The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Who They Are, Where They are Changing. Edited by David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge. Abingdon Press, 1975. $8.95.
In a “Guide to Further Reading” appended to these interpretive essays Don Tinder of Christianity Today warns against three failings of most attempts to analyze evangelicalism. Such efforts are often partisan (either against the whole or for one segment against others), usually promise a “far more general scope than their contents actually provide,” and frequently confuse fundamentalism and evangelicalism (pp. 292-3).
Editors Wells and Woodbridge (both church historians at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) have brought together nine “insiders” and four distinguished “outsiders” to interpret contemporary evangelicalism by describing evangelical belief, the shape of the evangelical world, and the cutting edges of change. One wishes the editors could have had Tinder’s warning earlier. Had they heeded it, they might have produced a better and more useful book. As it is, Tinder himself provides the reviewer with a most appropriate outline on which to hang a critique.
The partisan character of this book is revealed most clearly in the first essay by John Gerstner, church historian at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and also adjunct professor at Trinity. In establishing the “Theological Boundaries of Evangelical Faith,” Gerstner specifies not just the “message of salvation” epitomized in the Reformation insistence on “justification by faith” but the specific interpretation preserved during the 19th century in the so-called Princeton theology articulated by Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield.
From this “Old School” Calvinist perspective, the opposite of evangelicalism is not some form of liberalism but arminianism, identified by Gerstner as “pelagianism, the utter antithesis of evangelicalism.” The absurdity of this definition of evangelicalism is revealed as Gerstner works out its logic to conclude that “the greatest of 19th-century foes of evangelicalism” was “New York School” Presbyterian theologian Charles Grandison Finney, whom Gerstner admits was “the greatest of 19th-century evangelists” (pp. 26-27).
In claiming the “Old School” Presbyterian tradition as the prime carrier of proper evangelism, Gerstner flies directly in the face of the usual interpretations (including that of Sydney Ahlstrom whose essay “From Puritanism to Evangelicalism” concludes this volume and conveys in its very title the opposite thesis). American church historians like William McLoughlin, Winthrop Hudson, and C.C. Goen mean evangelicalism precisely that arminian, pietistic revivalism whose emergence on the American scene marked the end of the cultural dominance of that Old School theology. But more about this later.
The next essay on “Unity and Diversity in Evangelical Faith” by Trinity’s Dean Kenneth Kantzer illustrates Tinder’s second point about lack of inclusiveness. Kantzer accepts Gerstner’s emphasis on “justification by faith” as the “material principle” of evangelicalism, but adds the “formal principle” of biblical authority. The latter is interpreted, however, in terms of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and the diversity of evangelical faith is described in terms of the variety of apologetic systems (mostly neo-Calvinist variations on the Princeton theology) used to establish that doctrine. This discussion delineates the camps of the debates that dominate the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS).
But precisely by limiting his analysis to that arena Kantzer reveals his own provincialism and a major inconsistency that riddles his work. Several contributors refer to the existence of some forty million evangelicals. Always puzzled by this claim, I assume that it is established by adding to the few million members of denominations belonging to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) a few more million from similar but non-participating bodies; some twelve million Southern Baptists; a large proportion of the millions of Black Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals; perhaps three million Lutherans (mostly Missouri Synod -- do they all still count?); a couple of million or so members of the Churches of Christ; a smattering of Quaker, Mennonite and Brethren groups; and so forth. The rest of the total is presumably gained by adding in large blocks of the so-called “mainline” denominations, especially Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian.
But these various groups are not represented in this book theologically and are not participants in the debates of the ETS -- at least half of the above are not even accustomed to identifying themselves as “evangelical.” The diversity described by Kantzer is not even characteristic of the NAE. By insisting on the single affirmation of biblical authority defined in terms of the “inerrancy of the original autographs” (an 1870s formulation by Princeton theologians) the ETS has limited its membership largely to post-fundamentalist Reformed camps and others who moved toward this theological tradition during the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the 1920s and 1930s. Even the Wesleyan and Pentecostal factions (each constituting about one third of NAE membership) have been forced by this orientation to establish their own theological societies, the Wesleyan Theological Society (now as large as ETS) and the Society for Pentecostal Studies. But this book has hardly a word about the theological issues agitating these groups.
