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Evangelical Advantages

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The Bible Made Impossible:
Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture
by Christian Smith
Brazos, 234 pages, $22.99

How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps
by Christian Smith
Cascade, 205 pages, $24

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Minding the Evangelical Mind

Mon, 01 Jan 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Those of us who call ourselves “evangelical scholars” are accustomed to suspicion from the church and incredulity from the academy. Modern scholarship, many in the churches believe, has proven itself implacably hostile to faith. Evangelical Christianity, many in the academy believe, holds to propositions that have no legitimate place in learned discourse. Perhaps more commonly, we evangelical scholars find ourselves in the even more depressing situation where no one pays us any notice at all. As an antidote to the wounded amour propre brought on by this state of affairs, it is good to recall how Bishop John Wright once challenged Catholic scholars of a previous generation who were tempted by self“pity: “Where in the New Testament, the Church of the Fathers, or the history of the saints from Paul to Thomas More were the genuinely thoughtful promised any other lot, whether at the hands of the world or at the hands of their uncomprehending brethren, than contradiction and constant testing?

“For those of us who nonetheless continue to complain about opposition and neglect, Alan Wolfe’s report in the October 2000 Atlantic Monthly on “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind” comes as a pleasant surprise. In the fifteen“page cover story, Wolfe advances what he obviously thinks are startling theses for the magazine’s regular readers. His main point is that a number of religious colleges and universities (he mentions Baylor University, Calvin College, Pepperdine University, Valparaiso University, Wheaton College, Fuller Seminary, and also includes the high“profile evangelicals teaching at Notre Dame) are actually promoting a fairly vigorous intellectual life. Specifically, at these institutions, “evangelical scholars are writing the books, publishing the journals, teaching the students, and sustaining the networks necessary to establish a presence in American academic life.

”Wolfe’s article asks some important questions about the quality and durability of evangelical achievement. Before returning to these, it is perhaps allowable”if also characteristically un“evangelical”to bask for a moment in Wolfe’s positive observations.

For example, Wolfe shows that evangelicals enjoy a few public spokespersons, like Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Theological Seminary, who can be as innocent as doves in proclaiming an old“fashioned gospel message and wily as serpents in knowing when, where, and how to proclaim it. Wolfe also provides some overdue recognition for the evangelical political scientists (including John Green, James Guth, Lyman Kellstedt, and Corwin Smidt) who have provided necessary categories and much of the essential analysis for understanding evangelical political clout in the recent past. In addition, he is unusually perceptive in noting that one of the roots of the current boom in Christian philosophy, to which evangelicals make a substantial contribution, was the painstaking pedagogy of O. K. Bouwsma, William Frankena, and William Harry Jellema, three scholars from a previous generation all but unknown in broader evangelical circles. (Wolfe might also have paid similar attention to the better“known Carl F. H. Henry.) He also notes the solid gains made by evangelical historians in pushing the record of revivalist, fundamentalist, sectarian, holiness, and theo logically traditionalist groups into the consciousness of general American historians. (He mentions George Marsden as a key figure, as is appropriate, though an even longer article would have given Wolfe the chance to add the names of two deceased scholars, the Nazarene Timothy L. Smith and the Canadian Baptist George Rawlyk.)

Wolfe’s appreciative report carries, however, far more than mere commendation. His probing of the new evangelical intellectualism is, in fact, as challenging as it is complimentary. It invites several kinds of response.On the most superficial level, it is possible to question some of Wolfe’s factual assertions. He confuses the chronology and the circumstances under which the distinguished then“Lutheran historian Jaroslav Pelikan left Lutheran Valparaiso University for employment elsewhere, and he depicts the style of Baylor’s energetic president, Robert Sloan, as much more authoritarian than is the case. Wolfe, in addition, claims that the departure of George Marsden, Richard Mouw, Alvin Plantinga, and Nicholas Wolterstorff from the faculty of Calvin College in the 1980s left the intellectual cupboard bare, when in fact there remained (and remain) at Calvin an awful lot of solid academic contributors.

But such matters are niggling quibbles. The critique of evangelical intellectual life contained within Wolfe’s substantial appreciation is worthy of serious attention from those who want to promote learning in league with faith. Two of the most sharply stated items in his bill of particulars are provocative questions about institutional statements of faith and a pensive query about the intellectual effects of evangelical democratic populism.

