The Remaking of Evangelical Theology
Reviewed by Robert Dooling, May 6, 1999
Honesty demands that I begin this review with a confession. I am unable to be an entirely impartial critic of The Remaking of Evangelical Theology, because the history that it recounts is too much my own history, and because many of its central characters were the people who shaped my theological persona (Everett Harrisson, George Eldon Ladd, Leland Sanford LaSor, and especially Edward John Carnell, and Paul King Jewett). I was, therefore, unable to read it with a disinterested and objective mind. As a matter of fact, my stomach hurt as I was reminded of the existential pain I went through grappling with issues about which many younger pastors merely wonder, “What’s the big deal?”
Dorrien begins his work with the assertion that the mainline theological and academic world has systematically ignored the contributions of American evangelicalism because it has assumed that evangelicalism demands belief in unbelievable things, and that it is hostile, even incompatible, with modern learning and intellectual freedom. This is a misunderstanding that Dorrien hopes to mitigate, even though he places himself clearly outside the circle of evangelical commitment.
In tracing the development of evangelicalism, Dorrien distinguishes four historically dominant paradigms, and one that he sees as its hopeful future. The first is that of the sixteenth-century Reformation (what he calls “classical evangelicalism”). The second paradigm is that of pietistic evangelicalism – the product of the eighteenth century German and English Pietist movements. The third paradigm is that of fundamentalist evangelicalism that derives from the fundamentalist-modernist conflict of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Then comes the influence of Fuller Theological Seminary and the “new-evangelicalism,” followed today by an ongoing re-thinking of evangelical assumptions that is open to the proposition “that God still has more light and truth to break forth from his Word.”
The theological thread that Dorrien traces through these five periods of evangelical history is the theology of Scripture – what it is; what it isn’t; and how it is (or conveys) the authoritative word of God. The so-called battle for the Bible (inerrancy) plays a prominent role in this discussion, and become the fulcrum over which rides the majority of Dorrien’s analysis.
In his treatment of the Reformation and the subsequent radical reformation, he adds very little to Rogers’ and McKim’s analysis of that period in The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible. As they did, he argues that there never was a reformed doctrine of inerrancy, and that the magisterial reformers’ understanding of inspiration was never static. While they held a high view of scripture, they also taught that absent the illuminating work of the Spirit, the truth of the divine message cannot be perceived. Calvin put it this way, “The external word is of no avail by itself unless animated by the power of the Spirit.”
This, of course, begs the question: what does it mean to perceive the message of Scripture? That is to say, as we read the Bible, is the illuminating work of the Spirit to convince us of the truth of what we read and to show us how that truth should impact our lives, or does the Spirit actually “open our eyes” to new information that cannot be educed by careful exegesis? Dorrien opts for the second answer, suggesting that the truth of scripture is discovered not in its words, but in the reader’s response to those words as they are illuminated by the Spirit – which means that, for Dorrien, the “truth” taught by the Word and Spirit may be completely inconsistent with the plain meaning of the words themselves.
Although more detailed, his review of the nineteenth and twentieth century fundamentalist debates tells us little that Lefferts Loetcher didn’t tell us nearly a half century ago in The Broadening Church. As did Loetcher, he recounts the history of that period as a time during which the church responded to the modern world by opening itself to more liberal understandings of the world and the role of the church in the world. It was a time during which the findings, assumptions and culture of “modernity” became more important to many than the insights of scripture. In a word, it was a time of radical epistemological revolution during which the mind of the church was “broadened,” and the advocates of more fundamental theologies were sidelined and eventually ignored by the academic world.
And, in his handling of Fuller’s so-called “battle for the Bible” during the 60’s and 70’s , he adds little or nothing to George Marsden’s treatment of the same period. Like Marsden (Reforming Fundamentalism), Dorrien recounts the struggles of Carnell, Jewett, et al to find a middle way between the Princeton Fundamentalists and the dominant liberalism that didn’t fall prey to the perils of Neo-Orthodox epistemological subjectivism. However, Dorrien’s treatment of this period is not nearly as sympathetic as Marsden’s. Marsden sees it as a time of intellectual ferment and creativity; Dorrien sees it as the last throes of the old Fundamentalism.
It is clear, however, that all of this is merely a backdrop for his primary point – that the real crossroads for evangelicalism was its encounter with neo-orthodoxy, and the new understanding of role of the Spirit in biblical interpretation brought to Ramm, Bloesch and Pinnock by Barth. Indeed, Dorrien sees a good future for evangelicalism to the degree that it becomes willing more and more to move away from objective authority and certainty (even farther than did Barth), and to sit loose relative to a number of issues that have historically been at the heart of its social and theological witness.
But to this old disciple of Edward John Carnell, Dorrien’s prescription sounds peculiarly like the siren call of liberalism with its immanental theology rooted and grounded in the notion that God speaks his changing word out of our experience rather than through the plain meaning of the words of scripture understood in their historical and grammatical context.
Dorrien squares the circle of one of our most profound theological problems (the meaning of inspiration and authority) by suggesting that evangelicals will find academic acceptance to the degree that we are willing, more and more, to abandon the idea that God has spoken and that there is a back cover on our bibles. But, for evangelicals, it isn’t academic approbation that we crave. It is rather our Lord’s, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
The Remaking of Evangelical Theology is a good summary of the evangelical theology of scripture from Calvin and Luther to the present day for seminarians and pastors. Its conclusions, however, simply rehash the ongoing debate over authority in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Robert Dooling is pastor of Mountain View Presbyterian Church in Loveland, Col.