In the November/December 1996 issue of Books & Culture, reviewing Andrew Walls’s book The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Orbis), Mark Noll wrote that “if a more important book on the general meaning of Christian history is published this year—or even this decade—it will be a surprise.” Last year, the book was included in Christianity Today’s list of the 100 most influential Christian books of the twentieth century. That’s a fair measure of the impact of Andrew Walls’s work. Walls, who is professor of world Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and founder of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Edinburgh, has a new book just out from Orbis, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History. Don Yerxa spoke with Walls at Eastern Nazarene College in January of this year prior to Walls’s lecture in the ENC History Department’s Distinguished Lecture Series.

Would you tell us a little bit about your childhood and early religious experiences?

I come from a working-class family. My mother was traditionally devout. Though I believe he prayed every day of his life, I don’t recall my father ever going to church. Like many people from that generation, he believed that the church had abandoned working people and was not standing for righteousness. The person I have realized since that was a great influence on me was my grandfather, who lived with us. He had run away to sea from Dundee at the age of twelve and had traveled the world. He eventually settled down looking after sheep in Patagonia. My earliest memories include floods of what I now realize to be very bad Spanish, but also insights into things from all over the world. He himself was a rugged old unbeliever, but the impressions remained with me for a long time.

I went to Sunday school and church and in adolescent years made a commitment to Christ.

Did your education encourage or hinder your call to missions?

Influences while a student were very important in shaping my Christian life and understanding. A deep impression of the mission field was there from an early stage and a very definite consciousness of the rest of the world, which I think had come from this early exposure from my grandfather. During my student years at Exeter College, Oxford, I felt a tension. A desire to be a missionary remained. I was very conscious, however, of gifts I didn’t have, including the obvious pastoral gifts you are looking for in a minister. The other part of the tension was my deep absorption in academic work—a desire and, as I believed, a calling for Christians to continue in these lines. I couldn’t reconcile the missionary and the academic lines, possibly because I was thinking of mission work in rather conventional terms that one got from Sunday school and church. They did come together, of course, and when the opening came it was indeed desired that it be someone with a good academic background, with graduate work, and so on. I had, in the meantime, become the librarian and general factotum at Tyndale House in Cambridge in its early days as a biblical research library. I had been in a research setting for some time and was still not clear how this reconciled with what I still retained from the missionary vocation.

You have written about an epiphany experience early in your time in West Africa in which you came to recognize that the African church was experiencing essentially the same tensions as those of the early church. Could you describe how that realization dawned on you?

In the 1950s, we still talked about “the younger churches,” and the expectation was that the younger churches would learn from the experience of the older ones. I was to teach early church history. Church history was my background; I had done my work at Oxford in Patristics and had written on the apostolic tradition of Hippolytus. I started teaching still very much with this idea of imparting the lessons of the past—as the arbiter of this—to an expectant audience, which obviously had great difficulty in making anything out of this peculiar set of information. The students wrote it all down. Ritual transfer of knowledge was important. But it clearly didn’t have any impact or make any particular sense to people. This attitude of imparting lessons was combined with a very critical sense of the existing African church and great awareness of its faults,—and very little awareness, as I began to discover, of its inwardness, of where it had come from.

I do still remember the sense with which it came to me: “Good gracious, man, you’re living in a second-century church! Why don’t you just shut up and watch what is going on around you?” Well, it has taken me the rest of my life working with it, but certainly I think there was the beginning of a new attitude, both to the churches in Africa and eventually to church history itself. In fact, the African and Asian churches are jam-packed with resources for the study of early church history. There is more there than you will get in the Bodleian Library for the study of the early church. You very often have got the same sort of material as you had in the early church, sometimes the same media.

Was that understanding well-received in the church history community?

Those were heady times. Those were the times when the African nations were galloping toward independence. Ghana set the example in 1957. Then everybody was at the door. We were genuinely trying to build an African scholarship, but of course we did believe it would be an extension of European scholarship. There was a Theological Education Fund, supported by Rockefeller money, which supplied large quantities of theological books for African and Asian libraries and underwrote faculty development for theological institutions. I think most of us assumed the resulting scholarship would be measured in Ph.D.’s from Western institutions, who would read the same books we had read and ultimately write books on the same sort of topics. I gradually came to realize, however, the importance of the history of African churches just for a professional teacher of church history. At first, I thought of this as a sort of hobby, something one ought to do because one was living in Africa without realizing how intense and demanding a study it would require. “Real church history” there needed a whole lot of understanding of local society that was the equivalent of what you would be doing if you were working on the second or third century.