Regarding those statements of faith that several colleagues use to screen prospective faculty, Wolfe moves in two directions at once. On the one hand, he seems to suggest that schools that use statements of faith must inevitably lose credibility since they thereby choke off the free flow of debate, without which true intellectual life is not possible. In my view, this criticism is not compelling. Evangelical scholars who are active in their disciplines, publish in academic and popular forums, and use e“mail do in fact participate regularly in vigorous intellectual exchange. It is also the case that, as Wheaton’s President Duane Litfin suggested to Wolfe, “a healthy academic marketplace of ideas will view academic freedom as the right not only of individuals, but also of those institutions [made up] of voluntary groups or communities of individuals.” On this question, it would seem that Wolfe’s pluralism, which should deprecate institutional conformity as seriously as individual conformity, points in the same direction as the evangelical insistence that faith statements function as an essential guardian of their identity.

In some of his expressions, however, Wolfe seems to question not so much statements of faith as such, but only the overly restrictive ones. Wolfe notes, for example, that although the English Department at Wheaton “has a love affair with Catholic”and Anglo“Catholic”writers, including Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy,” and although Wheaton maintains an important collection of the papers of G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and J. R. R. Tolkien, it will not hire Roman Catholics and could not, because of its statement of faith, employ the Anglicans Lewis and Sayers. In his words, “Without a literature that is in one way or another a product of Catholicism, Wheaton could not aspire to a life of the mind. A college that would not allow on its faculty authors whose letters are welcome in its archives has a problem it needs to resolve.” If the defense by Wheaton’s Litfin of faith statements is fair, so too is Wolfe’s challenge about the shape such statements should take.

Wolfe is even more worried about the populism that pervades evangelicalism than he is about statements of faith at individual evangelical institutions. And well he might be. An ability to connect with ordinary people”in print, through the airwaves, by means of active voluntary societies, and above all in face“to“face speech”has always been the driving engine of evangelical religion. That same engine has often run roughshod over intellectual work. Wolfe is particularly concerned that since evangelical populism now finds expression in “a therapeutic sensibility and a culture of nonjudgmentalism,” evangelicals will not have the wherewithal to do the tough reasoning, make the unpopular tenure decisions, and carry out the arduous research required for genuine intellectual life.

Wolfe was disconcerted, for example, to find at one of the institutions he visited an entire course devoted to the work of M. Scott Peck, whom Wolfe calls “one of America’s best“known New Age psychologists.” Wolfe is on solid ground in seeing the respect granted to Peck’s ideas as the type of category mistake often made by evangelicals. As a popular figure and a publishing phenomenon, Peck does deserve attention, especially for the opportunity to ascertain why his writings resonate with so many readers. But to treat the writings themselves as of intellectual import is to confuse the dignity bestowed by popularity with the status earned by insight.

Evangelicalism’s populist instincts affect the prospects for a genuine life of the mind in other ways. Wolfe is quite complimentary about the still new journal Books & Culture: A Christian Review , which has provided five years of stimulating engagement with a wide range of cultural and intellectual topics. Yet this magazine faces the same challenges to survival confronted by all evangelical periodicals that are not directed at the populist center. It is a successor to such publications as Eternity , His , and the Reformed Journal , all of which aimed just slightly higher than the democratic average that evangelicals know so well, but in the end could not survive.

Alan Wolfe has many kind things to say about the Christian liberal arts education that Wheaton College is trying to provide its students. Wheaton’s appearance for the first time this fall among the “Best National Colleges” in the U.S. News & World Report survey might seem a fitting complement to Wolfe’s Atlantic essay. Yet closer attention to the specific information supplied by the U.S. News tout sheets actually reinforces Wolfe’s concern about the effects on evangelical learning of the democratic impulse. By comparison with other colleges in “The Top 50,” Wheaton students rank in the top half or even top quarter. But in “faculty resources” it ranks dead last, and in general “financial resources” next to last. I note that this conjunction is pertinent, not as a cryptic plea by a Wheaton professor for a higher salary, but as confirmation of Wolfe’s suspicions. Evangelicals characteristically view institutions of higher learning like Wheaton as worthy of both high expectations and enduring suspicion.

If, as the author of a book entitled The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind , I might be indulged a few words on what Wolfe has described as “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” I view signs of intellectual life among evangelical Protestants as the product of both energy and insight. The energy continues to come from traditional evangelical sources”urgency about the gospel, dedication to the Scriptures, and seriousness about God’s law, but also status anxiety about a fundamentalist past. The insight comes from new and serious appropriation of classical Christian traditions.

