated the evangelical world that Evangelicalism in America today is more relativistic than the nineteenth-century liberals ever were. Those liberals would blush at— Horton: Exactly. If you compare the moral teachings of your classic liberals like a William Newton Clark, or a Walter Rauschenbusch, it was fairly altruistic and giving. But we live in a culture that defines the Gospel as self-improvement, self-fulfillment, self-betterment—which is narcissistic to the core.

Rod Rosenbladt We incline to moralism by nature. In other words, not all theologies equally draw us. The theologies which draw us, as iron filings to a magnet, are the ones that have to do with self-improvement, with the righteousness of the Law. As children of Adam, we are drawn to those that say: “I stuck in my thumb and pulled out a plum, and what a good boy am I.” We are not neutral toward the various theologies.

The one that is true—that Christ’s death alone saves—we are hostile to, because we are children of Adam. Somebody will ask you, “Gee, don’t you believe that we contributed anything to our salvation?” The Reformation answers, “Sure: sin, hostility, alienation, death, guilt.” It’s not the answer they are looking for, but sure we contribute all of those things and more. But we don’t like that answer; we are resistant to this theology.

The reformers said that faith is of its very nature, assurance, the opposite of doubt. It rests upon the validity of the divine promise of the Gospel. Faith doubts not, though the Christian doubts often. This doubt must be reproved and combated.

But how is doubt combated? It is combated by hearing the doctrine done well. Somebody should answer back to you in terms of what the doctrine is in the promises of the Word. This is how the Spirit produces reliance and assurance. If you say, “Gee, I wonder if I’m really a Christian,” and your friend asks you, “Why?” “Well, my life’s just a total mess, maybe I’m not really a believer.” If your friend tells you to pray harder, cry more, read the Scriptures longer, fast, and so forth—go find another friend.

Find a friend who will talk to you about Christ, what he did at the cross, the sufficiency of his death, the truth of the imputation of his righteousness to you; those are the things we need to hear.

If the reformers were correct, you can relax about whether you’re going to heaven, even if a lot of times you hate God. Christ died to save God-haters. And the death of Christ is greater than your hatred of God. The death of Christ is greater than your and my flabby Christian life. It is greater than that. The doctrine of justification is greater than our sin.

This doctrine is what makes Christianity Christianity. You’ve got to get across that the righteousness that saves isn’t a change in the human heart, it’s a declared sentence, “I declare you innocent.”

And we say, “But I’m not innocent, I’m guilty as sin!” But the judge says, “I know, but I didn’t say that, I said I declared you innocent.”

That’s what Christianity is. It’s a declaration of innocence based on another’s righteousness, and reckoned to you as if it were yours.

Jones: One of the challenges that I think we face as an alliance as we call attention to all of these problems is how to tell people they are sick while they think

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they are at the prime of their health. We have never seen more mega-churches than we’ve seen developed over the last twenty years. Christian merchandising is off the charts. We see athletes celebrating touchdowns by giving prayers in the end zone. We hear famous personalities giving testimonies. We have Christian broadcasting. We have all of these things, so in many respects people are thinking that the church has never been healthier. And so an organization like the Alliance has the unenviable task of telling people that in actuality we are very sick. That’s one of the difficulties of the Alliance—telling people that we can’t be fooled by the countless mega-churches. We can’t be fooled by the fact that we see supposedly Christian programming (really just spiritual programming) on commercial television and other things that we wouldn’t have seen twenty, thirty years ago. But at the same time, as John has indicated, we’ve lost the heart of the Gospel. Christ has been reduced to everything but Savior; the authority of Scripture is undermined. People may be going to church, but what are they hearing preached?

Hannah: One writer has said there have never been so many of us at any time in human history to have had so little influence on this culture. The essence of our faith is Christ, but one of the fruits of a vivacious Christianity is that we make contact with our culture.

Horton: That’s one of the amazing things about the Reformation. Here were people who did not set out to change the culture at all. I mean, not even a little bit did they set out to change the culture. They wanted to turn the light back on in the Church and to recover the Gospel. But in doing that, the Reformation spawned what historians identify as a major impetus for the advance of civilization in science, the arts, benevolent concerns, and a whole host of other areas. And here evangelicals are today with this proud boast that there are 60 million of us—which really shouldn’t be all that proudly announced because the salt has lost its savor. There’s constant bellyaching about the state of the culture and yet the statistics (on divorce, etc.) show that evangelical Christians don’t live any differently. And then when you start digging a little bit, we find they don’t think differently from non-Christians either.

Hannah: I think one evidence of the greatness of the Reformation is that it has taken five hundred years to erode it. It impacted our culture.

Evangelicalism is at a point of crisis, but for the those of us associated with the Alliance, our passion isn’t really about what is wrong. Our passion is really about the beauty of a Savior who is all right. And we’re committed with reckless abandon to give our

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lives away joyfully to him, and we fundamentally believe that a proclamation of the simplicity of all that he has done is really all that is needed.

Horton: Exactly—and since this organization isn’t the Church, we can’t fix what’s lacking. Only churches faithfully preaching the Word and administering the Sacraments can make a dent. We just provide resources (from MR to broadcasts to conferences) that help pastors and laypeople think through these issues so that real reformation can happen in their churches.

Jones: Much of the problem is a result of pastors having lost confidence, and so if there’s going to be any solution it will come as pastors regain that confidence in the Word. One of the best things we have done or can do is to strengthen and encourage those pastors to stand and regain that confidence in the sufficiency of Scripture and in the power of God through the Gospel.

Sproul: Exactly, Ken. Why else would somebody trade the bold and accurate proclamation of the Gospel for a technique to build the church unless you have lost confidence in the Gospel’s being the power of God unto salvation?

Talbot: And that is happening in all of our denominations.

Horton: That’s right. This isn’t just about some evangelicals “out there.” This is under our nose in our own churches, and in our own hearts.

Hannah: And I think this lack of confidence is in our own seminaries. I’m a teacher in one, and what really pains me is watching the young men come through and walking away with a bag of technologies without a heart for Christ. And so the endemic problems that we’re seeing are being spilled into our churches every day there is a graduation. This is obviously my bias because of my life, but we need to earnestly pray that God will raise up professors who will direct these men to the sufficiency of Christ.

Sproul: Listen to that! Listen to that passion. Here is a professor of historical theology, making it clear that what we are about is Christ. Contrary to popular opinion, formal theology isn’t about pontificating regarding some abstract doctrines of the faith.

Rather, it is about love and affection for Christ. It is about seeing the Church filled with pastors who know the Word of God and who love the Word of God—and love it enough to want to propagate it to their people. It isn’t technologies and techniques— it is the Gospel that will win people. ■

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EVANGELICALISM TM | Who Owns It?

The Triumph of Charismatic Song: Lutheran and Reformed Neglect of Congregational Singing e cannot speak about the influence of the charismatic movement upon Evangelicalism without speaking about charismatic singing. For in this realm, the charismatic movement has had an impact upon the Church far beyond proportion. This has happened, I think, for two reasons: First, there is something especially harmonious between the charismatic movement and the spirit of the age (more about that later); secondly, Lutherans and Reformed have largely neglected the congregation’s song for three centuries if not longer (this, too, will demand some substantiation).

First, let me offer some necessary generalizations. When I speak of charismatic congregational singing, I mean that which most people would call “praise and worship songs or choruses.� Like so many aesthetic forms, there is no one, single, clear, and inviolable definition of this genre. Nevertheless, there are some identifying marks, and if enough of them are present, then we have a praise and worship cho-

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rus. These marks might be 1) small, guitar-based chord vocabulary; 2) slow rate of chord change rather than one chord per melody note; 3) performance by a “worship team,” i.e., several people in front of the congregation leading at the same time; 4) lyrics without multiple stanzas; 5) lyrics that predominantly emphasize the subjective experience; 6) lyrics that can fit on a single overhead folio; 7) a visible claim of copyright; 8) lyrics that speak to God vaguely without a lot of cumbersome detail about his attributes or actions; 9) repetition of the song within the service; 10) people in the congregation closing their eyes, raising their hands, and gently swaying to the music; 11) an induced state of “worshipfulness,” etc., in short, an overall music package that is rather strongly indexed to commercial, American popular music of the last three decades. (In the most extreme cases, some worship services are merely sanitized rock concerts, i.e., no foul language and no cloud of marijuana smoke up at the ceiling.) I hasten to add that many other styles include some of the above elements. It is the presence of many of the elements that lands a piece of congregational singing within the praise and worship tradition.

If one is an individualistic American, whose soteriology is Arminian, and who has a low view of sacramental efficacy, then the praise and worship chorus tradition is very harmonious. That is where the form is born, and the form fits the function. In this tradition, people speak to God with an almost erotic directness in much the same way one speaks to a girlfriend in the American popular song. It’s almost as if we were to experience God in the assembly of the saints privately, with our eyes closed, and our hands reaching out to touch him.

Where are Word and Sacrament here? At a mini-

(precisely because the gatheredness of the assembly has decreased in importance) but rather from commercial music publishers. For the charismatic, his experience is more significant than the confessional proclamation of the Church. Such a commercial line to the Church’s music simply does not trouble him.

So the praise and worship tradition is incongruent to both Lutheran and Reformed theologies, theologies which are grounded in a gathered ecclesiastical confession. But why then are we so beleaguered by the praise and worship chorus tradition?

Why is it creeping into our congregations? Why has it entirely overrun some of our congregations?

These questions are doubly vexing when we consider that there are some prominent Reformed popular music performers, and that there are also prominent Reformed theologians who unapologetically undergird the movement. Lutherans have been slower on the uptake, but then, being Lutheran and being cool have always been mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, even the Lutherans are dealing with a major encroachment of praise and worship choruses within their congregations.

Our Culpability for Christian Music’s Current State ow has this happened? We have room for much self-criticism here. We are dependent on the forms of nonReformational traditions because the Reformation traditions have devoted such scant resources to developing music that flows from our theology, both substantively and formally.

Reformed music never really developed from its earliest history. It had a closed canon early on, a canon of metrical, paraphrased psalms. This was certainly the case through the time of the If one is an individualistic American, Arminian in his view of salvation, and has a Westminster Assembly, and in some locales, for many low view of sacramental efficacy, then the praise and worship chorus tradition is years beyond that. Indeed, there are small pockets of very harmonious. That is where the form is born, and the form fits the function. that tradition down to this day. The Reformed failed to appreciate that the Word mum they retreat from the foreground. The theol- comes to us in a sung form, putting exclusive emphasis, rather, on the sermon within the divine ogy and the form really do match one another.

