Knowledge as performance: the Evangelical Response to Postmodernity (original) (raw)
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Journal of Religious History, 2020
Evangelicals have long evinced a deep interest in their own history. Conscious of occupying an important place in the outworking of God's purposes, in the first few generations of the movement they wrote a lot of history. The founding fathers Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley both occasionally cast their thought in an historical framework. The revival chronicles of the 1740s were salvation histories. John Newton, Joseph Milner, and Thomas Haweis were among those evangelicals who composed narratives of the history of the Church, which authenticated their movement. And the German Pietists accumulated vast archives so that the work of God in history would be properly documented. From about 1815 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, this stream waned and continued as a trickle for the next 150 years. Interest revived in the 1970s and gave rise to an ever swelling second stream of academic writing about the lives of evangelicals and the history of evangelicalism. The outcome was the (sometimes uneasy) coexistence of two approaches to the history of the evangelical movement: one popular and pietistic, the other scholarly and critical. This collaborative volume reflects this structure both in the story it tells and as an addition to the literature of stream 2. Twelve chapters follow the introduction. The first three deal with the formative years in stream 1. David Ceri Jones writes on the Glasgow Presbyterian minister John Gillies and his Historical Collections Relating to Remarkable Periods of the Success of the Gospel (1754-1761) and Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend George Whitefield (1772). Drawing down from a doctoral study of eighteenth-century evangelical historiography, Darren Schmidt attends to the little known London Anglican Erasmus Middleton and his Biographica Evangelica (1779-1786). Robert Strivens analyses the treatment of dissent in David Bogue and James Bennett's History of Dissenters, From the Revolution in 1688, to the Year 1808 (1808-1812) and the update in Bennett's The History of Dissenters, During the Last Thirty Years (From 1808 to 1838) (1839). The final three chapters cover the last half century, during which academic interest in the history of evangelicalism has flourished. Richard Burgess provides an account of the Nigerian historian Ogbu Kalu and his writings on African Pentecostalism. Mark Noll pays tribute to Timothy Smith, George Marsden, David Bebbington, and the historical analysis of Anglo-American Evangelicalism, a development to which he himself is a fourth outstanding contributor. Finally, David Bebbington credits Andrew Walls, Brian Stanley, Dana Robert, and Mark Noll with recognition of the rise of global evangelicalism. The in-between years, when history was not so much 1
Lessons from the Early Church for Today's Evangelical Christianity
Presuming that within Evangelical Christianity there is a crisis of biblical interpretation, this article seeks to address the issue, especially since Evan-gelicals view the existence of the church as closely connected to the proclamation of the Truth. Starting with a position that Evangelical hermeneutics is not born in a vacuum, but is the result of a historical process, the first part of the article introduces the problem of sola and solo scriptura, pointing out some problematic issues that need to be addressed. In the second part, the article discusses patristic hermeneutics, especially: a) the relationship between Scripture and tradition embodied in regula fidei and; b) theological presuppositions which gave birth to allegorical and literal interpretations of Scripture in Alexandria and Antioch. In the last part of the article, based on lessons from the patristic era, certain revisions of the Evangelical practice of the interpretation of Scripture are suggested. Particularly, Evangelicals may continue to hold the Bible as the single infallible source for Christian doctrine , continue to develop the historical-grammatical method particularly in respect to the issue of the analogy of faith in exegetical process, but also must recognize that the Bible cannot in toto play the role of the rule of faith or the analogy of faith. Something else must also come into play, and that " something " would definitely be the recovery of the patristic period " as a kind of doctrinal canon. "
Evangelical Theology, Postmodernity, and
2011
Postmodernity, interdisciplinarity, and evangelical theology are to a degree overused, if not misused, concepts. Their evocation is likely to generate indifference and their collocation raise eyebrows. On the one hand, interdisciplinarity presupposes the disciplinary practices that postmodernity opposes and, on the other, both interdisciplinarity and postmodernity do not easily rhyme with evangelical theology. This paper argues that beyond mere collocation, the rapprochement of interdisciplinarity and postmodernity can indeed lead to a fruitful cross-pollination that would benefit evangelical theology.
Recent historical scholarship of evangelicalism
In die skriflig, 1996
Recent historical scholarship o f evangelicalism Evangelical historiography is an aitempi within evangelicalism to assess its awn history. Books like Mark N o ll' s The Scandal o f the Evangelical M ind (1994), Stuart Piggin's Evangelical Christianity in Australia; Spirit, Word and World (1996) and David Bcbhington's Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (1989) are evidence o f a sustained attempt by ewngelical historians to re-appraise the history o f their religion. In this review Mark Noll's argument about the "mind" (or lack o f it), o f American evangelicalism is assessed His historiographical method is scrutinised The conclusion is that the scandal is wider than the "life o f the mind". Evangelicalism, av presented by Noll. Bebbington and Piggin, also involves an unelaborated philosophy o f history, which finds great difficulty in distancing itself from the popular sentiment, i f not the doctrines, o f modem society. The recent historiography o f evangelicalism needs a Christian method fo r criticising itself lest it become another form o f post-modern romantic popularism.