Today we do witness an evangelical artistic and aesthetic awakening, but it follows trails blazed by Roman Catholics, Anglo“Catholics, and a few Dutch painters from the age of Rembrandt and van Ruisdael. We are experiencing a genuine revival of philosophy among evangelicals, but it is a revival fueled by some Thomism, more Kuyperianism, and also a little eighteenth“century Scottish realism. Political and social thought is quickening among evangelicals, but the midwives are Oliver O’Donovan’s Anglican Augustinianism, Ronald Sider’s Anabaptism, the social pronouncements of Popes Leo XIII and John Paul II, the odd combination of ultra“postmodernism and traditional Anglo“Catholicism promoted by the Radical Orthodoxy circle, and (again) the principles of Abraham Kuyper. Most evangelical historians who publish for broader audiences downplay their traditional evangelical providentialism for in“house consideration and take their ideological cues instead from Augustine, Luther, Kuyper, or Reinhold Niebuhr.

Among all the fresh evangelical initiatives, the Intelligent Design movement comes closest to using indigenous evangelical resources to build its intellectual superstructure. But much of the impact of this movement comes precisely from abandoning the biblical literalism of historic fundamentalism and pushing the debate over origins back onto territory once occupied by Aquinas’ “Five Ways,” William Paley’s cosmology, and Thomas Chalmer’s Astronomical Discourses ”a territory where evangelicals are settlers rather than natives. In sum, evangelical intellectual life could not exist without both a distinctly evangelical religious energy and a broadly ecumenical appropriation of classical Christian resources from many traditions forgotten or suspected by modern evangelicalism.

Evangelicals should thank Alan Wolfe for providing considerate treatment of some of the fruits of this complex dynamic. We should be even more grateful for his challenge to think with greater care about our own habits of mind, our own expectations for learning, and the impediments we ourselves construct against faithful use of our God“given intellects.

Mark A. Noll is Professor of History at Wheaton College.

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1642 and All That

Sat, 01 May 1999 00:00:00 -0400

The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, and the Triumph of Anglo-America.
By Kevin Philips.
Basic. 651.pp. $32.

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The Innocence of Billy Graham

Thu, 01 Jan 1998 00:00:00 -0500

Just as I Am:
The Autobiography of Billy Graham
by billy graham
harper san francisco/zondervan, 760 pages, $28.50

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Selling God

Mon, 01 Aug 1994 00:00:00 -0400

In holy writ, the conjunctions between authentic faith and the worlds of commerce are strangely varied: the Hebrew Scriptures contain much in the Pentateuch on the protection and use of property, but a different realm of existence is central to the prophets: “Ho, every one who thirsts, come to the waters, and he who has no money, come, buy, and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” (Isaiah 55:1) In the words of Jesus, nothing could be stated more definitely than that “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” (Luke 12:15) Yet from the selfsame authority we hear that the End of the Age can be compared to a man who chastises a servant for not putting “my money with the bankers” so that he could have “received what was my own with interest.” (Matthew 25:27)

These biblical words do not directly answer modern questions about how to organize economies, nor do they provide the believer with easy guidelines to the practical conundrums thrown up for faith and morals by the need to live in a modern economic world. They do, however, show that biblical writers regarded economic and spiritual analysis as overlapping, and yet distinct, modes of reasoning.

R. Laurence Moore’s Selling God is an extended historical meditation on religious experience in the United States, where, from the start, the two spheres of reasoning “religious and commercial” have occupied almost identical territory. The larger canvass of the book is Protestantism, which from its sixteenth-century beginnings Moore regards as “an exercise in efficiency and bureaucratic streamlining that appealed to Europe’s commercial bourgeoisie.” But the specific focus is the manifold ways in which the story of religion in the United States may be written as a story of “commodification.” Moore, a veteran interpreter of American religion who teaches history at Cornell, states his thesis at the start or close of almost every chapter: secularization in America has never meant a zero-sum struggle in which the “world” and the “church” battle to control the same bit of turf. Rather, secularization has always been a much more nuanced reality, with the gains and losses for religion attending the same set of circumstances. It is “religion’s systematic and expansive complicity in mechanisms of market exchange” that provides Moore his argument and dictates the arrangement of his evidence.

This study is quite a bit more subtle than other recent books that have also featured the market orientation of American religion like Roger Finke and Rodney Stark’s The Churching of America, 1776-1990 , which celebrates the struggle of denominations for “market share”; or Michael Scott Horton’s Made in America: The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism , a bracing jeremiad bemoaning exactly what Moore describes. The subtlety in Moore’s book comes from the recognition that in the United States, it could not have been any other way. A free society, which prohibits a state church and discourages most kinds of governmental assistance to religion and a society, moreover, which, at least after the 1790s, organized itself in accordance with the reasoning of free markets is a society where, as Moore puts it, “Either religion keeps up with other cultural aspects of national life, including the commercial forms, or it has no importance.” The citizens of the United States “remained a religious people because religious leaders, and sometimes their opponents, found ways to make religion competitive with other cultural products.” Put in these terms, the process Moore describes has an air of inevitability about it and so deserves to be explored before it is celebrated or condemned.