And if the private experience within the assem- service. Very few Reformed congregations bly of the saints becomes the chief thing, then the would welcome Jack Hayford, Marty Mystrom, assembly of the saints becomes less important. Eddie Espinoza, or even Graham Kendrick into Indeed, one who opens his eyes might feel like a their pulpits. And yet the songs of these men are voyeur! And, of course, this emphasis upon the widely sung within Reformed congregations. private also impacts our music. So we find that Singing within the Reformed tradition has rarely praise and worship choruses do not come to us received the sort of scrutiny that preaching has.

Lutheran history is not so grim. Indeed, from from some acknowledged ecclesiastical authority

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roughly 1520 to 1750, about 100,000 Lutheran hymns were written, many of them by ministers of the Word. Martin Luther appreciated the great catechetical value of the congregation’s song and threw some of his most enduring efforts at that task. Nevertheless, the Lutheran well dried up in the eighteenth century, and the myriad of reasons for that is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that both the Lutheran and Reformed churches here at the beginning of the twenty-first century find themselves in the same precarious position, that is, constantly looking to people of other theological persuasions to provide congregational singing. We live in an individualistic and commercial culture. Should it surprise us that Charismatic Arminianism is riding the crest of the wave?

I will conjecture that church historians a hundred or two hundred years from now will look back at congregational singing as the defining issue of our time. It seems to me that we have three options before us: 1) we can gripe; 2) we can succumb (if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em); 3) we can repent.

Repentance is the only viable option, but it is painful and arduous. What will repentance look like for us? It will involve overhauling the preparation of ministers of the Word so that they can handle music competently, so that they will not be at the mercy of that committee called the “worship team,” or at the mercy of incompetent accompaniment. In some sense, the minister needs to become a musician and poet. I would add quickly that we are not necessarily talking about years of piano lessons or about aping popular music. No, the postworship-wars-minister of the Word will be able to write poetry intended for the congregation’s use, will be able to furnish the text with a melody intended for four generations to sing at the same time, and will be able to teach it to the congregation whether or not he has an instrument.

That’s the future ideal. Is it attainable? Yes. Will there be many of these types of ministers? I don’t know. Most likely, there will be many composite efforts like there have been in the past where one man writes the words, another, the music. Can this happen soon? Probably not, because the attainment of musical and poetic skills takes time.

Must we take this path? Yes. Why? Because it returns the Church’s song to the Church’s confession. It will restore harmony between doctrine and worship, thereby ending the worship wars. ■

Endnotes

[ C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 5 5 ]

Free Space Quoted from Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.

1

B. Eerdmans, 1994). However, I would say the seventeenth century anticipated it in Pietism and Puritanism. 2See Ernst Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970). Also, Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (London: Cape, 1976). 3Ian Bradley, op. cit. 4See William McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1959). 5Interestingly, Frank Macchia made the same point in his March 2000 presidential address at the Society for Pentecostal Studies—that Pentecostalism is closer to Trent than Luther.

See Maxim Piette, John Wesley in the Evolution of Protestantism (New York: Sheed &

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Ward, 1937). 7See Bernard Ramm, The Evangelical Heritage: A Study in Historical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000). I see this book has just been republished

by Kevin Van Hoozer of Trinity as a normative statement of “Evangelicalism” without any apparent awareness of the critique others and I have made of it, for example, Ed. Donald W. Dayton and Robert K. Johnston, The Variety of American Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL:

InterVarsity Press, c. 1991). 8See Donald

Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church: The History and Character of Radical Protestantism (New York: Macmillan, 1968) and also Howard A. Snyder, The Radical Wesley (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, c. 1991). 9Bernard Ramm, op. cit. 10See James Leo Garrett, Jr., E. Glenn Hanson, and James E. Tull, Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”?

(Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, c. 1983). 11See George Marsden’s, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, c. 1987). 12This is a tributary of the “name it and claim it” tradition that has found expression in the pentecostal and charismatic “gospel of health and wealth.” See Dale Simmons, E. W. Kenyon and the Postbellum Pursuit of Peace, Power and Plenty (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997). 13See Benjamin B. Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles (New York: C. Scribners, 1918). Also see the two volumes of essays on Perfectionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1931). 14See Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, as well as David Wells from Gordon-Conwell in various places, including the pages of MR! 15A. J. Gordon, The Two-Fold Life: Or Christ’s Work for Us and Christ’s Work in Us (Boston: Howard Gannett, c. 1883).

See Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in

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the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, c. 1985). 17Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper and Row, c. 1976).

James Davison Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: University of

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Chicago Press, 1987). 19See Barry L. Callen’s recent, Clark H. Pinnock: Journey Toward Renewal: An Intellectual Biography (Nappanee, IN: Evangel Publishing House, c. 2000).

Calley is editor of the Wesley Theological Journal.

Walter J. Hollenweger,

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Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody, MA:

Hendrickson

Publishers, c. 1997). 21See Doug Wead’s, Father McCarthy Smokes A Pipe and Speaks in Tongues (Carol Stream, IL: Creation House, 1973). 22For instance, think of someone such as Richard Longenecker in Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period telling me that the New Testament uses the Old in a way that is exegetically irresponsible by “historical critical” standards and so cannot be used by Christians today but it was permissible to the writers of the New Testament because of inspiration! 23See Harvey Cox commenting on Korean Pentecostalism in his Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing, c. 1995).

Leonard R. Payton (Ph.D., University of California, San Diego) is chief musician at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Austin, Texas.

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Interview with Donald Dayton

Are Charismatic-Inclined Pietists the True Evangelicals? And Have the Reformed Tried to Highjack Their Movement?

Our "Free Space" column, unlike the feature articles, is the opportunity for those outside of our circles to respond. It doesn't imply editorial endorsement, but encourages the open exchange of ideas. —EDS. MR: Before getting to your reading of charismatic and evangelical history, tell us a bit about your theological background and your relation to the charismatic movement.

DONALD DAYTON

Professor of Historical Theology Drew University

DD: Though sympathetic enough to be elected the only non-pentecostal/charismatic president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies (the theological society of the pentecostal tradition), I am not pentecostal in theology or experience. I was reared in—and now identify with—the Wesleyan church, formed when my abolitionist forebears were pushed out of the Methodist Episcopal church for agitating the slavery question. This church hosted the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 (which first called for women’s suffrage), participated in the ordination of Congregationalist Antoinette Brown, the first woman to be ordained (founder Luther Lee preached the ordination sermon) and originally founded Wheaton College— though in recent years the church has been identified as a “holiness church” and since then has been incorporated into the fundamentalist/evangelical tradition. This church has been very anti-pentecostal, and I prefer the Wesleyan emphasis on the centrality of love (following the Pauline text in Corinthians) and the fruits and graces of the Spirit over the supernatural gifts of the Spirit. I identify in many ways with the Wesleyan theological tradition and have been president of the Wesleyan Theological Society, but this is a late, post-college,

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and perhaps “second naiveté” identification that followed a period of rejection of Christianity, a reconversion in graduate school through the reading of Barth and Kierkegaard (in the age of Francis Schaeffer, a fact which kept me from identifying with the neo-Evangelicalism of the era—though I have served several years as the chair or co-chair of the “evangelical theology section” of the American Academy of Religion). My own theological formation was in the first place in seminary (Yale) through Calvin (I teach Calvin rather than Wesley at Drew) and especially through Barth (I teach Barth at Drew and have served for nearly three decades on the executive committee of the Karl Barth Society of North America). I say this to indicate that my own theological pilgrimage is more complex than is often assumed, and my historiographical and theological positions are relatively independent of both my rearing in—and present identification with—the Wesleyan tradition.

MR: You see Evangelicalism as basically Wesleyan, and Charles Finney as the movement’s fountainhead. Since arguably the theology of Finney is further from the theology of the Reformation than is Rome, what do you see as the relationship between self-consciously Reformational churches and the evangelical movement?

DD: Let me clarify my own position. I try to avoid the use of the word “evangelical” as much as

possible. It is, in the words of British analytic philosophy, an “essentially contested concept” in which the basic meaning of the word is so at dispute that it is impossible to use it with precision or without participating in an ideological warfare that empowers one group over another. I have expressed my own doubts about the usefulness of the word “evangelical” in The Varieties of American Evangelicalism. I would prefer a moratorium on the word so that we would learn to speak more coherently and precisely.

My own efforts to achieve precision emphasize three quite different and irreducible ways of using “evangelical” that are in fundamental conflict and represent three different periods of theological struggle: 1. There is the Lutheran use in the sixteenth century over against Catholicism to express an understanding of the Gospel rooted in the doctrine of justification and the disjunctive solas of the Reformation (by Christ alone, by grace alone, by faith alone, etc.). Alistair McGrath (and perhaps MR?), for example, seems to be working with this understanding.

2. There is the pre-fundamentalist Wesleyan use rooted in the “evangelical revival” of eighteenth century England with a polemic against “nominal Christianity” (mere orthodoxy) for a conversionist “religion of the heart” grounded in a strong doctrine of sanctification and the conjunctive unity of faith and works.

3. There is the twentieth century post-fundamentalist use in the “neo-evangelical movement” that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s (“fundamentalists with manners”) and found its theological agenda in the supposed defense of “orthodoxy” against the “acids of modernity” and the fight against “liberalism.”

When the “neo” is dropped, this becomes what I call “generic evangelicalism,” understood in a paradigm which makes fundamental a “conservative-liberal” divide—the paradigm that seems to dominate our own use of the term.

In English we have little means of distinguishing these variations. German, however, distinguishes these usages clearly. People: (1) describe Lutheranism as evangelisch; (2) speak of Pietismus or theologie der Erweckungsbewegung (the awakening movement); and (3) borrow from English to describe those who go to Billy Graham’s evangelism conferences as Evangelikale. Perhaps we should appropriate a convention from the church growth

school to speak in English of E1, E2, and E3 to make ourselves clear!

In the Anglo-Saxon world, the most useful and historically appropriate way of using the word “evangelical” is, I believe, according to the second or Wesleyan paradigm—what I would call classical Evangelicalism. Evangelicalism in this sense (as conversionism) did not exist before the eighteenth century.1 Similarly, the mission movement was a product of Anabaptism and Pietism and carried by the revival and awakening movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rather than the magisterial Reformation of orthodox Calvinism and Lutheranism. Nor is Wesleyanism easily assimmilatable into Lutheranism—despite the fact that Wesley had his Aldersgate “heartwarming” experience during a reading of Luther’s preface to the book of Romans in a Moravian meeting. When he actually read Luther (the commentary on Galatians), Wesley was horrified and regretted that he had recommended him. In his diary Wesley found Luther blasphemous in associating “the holy law of God” with the devil, hell, and sin (for Wesley the law is “established by faith”), unreasonable in his rejection of reason, and “tinged with mysticism” throughout this commentary. A similar analysis could be made of the differences between classical (or pre-fundamentalist Evangelicalism) and post-fundamentalist Evangelicalism; they are two different movements theologically.