Why do you consider Christianity to be a non-Western religion?

The great fact of the century just passed was the demographic and cultural shift in the center of gravity of the Christian faith. If you look at the beginning of the twentieth century, Christianity was quite clearly a Western religion. More than 80 percent of its adherents lived in Europe or North America. If you look at the end of the century, well over half of the world’s Christians lived in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. And every year there are fewer Christians in the West and more Christians in the rest of the world. However we interpret it, whatever we think of it, we’ve already got well over half the world’s Christians living in the Southern continents. At some point in the next century, if present trends continue, we could well find that two-thirds of the world’s Christians are living in those areas.

Now, this isn’t the first time that Christianity has been associated with other parts of the world. It has had a much longer continuous history in parts of Africa than it has had in Scotland and infinitely longer than it has had in the United States. So in many ways it is going back to an earlier state. But, nonetheless, the change has been very rapid, and I doubt if either in the Northern world or the Southern we’ve quite adjusted to the change or to the implications of it.

You describe the diffusion of Christianity as “serial” rather than “progressive.” Could you explain that distinction?

You get different types of expansion in the great religions of the world. Hinduism is essentially unifocal. In the end you can’t separate it out from India. Hinduism is Indianism. You could have a tradition like the Iranian, which can have a catalytic effect on one religion after another. Amongst the Aryans, it had an impact that produced what we eventually came to call Hinduism. It had a deep influence on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And yet, if you look at the Iranian tradition today, you’ve got a million or so Parsis in India and a few hundred thousand persecuted Zoroastrians in Iran. It hasn’t produced a continuing community, whereas with Islam, you have got something like progressive expansion that moves out steadily from its geographical center. It covers a wide area and is remarkably resilient. There are exceptions, but most of the areas that have been Islamic have so far stayed that way.

And it is there that I think the contrast with Christianity becomes so clear. Within 40 years of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and Pentecost, the working model of what the faith of Jesus was to be like—the one that he had supervised himself and was most closely associated with the apostles—is scattered.

One might well have expected the Christian movement, essentially Jewish in its origin, to die out with the collapse of its earliest model. The reason it didn’t was that it had crossed a cultural frontier. We see in the Book of Acts that cultural frontier being crossed, crucially in Antioch. You get an overwhelmingly Hellenistic Christianity developing something that dwarfs the old Jewish movement. And it settles in the richest provinces of the Roman Empire: Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. Yet the time comes when those very provinces come under Islamic rule after the Western Roman Empire be-comes engulfed.

The important thing, then, is that a cultural frontier has again been crossed when the barbarian people of the north and west—from whom I myself am descended—become Christians. And right down to modern times, just at the point when in Europe we realize we are in a post-Christian society, where Christian adherence and practice has dramatically reduced within my own lifetime, we find churches in Africa, Asia, and Latin America coming into their own. So, I think you can say that cross-cultural diffusion has been the lifeblood of historic Christianity.

Christianity and Islam had so much in common in their histories and origins. They have been the two great missionary faiths, and they have often been competitors for the same people. They have both covered huge areas and diverse cultures, and yet their histories of expansion have been different. Islam has been much more successful at holding on to the communities which it has gained, whereas Christianity’s tendency is to wither at the center and grow at or beyond the circumference. So there is a sort of death and resurrection. But the resurrection is somewhere else. There is a moving on, a passing of the torch.

In this respect, I think it is a serial type of expansion. No one place or culture owns it. It doesn’t have a Mecca. It doesn’t have a single geographic center. It doesn’t have permanence anywhere. Christian expansion isn’t a matter of gains to be plotted on a map. It’s a process of rise and fall, advance and recession. It has been that now for 2,000 years. Presumably we can now take that as characteristic of its history.

Any clues as to why Christianity exhibits that sort of pattern?

I have often wondered about this. I think there are two things one needs to look at. There certainly seems to be a vulnerability at the heart of Christianity. Maybe it is the vulnerability of the Cross. If we look at a circumstance such as the disappearance of the first model of Christianity, that Jewish church in Jerusalem that collapses really with the Jewish state in A.D. 70, it is not easy to point any fingers and say this was the fault of so and so. What is clear is that God’s purposes in the spreading of the gospel didn’t depend on that original church. By the time it disappeared, there was another one.

