Reclaiming the Center E-Book

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2004

Beschreibung

Reclaiming the Center is a valuable contribution to the study of contemporary evangelicalism. It is a guide for how evangelicals can move forward with wisdom and discernment without succumbing to the spirit of this age.

Leseprobe

Reclaiming the Center: Confronting Evangelical Accommodation in Postmodern Times

Copyright © 2004 by Millard J. Erickson, Paul Kjoss Helseth, and Justin Taylor

Published by Crossway Books a division of Good News Publishers 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Josh Dennis

Cover illustration: Photonica

First printing 2004

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version,™ copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NIV are from the Holy Bible: New International Version.® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataReclaiming the center : confronting evangelical accommodation in postmodern times / edited by Millard J. Erickson, Paul Kjoss Helseth, Justin Taylor.     p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and indexes.   ISBN 1-58134-568-2 (tpb)   1. Evangelicalism—United States. 2. Postconservative theology—United States. 3. Postmodernism—Religious aspects—Christianity.I. Erickson, Millard J. II.Helseth, Paul Kjoss, 1962- . III. Taylor, Justin, 1976- .BR1642.U5R44       2004 230'.04624—dc22                                                 2004015254

ML       14   13    12    11    10    09    08    07    06    05       04 15    14    13    12    11    10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

In memory of three theologians who were instrumental in the resurgence of evangelical theology in the twentieth century:

Edward John Carnell (1919–1967)

Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003)

Bernard L. Ramm (1916–1992)

CONTENTS

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART 1: INTRODUCTION

1 AN INTRODUCTION TO POSTCONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALISM AND THE REST OF THIS BOOK        Justin Taylor

2 DOMESTICATING THE GOSPEL: A REVIEW OF GRENZ’SRENEWING THE CENTER         D. A. Carson

PART 2: TRUTH, FOUNDATIONALISM,AND LANGUAGE

3 TRUTH DEFINED AND DEFENDED        Douglas Groothuis

4 THE PREMATURE REPORT OF FOUNDATIONALISM’S DEMISE         J. P. Moreland and Garrett DeWeese

5 LANGUAGE, THEOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE, AND THE POSTMODERN PARADIGM        R. Scott Smith

PART 3: THEOLOGICAL METHOD

6 IS THEOLOGICAL TRUTH FUNCTIONAL OR PROPOSITIONAL?POSTCONSERVATISM’S USE OF LANGUAGE GAMES AND SPEECH-ACT THEORY        A. B. Caneday

7 POSTCONSERVATISM, BIBLICAL AUTHORITY, AND RECENTPROPOSALS FOR RE-DOING EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY:A CRITICAL ANALYSIS        Stephen J. Wellum

8 POSTCONSERVATISM: A THIRD WORLD PERSPECTIVE        Kwabena Donkor

PART 4: EVANGELICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

9 ARE POSTCONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALS FUNDAMENTALISTS?POSTCONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALISM, OLD PRINCETON,AND THE RISE OF NEO-FUNDAMENTALISM        Paul Kjoss Helseth

10 PIETISM AND THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM        William G. Travis

11 DEFINING EVANGELICALISM        Chad Owen Brand

PART 5: POST-POSTMODERNISM

12 A REQUIEM FOR POSTMODERNISM—WHITHER NOW?        James Parker III

13 ON FLYING IN THEOLOGICAL FOG        Millard J. Erickson

CONTRIBUTORS

Chad Owen Brand. Associate Professor of Christian Theology, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Boyce College.

A. B. Caneday. Professor of New Testament Studies and Biblical Theology, Northwestern College, St. Paul, Minnesota.

D. A. Carson. Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Garrett DeWeese. Associate Professor of Philosophy and Philosophical Theology, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University.

Kwabena Donkor. Associate Director at the Biblical Research Institute, Washington, D.C. (on appointment).

Millard J. Erickson. Distinguished Professor of Theology, Western Seminary, Portland.

Paul Kjoss Helseth. Associate Professor of Christian Thought, Northwestern College, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Douglas R. Groothuis. Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, Denver Seminary.

J. P. Moreland. Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University.

James Parker III. Professor of Worldview and Culture, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

R. Scott Smith. Associate Professor of Ethics and Christian Apologetics, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University.

Justin Taylor. Director of Theology and Executive Editor, Desiring God.

William G. Travis. Professor of Church History Emeritus, Bethel Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Stephen J. Wellum. Associate Professor of Christian Theology, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE EDITORS WOULD LIKE to extend their appreciation to a number of individuals whose outstanding work helped make this volume possible. We would like to thank our contributors for their timely, thoughtful, and substantive essays. Our gratitude goes to the folks at Crossway Books—especially Lane Dennis, Marvin Padgett, and Bill Deckard—for enthusiastically embracing and supporting this project. A special word of thanks to Marshall Wall for his fine work assembling the indexes. Finally, we thank the Lord for his mercy and grace in our lives, and for giving us wives—Virginia Erickson, Marla Helseth, and Lea Taylor—who fear God and love his Word.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

1

AN INTRODUCTION TO POSTCONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALISM AND THE REST OF THIS BOOK

Justin Taylor

IN THIS INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER, my aim is not only to introduce the rest of this book, but also to sketch the broad contours of postconservative evangelical theology. I will first provide an overview of postconservatism and its proponents. I will then provide an overview of and a justification for our response.

POSTCONSERVATISM

Deciding whether postconservatism is a “movement” or simply a “mood” is rather unimportant for our purposes.1 What is important—and what is by and large no longer questioned—is that a significant shift is taking place in some segments of evangelicalism. The proponents of this perspective have assumed various labels with varying connotations—postconservatives,2 reformists, the emerging church, younger evangelicals, postfundamentalists, postfoundationalists, postpropositionalists, postevangelicals3—but they all bear a family resemblance and can be grouped together as having a number of common characteristics. They are self-professed evangelicals seeking to revision the theology, renew the center, and transform the worshiping community of evangelicalism, cognizant of the postmodern global context within which we live. They desire a “generous orthodoxy”4 that would steer a faithful course between the Scylla of conservative-traditionalism and the Charybdis of liberal-progressivism. At the risk of oversimplification and for the purposes of this introduction, I will refer to Stanley Grenz as postconservatism’s Professor, Brian McLaren its Pastor, and Roger Olson and Robert Webber its Publicists,5 summarizing in what follows their basic perspectives and contributions. My purpose at this point is primarily description, not analysis.