Fundamentalism marks the decline of classical Evangelicalism in its fixation on eschatology, especially dispensational Premillennialism, and the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture (largely not a part of classical Evangelicalism and even polemicized against in Pietism).2 Yes, I see Evangelicalism as basically Wesleyan even beyond the boundaries of Methodism as such.

Thus the Anglican evangelicals were dismissed by their critics as “methodists.”3 Or in America the beginning of “modern revivalism”—the tradition that goes through D. L. Moody to Billy Sunday and ends in Billy Graham in our time—is often identified with Presbyterian/Congregationalist evangelist Charles G. Finney.4 Finney and the larger “new school” Presbyterian movement may be interpreted, at least in part, as a sort of “methodistized” Presbyterianism. The new measures of Finney were largely anticipated in Methodism, and the theological tradition of “Oberlin Perfectionism” (Finney, Asa Mahan, etc.) was precipitated by the reading of Wesley and his close friend John Fletcher, Methodism’s first theologian.

But the real point of your question is the relationship to Rome and how to understand the relation of “classical Evangelicalism” to Reformation

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churches. I think I detect a caricature of Finney in your question, but I assume you refer to his tendency (later repudiated as understating the necessity of the work of the Holy Spirit in enabling response to the wooing of God) to speak of “sinners bound to change their own hearts.” It is also true that Finney was more radical than Wesley in this direction, but I see both as efforts to offer an important corrective to the overstatement of the magisterial Reformation in its struggle with the Roman Catholicism of the day. It is difficult to understand Wesley on these questions. In his soteriology everything is often subsumed under the doctrine of sanctification (conversion is not justification in the Lutheran sense, but regeneration— conversion understood as the beginning of sanctification), and often Wesley sounds closer to the Council of Trent than to Luther.5 Maxim Piette thus argues Wesley is a reversion to Catholicism in the life of Protestantism, and I have often suggested that his soteriology is more Catholic than Protestant.6 Perhaps a more balanced judgment would be Albert Outler’s that Wesley erected a Catholic view of sainthood on a Protestant foundation of justification. Both Luther and Wesley get what they get by faith and grace but what they get is not the same. For Wesley sanctification (transformation and impartation) is what you get rather than justification (forensic imputation). One might speak of Finney in similar ways.

If these two positions cannot be reconciled, then what is their relationship? On my more generous and ecumenical days I am inclined to think of them as mutually corrective and argue they need to be kept in tension. Kierkegaard (whose reaction to the Lutheran Danish state church led him in a Wesleyan direction) once said that if the corrective becomes the norm it has a tendency to become demonic. I have often thought Lutheranism in its overstated critique of Catholicism has often become socially and ethically passive. But the Wesleyan tradition also becomes demonically legalistic when it falls into its own decadence and is detached from the Reformation overstatement that it is trying to correct.

MR: But if the theological leadership of the post-1950 neoevangelical movement saw themselves as heirs of the Reformation heritage, is it accurate to define neoEvangelicalism as primarily heir to Finney and revivalism?

DD: Yes, I believe it is accurate, and your question goes to the heart of the strange schizophrenia in contemporary neo-Evangelicalism.

Bernard Ramm’s book The Evangelical Heritage is perhaps the best illustration of what you mean—that neo-evan-

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gelicals saw themselves as heirs of the Reformation.7 This book is a sort of theological and historical geography that places Evangelicalism in the Christian West (especially Augustine) rather than in the East, explicitly traces it through the Reformation in general but implicitly through Geneva and the Reformed wing, celebrates the line of Reformed Protestant Orthodoxy (Turretin in Geneva) and sees Evangelicalism as the effort to preserve this line intact against the acids of modernity and the rise of liberalism in a line of Reformed theologians maximally represented in the line of the Old Princeton theology (chiefly Hodge and Warfield) to Westminster Seminary and J. Gresham Machen.

I begin courses on the historiography of American Evangelicalism with Ramm’s book because it is an impossible construction—at least for most forms of the Evangelicalism I know. The Wesleyan tradition makes the opposite move at almost every point. Wesley drew as much or more from the East as the West and should not be seen in Augustinian terms (he saw Pelagius as a wise and holy man). As discussed above, his sources and theology are as Catholic as they are Protestant— perhaps because of the via media of the Anglican Reformation, though there is a school of thought that would put him, because of the radically disciplined character of his church life and his view of a Constantinian Fall of the Church, in with the Anabaptists so cavalierly and condescendingly dismissed by Ramm in a single footnote.8 Wesley is not a product of Protestant Scholastics but rather of their enemy the Pietists (totally ignored by Ramm, though they are arguably the real “heritage” of the Evangelicals). Wesley was in many ways a man of the Enlightenment (in his views of reason, experience, etc.)—and Pietism and the Enlightenment shared many critiques of Protestant Orthodoxy (its ahistorical tendency to read the Bible through the Protestant confessions, etc.).

This heritage is continued in modern forms of Pietism, revivalism, Pentecostalism, etc.—in my view the real carriers of the evangelical impulse over against the figures mentioned by Ramm who have been consistent critics of this line. After I had written my Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, I realized that I had in effect an alternative historiography of Evangelicalism in which there is hardly a common figure with The Evangelical Heritage of Ramm.9 But I am not the only one who has found the Ramm reconstruction impossible. E. Glenn Hinson argues that if Ramm is right, then Southern Baptists are not evangelicals.10 Ramm’s book does not even work for Ramm, who was an evangelical Baptist who taught for a while at (holiness)

Christian and Missionary Alliance Simpson College, named for holiness/Presbyterian (and Finneyite) founder A. B. Simpson. If I am right about the Wesleyan and Pentecostal traditions (which constitute some seventy-five to eighty percent of the membership of the National Association of Evangelicals) and Hinson is right about Baptists, for whom does this reconstruction work? Perhaps for a very small constituency of conservative Reformed traditions better described as Reformed Orthodoxy than evangelical.

How then did this reconstruction become the official line of the neo-evangelicals? I was greatly helped by a student who once commented that Ramm is a prescription for the ills of Fundamentalism rather than a description of the historical and theological lineage of Evangelicalism. It is what evangelicals want to become rather than where they came from.

Following this insight, I accuse George Marsden of having confused the genealogy and teleology of neo-Evangelicalism in his history of Fuller Seminary.11 Charles Fuller had a variety of Christian experiences (including Methodist) before he took his Bible class out of the Placentia Presbyterian Church to found an independent church that joined a fundamentalist, dispensationalist wing of the Baptists and began to invite pentecostal evangelists to speak! I sometimes suggest that if Marsden had been asked to write the history of Oral Roberts University, he would have seen that the basic narrative line is of a pentecostal holiness tent preacher who made it big with a television ministry that enabled him to found a university and move on a trajectory that drew him into a middle-class church—Methodism. When I look at Fuller I see the same narrative, only this time a Presbyterian trajectory from “baptistic” fundamentalist dispensationalism through a radio ministry (significantly the “Old Fashioned Revival Hour”) to the founding of a seminary that aspires to be the Princeton of the West. Fuller wants to become Princeton; it did not come from Princeton (in the construction of Ramm—or more nuanced in Marsden).

I find this analysis confirmed in the struggles of Fuller with the Los Angeles Presbytery. Marsden portrays it as so under the thumb of “liberals” (James Pike, etc.) that it would not admit the “orthodox” Presbyterians of Fuller. Yet he quotes documents of the study commission sent to Fuller that they were looking for signs of dispensationalism and Arminianism—as well as divisiveness.

That is, they feared that Fuller was too evangelical and insufficiently Presbyterian! Will the real orthodox Presbyterians please stand up?!

I would argue that what is true of Fuller is true

of most neo-evangelical leaders and institutions.

Wheaton College, for example, was founded by the abolitionist Wesleyan Methodists who then formed an alliance with Oberlin Perfectionists to bring in Jonathan Blanchard (a Finneyite leader deeply immersed in the culture of the holiness movement) as the president of a dually aligned institution. The Wesleyans defaulted after the Emancipation Proclamation allowed many to return to the Methodist church, and Wheaton drifted into Fundamentalism under Charles Blanchard’s conversion to dispensationalism before emerging as the premier neo-evangelical institution after World War II. Similar trajectories are found at Taylor University (named for maverick holiness Methodist missionary bishop William Taylor) and many other Christian colleges. I recently learned that many at Lee University, of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)—in the southern holiness/pentecostal tradition—now want the school to identify itself as evangelical rather than pentecostal. Even more interesting is the pilgrimage of the institutions founded by A. J. Gordon in New England. Gordon College has absorbed Barrington College with its roots in Providence Bible College and the work of E. W. Kenyon.12 Further roots of this institution are found in Faith College and the holiness/healing ministry of Episcopalian homeopathic physician Charles Cullis in Boston, the mentor of both Baptist A. J. Gordon and A. B. Simpson of the C&MA in their theology of divine healing that shaped the holiness and pentecostal movements. A. J. Gordon was a revivalist, abolitionist, feminist (he at least defended the ministry of women in times of “spiritual refreshing”) Baptist teacher of the Higher Christian Life tradition that so troubled B. B. Warfield at Princeton. Much of Warfield’s polemic is directed against A. J. Gordon.13 The irony is that today one cannot teach theology at Gordon-Conwell without standing in the neighborhood of the Old Princeton tradition of Hodge and Warfield.

If this analysis is true, then your question becomes focused in these institutional histories, and in the personal pilgrimages of many current evangelical leaders: How did the current (thin?) veneer of Reformed theology get erected on this revivalist foundation? I’m sure MR would see this movement as one of maturity or of “seeing the light,” but it looks quite different from the other side of the fence. Many of my theological and ecclesiastical compatriots would say something like, they (the neo-evangelicals) hijacked our institutions and bent them to a theological expression that we and the founders would find foreign and pernicious. And then they have the chutzpah to

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stand on these very platforms to advocate the Old Princeton theology and complain that we are to blame for the intellectual impoverishment of Evangelicalism or whine about declensions in Evangelicalism from proper Reformed theology.14 I think the situation is much more complicated, but I have enough sympathy with this position to wonder if Mark Noll ever feels compelled to expound and defend in his classes Wesleyan theology or Oberlin Perfectionism and sympathetically explain why they found the Princeton theology of Hodge and Warfield pernicious in its failure to support the antislavery cause or the suffrage and ordination of women? Or does David Wells ever feel that he owes it to A. J. Gordon to expound the teachings of The Ministry of Healing or The Two-Fold Life in such a way that they live as vital options in the face of the criticisms of Warfield?15 But I think the revivalist tradition is complicitous in this development as well. The present situation reflects a failure of nerve on the part of Wesleyans and Finneyites in the values of their own theology. Or in the light of the “Stockholm Syndrome” (Patty Hearst adopting, for example, the position of the Simbionese Liberation Army) or the insights of liberation theology that the oppressed tend to adopt the values of their oppressors as a way of gaining credibility in their eyes, we might find a variation of this explanation—one I think I detected in my father. He studied with Carl F. H. Henry and others at Northern Baptist Seminary and then supported a campaign for “inerrancy” in the Wesleyan church which he had learned was not up to “snuff” (that is, the Reformed Scholasticism of neo-Evangelicalism). Claude Welch hints at another, more theological, explanation, which I would expand as saying that in the late-nineteenth-century storms over biblical criticism many revivalist traditions climbed onboard the good ship Princeton to ride out the waves, became accustomed to its luxurious intellectual staterooms, and soon forgot that they didn’t really belong there.16 But in the final analysis I think the best explanation is just the plain old sociological forces that so profoundly shape American Christianity. I could take more seriously a theological explanation if these trajectories were not so predictable and in accord with certain sociological insights.