In Islam you have in the end certain fixed cultural norms that are tied into the language. The revelation of God is in Arabic, and it is fixed in heaven forever. For Christians, the Word of God is translatable, infinitely translatable, into different languages. But it also has to be translated into different cultures. Islam remains a prophetic religion. God speaks.

The human response is to obey. But Christianity is an incarnational religion. God becomes human. He takes human shape. He takes human shape in a particular place, a particular locality, culture-specific. The only sort of humanity we know is culture-specific humanity. So there must be a continual translation into culture-specific terms elsewhere. If that translation process stops, then Christianity withers. Yes, there is a vulnerability, a fragility. If it is the vulnerability of the Cross, it is the fragility of the earthen vessel, and sometimes they get broken.

I cannot help but note that you are using academic categories of historical analysis along with faith statements about the vulnerability of the Cross.

I suppose what I am doing is theologizing on the way. Most of my work is as an historian of religions—an historian of religions whose principal concern is the history of Christianity. Now, that involves not just what events take place and how they should be interpreted, but making some sort of generalizations about the Christian faith, especially if one is looking at it in relation to other faiths. One step beyond that takes us to the believer’s position, to questions that can only be answered from within. I can make an historical statement as a matter of observation about the difference between Christianity and Islam in their respective histories—the one being serial; the other being progressive. You asked me a question: “Why?” And I must be much more tentative about that than I am about the other. But the only answers I can make are from what appears to be the respective nature of the two faiths. In the end, if I have to speak from within one of them, I do so with another vocabulary.

Your work invites a question about what Christianity finally is. What unites the many local expressions of Christianity and makes them part of a global faith?

What we are seeing over a wide geographical area now, you also see if you look over a wide historical area. If you look at the manifestations of Christianity moving from early Jerusalem through the time of the Greek Fathers through to Catholic times through various Western expressions—all these wide cultural manifestations come from the need to translate Christianity into specific terms of cultural reality, specific segments of social reality. The Word of God. The Word who becomes flesh. The translation of Christ. Christ takes flesh again as he is received by faith in these different settings.

I don’t think we should try to define Christianity by drawing up some sort of creed. No harm in doing it, but I don’t know that things are settled by creeds because creeds themselves come out of a particular cultural expression of Christian faith. But there are certain basic convictions which have always linked with different expressions of historic Christianity. One is we worship the God of Israel. You can’t cut that connection. The God of heaven is also the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the Scriptures. You can’t cut the connection with Israel. In the second place, the One who appeared as Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ. That has ultimate significance. It is a cultural matter how you define ultimate significance, but it is ultimate in that you can’t get beyond it. God works in Christ. The third thing is that God is active where the believers are. It is not a passive belief. This is still something that is happening. And the community of believers transcends time and space. It is not defined in terms of one community.

You’ve given a Trinitarian response.

I think that if you are looking at it theologically, you can say, yes, there is God the Father; there is God the Son; there is God the Holy Spirit. There is the Church. You would have to go further, I think, to say that essentially Christians read the same Scriptures. And they have a special use for bread and wine and water, although sometimes there are local substitutes for the bread and wine. But it is in those areas that you have got common convictions, common affirmations. And if you are taking it seriously, this idea of one body is part of universal Christian conviction. This is something that transcends time and space. Then all these different local expressions belong to each other. They are not separate local forms that are private. They are part of one Christ.

And I think we must add that biblical faith is inseparable from historical consciousness. If Christianity means anything at all, it means that God saves us through an historical process. Not just an historical event. It is easy enough to say that the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ are historical events, that Christ is an historical personage, and so on. But it is more than that! It is integrated in an historical process. If, after all, God intended to save humanity by means of the Incarnation, why didn’t he do so immediately after the Fall and avoid all this hassle? In fact, that is not the way it goes. It goes through a particular clan moving out of Mesopotamia, that clan becoming tribes, the tribes becoming a nation, that nation going up and down and up and down and down. It is not just centuries, but millennia before the Christ appears. Even then the process isn’t wound up. It is left to run on for another couple of millennia to date.

So essential to any Christian view of the world is a historical sense. One has to take that seriously, if you will allow me to theologize again. If you think of those remarkable words at the end of the epistle to the Hebrews, you get the account of Abraham, Isaac, and all the others. Then it is all summed up by saying these all died in faith, not having received the promises, God having prepared a better thing, not for them, but for us (referring there to the people to whom he was writing the letter). In other words, this non-descript group of Christians to whom he is writing are tied into the bundle. Abraham is waiting for them. If your theology allows you to take in the 2,000 years since the epistle was written, then Abraham is waiting for us, too. And we are none of us complete without the other. None of our stories is complete in itself.