The Publicists: Olson and Webber

Postconservatism—in its broad conception—involves not only methodological proposals for the discipline of theology, but also historiographical and sociological analyses of the evangelical movement. Roger Olson and Robert Webber have been significantly involved as advocates and promoters of post-conservatism. The term postconservatism itself is most often associated with Olson, who claims to have coined the term in a 1995 article entitled “Postconservatives Greet the Postmodern Age.”6 He identified two loose and often warring coalitions within North American evangelical theology: the traditionalists and the reformists. The traditionalists, he argued, have a mindset that “values traditional interpretations and formulations as binding and normative and looks with suspicion upon doctrinal revisions and new proposals arising out of theological reflection.” The reformists, on the other hand, have “a mindset that values the continuing process of constructive theology seeking new light breaking forth from God’s Word.”7 Whereas traditionalists view the church as a bounded set, with strong boundary identification as a sign of authentic evangelical faith, reformists see the church as a centered set: the boundaries are open and undefined, so we should focus upon the center—usually identified as the oft-cited Bebbington quadrilateral: “conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and . . . crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.”8

Postconservatism is to conservatism what postliberalism9 is to liberalism:both desire to move beyond their forebears while retaining some of their positive qualities. Postconservatives and conservatives hold in common the Bebbington center, but the “old guard” of evangelical scholars is obsessed with battles over inerrancy, higher criticism, and liberal theology. In this way conservatives and liberals are unlikely bedfellows in their obsession with the modern mind. Conservatives are sliding headlong toward fundamentalism, unaware of the promises and possibilities of postmodernity’s unexplored terrain.

The postconservatives, on the other hand, have seized the opportunity to reform, reshape, and revision theology. They are eager to engage and learn from nonevangelical theologians, healing the divisions caused by modernity. They see the essence of Christianity not in doctrine but in a narrative-shaped experience. Sources for theology include not only the Bible, but also Christian tradition, culture, and the contemporary experience of God’s community. Postconservatives are open to open theism, have a hope of near-universal salvation, and place a renewed emphasis on synergy in the divine-human rela- tionship. They are willing to rethink the language and concepts of Chalcedonian Christology, viewing Jesus’ divinity in relational terms. They are impatient with triumphalism, epistemological certainty, and theological systems, judging that traditional evangelicalism is “suffering from a kind of hubris with regard to truth-claims.”10

In a recent article, Olson identifies the following characteristics of post-conservative evangelical theology and its theologians: they (1) are thoroughly and authentically evangelical; (2) embrace a vision of critical and generous orthodoxy; (3) believe in experience rather than doctrine as the enduring essence of evangelical Christianity; (4) express discomfort with foundationalism and embrace critical realism; (5) have a strong interest in dia-logue between diverse groups of theologians; (6) have a broad and relatively inclusive vision of evangelicalism; (7) have a relational view of reality, includ-ing a relational vision of God’s being; and (8) have an inclusivist attitude toward salvation. Postconservatism’s one major unifying motif—its one universal interest—is a “commitment to ongoing reform of evangelical life, wor-ship and belief in the light of God’s word.”11

This is all set over against Olson’s understanding of “traditionalism” or “conservatism.” He cautions that just because someone adopts a particular label does not mean that the person fits all of the characteristics he is identifying. He is “dealing with ideal types and not individual persons or institutions.” 12 Nevertheless, some general characteristics can be described:

A conservative evangelical places such value on the status quo that he or she is closed-minded with regard to theological creativity and innovation even when they are fueled by faithful exegesis and believing reflection on God’s word. . . . ‘Fundamentalism’ is being replaced with the label ‘conservative evangelicalism’ while retaining fundamentalistic habits of heart and mind. When a person proclaims himself or herself a ‘conservative evangelical’, more often than not it indicates commitment to strict biblical inerrancy, a fairly literalistic hermeneutic, a passionate commitment to a perceived ‘golden age’ of Protestant orthodoxy to be rediscovered and pre-served, and a suspicion of all new proposals in theology, biblical interpre-tation, spirituality, mission and worship.13

For Olson, the differences between the two pictures he has painted are rather stark. The postconservatives and their proposals are “liberated,” “bold,” “vibrant,” “interesting,” “new,” “relevant,” “committed,” “faithful,” “fresh,” and “fascinating.” The traditionalists are “old guard,” “obsessive,” “reactionary,” “highly rationalistic,” “rigid” “naysayers” with a “scholastic spirit” who love nothing more than “gatekeeping,” “control[ling] the switches,” and “patrol[ling] the boundaries.”14

Robert Webber joins Olson—though certainly framing his discussion in a more charitable and irenic fashion—by distinguishing between twentieth-century evangelicals and twenty-first-century evangelicals.15 However, he divides twentieth-century evangelicals into two camps: the traditional evangelicals (1950–1975, led by Billy Graham) and the pragmatic evangelicals (1975–2000, led by Bill Hybels). The emerging set of leaders is termed the younger evangelicals (2000 and beyond, led by Brian McLaren).

Webber works through a series of perspectives (e.g., on history and tradition, theology, apologetics, ecclesiology, etc.), and shows how the tradi-tionalists, the pragmatists, and the younger evangelicals approach them. Traditionalist evangelicals tend to have the characteristics of rationalism, denominationalism, and separatism. They want to retain Reformation distinctives, focus on church-centered programs, and use mass evangelism and printed materials for outreach. Pragmatic evangelicals focus more on therapeutic models and success-oriented apologetics, high-energy leaders, and interdenominationalism. They are interested in the innovative, focusing on outreach programs and using seeker services and broadcast tools for out-reach. The younger evangelicals, on the other hand, practice an embodied or incarnational apologetic, see the church as a community of faith, and are intentionally ecumenical. They take an “ancient-future” approach to tradition, whereby the future runs through the past. For outreach they look to “process evangelism” and interactive communication on the Internet.

“Younger” designates not only those “young in age,” but also those “young in spirit.” “The younger evangelical is anyone, older or younger, who deals thoughtfully with the shift from twentieth- to twenty-first-century culture. He or she is committed to construct a biblically rooted, historically informed, and culturally aware new evangelical witness in the twenty-first century.”16 According to Webber, the younger evangelicals value tradition over ahistoricism; stories over propositions; a communally embodied apologetic over rational argumentation; and the visible over the invisible church.

The Pastor: McLaren

The primary focus of our book is on the academic aspect of the postconservative movement. In this introductory chapter, however, my aim is to give a broad overview of this mood and its movement. Therefore, it is important to look at Brian McLaren, an increasingly influential pastor/writer/speaker in the Emergent Church Movement. McLaren’s developing perspective is impossible to separate from his own story or narrative. “Raised among the tiny Plymouth Brethren, shaped by the Jesus Movement, trained in the secular academy, impassioned by art, music, philosophy and nature—McLaren doesn’t fit neatly into any evangelical stereotype.”17 After teaching English at the University of Maryland and Montgomery College, he entered pastoral ministry full-time in 1986 as the founding pastor of what would eventually become Cedar Ridge Community Church in the Washington-Baltimore area.