Only one non-ETS “evangelical” segment is represented in this book -- the black churches, and those by essays by Bill Bentley, president of the National Black Evangelical Association and Bill Pannell of Fuller Theological Seminary. Pannell traces the “Religious Heritage of Blacks” with sensitivity to the sociological forces shaping both White and Black evangelicalism. (And Pannell, of course, grounds Black religion precisely in those revivalistic currents repudiated by Gerstner.)
Bentley provides a helpful overview of Black Christianity today, but his essay is noteworthy largely for the insight it provides into the Black experience in the evangelical world. Bentley accepts the more “orthodoxist” reading of the word “evangelical,” but reveals in his ambivalence toward the label the disjunction between Black religion and the normative evangelicalism of this volume -- and the “deep shame” and self-hatred of those Blacks who have allowed themselves to he “co-opted” and socialized to white evangelical culture.
I think I understand Bill Bentley’s experience -- probably more than he would wish to allow. I was also reared in one of those despised movements outside of normative evangelicalism, the Wesleyan “Holiness” movement, but grew up and was educated in the centers of that movement that had most deeply bought into modern ETS style fundamentalism. My own spiritual struggle finally required the conclusion that the evangelical theological systems being forced on me were not only distortions of Christianity but were preventing me from even understanding the scriptures.
In this process I recovered themes from the pre-fundamentalist period of my own tradition and came to conclusions not unlike those of Paul Holmer in his “outsider” critique of “Contemporary Evangelical Faith” contained in this volume. Holmer suggests that evangelical doctrines about the scripture and a tendency to use the scriptures primarily for the elaboration of rationalistic theologies “vitiate the religious vivacity that is being sought by recourse to the radical New Testament faith” (p. 86). They in effect serve to distance one from the scripture (in a way not unlike the distancing of modern critical methods) and make the scriptures the occasion “not for the business of becoming a Christian (which the scripture aims at), but for the business of stating God’s Truth” (p. 77).
Only much later was I able to recognize in Holmer’s position a restatement of the pietist critique of scholastic orthodoxy. (Holmer himself now recognizes the affinities of his current stance with the pietistic Lutheranism in which he was reared -- and has come to this position largely through the influence of another product of similar forces, Soren Kierkegaard, the bete noire of modern rationalistic evangelical theology.) Indeed, as I now understand the evangelical impulse, Holmer’s essay, presented by the editors as the contribution of an “outsider, breathes more of the evangelical spirit than any other essay in this book.
This discovery of the plurality of meanings that can be given to the word “evangelical” brings me to Tinder’s final warning about a tendency to confuse fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Tinder’s concern -- shared somewhat obsessively by several other contributors and recent evangelical reviewers of this book -- is more that modern evangelicalism should not be confused with a more benighted and negativistic fundamentalism.
My concern, however, is rather that I, along with a couple of the “outsider” essayists in this volume find this distinction much less obvious than most of the “insiders.” From my reading of history and the contemporary scene, this volume advocates, at least on the theological level, not evangelicalism but fundamentalism masquerading as evangelicalism. My reasons for taking this position can best be understood by attending to the issues raised by Martin Marty, University of Chicago church historian.
In analyzing “Tensions Within Contemporary Evangelicalism,” Marty raises one of the most intriguing and important questions in the book -- that of the continuity of modern with 19th century evangelicalism. Most contributors simply assume continuity, referring nostalgically to the great heyday of evangelicalism in pre-Civil War America when the movement was the dominant force in national life and supported a host of social reform movements. But modern evangelicalism is discontinuous with the nineteenth century movement, at least on the theological level -- and that discontinuity is an important part of the failure of the modern evangelical social conscience.
