A Passion for Truth: The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism,by Alister McGrath, (InterVarsity, 256 pp., $19.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Roger E. Olson, professor of theology at Bethel College in Minnesota and editor of the “Christian Scholar’s Review.”
With “A Passion for Truth,” British evangelical theologian Alister McGrath presents a promised and long-awaited statement of evangelicalism’s intellectual credibility–indeed, its superiority over other Christian traditions. Markedly missing, however, is any triumphalistic note, such as one might have detected in McGrath’s earlier “Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity” (IVP, 1995). In the present volume, the Oxford scholar presents evangelicalism as sufficiently mature and confident to learn from other contemporary schools of theology without compromising its distinctives. A Passion for Truth has its weaknesses, and critical readers will notice them without much effort. Nevertheless, it represents the strongest statement of evangelical intellectual vitality and competitiveness that has appeared in at least two decades. This is the book to give to nonevangelical, theologically minded friends, colleagues, and relatives. It will go far toward unburdening them of misconceptions about evangelicalism.
“A Passion for Truth” is not a work of systematic theology. McGrath calls it a “prolegomena for the foundation of an evangelical mind” and explains that its purpose is to explore evangelical Christianity’s intellectual foundations with a view toward establishing its inner consistency while exposing the contradictions and vulnerabilities that beset rival traditions.
The first half of the book contains McGrath’s vision of what constitutes “evangelicalism” and his explication of two major evangelical intellectual foundations: the centrality of Jesus Christ and the authority of Scripture. According to McGrath, evangelicalism is a type of Christianity (or, perhaps better stated, authentic Christianity itself!) marked by commitment to Jesus Christ as God’s unsurpassable self-revelation, Scripture as God’s authoritative written word, the experience of conversion as a special work of God by which one enters into a saving relationship with God, and evangelism. All of this is quite familiar, and so McGrath moves on quickly to a more controversial point.
While few will disagree with McGrath’s assertion that “Evangelical Christianity is . . . unashamedly Christ-centered,” some will balk at agreeing that “[f]or Christians, Jesus is the embodiment and self-revelation of God. At the heart of the Christian faith stands a living person, not a book.” McGrath decidedly places Jesus Christ at the center, core, and foundation of Christianity and finds this a strength of evangelicalism–its Jesus-centeredness. Of course, he is careful to explain that he is not playing Jesus against Scripture. In fact, the two are for him inseparable. However, throughout this volume the author continually hints that evangelicals need to rediscover the centrality of the divine revelation in a person, which has always been its strength and sure foundation.
McGrath’s chapter on the authority of Scripture is rather lengthy and, at times, convoluted. Nevertheless, it constitutes the real heart of “A Passion for Truth.” McGrath affirms and defends the normativity of Scripture and its rule over all culture, experience, reason, and tradition. At the same time, however, he criticizes some evangelical theology for neglecting the experiential, contextual, and narrative dimensions of the theological enterprise. In this chapter, as at other points throughout “A Passion for Truth,” McGrath deplores evangelical theology’s tendency to ignore or neglect the narrative nature of Scripture and to reduce it to a source book of doctrinal propositions. He diagnoses this as a symptom of twentieth-century evangelicalism’s capitulation to Enlightenment modes of thought.
Indeed, according to McGrath, “Throughout its history, evangelicalism has shown itself to be prone to lapse into a form of rationalism.” Clearly he is writing about evangelical theology and not popular religion. As one example of this lapse, McGrath cites the continuing dominance in some evangelical theological circles of commitment to the Old Princeton School’s version of scriptural authority–something he clearly believes evangelicals need to reconsider in the light of the narrative nature of Scripture.