Observers of American Christianity often notice how profoundly class-based our church membership is. The Episcopalians are on top and disproportionately represented in government, etc. The Presbyterians dominate the middle and upper middle classes; the Methodists and Baptists are a step down. Holiness and pentecostal churches prosper

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in the lower classes and in the ghettos (or at least it used to be that way!). As revivalist churches and institutions, which following Wesley tend to have their start in a “preferential option for the poor,” rise in social class and tastes, they tend to adopt corresponding theological and liturgical styles.

Thus the Presbyterian style of newly middle-class churches and the emerging Anglican culture at Wheaton and elsewhere.

Much of this became clear to me in reading an editorial in Eternity magazine (with the same postal address as MR?) in the 1970s: “Evangelicals are about to capitulate on the ordination of women.”

After noticing the debates in the Presbyterian church and the Christian Reformed church, the editorial commented that “of course, there have always been those lower class churches in our midst that ordain women.” In reading this editorial, the scales fell from my eyes, and I saw much more clearly the social class structure of neoEvangelicalism, who is calling the shots and has the power, and so forth. Without some such sociological analysis how can one explain the strange schizophrenia (between history and projected theology) of evangelical educational institutions—or parallel facts like the Evangelical Free church, which guaranteed the ordination of women in its founding constitution but now forbids it (perhaps through a combination of sociological development and the influence of the Princeton theology in the faculty of Trinity—like John Gerstner who remained an adjunct because he couldn’t join the faculty because he was not a dispensationalist!)? Or how does one explain the evolution of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles into Biola College and now Biola University, from the curriculum of a Bible college (usually dispensationalist) to the curriculum of a university (usually post-millennialist)?

One final illustration. I once visited Youth with a Mission headquarters in Amsterdam to study the social action of pentecostal/charismatic mission. I was assured by the PR officer, a newly minted D.Miss. from Fuller that I misunderstood YWAM—that it was not pentecostal; it was evangelical. I protested to no avail that I had been in its meetings and I knew it as the merger of two streams, one from Loren Cunningham of the Assemblies of God and another from Floyd McClung of the Church of God (Cleveland), who had appealed to the social radicalism of the Finneyite tradition (and had reprinted some of my articles that became Discovering an Evangelical Heritage in Incite) as a precedent for his own move into the red-light district of Amsterdam to found a church among the prostitutes. I finally found a way around these defenses by asking about early theological

influences and was rewarded by a description of the early Bible teacher Gordon Olson—a Finneyite who had taught early YWAMers certain controversial themes of Oberlin theology: that human beings have free will; that they are not condemned for Adam’s sin, but for their own inevitable sins (contra MR in its recent discussion of federal theology); a rejection of what he called credit-card theology (that is, forensic justification) that was seen as a “fictional transaction” in favor of a real impartation of righteousness in the Wesleyan sense. I then asked about recent developments and was told of two important resolutions in the same international assembly. One granted the right to develop pension funds. (Apparently “youth with a mission” had now become “middle-aged folk with a mission” who were now worried, since the world had not been converted and Jesus had not returned, about retirement and how to fund their children’s college education.) The other was an apology to their Calvinist brethren for the nasty things YWAM had said about them in its brash “youthfulness.” There is the movement in a single generation to the Reformed veneer on a revivalist base that is so characteristic of neo-Evangelicalism!

MR: It seems that all churches now are somewhat charismatic/pentecostal—at least in terms of worship. Why (and how) do you think these worship styles have so infiltrated other churches?

DD: I have little to say to this question, but I am fascinated by the negative language (“infiltrated”).

I’m much less inclined to see anything so nefarious.

In the nineteenth century Methodism grew by the time of the Civil War to be the largest Protestant denomination in the country and the trendsetter. It was the “age of Methodism” (a lá Reformed theologian Philip Schaff, Baptist historian Winthrop Hudson, etc.) not only in that it was numerically dominant but because it set the tone and convinced half the other Protestants to act like Methodists.

Similarly, in Latin America all Protestants have to act like pentecostals (sing popular music with guitars and tambourines) or risk losing their congregations who will go where they think the action is.

But, more profoundly, the newer movements may be more in touch with the cultural tastes of our time and of the “common person” than those churches formed in an earlier era. Both would reveal similar syncretistic cultural influences in their emergence, but the newer churches may be more in touch with the current generation than those formed in an earlier age or context (Europe?).

I admit that I prefer a more classical worship style and find much contemporary worship trivial and

vacuous, but I am reluctant to impose my own cultural (and class?) tastes on everyone. I keep in mind the Wesleyan experience, where perhaps the greatest hymn writer in English (Charles Wesley) was a part of a movement that reached down the social ladder and appropriated popular tunes of the time for Christian worship. And I have noticed the experience of some friends (e.g., Howard Snyder) who in efforts to found inner-city churches have found themselves moving to such worship styles because of the tastes of the members in such social locations—sometimes against their own tastes but in incarnational ministry to others.

MR: You’ve made a very interesting point that—given evangelicals’ view of the church, sacraments, worship, and theological distinctives—”conservative” is hardly the appropriate term for them. Instead, evangelicals have historically been the radicals on these and related issues. Can you elaborate?

DD: I first became aware of this and the poverty of the conservative-liberal paradigm in which evangelicals are contrasted with liberals, in dialogue with my father (later president of Houghton College) about the editor of the campus newspaper at Houghton, who had begun a trajectory that would take him into the Episcopal priesthood. My father lamented that he had “gone liberal” in spite of his evangelical education. I, a close friend and colleague of the editor, protested that he would not see it that way—that he had actually “gone conservative.” His pilgrimage was a result of a growing commitment to traditional forms of church life, to the liturgical expressions of The Book of Common Prayer, to the classical confessions of the Christian tradition, and so on.

I also struggle with this in efforts to interpret my own church. Is the Wesleyan church a conservative form of Methodism left holding to the classical tradition when Methodist “liberals” left the field—or is it as much a more radical form of Methodism? In many ways it is the latter: Wesley opposed slavery, the Wesleyans made opposition to slavery a matter of church discipline; Wesley dabbled with the informal ministry of women, the Wesleyans moved to ordination; Wesley believed in baptismal regeneration but stressed conversion, the Wesleyans so majored in conversion that Baptism became vestigial with the mode and age entirely optional and apparently unimportant; Wesley advocated regular celebration of holy Communion, the Wesleyans relegated it to a quarterly occurrence. In each of these, the Wesleyans moved further away from the classical tradition than the Methodists.

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Lurking behind this question is the issue of whether Evangelicalism is inherently “low church.”

Certainly this was the way Anglican Evangelicalism was originally understood. It was low church in contrast to broad church liberalism and the priestcraft and sacramentalism of the Anglo-Catholics. Once this was a clear distinction, and people moved from Evangelicalism to the Anglo-Catholicism only with great soul-searching (John Henry Newman and others). Now it seems this pilgrimage is almost normative—and under the influence of neo-Evangelicalism (which wants to see evangelical as equivalent to orthodox) permissible with the rediscovery of classical traditions under prompting from Bob Webber, Tom Oden, and MR (?). I am not able to follow this path (being taken now by so many of my Drew students from [neo-] evangelical backgrounds), though I once almost became Anglican. My study of the social engagement of nineteenth-century revivalists convinced me that in many ways this phenomenon was rooted precisely in a distancing from centrist (and therefore socially conservative) traditions—and so I am inclined to see such trajectories as a betrayal of the “evangelical impulse.”17 The issues here are closely related to those in the third question above. The Ramm paradigm prevents us from seeing what is actually going on in Evangelicalism when it is uncritically made the basis of analysis. This is most egregiously illustrated by James Davison Hunter in Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation.18 Hunter seems to assume (but never argues for) the neo-evangelical construction of Ramm. That is, he assumes Evangelicalism is essentially a form of “Reformation Christianity” attempting to maintain “orthodoxy” against the inroads of modernity. He then analyzes data from Christian colleges and seminaries to show development (i.e., decline) on each of his themes of Reformation theology and practice. But it is worth noticing the colleges he studies: George Fox (Holiness/Quaker), Messiah (Holiness/ Anabaptist), Houghton (Wesleyan); Wheaton (however we should interpret that in the light of the above analysis); Seattle Pacific (Free Methodist); Gordon College (Holiness Baptist), and so on. These schools were never intended to be understood in the line of magisterial Reformed orthodoxy; they are at their core protests against that tradition. As Hunter analyzes his themes he sees a loosening of behavioral standards and other trends he characterizes as “liberal” tendencies. But if these schools are radical movements spinning out and away from the classical and centrist traditions, many of these phenomena might better be interpreted as a conservative movement back toward

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the center. That is, the same phenomena may be given quite different meaning depending on the paradigm assumed. So much for the possibility of value-free social scientific analysis leading us into a real understanding of Evangelicalism!

MR: Open theism, which enjoys increasing popularity in evangelical circles, maintains that Evangelicalism hasn’t gone far enough in rejecting classical Christian views such as the divine foreknowledge of everything, God’s unchangeability, and related attributes. Why do you think Wesleyans are particularly sympathetic to open theism and process theology?

DD: Again, I’m suspicious of the underlying tone of this question. Am I expected to offer some sociological analysis of the defects of the Wesleyan tradition that cause it to fall into this heresy (a lá the articles in MR)? Eric Ohlmann, now Dean of Eastern Baptist Seminary, once said to me in the context of team teaching a course in Evangelicalism that he had discovered about himself that movements he liked and of which he approved he was inclined to interpret positively in theological terms while those that he found uncongenial he was likely to “explain away” sociologically. Is it really too much to believe that people turn to open theism because it is seen as a better reading of the Scriptures, a more coherent philosophical understanding, and more morally satisfying?