As McLaren interacted with unchurched postmodern seekers and studied church history, he began to reexamine not only his changeable methods but also his “so-called unchanging message.” He realized that his fairly standard “method-message system” was relatively new in comparison with the varied tradition of Christendom. As he searched for an unchanging message, an irreducible doctrinal core of “mere Christianity” held in common by all Christians at all times, he began to despair at the diversity of interpretations and proposals. His doubts about both his methods and his message continued to grow.

In 1994, at the age of 38, he faced a crisis of faith and a seemingly insurmountable dilemma: (1) continue practicing and promoting a version of Christianity that he had deepening reservations about, or (2) leave Christian ministry, and perhaps the Christian path, altogether.18 A process of wrestling and rethinking led to an alternative between hypocrisy and apostasy: learn to be a Christian in a new way.19 In the mouth of one of his fictional charac-ters, McLaren summarizes his discovery:

What a relief to have a third alternative—to read the Bible as a premodern text, emerging from a people who believed that truth is best embodied in story and art and human flesh, rather than abstraction or outline or moral-ism. . . . According to the Bible, humans shall not live by systems and abstractions and principles alone, but also by stories and poetry and proverbs of mystery.20

McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian, the first installment of his theological trilogy, was published in 2001. It is written in a narrative format as a philosophical dialogue between two fictional characters: Dan, a frustrated evangelical pastor, and Neo, a pastor-turned-high school teacher, who serves as McLaren’s prototype for this new kind of Christian. The sequel, The Story We Find Ourselves In, was released in 2003, and another volume is forth-coming (at the time of this writing). A New Kind of Christian proved both popular and controversial.21 At the crux of his proposal is a call for us to break free from the bondage of modern categories. As an “emergent post-modernist,” he advocates dialogue over debate, community over individual-ism, experience over proof. McLaren argues that evangelicals tend to think that the gospel is about how individual souls get into heaven when they die; emergent postmoderns point instead to Jesus’ message about the kingdom of God, which concerns the here-and-now, not just heaven; community, not just individuality; all of creation, not just the individual soul.

Through McLaren’s struggle over his dissatisfaction with the old kind of Christianity came four seminal ideas about the gospel across time and cultures that led him to believe that “our message (like our methods) must change from time to time and place to place in order to remain truly the gospel of Jesus and the gospel about Jesus.”22 (1) The gospel is story.We need to be “depropositionalized” and realize that the gospel is narrative and story, not propositions, mechanisms, abstractions, or universal concepts. (2) The gospel is many-versioned, many-faceted, many-layered, and Christ-centered. The story of the gospel lies embedded beneath multiple stories, versions, facets, and layers—all of which center not in a theory about Christ or an idea of Christ, but in Christ himself. (3) The gospel is cumulative. It did not arrive in a vacuum. It includes and continues the Jewish prequel, as well as the continued acts of Jesus by the Spirit throughout history. Jesus continues to work, the story continues to unfold, and the unchanging story continues to change and grow richer and deeper. (4) The gospel is performative and catalytic. The gospel is not just told, heard, and affirmed; it performs, catalyzes, and saves. The gospel, empowered by God’s Spirit, brings about transformation among the community of faith in order that God’s will might be done on earth, inaugurating the kingdom of God.

Knowing the gospel means knowing the times. We live in a postmodern era—but what does that mean? McLaren distinguishes and defines three forms of postmodernist: (1) absurd postmodernism—which denies truth, reality, and morality—is virtually nonexistent and is used by modernists to scare people; (2) adolescent postmodernism—associated with relativist pluralism, consumerism, alienated European intellectuals, and political correct-ness—is dying; and (3) emerging postmodernism—the approach advocated by McLaren—is an attempt to move beyond both the reductionistic ratio-nalism of modernism and the relativist pluralism of adolescent postmod-ernism. It is not fully definable, and may still be decades away from mature definition. McLaren argues that the people of faith will not only be instrumental in defining the term, but in shaping the era. This postmodern transition will likely be a 75-year or 100-year process.

McLaren certainly doesn’t claim to have all the answers for how best to define, or how best to live, in this transitional age. He has emerged, however, as an influential voice among younger evangelicals.

The Professor: Grenz

Stanley Grenz has been at the forefront of scholarly work from a post-conservative perspective. His theoretical commitments and theological methodology are dealt with in some detail in the pages that follow, so I will provide here a broad overview by focusing on his Revisioning Evangelical Theology (1983), an early programmatic work on evangelical method.Nearly a decade later he collaborated with John Franke to produce Beyond Foundationalism,23 a full-scale work on theological method in the post-modern context that seeks to flesh out what was sketched and suggested in Revisioning. His recent appraisal of evangelicalism, Renewing the Center, is summarized in some detail in chapter 2 of our book.

Grenz’s proposal involves revisioning evangelical identity and spirituality, and revisioning the task of and sources for theology, biblical authority, theology’s integrative motif, and the church. He argues that our transitional age, with the death of modernism and the advent of postmodernity, “demands nothing less than a rebirth of theological reflection among evangelicals. . . .”24 In Grenz’s view, “to be ‘evangelical’ means to participate in a community characterized by a shared narrative concerning a personal encounter with God told in terms of shared theological categories derived from the Bible” (chapter 1).25 This means that evangelicals have now shifted from a creed-based to a spirituality-based identity. Spiritually rooted theology is the essence and ethos of the evangelical movement (chapter 2). What is the foundation for this new theological vision? Traditional evangelical theologians have seen propositional revelation as foundational material for the theological enterprise. But Grenz rejects this as the product of an outdated modernist mindset that ignores the social nature of theological discourse. Building upon but going beyond Lindbeck, Grenz argues that “theology sys-tematizes, explores and orders the community symbols and concepts into a unified whole—that is, into a systematic conceptual framework.”26 In other words, theology is the intellectual reflection on faith we share as the believing community in a particular context (chapter 3). Whereas traditional evangelicals tend to see Scripture as the only source of theology, Grenz argues that we must also draw upon the theological heritage of the church and the thought-forms and issues of our historical-cultural context (chapter 4). All evangelicals acknowledge the authority of the Bible, but they differ on why it is authoritative. Traditional evangelicals have stressed the divine to the neglect of the human side of the Bible, and Grenz argues that therefore the Spirit-Scripture link must be revisioned. The Bible is the product of and the vehicle for the working of the Holy Spirit. In other words, its authority lies not in the text itself, but rather in the Spirit speaking through the Scriptures (chapter 5). Grenz next turns to the issue of theology’s integrative motif. The kingdom of God is an appropriate but insufficient candidate, for the content of the kingdom is left undefined. Its proper content, Grenz argues, is the community of God. With a view toward the already and not yet, the kingdom of God and the community of God function together as the proper integrating concept for theology (chapter 6). Finally, since the church is the proper con-text for theology, Grenz applies his conclusions on theological methodology to the doctrine of the church. He advocates an eschatological-process model of ecclesiology: the church is the eschatological community of love constituted by its destiny as the company of the kingdom that reflects its King.