Donald A. Yerxa is professor of history at Eastern Nazarene College and assistant director of The Historical Society.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Papers and responses from the first annual Theology Conference at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, in October 1999 have been gathered in a volume edited by John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Evangelical Futures: A Conversation About Theological Method (Baker Books), with contributions by Stanley J. Grenz, Trevor Hart, Alister E. McGrath, Roger E. Olson, J.I. Packer, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, and Stephen Williams. Books & Culture asked Harriet Harris and Richard Mouw to respond to this volume, with an eye to what it says about the current state of evangelical theology.

As a student, I was booed in an evangelical church in Oxford for saying that I studied theology. In Evangelical Futures, Kevin Vanhoozer reminds us of Bernard Ramm’s alarm when he realized that instead of a theology he had a rag-bag collection of doctrines. These anecdotes suggest that in recent times evangelicals have weakened their own theological awareness and practice.

Two factors help to explain how this happened. First, evangelicals became preoccupied with the nature and interpretation of Scripture and their concern to be “Bible people” (cf. Evangelical Futures, pp. 9, 46). Second, they developed a narrow conception of the theological task, understanding it in terms of “biblical induction.” According to this conception, the systematician collects relevant biblical texts on a given topic and develops from them general conclusions. Insights from the Christian community down the ages are not integral to this task, and the purpose of systematic theology is hard to imagine other than that it enables us to teach ourselves and others what the whole Bible says. In other words, theology is deemed worthwhile because it helps us to know the Bible better. This view of theology resulted in the doctrinal rag-bag that so appalled Ramm.

Contributors to Evangelical Futures seek to enrich evangelicalism for the future by attending to theological method. They take us beyond biblical induction, though still a key issue between them is whether theology does more than enhance Bible-reading. Kevin Vanhoozer says theology need not always begin from scratch, with the collecting and arranging of biblical verses into given topics (p. 62). For theology to be more than a doctrinal hodge-podge, he argues that it must look for connections among doctrines and develop a cumulative understanding, drawing on the past.

His proposal involves giving a greater role to reason and tradition than some evangelicals would accept. For example, Vanhoozer happily locates “the ultimate authority in theology” in the Triune God and in Scripture as God’s “communicative act” (p. 105). Similarly, Stanley Grenz writes, “At its core the content of Christian theology consists of a witness to, as well as participation in, the narrative of the being and act of the Triune God” (p. 131). But John Stackhouse holds that we should take more explicit biblical guidance in addressing issues, rather than beginning with an almost scholastic set of presuppositions regarding the Trinity (p. 49).

At issue is the old question of whether one can look beyond Scripture for sources of theological reflection. Of all the contributors, Grenz comes closest to giving theological authority to the church. He takes what he calls a communitarian approach, seeing theology as a conversation in which the primary voice is Scripture, but the participants are the entire faith community, past and present (pp. 121ff). He criticizes the way in which Luther’s sola scriptura principle became distorted so that Scripture was transformed from a living text into the object of exegetical and systematizing scholarship (p. 124). He makes tradition basic, not in the medieval Roman Catholic sense of treating it as a second source of truth, but rather by seeing tradition as the whole enterprise by which the Christian community interprets Scripture (p. 126).

Alister McGrath has a slightly different attitude toward tradition. His stress is not on learning from the understanding of past theologians but rather on observing how their cultural and philosophical assumptions affected their reading of Scripture. The image one gets from McGrath is that Scripture is basic, and perhaps somehow solid, while culture and philosophy are shifting. By contrast, the image one gets from Grenz is that theology is shifting, because its very basis is not a solid Bible but the biblically informed understanding of the Christian community.

This book is about the future of evangelical theology. Those who are ringing the changes are Grenz, Vanhoozer, and Trevor Hart, who writes a final response promoting theological imagination. They best fit Roger Olson’s claim that this volume is “postconservative,” a characterization that the editor John Stackhouse resists. Postconservatism is a trend among some evangelicals that transcends conservative-liberal disagreements over the place of Scripture and experience. Vanhoozer defines postconservatives as canonical-linguistic. This distinguishes them from postliberals who, following George Lindbeck, posit a cultural-linguistic understanding of the context of faith (p. 77). A canonical-linguistic approach looks to the canon of Scripture for the shaping of our norms, whereas postliberals see all our norms, including the acceptance of an authoritative Scripture, as culturally shaped.