Modern post-fundamentalist ETS evangelicalism is rooted in the thought-forms and styles of “Old School” Calvinism. Nineteenth-century evangelicalism was rooted in revivalistic “New School” Calvinism and Arminianism. The rise of anti-slavery conviction may be largely correlated with the rise of Arminianism. Both abolitionists and feminism emerged largely in the wake of Finneyite revivalism.
Charles Hodge of Princeton ardently resisted this whole complex of ideas and practices. He found that “both political despotism and domestic slavery, belong in morals to the adiaphora, to things indifferent.” His attacks on the abolitionists (“their fundamental principle is anti-scriptural and therefore irreligious”) were so strong that they were enthusiastically reprinted in such Southern defenses of American slavery as Cotton is King, and Pro-slavery Arguments. Hedge was horrified with feminism and the idea of women in the ministry. The Princeton Theologians even pitted themselves against women’s suffrage (Hedge: “females and minors are judged... incompetent to the proper discharge of the duties of citizenship”), arguing that two autonomous votes in a single family were utterly irreconcilable with the biblical doctrine of the headship of the husband.
Modern evangelicalism, however, is not just “Old School” Calvinism. If we may assume for the moment the conclusions of Ernest Sandeen’s work (especially his Roots of Fundamentalism), it is an ironic synthesis of Princeton theology with millenarianism (Sandeen’s term for what is more commonly called “pre-millennialism”). But here, too, is a major disjunction between 19th and 20th century forms of evangelicalism.
Pre-Civil War reformist revivalism was largely “post-millennial” in eschatology. Such figures as Finney saw the grace of God not primarily as a forensic “justification by faith” but as an active transforming power in the world, reordering and restructuring both human lives and society. Their confidence in the efficacy of God’s grace was so great that they expected that the millennium would soon be ushered in by God in some mysterious way in continuity with human effort and social reform.
This vision was punctured by the Civil War and the complexities of post-war American society. Most evangelicals switched to a “pre-millennial” eschatology that saw this world largely in the hands of the devil, growing steadily worse and worse. In this scheme the “saints” were to be “raptured” out of this world, which would have to be abandoned until Christ should return to restore a millennium disjunct from human effort. Social reform and structural change became not only irrelevant and wrongheaded (part of the “social gospel”), but actually counter-productive. Some even went so far as to argue that social amelioration would only delay the “blessed hope” of Christ’s return by postponing the further social degeneration that must necessarily take place before that event.
It is no accident that modern fundamentalist evangelicalism -- rooted largely in the reactionary Princeton tradition and world-denying dispensational pre-millennialism -- has not sustained major social witness or supported substantial social reform. It is also striking the extent to which modern calls for the recovery of an evangelical social witness depend on a repudiation of the themes of modern fundamentalism. One has only to glance at Richard Quebedeaux’s study of The Young Evangelicals to discover his rejection of dispensationalism, his turn toward a doctrine of sanctification, his fascination with pentecostal and charismatic manifestations of revivalistic religion, a repudiation of the niceties of evangelical doctrinalism (especially its doctrine of inerrancy and anti-critical bias) and a consequent relaxed ecumenism -- all themes more at home in 19th century forms of evangelicalism.
These disjunctions and theological developments are almost totally ignored by the essayists in this book. The most satisfactory analysis is by George Marsden of Calvin College who in tracing the shift “From Fundamentalism to Evangelicalism” not only reveals a broader grasp of the varieties of evangelicalism, but also struggles to relate the revivalism of a century ago to the fundamentalist experience of half a century ago. Fortunately, Marsden reports that he is working on a full book-length treatment -- for which prospective purchasers of Woodbridge and Wells may wish to save their money!