The response in academia to Grenz’s work has been varied. All recognize its ambition and creativity. Some have judged it remarkable and revolutionary as a methodology that takes seriously the postmodern situation; others have seen it as a dangerous and damaging accommodation to the spirit of this age. Due to the serious, extensive literature Grenz has produced in this area, we believe his work merits our sustained engagement.

OUR RESPONSE

This book is an interdisciplinary work that critically engages this proposal for evangelical methodology and identity. Our desire is not merely to debate, but to enter into dialogue; not only to denounce, but to accurately and charitably describe; not only to critique, but to learn. No doubt we have not done so perfectly, but that is the spirit in which these chapters are presented.

As alluded to above, the next chapter in this book is a review by D. A. Carson of Renewing the Center, summarizing and critiquing the broad out-lines of Grenz’s vision for evangelicalism. Carson argues that Grenz’s historical conclusions are either tendentious or highly questionable and that his theoretical commitments are in danger of domesticating the gospel to post-modernism, with the result that his program could be largely irrelevant to the world and devoid of power. Grenz warns against evangelical accommodation to modernism, but Carson fears that it is Grenz who is in danger of being held captive to an unbiblical, postmodern epistemology.

In the opening chapter of the section on philosophy, Doug Groothuis observes that something philosophically significant is afoot among purported evangelicals, for the received concept of truth is being jettisoned in favor of postmodern models. He examines the coherence, pragmatic, and postmodern theories of truth against the standard of the correspondence theory of truth, showing that only the latter is sufficient and acceptable for evangelicals.

Whereas postconservatives routinely celebrate the “demise of foundationalism,” epistemologists J. P. Moreland and Garry DeWeese suggest that the obituary has been written prematurely. While denouncements and assertions regarding foundationalism are rampant, specific arguments have been rather rare. Moreland and DeWeese, however, identify three theoretical commitments that are key to the postconservative package: (1) the rejection of the correspondence theory of truth in favor of an epistemic or deflationary theory of truth; (2) a rejection of metaphysical realism in favor of a theory of socially or linguistically constructed reality; and (3) a rejection of the referential theory of language in favor of a semiotic theory. Moreland and DeWeese provide rebuttals and offer a positive case for modest foundationalism as the correct general epistemological theory of justification, and modal reliabilism about evidence as the best form of modest foundationalism. They then proceed to show that modal reliabilism about evidence comports with biblical inerrancy.

Scott Smith, who has written extensively on the language-world relation-ship, argues that the core of the postconservative view is that we are inside language and have no epistemic access to the world as it is in itself. In other words, they believe that we live in a linguistic world of our own making. Our dis-course is simply an expression of the way in which our localized communities talk. But which community? And if their claims are nothing more than this, then who cares? The way in which postconservatives actually argue their case demonstrates that they are inconsistently presupposing what they purport to deny, namely, epistemic access to the real world. Smith goes on to apply this linguistic constructionism to some central doctrines of the Christian faith.

The next section turns to theological method. Ardel Caneday shows that Grenz and Franke view Scripture as functional over against propositional. In so doing, the postconservatives have bought into a false disjunction. The locus of God’s revelation and authority is not to be found in the text of Scripture, they argue, but rather in the Spirit’s appropriation of Scripture for the contemporary community of believers. Over against Grenz and Franke’s adaptation of Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic method of theology, Caneday proposes that we look instead to Kevin Vanhoozer’s canonical-linguistic approach,27 with its recovery of a robust biblical theology that draws upon the categories and structure of Scripture.

Steve Wellum continues this examination of the Grenz-Franke model, explaining how they understand postmodernism and its importance for doing theology, what their alternative proposal is, and the role that Scripture plays within it. After delineating some of its positive features, Wellum offers a number of criticisms. Their interpretation of postmodernism is overly optimistic, and their linking of Scripture as an inerrant foundation with Enlightenment foundationalism is grossly unfair. Employing coherentism, pragmatism, and epistemological and metaphysical nonrealism as resources for their theological method, they have obvious difficulties stating and defending the truth question. Finally, their doctrine of Scripture is incompatible with the Bible’s own claims for itself and weakens the possibility of doing theology in a normative fashion. It is this surrender of biblical authority that Wellum ultimately finds most disconcerting. He closes by offering summary reflections on what is necessary for the doing of theology that honors Scripture as fully authoritative, seeks to be faithfully biblical, and is applicatory for all of life.

In the final chapter of this section, African theologian Kwabena Donkor describes and evaluates postconservative methodology by focusing mainly upon Grenz’s proposal. An attractive feature of postconservative theology is that it welcomes the perspective of the Third World and seeks to make sense of our global context. But Donkor sees a dilemma between the necessity of missiology and a consistent postmodern methodology. In his view, the post-conservative incredulity to metanarratives undermines the very legitimacy of apologetics and evangelism. With respect to the question of how we can maintain the finality of the Christian vision when all religions claim to foster community, Donkor detects conceptual difficulties at every turn. He then applies this to the African context in particular, arguing that the proper way forward runs contrary to the postconservative ethos and is inconsistent with postconservative principles.

In the next section we turn to the historiographical discipline. One of our concerns about postconservative epistemology has been well-expressed by Richard Mouw:

I worry . . . about an iconoclastic spirit that often manifests itself in evangelical calls for new constructive theological initiatives. If we cannot be fair to our past in spelling out our heritage, I am not confident that we will accomplish much that is good in our efforts to clear the way for new theological paths.28

Historiography of evangelicalism is essential to the postconservative program. “If they can convince enough people that evangelicalism has always been primarily a movement defined not by beliefs and doctrines, but by other concerns, then it becomes easier to stretch the label ‘evangelical’ to include more and more people today who ignore these doctrinal distinctions.”29

Paul Helseth begins this section by explaining that the postconservatives see Old Princeton’s theology of Scripture as owing more to Scottish Common Sense Realism and Enlightenment-foundationalist rationalism than it does to the Word of God. While this historiography certainly fits into the postconservative perspective, Helseth argues that recent scholarship suggests this is a superficial, caricatured reading. The Princetonians viewed reason in a moral, not merely rational, fashion—advocating what Warfield termed “right reason.” Helseth then turns the tables on the postconservatives, arguing that since they can offer no justifiable reason for validating Christianity’s truth-claims, it is the postconservatives who are therefore necessarily imperialistic, triumphalistic, and elitist. In other words, the postconservatives have become a new incarnation of the fundamentalism they so despise.