Both postliberals and postconservatives see that neither Scripture nor experience can be isolated and used as primary raw data, and so both set about dismantling foundationalism in modern theology. Foundationalism in liberal theology treats human experience as basic. Foundationalism in evangelical theology looks like this: it requires an authoritative Bible at the base of its system; otherwise, it says, there is no sure ground for faith. It then infers doctrines from Scripture, seeking first to interpret the meaning of the text, and then apply that meaning to our own cultural context.

Some contributors to Evangelical Futures remain within this mindset. Stackhouse points out that J.I. Packer is hardly a postconservative. Hardly, indeed. Packer is still fighting an evangelical-liberal battle (pp. 183, 186) and working with a model whereby meaning and understanding precede application. He holds that we need to “move on from knowing about God to a relational acquaintance with God himself” (quoted by McGrath, p. 19), as though our knowledge about God were not already shaped by our affections. He also calls for “surefooted application of Bible teaching to the life of today’s church” (p. 187). He must feel uncomfortable with postconservative attempts to wean us away from sure-footedness, but he will not argue the point. He contributes to the volume more as an elder statesman than as a significant participant in debate.

Similarly to Packer, McGrath and Stackhouse treat theology and piety as separate activities which we somehow need to unite (e.g. pp. 26, 51). One wonders how wisdom will ever develop in such a world, where the discernment of meaning is held separate from spiritual attunement and our development as disciples of Christ.

Vanhoozer and Grenz are more conscious of the role of the affections in shaping our understanding. They draw on the Reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff and extend the notion of properly functioning cognitive faculties to the idea of interpretive virtues that enable us to read Scripture aright. Grenz understands this in terms of being nurtured within a Christian community. He identifies “the specifically Christian experience-facilitating interpretive framework” as basic for theology (p. 131). Vanhoozer is more individualistic: we are to pray for the interpretive virtues and to curb our sinful will- fulness to go against the grain of the text (pp. 87-88). He emphasizes God’s calling on the individual as prior to our entry into the church (p. 86).

Two aspects of this volume reflect, sadly, a lack of accountability and self-scrutiny within the evangelical world. One is the manner in which academic theology is discredited. McGrath says that much academic theology is elitist, and he criticizes a “theology that cannot be preached” (pp. 155-56, p. 18), although one might ask how the endless evangelical writings on biblical inerrancy could profitably be preached. Stackhouse writes that “evangelicals properly distance themselves from a liberal methodology that feels ‘free’ to ignore, and even contradict, express teachings of Scripture in the name of the putative superiority of current opinion” (p. 48). Packer accuses liberation and feminist theologians of displacing the Christ of Scripture (pp. 186-87). No explanation, example, or reference is given to support these characterizations, so they are not responsibly made, and perhaps the judgments underlying them were not responsibly reached.

The second aspect is the complacency with which Stackhouse notes that all the contributors to Evangelical Futures are North American or British white men. (They are, indeed, a familiar lineup.) “For this unhappy narrowness of field,” Stackhouse says, “we can only plead in defense that the state of evangelical theology today is itself dominated by such demographics.” But that works as a defense only if your conception of evangelical theology is so narrow that you screen out African American theology, European evangelical theology, and various African, Latin American, and Asian theologies. Even then, if it turns out that evangelical theology is dominated by Anglo-Saxon men, these men should ask themselves why, given that the body of Christ is as diverse as humanity itself. “Evangelicalism has yet to produce a substantial theology written from a feminist perspective” (pp. 47-48), Stackhouse writes. But he then dismisses exponents of feminist theology who “preoccupy themselves with secular matters: who occupies which position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy or domestic economy, and more general questions of how women are to function and be treated in a just society.” Women who expect theology to relate to social justice, and who recognize that resistance comes from those wanting to maintain the status quo, will not write with Stackhouse’s vision of evangelicalism!