I do think that there is truth, however, in your observation that the Methodist and Wesleyan traditions are more receptive to process theology (major centers of process theology in the United States—Claremont, Drew, Iliff in Denver, Boston, SMU—are Methodist) and open theism (Wesleyans are inclined to interpret the movement of Clark Pinnock to be in a Wesleyan direction).19 The Wesleyan Theological Society recently invited Pinnock to speak. At first Clark misjudged his audience, but once he quit talking about Carl Henry and the neo-evangelicals, he found himself in many ways at home theologically and was received as a theological brother, though not by all.

I suppose that the basic theological issue is that Wesleyan Arminians have already rejected the Calvinist model of the nature of divine/human interaction and irresistible grace—and the various doctrines that flow out of this model: perseverance, predestination, limited atonement, and even the doctrine of inerrancy (in that it would appear that the “dictation view of inspiration” and “irresistible grace” belong coherently to one model and that the possibility of “backsliding” and “errancy” belong coherently to another—a point that has been made for centuries: that the natural location of the doctrine of inerrrancy is in high Calvinism).

The Arminian tradition has been defended, as by my father in certain gatherings of the Evangelical Theological Society, by an appeal to a divine omniscience that knows the future without determining it. My own sense is that this has begun to break down and that one possible response is to push further toward open theism. It has been interesting to me to note that Pinnock’s collaborators are often Wesleyan or at least Arminian (the Basingers are Free Methodist, I believe; William Hasker is from Huntington College of the Wesleyan-inclined United Brethren; Rick Rice, one of my University of Chicago Ph.D. classmates, is Adventist—a fact that is, I find it hard to believe, often used against the position in ad hominem attacks).

I cannot speak for all Wesleyans; I can only testify to my own pilgrimage that produced an openness to open theism; but the sources for me are not all or even primarily Wesleyan. I think I first moved in this direction in my first year of seminary at Yale in a course that consisted of a close reading of Calvin’s Institutes. My paper for that course argued against the model of divine sovereignty in Calvin and advocated the image of a child playing chess with a computer. The child is genuinely free in making moves, even stupid and irrational and therefore unpredictable ones, but the sovereignty of God (omniscience and omnipotence) is manifested in the ability of God to achieve the divine will in spite of the idiotic moves of the child. I still think this is a more exalted view of divine sovereignty than more mechanical views that are a bit too much like puppetry to me.

By this time I was already under the influence of Barth and his argument that the God of the Bible (of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) is not the God of the philosophers—particularly the God of Greek philosophy—and that we create problems for ourselves by accepting a pagan idea of God and then have difficulty figuring out how such a God can be incarnate rather than reasoning a posteriori from the fact that God has become incarnate to an understanding of the divine nature. I am inclined to think, following Barth, that it is of the essence of the Christian God to become incarnate and the glory of God is not in transcendence but precisely in the ability to be vulnerable in incarnation.

Some have even argued that Barth in his actualism (that fundamental reality is “act” and “event” not being) rejects classical metaphysics and in so doing does a better job than Process theology of answering Process theology’s own questions. I am also a (personal, in Tubingen) student of Jurgen Moltmann and troubled by the classical attacks on “patripassionism” that preclude an understanding of

The Crucified God. I have also been influenced in my dialogue with the Seventh Day Adventists to entertain the idea that another pernicious influence of Greek philosophy is its (arguably) unbiblical idea of the immortal soul. I am thus open to the suggestion of Walter J. Hollenweger that some of fourth-century classical orthodoxy is a form of Christian syncretism (i.e., with Greek metaphysics) that may need to be rethought.20 I was also at Yale when my adviser Paul Holmer and his student Don Saliers (now at Emory) used to make comments, based in anti-metaphysical Kierkegaardian/ Wittgensteinian fideism, that the greatest barrier to Christian faith in the twentieth century is the philosophical tradition of Christian theism. It was only at the end of my theological studies that I first read Wesley in a course with Paul Holmer, reared in the Swedish Pietism of the Evangelical Covenant church.

MR: Pentecostalism is often regarded—at least by its friends—as a uniting force. Is that justified given the history of the movement?

DD: Yes, I think it is justified. All renewal/reform movements are ambiguous in having both unitive and divisive impulses (Reformation, Pietism, Puritanism, Methodism, Pentecostalism, the Charismatic Movement, or whatever). Any push for change has an oppositive element (to use the word of Ernest Stoeffler in describing Pietism).

One side or another of this dialectic comes to the fore depending on leadership, historical circumstances, the response the movement receives, etc.

There is no denying that Pentecostalism has at times shown a sectarian and divisive side—so much so that both adherents and opponents have often forgotten that the last phrase in the first clause of the confession of faith in early issues of The Apostolic Faith from the Azusa Street Revival commits the movement to “Christian unity everywhere.”

Much depends, of course, on response to a movement. When Catholics, Reformed, and Lutherans persecuted the Anabaptists, burnt them at stakes and drowned them in rivers, do we blame the victims for withdrawing into sectarian communities? Who was being divisive in this case? When fundamentalist and mainline alike denounced the early pentecostals by the hurling of such epithets as “the last vomit of hell” and the “religion of a sodomite,” who is breaking Christian fellowship?

The pentecostal and charismatic movements have contributed both informally and formally to Christian unity. When the history of the twentieth century is written, I believe some “unintentionally ecumenical movements” (like the transdenomina-

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tional search for social justice and the charismatic movement) will prove to have been more effective than the formal “ecumenical movement” in crossing the lines between Christians by breaking down stereotypes and bringing Christians together in common worship (like the big transdenominational charismatic gatherings).21 One thinks of the work of H. Vinson Synan, son of a bishop and himself an assistant general superintendent in the Pentecostal Holiness Church (Oral Roberts’ original church), as the chair of the committee of the heads of the renewal groups in the various mainline denominations (both Catholic and Protestant)—or the profoundly interdenominational character of the faculties of the divinity schools at charismatic universities like Oral Roberts and Regent.

But we are also seeing major formal contributions to Christian unity on the side of even classical pentecostals. One thinks of South African David DuPlessis and Donald Gee of England, who were both ahead of their time in their work to bridge between Pentecostalism and the mainline churches. One can notice the quiet ecumenism of Dutch Pentecostalism or chronicle the ecumenical work of W. J. Hollenweger (Swiss Pentecostal, now Reformed) in the World Council of Churches and since. It breaks stereotypes to realize that Assemblies of God clergyman Mel Robeck is the professor of ecumenism at Fuller Seminary, attends Roman Catholic high level meetings in Rome with voice and vote where he drafts documents on proselytism and related topics, and plays a major role in dialogue about the restructuring of the WCC to make it more responsive to critics.

We need to take a long-range view. Just as Methodism split from Anglicanism in the eighteenth century and spent the nineteenth century gaining numerical and cultural force before becoming a major force for Christian unity in the twentieth century, Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Movement have been gaining power to become a major uniting force in the twenty-first century.

They have already demonstrated thrusts in this direction, and the sociology of the movements is on the side of the fulfillment of the Azusa Street Revival commitment to “Christian unity everywhere.” But only time will tell for sure.

MR: Do you think that Arminian and pentecostal traditions are more inclined to adapt to the culture of modernity than other traditions? And if so, why?

DD: Again, I wonder what to read into this question. Part of my problem is with the word “modernity”—another of those words I try not to use. But if prompted to use the word, I would be inclined to

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argue that classical Reformation thelogy is more likely to adapt to the culture of modernity. I’ve always been fascinated with the argument of Bishop Krister Stendahl (of the Swedish Lutheran church and formerly New Testament professor at Harvard) that Luther is a major source of the “introspective conscience of the West” and thus of modern individualism that both Anabaptists and Wesleyans have struggled to combat. Or what about the discussions of Calvinism and links with the rise of capitalism—a major theme of modernity? Or what about the tendencies of the Reformed tradition to suppress the miraculous element in Christianity—in the liberal wing by the denial of its existence in the first place and in the conservative wing by Warfield’s doctrine of the cessation of the gifts of healing, etc. Either way produces a style of worship that often appears to me to be accommodated to modernity and on the face of it in fundamental conflict with the New Testament.

Or is this a class issue—that middle-class churches prefer a more rationalized and propositional style of worship? Or are these related issues?

Or are you asking about something else—like the adaptation to “postmodernity”? It does seem to me that there might be something here, but again the issues are complex. Is the pentecostal/holiness adherence to divine healing premodern or postmodern? It certainly seems a break from modernity. I have been fascinated with the way that many pentecostal biblical scholars seem to easily move beyond the critical traditions of biblical scholarship and the conservative (and modernistic?) mirror image in the neo-evangelicals22 into postmodern (or at least post-critical) styles of biblical interpretation. I do think a significant argument can be made that there is a pentecostal and/or holiness affinity with some themes of postmodernity: emphasis on experience, holism (unity of body and soul—as in divine healing), the ability to live with more intellectual ambiguity than was common in modernity, an ability to accept post-foundationalist philosophizing, etc.

But I rather suspect that you are really worried about issues of syncretism here and that the question is about the adaptation of holiness and pentecostal movements to popular culture in an irresponsible manner. My first instinct is to raise questions of elitism and argue that both middle- and upper-class and populist forms of Christianity are syncretistic adaptations. I’m always fascinated in ecumenical dialogue that the Eastern Orthodox traditions see themselves as merely Christian orthodoxy and resist any form of syncretism (thus attracting the admiration of neo-evangelicals) when it seems so obvious to the outsider that their

tradition is a form of syncretism with Greek metaphysics and culture. It is the problem that one often encounters in discussions of third-world theology. My theology is theology; yours is “contextual theology.” My theology is “biblical”; yours is syncretistic!

But after saying all that, I do think that it is one of the great gifts of Pentecostalism, especially, is to adapt to a variety of contexts and work its way into the nooks and crannies of a culture in such a way as to present a culturally relevant expression of the Gospel. I have reflected on these questions during several visits to Thailand. That society is Theravada Buddhist (ninety-five percent, less than one percent Christian and Muslims in the South as one approaches Malaysia). Thais have been very resistant to the Christian preaching of the Presbyterians and Congregationalists over the last couple of centuries. They are beginning to respond to Pentecostalism, and we are seeing the rise of indigenous pentecostal and holiness churches (especially the growing, in both Asia and the West, of the Hope of Bangkok Church which now has thousands of members and hundreds of congregations). Why is this so? The best answer I have is that the Thai are underneath the veneer of a rather austere and ethical tradition of Buddhism, really animists who want power over the spirits that appear to threaten their lives; thus the appeal of Pentecostalism whose Gospel brings that element of Christianity to the fore. Does this mean that Asian pentecostals produce a syncretistic form of shamanism?23 I prefer to say the pentecostal version of Christianity happens to scratch where the Thai itch and that it has as much claim to be biblical as those forms of Protestantism that are prevented from doing that by their own syncretism with Western and European cultures (and perhaps with modernity!).

his tract defending proto-Pentecostalism in its earliest years) in a way that has undercut most of its creative impulses, as well as my hopes for its future.