But even Marsden’s historical analysis does not answer the questions about evangelicalism that intrigue me the most: How are we to explain the evolution of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary out of the populist and revivalist abolitionism and feminism of Baptist A.J. Gordon into a center of elitist post-fundamentalist Princeton theology serving as a major locus of Presbyterian resistance to the ordination of women? How are we to understand the gradual transformation of so many of the Bible schools founded in the wake of the rise of pre-millennialism into more world- and culture-affirming liberal arts colleges more like those founded by the earlier post-millennial evangelicalism? What lies behind the recent abandonment of the Times Square area by the Christian and Missionary Affiance, originally founded by A.B. Simpson who left his upperclass Presbyterian congregation to found a “Gospel Tabernacle” and ultimately a new movement with a special calling to serve the “neglected classes both at home and abroad"?
Such striking reversals of original, founding convictions stand in sharp contrast to the supposed constancy of evangelical thought and practice assumed by the usual in-house interpretations. The historical myths derived from post-fundamentalist intellectualist perspectives may or may not account for the character of those traditions most immediately descended from the Princeton theology, but they prevent us from understanding the majority of institutions that lie at the heart of the evangelicalism most identified with Christianity Today and the NAE.
Christianity Today recently listed some 70 recommended evangelical liberal arts colleges. Of these schools about 35% are rooted in aspects of the 19th century holiness movement, 15% in various reformed bodies (some deeply steeped in American revivalism -- quick test: do they advocate “temperance”?), 12% in various Mennonite and Brethren movements, 10% in assorted Baptist sects, 7% in Pentecostalism, perhaps 7-8% in various other sectarian movements, with some 15% independent or unidentifiable (though often showing the dynamics of the more sectarian movements).
These statistics clearly indicate the extent to which contemporary “hardcore” evangelicalism is primarily a collection of sectarian and revival movements (often but not always taking shape in separate denominations) best understood as a sort of “third force” within Christianity. Such currents must be understood not primarily in terms of the preservation of orthodoxy but according to the sociological categories of sect development.
Only when attuned to such categories can we begin to understand the amazing number of Episcopalians among the faculty and recent graduates of such colleges as Gordon and Wheaton. Only then can we grasp the significance of the evangelical obsession with “respectability” revealed by the “insider” accounts of this volume. From such a vantage point we can begin to understand the full significance of the post-World War I founding and recent growth of evangelical seminaries. Movements founded in protest against the embourgeoisment of 19th century evangelical churches (indicated in part by the founding of theological seminaries) have now come full circle, have rediscovered seminary education, and are channeling phenomenal numbers of students into a few outstanding institutions still in their youth and vigor. Much of the “current resurgence of evangelicalism” so celebrated by the contributors to this volume is not so much the “growth in evangelical commitment” claimed by the editors (p. 16) as the upward social mobility, intellectual “maturity,” and cultural accommodation of theologically and socially innovative movements once identified with the poor and disenfranchised of our society.
And only from such a perspective will one be able to project a scenario for the future development of evangelicalism over the next generation or so. We will see further movement of evangelicalism toward more traditional styles of church life, a leveling off of growth patterns, and perhaps even the decline of evangelism. Evangelical theology will become more centrist, more open to biblical criticism, more given to broad cultural analysis, more accepting of the results of science (all themes celebrated in their incipience in the last section of this volume). Upward social mobility and cultural accommodation will continue to make socially dysfunctional such distinctive behavior patterns as abstinence from alcoholic beverages. Receptivity to ecumenical concerns will increase and new coalitions and realignments will emerge forced by the collapse of the post-World War II NAE coalition made possible by the temporary intersection of fundamentalist and “third force” currents, but now strained as the more sectarian side continues its trajectory of development. Out of these currents will emerge a restrained form of establishment social witness, but major social change is more likely to be produced by the protest movements that check out of this trajectory to find their identification again with the poor and disenfranchised of this world.
When this article appeared, Don Dayton was the Sojourners Book Editor and taught theology and history at North Park Theological Seminary. The themes of this review essay are given further amplification in Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, a book incorporating a revised version of the series entitled “Recovering a Heritage” originally published in these pages.
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