The fact that Moore himself admits to a “secular” standpoint actually helps to clarify his interpretations. Moore does comment more extensively on how commodification affects the ability to apprehend transcendence than his purportedly secular standpoint would lead readers to expect. But for the most part, he succeeds in treating the subject in terms of historical forces instead of divine reality a strategy that, ironically, only sharpens the impact of his book on those who do believe.

If Moore comes close to overkill in repeating his thesis, his evidence is strikingly diverse. The book’s first five chapters treat ways that nineteenth-century Protestants (with a concentration on circumstances before the Civil War) carried out the commodification of faith. The last four treat twentieth-century matters and expand coverage to Jews and Catholics, while also noting the very different forms of Protestantism that have emerged in this century. Throughout, Moore readily acknowledges the insights of earlier scholars on the particular topics he treats; his contribution is not so much fresh research as large-scale synthesis of individual themes that the burgeoning scholarship on American religious history has made available for such a purpose.

For the nineteenth-century United States, Moore argues his thesis by examining salient examples of religious-market interaction. He begins with activistic Protestants, led by the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society, who exploited new capacities for popular print to reach the country’s rapidly expanding audience of readers. He then describes the way that urban revivalists adopted theatrical methods for their own tasks even as they combatted the evils of the stage. Moore shows how the Protestant mobilization for evangelism and reform provided models for the organization of America’s first political parties and then outlines ways in which political salesmanship may have doubled back to influence the churches. He reviews the tangled story of why Protestants first resisted the exploitation of leisure but then became earnest advocates in market competition for leisure time. This section closes by examining the way that Protestant leaders self-consciously used religious controversy to “sell” their distinct beliefs and also to distribute books and periodicals, market their meetings, finance their church buildings, and meet budgets.

Moore’s case studies provide intriguing vignettes: from the instincts of Washington biographer Mason Weems, who was almost as capable a salesman for the idea of lively, dramatic, popular literature as he was a seller of such works himself; through the reluctant accommodation of evangelical Protestants to the idea that fiction and the visual arts could be enlisted for religious purposes; to the way in which republican civic humanism worked to inspire audience-oriented market thinking for both Protestant reform societies and the great political parties of the antebellum period. But his overarching conclusion is more important: even to have a chance at preserving a substantial place for religion in American society at a time when most European nations were witnessing steady decline in religious adherence, the question was not whether Americans would market their faith but how.

The arguments of the second half of the book may not be quite as compelling, since (as Moore recognizes) immigration, splits within denominations, and adaptability to modern realities have led to a tremendous diversity in religion throughout the United States. Still, by focusing on mainstream liberal Protestants identified with the Federal and National Councils of Churches, the Protestant evangelicals who have most aggressively exploited the popular media, and those Catholics and Jews who have participated most visibly in popular culture, Moore sustains his argument down to the present.

For the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he shows how the Chautauqua movement brought together into a seamless whole an unlikely combination of traditional Protestant uplift and equally traditional Protestant suspicion of organized holidays. As a counterpart Moore suggests that working Americans, especially the growing numbers of Roman Catholics, made their own adaptations of religion to laborers’ needs in ways that were neither as orderly as contemporary religious leaders hoped nor as filled with bad faith as later Marxist interpreters contended.

The book closes with strong chapters examining full-scale liberal Protestant commitment to the big-time advertising of the 1920s and the similarly unreserved exploitation of television and radio by evangelicals in the last half century. In these chapters, Moore is very hard on the liberal Protestants, especially for their painstaking efforts to remove the inconveniences of faith. In this context, Moore summarizes Reinhold Niebuhr’s complaint about Protestant liberalism: “The problem was that they had exchanged the emotional fervor of Christianity, its deep and moving feeling for the terrible burden of human depravity, for a breezy faith in efficiency.” And he says of efforts by the Federal and National Councils of Churches to retain free air time by accommodating to the wishes of the networks and the Federal Communications Commission: “The effort not to antagonize an audience (listeners after all only had to turn the dial) seemed a strange extrapolation from the life of a crucified Christ.” For some reason, Moore expresses warmer feelings toward the evangelical entrepreneurs of radio and television who, in their own way, have out-liberaled the liberals in orienting their message to what could pay.

