by
Robert Dooling
I recently did something that I suspect few of us really enjoy doing I
thinned out my library. It was a job that had to be done because there was
no room on my shelves for anything new. They were packed, sometimes three
books deep. I was having an increasingly difficult time finding what I was
looking for, and the disorder was beginning to offend against my sense of
library propriety.
As I did my dusty work, it occurred to me that while I have read many big,
heavy, thick ‘tomes” during the past forty-five years, it has been two
rather small ones that made the biggest impact on my life Bonhoeffer’s _Life
Together_, and Edward John Carnell’s, _The Case for Orthodox Theology_.
Carnell’s _The Case for Orthodox Theology_ is now out of print. Published in
the late 1950’s by Westminster, it was part of a trilogy that was intended
to introduce lay readers to three then-contemporary theological viewpoints.
The other two volumes in the collection were William Hordern’s, _The Case
for a New Reformation Theology_, and L. Harold DeWolf’s, _The Case for
Theology in Liberal Perspective._
In what he called his _’Casebook_,” Carnell differentiated between
classical reformed orthodoxy and fundamentalism. The latter he characterized
as orthodoxy-gone-cultic.
Carnell paid a terrible price for making this important distinction. When
the book was published, many of his former friends and supporters turned on
him, and the stress became so great that by the time I met him in the early
60’s, he was a broken man. By 1965 he was dead either by an accidental
overdose of his sleeping medications, or more intentionally by suicide. No
one knows for sure.
The current conversations about dividing the Presbyterian Church have caused
me once again to think about my teacher and the _’Casebook”_ and with
Sylvia’s permission I have reproduced a chapter from it in the hope that his
insights may constructively inform our thinking.
To some, Carnell’s words will sound anachronistic. He writes from a
different time and place in history one that had its own distinctive set of
problems. His discussion of Dispensationalism, for example, will strike many
contemporary readers as odd. So may his warnings against fundamentalism, as
most of us believe that there isn’t a fundamentalist bone in our bodies. One
will be able to find very little direct, one-to-one correspondence between
Carnell’s critique and the situation in which we currently find ourselves.
It will be easy for us to say, ‘The phenomenon that Carnell is analyzing is
dead and gone.” And, in many respects it is.
But, for those who are willing to read between the lines, there are lessons
in this critique that will allow us to learn from other peoples’ mistakes
rather than by repeating them ourselves.
Edward John Carnell was the finest teacher with whom I ever studied. So,
even if you are disinclined to read the entire attachment, I encourage you,
at the very least, to read the following paragraph, and to measure yourself
against its warnings:
‘The mentality of fundamentalism is dominated by ideological thinking.
Ideological thinking is rigid, intolerant, and doctrinaire; it sees
principles everywhere, and all principles come in clear tones of black
and white; it exempts itself from the limits that original sin places on
history; it wages holy wars without acknowledging the elements of pride
and personal interest that prompt the call to battle; it creates new
evils while trying to correct old ones.”
To read the entire chapter click here [1] .
[1] http://layman.wpengine.com/Documents/Doc0067.aspx