Postconservatives pan the Princetonians, but they praise the Pietists. According to Grenz’s historiography, the material principle or essence of evangelicalism is “convertive piety”—a personal experience of God through new birth coupled with a transformed life. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the neo-evangelicals added a formal principle of “correct doctrine,” with the result that the formal has now subsumed the material. Postconservatives, by championing convertive piety, are calling evangelicalism to return to its roots.

Historian Bill Travis examines this revisionist historiography through a detailed analysis of Pietism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with studies of Methodists, Lutherans, and others in the United States. Travis shows that Philipp Jakob Spener, August Hermann Francke, and those influenced by them were very much concerned with orthodox doctrine, seeing the relationship between doctrine and experience as one of both/and, not either/or.

Despite an array of theological and sociological perspectives on the state of contemporary evangelicalism, many seem to agree on one thing: evangelicalism has become an “essentially disputed concept”30 trapped in a “definitional quandary”31 and “descriptively anemic.”32 Whereas Helseth and Travis examined specialized aspects within the story of evangelicalism (the Princetonians and the Pietists, respectively), Chad Brand steps back to exam-ine the nature of evangelicalism in general. He is convinced that despite the difficulties of definition, it is still possible to use the term “evangelical” in a meaningful sense to describe the broad coalition of conservative Christians today. Early on in his essay he offers a minimalist working definition: “a movement within generally North American and British circles that emphasizes the classic Protestant doctrines of the authority and reliability of Scripture (especially over against a rising liberal reconstruction of the doctrine of Scripture), the triune God, and the historical second coming of Christ, and which promotes the need for fervent evangelism, a conversion experience, and a life of discipleship before God.” Before refining and expanding upon this, he first explores the roots of evangelicalism by providing a look at three major periods: the eighteenth-century Awakenings, the conservative response to liberalism, and the transition from fundamentalism to evangelicalism. Evangelicalism is certainly a variegated movement, and yet the “evangelicals”were united around certain core beliefs until the mid-twentieth century. These commitments included the sole sufficiency of Scripture as the source of our theological knowledge, the complete and utter reliability of God’s Word, and the nature of theology as a study of what God has said to us. In the next major section Brand asks whether the postconservatives have been faithful to this tradition. His conclusion is that the postconservatives are mobilizing against these core beliefs in the interest of defending relational theology, defeating foundationalism, contextualizing Scripture, and emphasizing tradition.

In the final section, we explore postmodernism’s future. Jim Parker suggests that postmodernism’s demise is now all but certain, and asks, “Whither shall we go?” Following Paul Vitz, he argues that a significant cultural shift is on the horizon: a coming transmodern period is emerging that avoids the extremes of both modernism and postmodernism, while drawing upon the strengths of each. This transmodern vision is elucidated through a brief examination of new trends within the diverse disciplines of music, the visual arts, architecture, poetry, cinema, ethics, and social-political philosophy.

In the final chapter of this book, Millard Erickson attempts to clear away some of the fog by drawing together the insights of the previous chapters and sketching the contours of the type of theology we need in order to navigate our way into the post-postmodern period. The future evangelical theology will be global, broadening itself to include the voices of Third World and female theologians. It will seek to be objective—not in the naïve modernist sense, but as a careful return to the correspondence theory of truth and metaphysical realism presupposed by Scripture, an adoption of neo-foundationalism, and a rejection of the new historicism. This new conservative theology will be practical and accessible, with contributions by and application toward those in practical areas of ministry, not just the small and isolated ivory tower. It will be postcommunal, recognizing not just the value of community but also the liabilities therein, including the tendency of groups to gravitate toward that which is new and creative. Instead, it will bring critical thinking and healthy skepticism to bear, asking of every new proposal, “Yes, but is it true?” This new theology will be metanarratival, insisting that the exclusivity and universality of the biblical message not merely be dogmatically asserted, but be substantiated with support. It will be dialogical, not in the sense of being improperly polemical, but in interacting with differing claims, considering those claims, and advancing cogent argumentation. Finally, this new evangelical theology will be futuristic, anticipating and preparing for the future and the forthcoming need to contextualize our message.

DEBATE, THE ACADEMY, AND THE CHURCH

If good theology, faithful philosophy, and accurate historiography didn’t mat-ter—or if we all agreed—books like this wouldn’t need to be written and debates wouldn’t need to be undertaken. But it does matter, and we don’t all agree. Although the notion that “bounding lines must exist”33 is inherently offensive to some and elicits caricatures and pejorative labeling, we feel obligated nonetheless to engage our friends across the aisle.

Nothing could be clearer from the New Testament, it seems to me, than the idea that God has given us universally true doctrinal revelation that can be understood, shared, defended, and contextualized. “The faith” has been once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). We are to guard “the good deposit” entrusted to us (1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:14), instructing in “sound doctrine” and rebuking contrary doctrine (Titus 1:9; 2:1). False doctrine is associated with conceit and ignorance (1 Tim. 6:3-4), and we are commanded not to be tossed to and fro by its winds (Eph. 4:14).

These commands and warnings are set forth in the context of purifying and protecting the church. Why, then, have we labored to assemble a largely academic tome? The reason is that as goes the academy, so goes the church. Sociologist James Davison Hunter, writing at the height of the culture wars in the 1980s, observes:

The struggle over the ivory tower is significant for the contemporary culture war for the simple reason that its outcome will ultimately shape the ideals and values as well as the categories of analysis and understanding that will guide the next generation of American leaders.34

If this is true of the culture wars, how much more so is it true within the church? For good or ill, the postconservative project is already influencing the church. Postconservatives have raised extensive questions regarding the nature of theology and the nature of evangelicalism itself. And we judge it a worthwhile investment—ultimately for the health of the church—to engage the postconservative proposal with seriousness and candor.

AVOIDING TWO ERRORS AND RECLAIMING THE CENTER

It is possible to turn both the past and the present into idols and objects of functional worship. Some confess with their lips that the church is semper reformanda, but their hearts are far from it. Others tend to operate on the notion that “the newer is the truer, only what is recent is decent, every shift of ground is a step forward, and every latest word must be hailed as the last word on its subject.”35 Needless to say, both attitudes must be avoided.