In a revealing epilogue, Moore tries to take the sting out of a book that could be read as a massive indictment of the churches. What we have seen in the United States is new, Moore argues, only as it represents a new way of brokering the accommodations that have always occurred between church and world. “Although the nature of organized religion’s “secularity has changed in the past two hundred years,” he says, “that . . . is not by itself a reason for scandalized outcry.” “The particular form of worldliness that churches in the United States have exhibited by entering the marketplace of culture has only displaced earlier forms of church worldliness: direct political involvement in the domestic and foreign policy of states, conspicuous displays of non-bourgeois pomp and wealth, and heavy investment in the higher forms of philosophical and scientific knowledge.”

But despite a great capacity to treat such matters analytically, and with much deference to the ongoing spiritual mission of religious groups, Moore cannot hide his alarm as the book draws to a close. He asks where religious bodies will obtain “transformative power” where they will find “the paradigm-busters” and “the real religious prophets” if the churches are so thoroughly integrated into the system that the effort to market consumes their whole vision.

This provocative book raises, but does not itself answer, several vitally important questions. First, it draws attention to the more general worldwide context in which religious bodies now struggle to exist. That context may be put in the form of a conundrum: from the experience of the last two centuries it would seem to be the case that for churches to engage without reserve in the world of laissez faire markets is to lose their souls (mostly the experience of the liberal West); on the other hand, for societies to seek an alternative to laissez faire economic organization is to destroy bodies along with souls, for churches and individuals alike (mostly the experience of the communist East and the tribal South). For churches in the West, the spiritual lesson of Selling God would seem to be that there is no point in opting out of the market relationships that define such a vast proportion of western life. At the same time, opting in must be regarded as a dangerous matter where the stakes, as stated long ago, are ultimate: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matthew 5:21)

A second effect of Moore’s book is to raise curiosity about other ways of organizing religion that have embodied alternatives to the commodification of faith. Historically, these alternatives have included primarily varieties of established religion and of radical sectarianism. Neither of these alternatives is flourishing today. The Roman Catholic Church is the prime instance of a body that once insisted upon the principle of establishment, but now increasingly acknowledges the importance of freedom in the choice and expression of religion. Sectarianism (at least of the sort that abandons market concerns) also seems like an increasingly difficult road to pursue in a world so insistently networked as the globe has become at the end of the twentieth century. Yet it may be that seasonings of an establishment mind, or hints of sectarian subversion, may still retain some potency and, if pursued by religions in the marketplace, may enable believers to sell their wares with more integrity than otherwise might be the case.

Finally, almost despite himself, Moore pushes believers to a fresh evaluation of the “product.” In the end, if what churches, synagogues, mosques, and other religious organizations have may be marketed, then there is no purpose in wringing one’s hands if it is marketed. But there is every need to see clearly what is going on, and to strive valiantly against simply equating the marketable with the real. One of Moore’s most provocative assertions heightens the issue: “Religion in the marketplace of culture has become an ordinary commodity. It might seem a high-class product or a low-class product, just like automobiles and cheeses. Jim Bakker is Velveeta; Norman Vincent Peale is sliced Swiss in plastic wrap; Reinhold Niebuhr is Brie. Without an official role to play, religion’s power lies in what can be claimed through advertising. Conservative evangelicals and liberal Protestants are essentially doing the same thing. Imitation breeds imitation, and so it will go into the future.” In these terms, everything hinges on the implications of the word “ordinary.”

Mark A. Noll is Professor of History at Wheaton College and author of A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Eerdmans) .

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Cold Dawn at the Shelter

Wed, 01 Dec 1993 00:00:00 -0500

(For Alva Steffler)

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Jonathan Edwards & the Public Square

Tue, 01 Jun 1993 00:00:00 -0400

One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards
by gerald r. mcdermott
pennsylvania state university press, 203 pages, $29.95

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Ignorant Armies

Thu, 01 Apr 1993 00:00:00 -0500

The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism
by ronald l. numbers
knopf, 458 pages, $27.50

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The End of Canadian History?

Wed, 01 Apr 1992 00:00:00 -0500

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The Lutheran Difference

Sat, 01 Feb 1992 00:00:00 -0500

To the extent that Lutherans are noticed at all by non-Lutherans in America, impressions can be wildly contradictory. From one perspective, they can look like mildly exotic ethnics—sort of like the Mennonites, only more numerous. Thus it is possible for interested outsiders to smile indulgently at in-group reminiscences, like James Nuechterlein’s engaging “Memoirs of a Lutheran Boyhood” ( First Things , October 1990), where he reports that “It was one of the great curiosities of my childhood that so few people outside of my family and congregation understood the centrality of the fate of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod to world-historical development.”

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