One might hope that Stephen Williams’s essay would help address unacknowledged partiality, because it calls for moral accountability in theology. But Williams seems lacking in empathetic imagination. He draws on Bonhoeffer but makes the reader acutely aware that neither physically nor spiritually has he been where Bonhoeffer has been. Happily, Williams has not suffered under Nazism, but nor can he enter into Bonhoeffer’s struggle. It is for him a matter of cool assessment whether Bonhoeffer should have been politically complicit in a plot to assassinate Hitler (pp. 171-72). Perhaps there is a lack of empathy more generally among evangelicals, which helps to explain why many are so unmoved by liberation and feminist theologians.

A possible path to moral accountability in theology lies in Grenz’s definition of objectivity: as the objectivity of the world as God wills it. True reality is not what we can see with our eyes and understand with our ears, but what God intends for the world. We could add that the struggle to disclose truth is not just an epistemological or hermeneutical one, to do with interpreting Scripture correctly. It is a moral and spiritual one, involving training our eyes and ears to perceive that which is not very visible or audible. Attentiveness to people and to possibilities that frequently go unnoticed is a moral and spiritual practice.

I have always thought it a strength of evangelicalism that, while it may not choose the term “sacrament,” it promotes a sacramental view of the Word: of Christ made present through reading Scripture and through preaching. One of my favorite parts of this volume is Vanhoozer’s insight about seeing “the silhouette of Jesus Christ in his living body” when the gospel is celebrated (p. 103). This is an insight that could be made more central to evangelical theological method. Making Christ present is how Christians are called to live; and this makes us properly Christocentric rather than bibliocentric.

Evangelicals are sometimes criticized for putting the Bible in place of Christ. Stackhouse faces this charge but continues to insist that “the kernel” of theology is “the unique and supreme authority of the Bible” (pp. 46-47). Behind such statements lies an epistemological point: that we know about Christ primarily through the pages of Scripture. Evangelicals can tend to speak as though Christ is no longer among us, and we have been left with the Bible instead (cf. Grudem’s Systematic Theology, ch. 1). Herein lies the problem that has beset evangelical theology: the possibility of doing theology has been thought to hinge on establishing Scripture as the reliable foundation of our faith.

Vanhoozer’s insight is a potentially powerful corrective to this way of thinking. Christ is still among us. This is why faith and theology are possible. Scripture is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, but it is not what our theology depends on. God in Christ is what our theology depends on, and we cannot pin God down as a sure foundation. God will not be so manipulated, but God calls from us a response to seek and live in the divine presence. In this presence we should hopefully grow in wisdom and relax over sure-footedness.

Harriet A. Harris is chaplain of Wadham College and of the University Church, Oxford, England. She was formerly lecturer in theology at the University of Exeter, and is author of Fundamentalism and Evangelicals (Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following book, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase: • Evangelical Futures, edited by John G. Stackhouse, Jr.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

How Should Evangelicals Do Theology? Stop Fretting About Sure-Footedness

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Evangelical Futures

Papers and responses from the first annual Theology Conference at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, in October 1999 have been gathered in a volume edited by John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Evangelical Futures: A Conversation About Theological Method (Baker Books), with contributions by Stanley J. Grenz, Trevor Hart, Alister E. McGrath, Roger E. Olson, J.I. Packer, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, and Stephen Williams. Books & Culture asked Harriet Harris and Richard Mouw to respond to this volume, with an eye to what it says about the current state of evangelical theology.

During the course of some recent travels I carried the Evangelical Futures volume around as my “heavy” reading. For a change of pace I would switch over to Ben Rogers’s fascinating recent biography of A.J. Ayer. At one point Rogers quotes a few lines from a 1956 review that Stuart Hampshire wrote of Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledge. Hampshire saw “a certain tameness” in the book: “one can see from the beginning,” he reported, “that none of the sceptical arguments are going to get out of hand; they are on a tight, light rein, familiar, domesticated animals which are taken out for a short run.”

It struck me that Hampshire’s characterization of Ayer’s approach nicely captured my own sense of what was going on in the evangelical essays. To be sure, Hampshire did not intend his remarks to be words of praise; Ayer’s book, he said, had “a lack of impulse, as in a school work.” In my reading of Evangelical Futures, on the other hand, I actually found the taming patterns to be refreshing. While some of the familiar themes that we associate with postmodernity were taken out for a walk—communities of interpretation, the importance of narrative, language games, coherentist understandings of truth, and so on—they were kept on a leash. And the writers were not reluctant to tug on that theological leash at many points as they frequently introduced appropriate qualifications and identified genuine dangers.