This is especially ironic because one might argue that the culture is becoming more open to its distinctive themes and that even neo-evangelical theology may be moving in its direction. The Wesleyan tradition may, however, find a way to recover its earlier and more original dynamic and transcend the current tendency to be a mere cultural relic, a husk that was cast aside within the birth of Pentecostalism in its most radical wing. I would pray for that, but I am not optimistic.

The story is different for Pentecostalism which has grown to be a dominant and powerful form of Christianity now entering its culture formation stage. Let me take the issue of theology to illustrate. We have had pentecostal seminaries (and now universities) only in this generation. We are just beginning to see the emergence of pentecostal Bible scholars and theologians working in a critical tradition. (It’s a little odd and condescending, isn’t it, to compare the theologies of the Reformation born in the universities of Europe with the emerging theology of a movement born in a stable in Los Angeles under the tutelage of a poorly educated black man?) I see these pentecostal scholars working with an imagination and freedom that with all their limitations promise more excitement and vigor than the neo-evangelicals. Only time will tell for sure, but I look forward to the next century with an eye on the pentecostals with the expectation that I will be helped not only with new visions of evangelism and church growth but with a new and creative era of theological insight. But we shall have to see.

I have enjoyed being forced to reflect on these issues by your questions. Thank you very much.

MR: What do you see as the future of Wesleyan and pentecostal movements, particularly in the United States?

DD: I’m inclined to duck this question with the comment that I am neither a prophet nor a son of a prophet—only the son of a husband and wife team of seminary professors! I am more skeptical about the future of my own Wesleyan tradition which has been far outstripped by the incredible growth of Pentecostalism (in a century to perhaps a half-billion adherents or one-fourth of all Christians, if we can accept statistics that have also been quoted by MR). My own tradition has been driven back into the arms of the neo-evangelicals by its own “pyrophobia” (the irrational fear of Pentecostalism—a term coined by B. H. Irwin for

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| Two Views of Hell: A Biblical & Theological Dialogue

Debating the Doctrine of Hell

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hristian doctrine is grounded first and foremost in the testimony of Scripture.

The discussion begins with Fudge giving readers a helpOn this, evangelical Christians concur. Yet evangelicals often arrive at deep and ful, concise introduction (seventy-two pages comseemingly irresolvable disagreements on the details and implications of that tes- pared to the five-hundredpage first edition of The Fire timony. How sinners who lack faith in That Consumes) to the main contours of his arguChrist Jesus will be punished at the final ment. Fudge alleges that the traditional doctrine of judgment is one such point of con- hell is a product of blind tradition rather than faithtention. Edward William Fudge and ful exegesis. Attention to Scripture shows humans Robert A. Peterson intend to clarify this are contingent creatures wholly dependent upon issue and move it toward resolution in “God’s immediate gift of grace” for their minute-totheir recently published exchange, Two minute existence. The Church fathers and the Views of Hell.

Christian tradition that followed them overlooked Neither Fudge nor Peterson is new to this obvious Bible teaching because of being this discussion. In 1982, Fudge pub- gripped by a false platonic philosophy that taught lished The Fire That Consumes: The Biblical that the human soul is naturally immortal. But if Case for Conditional Immortality Christians would only heed the “common, ordi(Providential Press). It poses a signifi- nary” meaning of the terms that Scripture uses to cant exegetical challenge to the perpetu- describe the punishment awaiting the wicked (e.g., ity of hell’s conscious punishment and die, perish, be destroyed) and accept the condihas received endorsements from respected evan- tional immortality of human existence, then they Two Views of gelical scholars including F. F. Bruce, John would not be tempted to think that hell’s punishHell: A Biblical Wenham, and Clark Pinnock, who also demur on ment is unending. Fudge presents this position & Theological the traditional doctrine. Fudge’s position, which he over four chapters that cover teachings from the Dialogue refers to as “conditionalism,” is among those Old Testament, Jesus, Paul, and the rest of the New Peterson answers in his 1995 volume Hell on Trial: Testament. Fudge claims that the Old Testament The Case for Eternal Punishment (Presbyterian & events, prophecies, and vocabulary concerning

by Edward William Reformed). As its subtitle indicates, that book God’s judgment of the wicked present a unified Fudge and Robert A. seeks to reverse the erosion of evangelical belief in teaching of utter eradication and that the New Peterson the traditional doctrine of hell. Two Views consoli- Testament reinforces this outlook.

InterVarsity Press, 2000. dates this debate: Each theologian unfolds his case Peterson’s response to Fudge is on point but $11.99, 228 pages over several consecutive chapters and then submits detailed; so I will only mention some of the more it to his colleague for a chapter-length response. material items. The impressive array of Scriptures Thus, the volume represents a valuable opportuni- Fudge marshals in support of conditionalism dwinty for assessing the rational adequacy of each posi- dles, Peterson says, if we exclude arguments from tion with respect to how well it survives interroga- silence and Old Testament texts that “do not speak tion by a well-versed critic. of the final fate of the wicked at all” but “of God Part One of Two Views is generally excellent. visiting the wicked with premature death.” Fudge’s

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interpretation of passages about eschatological destruction involves specious arguments from linguistics and the passages‚ contexts for restricting the lexical range of “die,” “perish,” “be destroyed,” and “eternal punishment” to annihilation. Indeed, several Scriptural passages (Isa. 66:24; Dan. 12:2; Matt. 25:31–46; 2 Thess. 1:9; Rev. 20:10 –15) seem recalcitrant to any meaning but the perpetual existence of the unrepentant outside God’s favor and immediate presence. To the charge that the traditional doctrine has pagan origins, Peterson replies that Fudge’s exposition “gives no evidence” for this assertion; it “ignores” key Scripture passages that indicate human souls are immaterial and survive bodily death (e.g., Luke 23:43, 46; Phil. 1:22 –24; 2 Cor. 5:6 –9); and it reverses the traditional chain of inference where human immortality is inferred from what the Bible teaches about the eternal, conscious destinies of both lost and saved.

Unfortunately, the discussion weakens in Part Two, where Peterson makes his case and Fudge responds. For example, in what seems to be a strategic error, Peterson presents the judgments of eleven distinguished theologians and the ecumenical council of Chalcedon against Fudge. The theologians and council are simply too much for Peterson to cover satisfactorily in the space allotted. Peterson then argues that these theologians’ unanimous affirmation of the tradition makes it “highly unlikely” that they “all are in error”; and “if we take their own words seriously,” we will conclude their belief was borne neither of vindictive hearts nor of pagan philosophy but of fidelity to Scripture. Yet establishing that these theologians unanimously affirm the traditional doctrine and consider their own judgments biblical doesn’t answer Fudge’s claim that the tradition is entangled in a systematic error that renders the majority’s selfassessments mistaken. Similarly, Peterson’s argument that an annihilationist substitutionary-atonement theory would conflict with orthodox Christology as defined at Chalcedon doesn’t explain the council’s soteriological and liturgical concerns. Bereft of that crucial information, Peterson’s complaint appears to presuppose that agreement with ecumenical councils is intrinsically important, and Fudge easily dismisses that claim.

Overall, Peterson’s truncated explication of the tradition needlessly feeds Fudge’s allegation that the traditional doctrine rests on inertia rather than on sound exegetical and theological grounds.

On the other hand, Peterson spends about forty pages on ten Old and New Testament passages that he claims demonstrate that the traditional doctrine is biblical. Although his argument is less clear and concise than his response to Fudge in Part

One, Peterson makes some reasonable claims that deserve a reply. Yet Fudge devotes only six pages to these arguments, preferring instead to spend about eighteen pages rebutting Peterson’s earlier nonexegetical arguments. In some cases, Fudge’s paragraph-long dismissals of Peterson’s arguments are valid because Peterson doesn’t give Fudge’s reading enough credit (as with Isa. 66:24) or the passages at issue are neutral to the conditionalisttraditionalist question (as with Matt. 18:6–9 and Mark 9:42–48). But in other cases, Fudge just repeats an interpretive move that Peterson has properly questioned (using Isa. 66:24 to explain away Dan. 12:1 –2) or he simply ignores Peterson’s analysis (as with 2 Thess. 1:5 –10; Jude 7 and 13; Rev. 14:9–11; Rev. 20:10–15). Twice, Fudge claims Peterson “confesses” or “admits” that a Scripture passage “could teach annihilationism” while ignoring Peterson’s qualifying phrases “considered by itself” and “[t]aken in isolation” that indicate that the passages support annihilationism only when wrenched from their contexts. InterVarsity’s editors should not have permitted this, since it gives Fudge, who has the last word, an unfair advantage with less careful readers, and it needlessly taints Fudge’s credibility with the more careful. In any case, Fudge doesn’t adequately attend to Peterson’s exegetical arguments, and this damages the cogency of his conditionalism.

So Two Views of Hell starts more strongly than it ends. Moreover, the volume’s format prevents the dialogue from developing beyond the initial level of criticism, leaving its readers with the task of unraveling and clarifying the issues Fudge and Peterson both explicitly and implicitly raise. Yet this task must be done because some of these issues are crucial to the debate’s direction and ultimately to its resolution.

For example, Fudge claims that his case “rests totally on Scripture” and “simply… [walks] through the Bible” in contrast to his opponents’ case, whose nonexegetical contributions to the debate (e.g., philosophical theology and literary analysis) he portrays less charitably. Arguments of the latter sort are “rationalistic,” “pagan,” “nonbiblical,” “unscriptural,” “feudalistic,” and “uninspired”; they provide “no reliable starting place” and their conclusions “cannot be proven.” If Fudge’s use of this language were merely descriptive, it would be accurate in many cases, since Greek philosophy is pagan, etc. However, his pejorative use of it gives the impression that his arguments are intrinsically more rational or trustworthy than his opponents’ arguments, because he appeals only and more often to Scripture. But this is misleading.

The “emotionally charged language” describing

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traditionalism’s hell as “torture” and traditionalism’s God as an “eternal torturer” for which Peterson chastises Fudge in Part One multiplies from one pejorative usage in Fudge’s exposition to ten in his response to Peterson. Fudge offers no Bible verses to back up these descriptions because there are none—no Scripture says that the unending punishment of unrepentant sinners would be unjust.