Postconservatives complain of a “conflictual polarity” between the categories of liberalism and conservatism.36 But one of the arguments through-out this book is that the postconservatives have set forth their own set of debilitating dichotomies: focus on the center versus preoccupation with boundaries; convertive piety versus correct doctrine; appropriation of post-modernism versus stagnant traditionalism. In this book, we want to argue that these polarities are misguided. The path forward is to reclaim the historic center of evangelical theology, which is centered on the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ—both in its doctrinal assertions of objective and accessible truth and its experiential effects of transforming our lives.

Al Mohler has expressed our conviction well, and with this I conclude our introduction:

A word that can mean anything means nothing. If “evangelical identity”means drawing no boundaries, then we really have no center, no matter what we may claim. The fundamental issue is truth, and though the modernist may call us wrong and the postmodernist may call us naive, there is nowhere else for us to stand. . . .37

Soli Deo gloria.

1 Roger Olson referred to postconservatism in 1995 as a “small and diverse movement,” a “movement in its infancy,” and in 2002 as a “mood (not movement!).” In 2003, he clarified that it is “a movement of mood; a paradigm shift without organization” (Roger E. Olson, “Postconservative Evangelicals Greet the Postmodern Age,” Christian Century 112 [May 3, 1995]: 480; idem, “Reforming Evangelical Theology,” in Evangelical Futures: A Conversation on Theological Method, ed. John G. Stackhouse, Jr. [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2000], 201; idem, “Postconservative Evangelical Theology and the Theological Pilgrimage of Clark Pinnock,” in Semper Reformandum: Studies in Honour of Clark H. Pinnock, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Anthony R. Cross [Carlisle, England: Paternoster, 2003], 20 n. 11).

2 This is the term we adopt throughout this book, though its use by some has been rather elastic. For example, Roger Olson seems to claim that even J. I. Packer’s essay in Evangelical Futures is “postconservative” (“Reforming Evangelical Theology,” 201-202). The editor of Evangelical Futures, John Stackhouse, disagrees, saying that Packer is “surely no one’s idea of a ‘postconservative’” (“Preface,” in Evangelical Futures, 10). And although Kevin Vanhoozer uses the term to identify his own position (“The Voice and the Actor: A Dramatic Proposal About the Ministry and Minstrelsy of Theology,” in Evangelical Futures, 76-77ff.), a number of our contributors strongly advocate Vanhoozer’s methodology over and against that of someone like Stanley Grenz.

3 Those who use this label are quick to insist that the term does not mean non- or anti-evangelical. For example, Dallas Willard writes that “post-evangelicalism is by no means ex-evangelicalism. There are, of course ex-evangelicals, and even anti-evangelicals, but post-evangelicals are evangelicals, perhaps tenaciously so. However, post-evangelicals have also been driven to the margins by some aspects of evangelical church culture with which they cannot honestly identify” (Dallas Willard, “Smothering Jesus in a Heap of Trivialities,” foreword to Dave Tomlinson, The Post-Evangelical, rev. North American ed.[Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2003], 11).

4 The phrase, coined by Hans Frei, is often used by Stanley J. Grenz, Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological Era (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2000), passim. A Generous Orthodoxy is also the title of a new book by Brian McLaren (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2004).

5 Stanley Grenz is Pioneer McDonald Professor of Baptist Heritage, Theology, and Ethics at Carey Theological College (Vancouver, B.C.). Brian McLaren is the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church (Spencerville, Maryland). Roger Olson is Professor of Theology at Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University (Waco, Texas). And Robert Webber is the William R. and Geraldyn B. Myers Professor of Ministry at Northern Seminary (Lombard, Illinois).

6 Olson writes, “In a Christian Century essay [May 3, 1995], I coined the label ‘postconservative’ to describe a new mood arising within North American evangelical theological circles” (“Reforming Evangelical Theology,” 201). It should be pointed out, however, that Clark Pinnock was using the term and making virtually all of the same sociological-theological identifications five years earlier. See his Tracking the Maze: Finding Our Way Through Modern Theology from an Evangelical Perspective (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 63-76.

7 Roger E. Olson, “The Future of Evangelical Theology,” Christianity Today 42 (February 9, 1998): 41.

8 D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman Ltd, 1989), 3.

9 Postliberalism is usually associated with Yale University and theologians George Lindbeck, Hans Frei, Paul Holmer, and David Kelsey. Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984) seeks to move beyond the modernistic, totalizing foundations of conservatism (cognitive-propositional) and liberalism (experiential-expressionists). Over against these, Lindbeck proposes a cultural-linguistic turn, wherein doctrine is to theology what grammar is to language. The function of doctrine is not to correspond to objective reality or to express universal experience, but to serve as the communal rules of discourse, attitude, and action. For a symposium of postliberals and evangelicals, see Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis Okholm, eds., The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Liberals in Conversation (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1996). For a critique, see Michael S. Horton, “Yale Postliberalism: Back to the Bible?” in A Confessing Theology for Postmodern Times, ed. Michael S. Horton (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2000), 183-216. And for a recent, clarifying exchange between Lindbeck and Avery Cardinal Dulles, see the October 2003 and January 2004 issues of First Things (57-61; 13-15). Olson has also used the analogy that postconservatism is comparable to progressive Roman Catholic theology after Vatican II (“Postconservative Evangelical Theology and the Theological Pilgrimage of Clark Pinnock,” 20).

10 Olson, “Postconservative Evangelicals Greet the Postmodern Age,” 482.

11 Olson, “Postconservative Evangelical Theology and the Theological Pilgrimage of Clark Pinnock,” 36, emphasis his.

12 Ibid., 18.

13 Ibid.

14 And this is from just one article! See Olson, “Reforming Evangelical Theology,” passim. For some thoughts on the phenomena of pejorative labels under the ostensible category of analysis, see Millard Erickson’s chapter at the end of this volume.

15 Robert E. Webber, The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2002).

16 Ibid., 16.

17 Greg Warner, “Brian McLaren Unlikely Leader of ‘Emerging Church’ Movement,” Associated Baptist Press (May 13, 2003). See http://www.abpnews.com/abpnews/story.cfm?newsId=3587.

18 The story is recounted in Brian L. McLaren, “The True Story Behind This Story,” in A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), ix-xviii.

19 To facilitate this end, he also helped to found Emergent (www.emergentvillage.com)—a “growing generative friendship among missional Christian leaders.” McLaren is a senior fellow of this international theological network.

20 McLaren, New Kind of Christian, 159

21 Christianity Today granted the book an “Award of Merit” in their best books edition of 2002. And Books and Culture commissioned three essays on the book, along with a response by McLaren. See Andy Crouch, “Let’s Get Personal,” Books and Culture 8 (January/February 2002): 12; Mark Dever, “Reformed or Deformed?” Books and Culture 8 (March/April 2002): 26; Tony Jones, “Post- Evangelicalism,” Books and Culture 8 (May/June 2002): 32; Brian D. McLaren, “Faithfully Dangerous,” Books and Culture 8 (May/June 2002): 33.

