As usual, Martin E. Marty knows what’s going on. Apparently, Brian McLaren has begun promoting some sort of “Evolutionary Christianity,” which has something to do with both biological evolution and the historical evolution of Christianity. As Marty notes, first of all, joining these two issues is a horrible category mistake. Secondly, McLaren’s shocking revelations regarding the development of doctrine come about two centuries after John Henry Newman’s sytematic reflections on the subject.
Recently, Brett McCracken’s book Hipster Christianity criticized younger Emergent types for paying too much attention to style and for trying to fit in with cultural trends. To be sure, he has a point. In a scathing review, though, James K. A. Smith points out McCracken more or less assumes that everyone is as much of a poser as he apparently is. That is to say, only someone consumed with a young group mentality would ascribe to “hipster Christians” the motivations that McCracken does. In addition, he, I think, rightly implies that the measured and moderate Evangelicalism of much of the Relevant Magazine crowd is a front for continued acceptance of a politics of war and torture, if only because of its focus on trivial pop cultural issues and its rootedness in white culture. Still, Smith could use more appreciation for the importance of individual salvation/sanctification as an integral part of his vision of communal Christianity.
[As I note at the end of this post, it is very speculative, and I am mostly just interested to see what others have to contribute either in the poll or in comments.]
Since their origins in the Protestant Reformation, evangelicals have focused on the importance of the Gospel above almost anything else. If neo-evangelicalism is fracturing today, we would expect to see its account of the Gospel fracturing first. And this is, I think, what is happening.
As Brett McCracken notes, this past spring two large conferences prominently promoted divergent (though not necessarily entirely contradictory) accounts of the Gospel: While the Wheaton College Theology Conference was centered on the work of N. T. Wright, who promotes a revisionist (no, that doesn’t have to mean “bad”) account of Paul’s notion of “justification,” Together for the Gospel had a conference that aggressively pushed “neo-Reformed” theology, a perspective that owes much to John Piper’s view of justification (about which he and Wright have debated). And these are only two perspectives. Here, I think, is a (hopefully) fair summary of the major accounts on offer today in what used to be evangelicalism:
Neo-Evangelical: This is the Billy Graham/Josh McDowell emphasis on human sinfulness, the divine intervention in the form of Christ’s substitutionary atonement, and a joyful and life-changing experience of conversion, of being born again. Such cultural institutions as “finding Jesus Christ,” the “Four Spiritual Laws,” the “Romans Road,” the “ABC’s of Salvation,” and Gospel tracts are usually associated with this account. While many who were converted to evangelicalism using this model still hold to this account, few use the traditional methods mentioned above when propagating it. Actually, most of these people no longer have enough “unsaved” acquaintances to make these methods worthwhile to them. [James has added that forensic justification is usually assumed as part of this account.]
Pentecostal: While they were part of the neo-evangelical coalition, white Pentecostals held to substitutionary atonement as the means by which Jesus is Savior, a means that had been inherited from the Fundamentalist emphasis on the significance of substitutionary atonement (over against the Modernist rejection of this theory). This, however, was slowly replacing the four-fold emphasis on Jesus as Savior, Healer, Spirit-Baptizer, and Coming King that had marked early Pentecostalism. Now, though, some Pentecostals are drifting more fully into something like neo-evangelicalism while others are diverging. For those who are diverging from this stream, the Gospel looks like a manifestation of the Spirit’s power and the reenactment of New Testament church life than like the emphasis on forgiveness from sin. As a result, pursuit of a better life and use of God as a good-luck charm of sorts (don’t be so quick to judge) are characteristic of the decreasingly evangelical wing of Pentecostalism.
(Neo-)Reformed: As Christianity Today says, they are “Young, Restless, Reformed.” Unflinchingly dogmatic (not always a bad thing), this faction is largely inspired by John Piper and emphasizes the glory and sovereignty of a God who elects for salvation those whom He (yes, He – it’s very important) wishes to elect. For these people, “justification” is forensic; it is a court-room scene in which Jesus is made the substitute for the elect. This perspective has much in common with the magisterial Reformation, but it was less well-represented for some decades during the neo-evangelical coalition.
Emergent: No one is really sure what this is, so I use it as a “catch-all” for those who are intentionally moving beyond neo-evangelicalism. This “movement” includes the vagueness of Brian McLaren’s approach, the revisionism of N. T. Wright’s nature-saving, society-transforming emphasis on human cooperation with God, and the deep digging of Robert Webber’s return to the liturgy of the ancient church. For these people, the Gospel is too big to be narrowed down to substitutionary atonement or a three-step prayer; instead, they emphasize process and a holistic approach that sometimes lends itself to a lack of clarity about beliefs.
So do you fit into one or more or these categories? Take the poll below, and feel free to comment if you don’t fit into any category or if you object to the way I’ve described one or more of them.
Recently, Brett McCracken has offered an insightful Wall Street Journalopinion piece (found via First Thoughts). After laying out the dire situation that evangelicalism faces among its younger generation (“70% of young Protestant adults between 18-22 stop attending church regularly”), he rightly ridicules the tendency to try to seem cool or use shock tactics such as Mark Driscoll’s addressing of the topic “Biblical Oral Sex.” To be blunt, no younger post-evangelical is fooled by such cheap pageantry – or, at the very least, a vanishingly small percentage are. As McCracken indicates, we’ve seen it all before. In youth groups, we were often the ones who were desperately trying to make God cool, so we know the game already.
And the further irony is that the younger generations who are less impressed by whiz-bang technology, who often see through what is slick and glitzy, and who have been on the receiving end of enough marketing to nauseate them, are as likely to walk away from these oh-so-relevant churches as to walk into them.
If you eliminate the cross in exchange for Power Point presentations, in other words, you will have given away what little credibility you had. As for McCracken’s solution, I found it both convincing and unconvincing:
If we are interested in Christianity in any sort of serious way, it is not because it’s easy or trendy or popular. It’s because Jesus himself is appealing, and what he says rings true. It’s because the world we inhabit is utterly phony, ephemeral, narcissistic, image-obsessed and sex-drenched—and we want an alternative. It’s not because we want more of the same.
While this is absolutely right, I don’t think that evangelicalism can offer this. Instead, Wells’ vision of historic Protestantism may be necessary, since evangelicalism’s connection with marketing ploys runs deep. If nothing else, the Fundamentalists were advertisers, and, from Billy Graham to Rick Warren, neo-evangelicals have likely been better at selling things than at anything else. As we might be finding, though, you can’t really buy or sell eternal life in the long-term.
In a recent interview by Scot McKnight (via Robert E. Sagers), Brian McLaren says probably hundreds of things with which I disagree. In particular, though, at about 7:00 in the interview he talks about rejecting the Greco-Roman history of Christianity in favor of liberation and queer theologies.
Although there are dozens of holes that one could poke in his argument, one thing specifically stands out to me: McLaren is utterly convinced that there is an emotional and social content to “the Gospel” that is not culturally embedded via the mainstream history of early Christianity. When he talks about “the faith,” he makes it clear that he is rejecting the notion of a “historic faith” as a set of orthodox beliefs and liturgical practices in favor of a notion of “faith” as individual emotional dependence on God, with social consequences.
This is hardly different (especially given their mutual tendency to pander to current fashions among the cultural elite) from the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of Protestant liberalism. So congratulations, Brian McLaren, you’ve reinvented a certain non-functioning wheel, the use of which is at the core of a whole segment of what used to be evangelicalism.
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Evangelical Futures 