Moreover, both his own assertion that it would be unjust to “punish people forever for deeds done during a few years on earth” (which, incidentally, impugns the justice of irreversible annihilation as well) and his three-paragraph rebuttal to Anselm’s argument that everlasting punishment is fitting for creatures who have sinned against God’s augustness belong to moral philosophy and philosophical theology, not to biblical exegesis.

So Fudge’s rhetoric is inconsistent with his brand of biblicism, and it takes the moral high ground with paltry warrant at best. But upholders of the traditional doctrine should press him further.

Fudge repeatedly states that the conditionalist account doesn’t restrict whether and for how long God can justly inflict conscious pain on the wicked prior to their annihilation, most likely because mere annihilation doesn’t capture the Bible’s depiction of the eschatological sufferings of unrepentant sinners. But can he then furnish a sound argument that identifies a relevant ethical difference between the traditional doctrine and his conditionalism?

On the one hand, if the traditional doctrine of hell condones torture, then so does Fudge’s conditionalism; on the other, if there is an argument explaining why the potentially lengthy conscious sufferings of unrepentant sinners prior to their annihilation do not constitute torture, then the traditional doctrine may also stand exonerated. So not only does Fudge’s response to Peterson use doubly unacceptable rhetoric, but the practical interests of pastoral caregivers, apologists, evangelists, missionaries, and others are not advanced by adopting his conditionalism.

Besides the relationship of exegesis and philosophy to doctrinal inquiry and each other, this dialogue raises the issues of whether in practice Fudge and Peterson base their exegetical cases on an accumulation of the evidence in the Scriptures or on a group of anchor texts (Ps. 110:12; Is. 66:24; Dan. 12:2; Matt. 10:28; Matt. 25:31–46; 2 Thess. 1:9; 2 Pet. 2:4–10; Rev. 20:7–15) and whether Fudge or Peterson presents the more accurate understanding of the zoen aionion or aionios zoe with which Scripture often contrasts the fate of the unsaved.

Pastors, evangelists, teachers, and other laity who read Two Views of Hell to obtain an immediately clear understanding of the conditionalist-tradi-

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tionalist debate and a knockdown argument for either position may come away disappointed. But for those with less lofty expectations and time to think through the issues, Fudge and Peterson provide an invitation to this discussion and plenty of grist for our own theological milling.

Michael Ajay Chandra Wheaton College Graduate School Wheaton, IL

SHORT N OTIC E S The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text

by G. K. Beale Eerdmans and The Paternoster Press, 1999. $75.00, 1,245 pages G. K. Chesterton expressed the opinion of many when he wrote: “Though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.” Too true too often. One antidote, however, would be a judicious, scholarly commentary based on the Apocalypse’s Greek text. It must deal with the Greek text, because John often does things which are quite exceptional and impossible to translate. And it must recognize that Revelation’s visionary tapestry is woven from threads stretching far back into the Old Testament revelation.

We do have some serviceable commentaries and general introductory texts for Revelation, but nothing that goes into the kind of depth that the Apocalypse deserves. Enter Gregory Beale’s 1,245page contribution to The New International Greek Testament Commentary series. Dr. Beale, until recently Professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and now holding the Kenneth T. Wessner Chair of Biblical Studies in the Graduate Theological Studies program at Wheaton College, has produced what is now the best single commentary available on Revelation.

Professor Beale’s strengths make him particularly suited for producing a lasting commentary on Revelation. He handles John’s Greek with sensitivity and skill. He has already done quite a bit of work on the use of Old Testament texts in the New Testament and some work (including his dissertation from Cambridge University) specifically on the use of Old Testament texts in the Apocalypse. In addition, he has studied ancient Jewish interpretation methods.

He also knows the scholarship and the various views on Revelation, with which he interacts fairly but not so much that his own helpful insights get lost in clutter, as so often happens in scholarly works.

Perhaps the best way to judge the usefulness of a commentary is to go to the passages that you feel you already know thoroughly and see if the commentator gives you new insights from the text. I did that with Beale’s book and was consistently helped. His knowledge of the ancient Jewish and Rabbinic sources was particularly helpful to me, though I think he would admit that he could add a little more firsthand knowledge of relevant GrecoRoman primary sources. This small caveat aside, this commentary will be a lasting contribution.

Obviously, a technical commentary such as this is designed for people who know Greek, but Beale does provide translation of Greek words, so it can be used profitably by anyone.

S. M. Baugh Associate Professor of New Testament Westminster Theological Seminary, California Escondido, California

The Legacy of Sovereign Joy: God’s Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin

by John Piper Crossway Books, 2000 $17.99, 158 pages In 426 A.D., Augustine handed over leadership of his church to his assistant, Eraclius.

Overwhelmed by his own inadequacy and fearing his predecessor’s voice would be lost, Eraclius lamented, “The cricket chirps, the swan is silent.”

A thousand years later, Augustine’s doctrine of grace reverberated through the voice of John Hus, who was burned at the stake for convictions that anticipated the Reformation by one hundred years.

Hus wrote in his cell before dying, “Today you are burning a goose [ “Hus” in Czech]; however, a hundred years from now, you will be able to hear a swan sing … [and] you will have to listen to him.”

Augustine’s song of grace crescendoed in Luther and Calvin. In 1531, Luther wrote, “John Hus prophesied of me … from his prison in Bohemia: ‘They will now … roast a goose but after a hundred years they will hear a swan sing; him they will have to tolerate.’

And so it shall continue, if it please God.” John Piper, senior pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis since 1980 and director of Desiring God Ministries, continues singing this song of divine grace in The Legacy of Sovereign Joy, which opens his series, “The Swans Are Not

Silent.” A compilation of biographical sketches originally presented at the annual Bethlehem Conference for Pastors, the book centers on the lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, who experienced God’s grace and then built their ministries upon it. In a post-modern and post-Christian culture hostile to this grace, pastors and laity must follow their example.

Piper’s premise is that saving, converting grace is a divine gift of “sovereign” (or uncontested) “joy” (or rest in God) that triumphs over all other joys and sways the will. Sovereign joy freed Augustine from sin’s “pleasant slavery”: “You drove [fruitless joys] from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy… and took their place.” Sovereign joy in justification by faith propelled Luther’s love for study of God’s Word. Sovereign joy in the selfauthenticating supremacy of God as revealed in his Word fueled Calvin’s zeal and his relentless consistency in preaching.

Above the Reformed doctrine of salvation, Piper hears a descant of God’s grace as the sovereign joy that frees us from sin’s bondage: total depravity is not just badness, but blindness … and deadness to joy;… unconditional election means … our joy in Jesus was planned for us before we ever existed;… limited atonement [means] indestructible joy in God is infallibly secured for us …;… irresistible grace is the commitment and power of God’s love to make sure we don’t hold on to suicidal pleasures, [because we have been] set … free by the sovereign power of superior delights; and … the perseverance of the saints is the almighty work of God to keep us… for an inheritance of pleasures at God’s right hand forever [p.

73]. Sovereign joy, the essence of grace, grants “gutsy guilt”—a freedom from the paralysis that can come with the perception of our weaknesses or flaws. It sets the battle for sanctification at the level of what we love. The majesty of God revealed in his Word severs our will from the root of sin.

These swans are not silent. Their songs of triumphant grace continue to be sung in The Legacy of Sovereign Joy. And so they shall continue to sing as long as it pleases God. Joanne Erickson Wheaton, IL

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Time for Truth: Living Free in a World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

by Os Guinness Baker Books, 2000 $12.99, 125 pages Today, the notion of truth has almost completely disappeared from American culture. In Time for Truth, Os Guinness profiles this phenomenon that he calls “America’s ‘Nietzschean Moment.’”

Following in the German philosopher’s wake, the radical onslaught of postmodernity with its “assault on truth” amounts to “a profound crisis of cultural authority in the West—a crisis in beliefs, traditions, and ideals that have been decisive for Western civilization to this point.” Guinness gives sober warning that the fashionable skepticism of today is sounding “the death knell of Western civilization.”

Time for Truth accurately reveals the depths of America’s crisis of truth by examining the “telltale fingerprints” of postmodernity on the many practical and public—and “not simply theoretical and analytical”—concerns confronting us. Truth, Guinness tells us, is anything but inconsequential; it matters supremely “because in the end, without truth there is no freedom”; indeed, truth “is freedom.” With great economy of words, Guinness addresses the difficulty of living free in our world today, placing this discussion within the context of our culture’s companion crises concerning ethics and character.

The strength of Guinness’s assessment lies in his understanding the dangers of both modern and postmodern misconceptions of truth. He repeatedly underscores that he is “not arguing against the postmodern view of truth on behalf of the modern view,” since “the postmodern [view is] the direct descendent of the modern and the mirror image of its deficiencies.” Because conforming to the postmodern view or retreating to modernity can offer no solution, he instead outlines the rich JudeoChristian conception of truth.

This biblical view of truth “gives a proper place to the importance of presuppositions in thought, the importance of tradition in handing down thinking, and the necessity of a transcendent reference in human knowledge.” Truth, Guinness argues, is “not finally the matter of philosophy but of theology,” grounded in “God’s infinite knowing” and ultimately “in the trustworthiness of God himself.” Truth, then, is “alive and well, and in an important sense, undeniable.”

The challenges of modernity and postmodernity are confronting America with a crisis of epic proportions. As part of Baker Books’ “Hourglass Books” imprint, Time for Truth is intended, the pub-

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lisher states, “for all who long for reformation and revival within the evangelical community.” It, as other books under this imprint, is meant to be a tract for the times that confronts a major issue of our day in a way that is more practical than academic, more “a first word than the last.” For those who desire to understand the present cultural landscape and how the robust Christian view of truth can enable free living in our “world of lies, hype and spin,” it is a must read.

Ryan Glomsrud Wheaton College Wheaton, IL

Reformed Confessions Harmonized edited by Joel R. Beeke and Sinclair B. Ferguson Baker Books, 1999 $19.99, 288 pages This useful volume harmonizes the Belgic Confession of Faith, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort, the Second Helvetic Confession, and the Westminster Confession, and Shorter and Larger Catechisms. It is divided into subjects—theology, anthropology, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology—and presents the texts in parallel columns. The actual harmonization is preceded by a brief but illuminating historical introduction to these documents and is followed by a carefully annotated bibliography that is designed to help both beginning and advanced students to delve more deeply into the topics these confessions address. The bibliography, divided according to the 37 articles of the Belgic Confession (e.g., “The Doctrine of God,” “The Authority of Scripture,” “The Deity of the Holy Spirit,” “Divine Providence,” “Original Sin,” “Justice and Mercy in Christ,” “Sanctification and Holiness,” “The True and the False Church Compared,” “Ministers, Elders, and Deacons,” “Church and State”), comments on the best Reformed works written from the sixteenth century onward. It covers only books available in English and suggests both where readers should begin and the order in which they can proceed. It alone warrants purchasing this book.