22 The following summary is drawn from Brian D. McLaren, “The Method, the Message, and the Ongoing Story,” in The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives, ed. Leonard Sweet (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2003), 191-230. This book has an intriguing format whereby the other contributors’ comments—both critiques and agreements—are embedded within the individual essays, not unlike an extended email exchange. Michael Horton’s critique of McLaren is, in my opinion, extremely insightful. Horton thinks that much of popular postmodernism is in fact “most-modern.”

23 Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001).

24 Stanley J. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology: A Fresh Agenda for the Twenty-first Century (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 17.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 78.

27 See Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, forthcoming).

28 Richard J. Mouw, “Comments on Grenz Paper and ‘The Word Made Fresh,’” unpublished paper read at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Toronto, November 2002.

29 D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids, Mich.:Zondervan, 1996), 458.

30 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Foreword,” in Bernard L. Ramm, The Evangelical Heritage: A Study in Historical Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2000), xiii.

31 Jon R. Stone, On the Boundaries of American Evangelicalism: The Postwar Evangelical Coalition (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 7.

32 David F. Wells, No Place for Truth, or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993), 134.

33 The expression is from C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 147-148. The entire essay is worth a careful read.

34 James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 211.

35 J. I. Packer, “Is Systematic Theology a Mirage? An Introductory Discussion,” in Doing Theology in Today’s World: Essays in Honor of Kenneth S. Kantzer, ed. John D. Woodbridge and Thomas Edward McComiskey (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1991), 21.

36 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 331.

37 R. Albert Mohler, Jr., “Reformist Evangelicalism: A Center Without a Circumference,” in A Confessing Theology for Postmodern Times, 146.

2

DOMESTICATING THE GOSPEL: A REVIEW OF GRENZ’S RENEWING THE CENTER1

D. A. Carson

RESPONSIBLE THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION must simultaneously embrace the best of the heritage from the past, and address the present. If theologians restrict themselves to the former task, they may become mere purveyors of antiquarian artifacts, however valuable those artifacts may be; if they focus primarily on the latter task, it is not long before they squander their heritage and become, as far as the gospel is concerned, largely irrelevant to the world they seek to reform, because wittingly or unwittingly they domesticate the gospel to the contemporary worldview, thereby robbing it of its power. Stan Grenz, I fear, is drifting toward the latter error.

CONTENT

As usual in his writings, Grenz in this book is free of malice, and, provided one is familiar with the jargon of postmodern discussion, reasonably lucid. The book’s ten chapters can be divided into two parts. Grenz begins by citing a representative sample of voices that find contemporary evangelical the-ology in disarray—though admittedly these analyses do not all agree. So in the first four chapters, and part of the fifth, Grenz treats evangelicalism historically “as a theological phenomenon,” trying to “draw from the particu-larly theological character of the movement’s historical trajectory” (15).Accepting William J. Abraham’s analysis—that the term “evangelical”embraces at least three constellations of thought, viz. the magisterial Reformation, the evangelical awakenings of the eighteenth century, and modern conservative evangelicalism—Grenz devotes the first two chapters, respectively, to the material principle and the formal principle of evangelical thought. In both cases he is attempting to tease out a “trajectory” of historical development. With respect to the material principle: Luther’s commitment to justification by faith, modified by Calvin’s quest for sanctification, augmented by Puritan and Pietist concern for personal conversion, sanctified living, and assurance of one’s elect status, decline into comfortable confor-mity to outward forms, until the awakenings in Britain and the American colonies charged them with new life. The effect was a focus on “convertive piety” (passim) and concern for transformed living, rather than adherence to creeds. Evangelical theology focused on personal salvation.

As for the formal principle (chapter 2), contemporary conservative views of the Bible have not been shaped exclusively by Luther or Calvin, but also by Protestant scholastics who “transformed the doctrine of Scripture from an article of faith into the foundation for systematic theology” (17). At the end of the nineteenth century the Princeton theologians turned the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture into “the primary fundamental” (17). This was passed on to neo-evangelical theologians, the thinkers who from the middle of the twentieth century tried to lead evangelicalism out of its introspection and exclusion, and into engagement with the broader culture.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 carry on Grenz’s analysis of contemporary evangelicalism by studying three pairs of men. The first generation of neo-evangelical theologians can be represented by Carl F. H. Henry and Bernard Ramm, the former setting a rationalistic and culturally critical cast to neo-evangelical theology, and the latter trying to lead evangelical theology out of “the self-assured rationalism he found in fundamentalism. Consequently, he became the standard-bearer for a more irenic and culturally engaging evangelicalism” (18). In the next generation, the polarity is Millard Erickson and Clark Pinnock, the former an establishment theologian who systematized neo-evangelical theology, the latter reflecting a theological odyssey that wanted to fulfill the evangelical apologetic ideal by engaging in dialogues with alternative views. He thereby carries on the irenic tradition of Ramm. The fifth chapter proposes that the polarities in the third generation can be aligned with Wayne Grudem and John Sanders.

Is this polarity so great that David Wells is correct in thinking that we are on the verge of evangelicalism’s demise? Or does Dave Tomlinson’s announcement of a post-evangelical era point the way ahead? In the second half of chap-ter 5, Grenz opts for neither stance, but suggests that the emerging task of evangelical theology is coming to grips with postmodernity. Recognizing the ambiguities in this term, Grenz identifies the heart of postmodernism in the epistemological arena. It adopts a chastened rationality (his expression), and marks a move from realism to the social construction of reality, from meta-narrative to local stories. The rest of the book teases out Grenz’s proposal.