2020
This dissertation tracks the epistemological precursors, what I call the "pragmatic attitudes," of William James's pragmatism as they appear in liberal evangelical culture from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the postbellum Social Gospel movement. I examine what I take to be three major epistemological underpinnings of this tradition of evangelical theologythe privileging of direct experience, the practical identification of essence and praxis, and the emergent belief in God's pervasive affection toward Creationand their role in the shaping of a distinctively pragmatic ethos in American evangelical culture. By juxtaposing two different traditionsone putatively "secular" and one "sacred"-I offer an interdisciplinary bridge between American religion and philosophy while challenging assumptions that American history can be divided along secular or sacred lines. I begin with Jonathan Edwards's "latent pragmatisms," certain epistemological attitudes toward religious conversion and the nature of God that lead Edwards to justify these ideas on logics fundamental to modern pragmatism, namely the integration of the "separate" faculties feeling and volition and the justification of religious experiences by their practical effects. The second chapter explores the antebellum revivalist Charles G. Finney and his interpretation of these Edwardsean pragmatic attitudes, making the case that Finney and the evangelical culture he represents merit a place in our understanding of the history of American pragmatism. Chapter three looks directly at the theology of William James's father, Henry James Sr, and the extent to which its decidedly Swedenborgian influence reflected the pragmatic attitudes I outline in the first two chapters. The fourth and final chapter deals with the transatlantic Social Gospel movement, a self-consciously pragmatic evangelical reform movement whose theology and literature most visibly brought the realms of the sacred and the secular together for the common goal of bettering the condition of people here and now. The epilogue broadly addresses the implications of the sacred/secular binary in American culture. 3 This understanding of "pragmatic" as fixated on what "works" for us to the exclusion of more "noble" concerns haunted, as it continues to haunt, what we mean when we say pragmatism. Peirce, Dewey, and James had their own reservations about the name. Pragmatism was frequently mischaracterized by such intellectual leaders as Bertrand Russell, Alfred E. Taylor, and F.H. Bradley as coopting the hallowed name of philosophy to justify caprice and avarice. Russell repeats a common misconception of Jamesian pragmatism by labelling "the pragmatist definition of truth as that which has fruitful consequences" (279), which is only partly true. Confusing pragmatism with positivism, Martin Heidegger reportedly felt that pragmatism was "nothing but a 'Weltanschauung for engineers and not for human beings in the full sense of the word'" (Oehler 33). About the selection of the word "pragmatism," James wrote to Dickinson S. Miller that "a most unlucky word it may prove to have been" (LWJ, 2 295). In a way, he was right. In a curious turn, the philosophy that was designed to rescue faith from outright dismissal became subject to the same line of criticism. To walk by capricious faith and not by empirical sight is virtually the same as acting "pragmatically"-in other words, in whatever way you like regardless of the moral consequences. An assumption still with us today, when the word pragmatist is more likely to call up, not James or Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr or Eugene William Lyman, but Machievelli's prince or Shakespeare's Iago. I'm very much of the opinion of Hunter Brown when he says that "[s]uch readings are as deeply erroneous as they are widespread. On the contrary, James was deeply committed to the importance in principle of restraining belief, or to the importance of evidence in the responsible conduct of the life of reason" (4). 17 In his Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius opposes two kinds of philosophy: the speculative and the practical, allegorized by the Greek letters Theta and Pi, respectively (36). For the influence van Mastricht's Theoretica-Practica Theologia had on Jonathan Edwards, see E. Brooks Holifield's Theology in America (103 and 117). In Baxter's enormously popular devotional, The Saints' Everlasting Rest (1650), he touches on the longstanding Protestant dilemma between grace and works: "it hath been the ground of a multitude of late mistakes in divinity to think that 'Do this and live' is only the language of the covenant of works. It is true in some sense it is; but in other, not. The law of works only saith, 'Do this' that is, perfectly fulfil the whole law, 'and live,' that is, for so doing' but the law of grace saith, 'Do this and live' too; that is, believe in Christ, seek him, obey him sincerely, as thy Lord and King" (30). 18 Take for example the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing's frustration with hell-fire homiletics. Channing grew to reject the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity as productive only of misery and hopelessness, and vilified its promulgators as concerned more with sadistically agitating sinners than