McGrath’s account of ideal evangelicalism is refreshing. It is true to evangelicalism’s deepest impulses, even if it is contrary at some points to establishment evangelical defenses. For example, there is no need to contrast doctrine with narrative, as many are prone to do. For McGrath, doctrine arises out of narrative and community together and yet is more than mere “rules of the game” of the grammar of faith. Instead, evangelical doctrine, McGrath avers, “articulates the particular interpretation, or range of interpretations, of the scriptural narrative appropriate to the self-understanding of the Christian community, calling others into question.” Doctrine, then, is second-order language, which protects, defends, and recommends the narrative-and-community shaped Word of God that forges Christian identity. In no manner does McGrath’s program demote or water down doctrine. But it preserves evangelical Christianity from being reduced to mere orthodoxy. At the heart of it stands a life-giving Christ and the inspired narrative about him, not rational propositions in an orderly system.
On the other hand, when McGrath turns to evangelical Christianity’s main contemporary rivals, he has no hesitation about criticizing their lack of solid, objective, doctrinal content. In the end, neglect of objective truth is what undermines the validity of postliberalism (“Yale theology”), postmodernism, and pluralism. Through meticulous, fair-minded examinations of these three contemporary rivals of evangelical Christianity, McGrath demonstrates their inferiority by exposing inner tensions and inconsistencies. In each case, he concludes, evangelicalism presents a stronger, sounder intellectual option for thinking Christians today.
McGrath commends postliberal theology for rejecting Enlightenment foundationalism, which wrongly insists on universal, rational discourse for establishing truth. He also commends it for rediscovering and emphasizing the narrative nature of divine revelation. Postliberalism’s weakness, according to McGrath, lies in its unwarranted rejection of cognitive-propositional doctrine in favor of a “rule theory” in which doctrine is not seen as objectively true but only as a system of rules for governing Christian speech and life. McGrath exposes the inadequacies of any theory of doctrine that ignores or dismisses its function of describing divine realities.
McGrath also criticizes extreme forms of postmodernism for falling into cognitive relativism. Perhaps he too narrowly defines this cultural phenomenon, ignoring less extreme and aggressive forms of postmodernity than those connected with names such as Foucault and Lyotard. In fact, in “Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity,” McGrath briefly discussed certain positive aspects of postmodernity with which evangelicals can and should agree. There he treated postmodernity as an ambiguous ally of evangelicalism against aggressive secular rationalism. Here he focuses quite narrowly on negative aspects of postmodernism.
Against both postliberalism and postmodernism McGrath rightly argues that “[i]t is important to insist, not just that truth matters, but that Christianity is true.” At the same time, and equally correctly, however, he insists that evangelicalism must reject its traditional alliance with Enlightenment rationalism and propositionalism: “It is a travesty of the biblical idea of ‘truth’ to equate it with the Enlightenment notion of conceptual or propositional correspondence, or the derived view of evangelism as the proclamation of the propositional correctness of Christian doctrine.”
McGrath saves his strongest ammunition for religious pluralism–the idea that all major religious traditions are simply diverse paths to the same ultimate truth and reality. This “prescriptive pluralism,” associated with the liberal theologian John Hick, McGrath labels “religious Stalinism,” arguing that it is “little more than an intellectual satellite of the Enlightenment, inextricably linked with its totalizing and homogenizing agenda.”
As noted earlier, this book has its flaws. For instance, McGrath wrongly accuses postliberal theology’s major theorist–the late Hans Frei of Yale–of denying the objective reality of Jesus’ resurrection, reducing it to a narrative affirmation of an identity between Jesus’ self-manifestation and God’s self-manifestation. In fact, in “The Identity of Jesus Christ” (Fortress, 1975), Frei wrote (inconsistently, perhaps) that “there is a kind of logic in a Christian’s faith that forces him to say that disbelief in the resurrection of Jesus is rationally impossible” and made clear that by “resurrection” he meant a bodily resurrection.
Such flaws, however, do not diminish McGrath’s achievement. “A Passion for Truth” makes a significant contribution toward the recovery of an authentic evangelical mind healed of its captivity to Enlightenment modes of rationalistic and propositional thinking.
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