The next three chapters constitute the heart of the book. Chapter 6, “Evangelical Theological Method After the Demise of Foundationalism,” is a summary of the book Grenz jointly wrote with John R. Franke entitled Beyond Foundationalism.2 Grenz provides his take on “the rise and demise of foundationalism in philosophy” (185) before offering his own alternative. Here, he says, he has been influenced especially by Wolfhart Pannenberg and George Lindbeck. The former’s appeal to the eschatological nature of truth, i.e., to the eschaton as the “time” when truth is established, responds to the reality that “God remains an open question in the contemporary world, and human knowledge is never complete or absolutely certain” (197). Lindbeck’s rejection of the “cognitive-propositionalist” and the “experiential-expressive” approaches in favor of a “cultural-linguistic” approach supports Pannenberg’s emphasis on coherence (the view that affirms that a structure of thought is believable because its components cohere—they hang together). In the shadow of Wittgenstein, Lindbeck in effect insists that doctrines are “the rules of dis-course of the believing community. Doctrines act as norms that instruct adherents how to think about and live in the world” (198). Like rules of grammar, they exercise a certain regulative function in the believing community, but they “are not intended to say anything true about a reality external to the language they regulate. Hence, each rule [doctrine] is only ‘true’ in the context of the body of rules that govern the language to which the rules belong” (198). Lindbeck calls for an “intratextual theology” that aims at “imaginatively incorporating all being into a Christ-centered world” (199).3 Within evangelicalism, Grenz finds most hope in the work of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, especially in their claim that Christian theology “is an activity of the community that gathers around Jesus the Christ” (201). This constitutes a “communitarian turn” in evangelical theology: “we have come to see the story of God’s action in Christ as the paradigm for our stories. We share an identity-constituting narrative” (202). This is not the same as old-fashioned liberalism, Grenz asserts, because (1) liberalism was itself dependent on foundationalism, which Grenz rejects; and (2) older liberalism tended to give primacy to experience such that theological statements were mere expressions of religious experience, while in the model that Lindbeck and Grenz are propounding “experiences are always filtered by an interpretive framework that facilitates their occurrence. . . .[R]eligions produce religious experience rather than merely being the expressions of it” (202-203). Grenz wants to go a step farther, a step beyond Lindbeck:the task of theology, he argues, “is not purely descriptive . . . but prescriptive” (203, emphasis his), i.e., it “ought to be the interpretive framework of the Christian community” (203). Taking a leaf out of Plantinga’s insistence that belief in God may be properly “basic,” Grenz writes, “In this sense, the specifically Christian experience-facilitating interpretative framework, arising as it does out of the biblical gospel narrative, is ‘basic’ for Christian theology” (203).This is not a return to foundationalism by another name, Grenz insists, because the “cognitive framework” that is “basic” for theology does not precede theology; it is “inseparably intertwined” with it (203-204). The appropriate test becomes coherence, not the disparate and often integrated data of foundationalism (exemplified, Grenz asserts, in a Grudem).

In all this, Grenz does not want to lose sight of the Bible, which must be the “primary voice in theological conversation” (206). But he wants to distance himself from the modern era’s misunderstanding of Luther’s sola Scriptura. The theologians of the modern era, Grenz says, traded the “ongo-ing reading of the text” for their own grasp of the doctrinal deposit that they found in its pages and which was “supposedly encoded in its pages centuries ago” (206). It is far wiser to incorporate speech-act theory, and be sensitive to what the text does, how it functions, what it performs. “The Bible is the instrumentality of the Spirit in that the Spirit appropriates the biblical text so as to speak to us today” (207). The reading of text, in this light, is “a community event.” Grenz agrees with Walter Klaassen: “The text can be properly understood only when disciples are gathered together to discover what the Word has to say to their needs and concerns” (208). Thus if the Bible is the “primary voice,” that voice must never be thought of as independent of the culturally bound situation of the community of readers. “The ultimate authority in the church is the Spirit speaking through Scripture. The Spirit’s speaking through Scripture, however, is always a contextual speaking: it always comes to its hearers within a specific historical-cultural context. This has been the case throughout church history, for the Spirit’s ongoing provision of guidance has always come, and now continues to come, to the com-munity of Christ as a specific people in a specific setting hears the Spirit’s voice speaking in the particularity of its historical-cultural context” (209). Thus tradition may play a secondary role, a kind of reference point, as the members of a community of faith recognize that they belong to a community that spans centuries. Moreover, evangelical theologians must not look only to the voice of the Spirit through the Scripture. They must also “listen intently for the voice of the Spirit, who is present in all life and therefore precedes us into the world, bubbling to the surface through the artifacts and symbols humans construct” (210), even though that voice “does not come as a speaking against the text” (210). In short, “We listen for the voice of the Spirit who speaks the Word through the word within the particularity of the hearer’s context, and who thereby can speak in all things, albeit always according to the Word who is Christ” (211). This approach is what opens the way, in the wake of foundationalism’s demise, “for an evangelical method that views constructive the-ology as an ongoing conversation involving the interplay of Scripture, tradition, and culture” (211).

Because the “one God, Christians assert, is triune” (212), communitarian focus is mandated. Following “the lead of Reformed epistemologists,” then, Grenz declares that the church, the community of believers, is “basic” in theology (214). This in turn “opens the way for introducing community as theology’s integrative motif. That is, community—or more fully stated, persons-in-relationship—is the central organizing concept of theological con-struction, the theme around which a systematic theology is structured. Community provides the integrative thematic perspective in light of which the various theological foci can be understood and significant theological issues explored” (214-215, emphasis his). Christian theology is not the theology of the individual, but of the community. “Christian theology must be communitarian, because it is linked to a particular community, namely, the community of the disciples of Jesus” (215).

This leads to chapter 7, whose title (“Theology and Science After the Demise of Realism”) does not immediately disclose where Grenz is going. He begins by asking the question, “Exactly how are theologians scientists?” (220, emphasis his), and sketches “three paradigmatic Christian theological answers to the question” (220). (1) According to the modern paradigm, theology is like science, emphasizing data, controlled thought-experiments complete with hypotheses to be tested and which are themselves “members of a larger net-work held together by a [sic] overarching program that consists of certain methodological rules that guide the research process” (227). Grenz argues that this model is no longer tenable, since scientists “are no longer agreed as to what ‘the scientific method’ in fact entails” (228). (2) According to the medieval paradigm, theology is the queen of the sciences. Perhaps this model reached its apogee with Thomas Aquinas: theology presides over a hierarchy of scientias speciales. Although that model is now behind us, a form of it is being given new life today: in this view, “theology brings the sciences together into a unified whole” (232), a stance expounded in detail by Pannenberg.Grenz thinks that although this approach correctly reflects the fact that “the scientific portrayal of the universe is also fundamentally religious in tone”(235), it retains “a potentially problematic objectivist orientation” (235). (3) Under the postmodern paradigm, science is theology. Here Grenz sides with the postmodern writers who insist that scientific method is not as objective and neutral as it thinks it is. Kuhn has taught us to recognize shifting paradigms, and a host of others have insisted on the constructionist elements of science. Science and theology alike are social constructions. So-called “critical realists”may demur and maintain that “scientific theories seek to approximate a natural world that actually exists apart from scientific descriptions of it” (242), but Grenz insists that we do not inhabit the “world-in-itself”: social con-struction is unavoidable. So Grenz concludes that “both theologians and scientists are involved in the process of constructing ‘world’” (244).