Mark R. Talbot Associate Professor of Philosophy Wheaton College Wheaton, IL

E N D N O T E S

Evangelicalism. It makes theology increasingly difficult to do in any depth, except in opposition to a perceived common enemy” (ibid., 386–87).

John Williamson

11

Nevin, “The Anxious Bench,” in Catholic and Reformed: Selected Theological Writings of J. W. Nevin, ed. Charles Yrigoyen, Jr., and George H. Bricker (Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwick

Ex Auditu by Richard D. Phillips I. Howard Marshall, “The Gospel of Luke” in The New International Greek Commentary

Press, 1978), 13.

(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978), 389–90. Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy

(February 1980): 2–3.

1

2

Lewis Smedes, “Evangelicalism—a Fantasy,” Reformed Journal

12

Ibid. 14C. Norman Kraus, “A Mennonite Perspective,” The

13

Scripture, vol. 6 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1959), 15–16. Martin Luther, c.f. Alistair

Variety of American Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1987), 191.

McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 152.

15

3

Ibid., 198. 16Some evangelicals, especially historians, have sought to overcome the

confusion by borrowing set-theory. Instead of classic orthodoxy’s “bounded-set” The Battles Over the Label “Evangelicalism by Michael Horton

paradigm, they argue for a “centered-set“ Evangelicalism that can incorporate evan-

1

Donald Dayton, “The Search for the Historical Evangelicalism: George Marsden’s

gelical and mainline Protestantism of nearly every stripe. But does this settle any-

History of Fuller Seminary as a Case Study,“ Christian Scholars Review 23:1 (1993): 26–27.

thing? Or is it simply a variation on the same theme? Despite different nuances,

“It is a great historical irony that A. J. Gordon was one of the objects of the fiercest

Lutheran and Reformed traditions have historically maintained this centered-set

polemics of B. B. Warfield of Princeton for his perfectionist tendencies and his commit-

thinking, with Christ and the gospel. Yet, they have also been bounded-set thinkers,

ment to ‘faith healing’ and ‘modern miracles of healing’… but today one cannot really

in their recognition that scripture infallibly norms not only the central but the

teach in the theology department of Gordon-Conwell without being in the line of

peripheral edges beyond which Christian liberty encourages variety. As communal

Warfield.” (26). Dayton reckons that the current NAE is “probably 75 percent or more

interpretations of Scripture, the creeds and confessions indicate the tradition’s con-

Holiness and Pentecostal” (27). Later, he writes, ”If this is the case, how might we bet-

victions as both to what is central and to what, though perhaps less central, is essen-

ter describe the story line that constitutes the background of Fuller? We might start the

tial to affirm together. A common confession has, more often than not, generated a

story with the refusal of Evangelist Charles Grandison Finney to attend Princeton

sense of unity that is increasingly eroded by vague notions of mission. The adoption

Theological Seminary after his conversion and call to the ministry.…We could trace the

of a centered-set way of thinking does not seem to go any further in settling the

amalgamation of Finneyite revivalism with the emerging Holiness Movement and its fur-

question of who does the defining and what therefore counts as central or peripher-

ther radicalization into Pentecostalism—and the parallel emergence of dispensationalism

al. Confessional Lutherans and Calvinists will doubtless regard Wesleyans and

and the radicalization of ‘New School’ Presbyterianism into a form of ‘Reformed’ funda-

Restorationists as having a different center than forensic imputation. If Dayton is

mentalism much like these other movements.” Perhaps Fuller represents “the decision of

correct, that is as it should be. For at least some of us, such appeals to a “centered-

the great grand-children of Finney deciding to go to Princeton after all” (32–33). 2Mark

set” model sound like another verse of modern theology’s hymn, “Don’t Fence Me

Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,

In.” That this may be sound scholarship for historical research is not in doubt, but

1992), 439. 3Ibid. 4Carl Henry, Evangelicals on the Brink of Crisis (Waco, TX: Word Books,

those who are actually entrusted with the care of sheep will want to talk about fences

1967), 75. 5Mark Noll and Cassandra Niemczyk, “Evangelicals and the Self-Consciously

at some point.

Reformed,” The Variety of American Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press,

Scott for “most of the divisiveness that plagues evangelicalism” (“Evangelical

1991), 204. 6Ibid., 205. 7Ibid., 206. 8Ibid., 147. 9Donald Dayton, op. cit., 15. 10B.B.

Theology: Rock or Reef,” in The Evangelical Roundtable, op. cit., 119.) But even

Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings—I, ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and

from the historical point of view, this popular assertion is faced with difficulties,

Reformed Publishing Company, 1970), 304. Although Warfield did argue for a federa-

especially since the lion’s share of sects and subsects in North America hail from

17

“Bounded-set” thinking (i.e., “scholasticism”) is blamed by Waldron

tion of evangelical churches, he warned that a genuinely evangelical Christianity could

nineteenth- and twentieth-century divisions, many of them founded as alternatives

be undermined by the attempt to keep essential doctrinal commitments at bay. In an arti-

to the apparently “bounded-set” confessionalism of Protestant bodies. Bounded-set

cle titled “In Behalf of Evangelical Religion,” first published in The Presbyterian, September

thinking is only divisive if the Wesleyan set or the Calvinist set or any other set

23, 1920, and available in the above-cited source, Warfield wrote the following con-

claims hegemony over the movement. But the call for abandoning bounded-set

cerning the proposed statement of faith for this new coalition: “The union proposed is

thinking entirely strikes some of us as the hauntingly familiar imperialism of an evan-

based on a brief creed which is recited in the plan. By entering upon this union on the

gelical movement impatient with the messiness of distinct theological and ecclesias-

basis of this creed, the Church will declare this creed a sufficient basis for united work in

tical traditions under its big tent. 18Lewis Smedes, op. cit. 19C. S. Lewis, Preface, Mere

propagating the gospel.” He complains that the creed that resulted contains only a few

Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 11.

starved and hunger-bitten dogmas of purely general character”—dogmas that are not contested by Roman Catholics or even rationalists, “by respectable Unitarians, say.” The

The Perils of Definition

heart of it is this: “There is nothing about justification by faith in this creed. And that

1

means that all the gains obtained in that great religious movement which we call the

Evangelicalism Soon?”, The Evangelical Roundtable, ed. David A. Fraser (St. Davids, PA:

Reformation are cast out of the window.” But that is not all: The new creed says noth-

Eastern College and Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1987), 212.

David Lim, “Beyond Success:

Another ‘Great Awakening’ Through U.S.

ing about the substitutionary atonement, nothing about sin and grace, nothing even about the Trinity or the deity of Christ or the Holy Spirit. “We need believe in the Holy

Unity and Diversity in the New Testament by Shane Rosenthal

Spirit only ‘as guide and comforter’—do not the Rationalists do the same?” All the gains,

1

then, of the ancient, medieval, and Reformation periods are “summarily set aside.” “Are

(1916): 177–201.

Warfield, B. B., “Redeemer & Redemption,” The Princeton Theological Review, vol. 14

we ready to enter a union based on the elimination of these? … Is this the kind of creed which twentieth-century Presbyterianism will find sufficient as a basis for co-operation in evangelistic activities? Then it can get along in its evangelistic activities without the gospel. For it is precisely the gospel that this creed neglects altogether.” While the neoevangelical movement produced statements of faith that were often better than this, the

[ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 9 ]

doctrinal minimalism inherent in such consensual movements is readily abundant in

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Paul F. M. Zahl

Ultimate Penultimates

W PAUL F. M. ZAHL

Dean Cathedral Church of the Advent Birmingham, Alabama

e all have to think about church-dividing issues, or rather the substance of

burned for rejecting the mass.

We could almost say, in conthose theological convictions that must be insisted on even at the cost of temporary terms, that they were martyred for the sake of unity. What are the “here I stand” issues today? What are the distinctions Prayer Book reform.

And now, in the mainthat confessing evangelicals are bound to make, even stream denominations like my own, what is the preif they override the eirenicism that is also always senting issue? It is human sexuality, and, in particuproper to Christian people? When and where do we lar, the practice of homosexuality. This, I used to say to our sisters and brothers in the communities and believe, was a secondary issue. It would all be sorted denominations we serve: Thus far and no further? out in the Church if we were just faithful to the call For me as an Episcopalian, the question is actual. of the trumpet on the sustained note of sola gratia. But I can’t slide under it or get around it. Among the I have changed my mind. More is involved than the Episcopalians of ECUSA, a body that has always issue as such. What is involved is the authority of the been per mixtum, the question has been forced upon Bible to deconstruct a raging self-will incited by the us. One used to say, just focus on the Gospel of Zeitgeist. What is involved is a form of self-assertion grace and justification, focus on the Lordship of that refuses instruction. The agenda on the left is this: Christ, and all the church-political issues will find Behold, ye shall be as gods.

For Reformation Christians, the assumption their proper solutions. Don’t go to war over human sexuality or Prayer Book reform or ecclesiology. behind the plea that homosexual practice should be The Spirit will lead us into the truth regarding accepted by the Church is the anthropology of the penultimates if we stay secure in the Ultimate, the contention that “because this is the way I am—i.e., One Thing Needful (Luke 10:42). Or as we often because I had no choice in my orientation—the Church has no right to make a judgment.” This hear: stop squabbling and focus on mission.

I used to think that was true. I now think it is a passionately contended notion is Arminian from stem to stern. The assumption is that God cannot half-truth.

What impresses one in Church history is the and must not accuse our human nature when it is way that presenting issues of the Christian movement bound, but only when it is free. Yet Reformation are often Gospel issues in hindsight. For example, the Christians believe that no human being is free ab iniArian controversy looks abstract if you just read the tio. We are only free after we have been freed! No texts. But it proved to be a Church-defining one has chosen to be a sinner in his or her own moment for us. The Donatist schism could appear nature. Yet we are. None of us chooses to be comsecondary if viewed solely from the vantage point pulsive or passive-aggressive or addicted or freeof its original protagonists. It was a fight over valid floatingly enraged. Yet we are. The Law accuses us and invalid Orders. But it proved to be a Church- in our inherited human nature as well as in the sindefining moment. ful acts expressed by that nature. Lex semper accusat.

Or take the presenting issue of the English Confessing mainliners like myself can no longer Reformation. Why, as Bishop Ryle asked so forceful- deny that what we wished to regard as a secondary ly, were our reformers burned? The answer is not: on matter involves the primary matter of self-arrogation. account of justification or for the sake of the freedom “Behold, ye shall be one god” (Genesis 3;5; Romans of the Word. Rather, our reformers were burned 1:25). I wonder what the next church-dividing issue because they rejected transubstantiation. They were will be. It is bound to come, maybe, by the year 2525.

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