Nothing in these kinds of discussions causes me to have deep worries about the future of evangelical thought. But I must confess that I do get a little nervous at times, especially when too much is made of the need for some sort of basic epistemological shift in our thinking. For example, I do not find the label “postconservative” at all attractive, mainly because I do not see myself as deviating all that significantly from previous generations of thinkers who thought of themselves as theological conservatives.

Frankly, I am not convinced that past generations of evangelical thinkers were quite as misguided as some folks seem to suggest in these discussions. In my own experience, many of the good emphases that I find in these “new” methodological approaches simply confirm for me lessons that I learned—long before I heard of postmodernism—from the likes of Cornelius Van Til, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, E.J. Carnell, Francis Schaeffer, and others. These evangelicals insisted that reason was not “neutral,” and that all of our thinking is fundamentally guided by pre-cognitive commitments. They also argued convincingly that we cannot adequately interpret specific biblical passages without seeing them in the context of the overall drama of creation-fall-redemption-eschaton. To be sure, they would have been deeply offended by the contemporary rejection of a “metanarrative.” But so am I. Nor would they have looked favorably on the notion that what drives all of our attempts to define our shared humanness is the desire to exercise power over others. But neither do I.

Past generations of evangelical thinkers paid considerable attention to some distinctions that I think are still important for our explorations of these matters—more important than is evident in the Evangelical Futures essays. Take, for example, the distinction between divine and human knowledge. What is going on when we talk in unqualified ways about how all efforts to know are constrained by cultural location? Or that a “foundationalist” account of certainty is simply wrong? Do we mean to be implying that God’s own knowledge of things is “non-foundationalist”? Or that the Creator himself is obliged to be tentative in his claims to certainty? If we do think—as I think we ought—that God’s grasp of reality is not susceptible to the limitations that the postmodern types insist on emphasizing, then we would do well to introduce some significant nuances into our epistemological formulations.

At the very least, the simple fact of the distinction between divine and human knowledge should be taken into account in Christian epistemological discussions. Surely it is relevant to our theories of knowledge that we believe that there is a divine consciousness whose ways are far above our own, and whose thought patterns are not plagued by the limitations that characterize our own cognitive strivings. To acknowledge the reality of divine knowledge is to believe in some fundamental sense that there is “objective” truth, and that it is possible for at least someone in the universe to have certainty about the way things are. And, as Wheaton’s Arthur Holmes has long insisted in his writings, this kind of acknowledgment can provide us mortals with both “epistemic humility” and “epistemic hope.” The humility comes from awareness that we are not God, that our claims to know the truth must always have a tentativeness about them. But the cause for hope is also important to emphasize: we can stay with the struggle because of God’s promise that our cognitive condition will eventually improve greatly, when that day finally arrives when we will know even as we are known.

We would also do well to keep in mind the traditional distinction between pre-fallen and fallen human knowing. To what degree are our “non-foundationalist” limitations due to our sinfulness and to what degree are they endemic to the human condition as such? Our answer to this sort of question will tell us something about whether we are talking about human epistemology as such or about the ways in which our cognitive capacities have been wounded by our sinfulness. To be sure, past discussions of “the noetic effects of sin” were often highly speculative. But those thinkers who paid attention to this topic did manage to come up with at least a few emphases that parallel those which have been inspired these days by anti-foundationalist perspectives.

One important consideration that can sustain our epistemic hope is the firm conviction that we are constituted by our Maker with the capacity to get things straight. In emphasizing this conviction, the recent defenders of a “Reformed epistemology”—Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and others—have given us at least one good reason to exercise caution in the way we go about criticizing Enlightenment thought, since they have some of their inspiration from the writings of Thomas Reid, himself a Scottish Enlightenment thinker. In formulating his alternative to Hume’s scepticism, Reid insisted that God has created us with certain epistemic dispositions—for example, the disposition to believe that causal relationships exist, and that physical objects exist apart from our perceptions of them, and that we are unified centers of consciousness and not mere bundles of transitory perceptions and feelings—and that it is legitimate to trust these sorts of dispositions as we make our way through the world.

For all of that, though, I am pleased that we evangelicals are taking these postmodern-type themes out for a walk. Indeed, my own motivation for wanting to do so is reinforced by a kind of conversation that gets little attention from the Evangelical Futures discussants. As many Christians from other parts of the world challenge our “North Atlantic” theologies, they too ask us to think critically about our own cultural location, as well as about how we have sometimes blurred the boundaries between what is essential to the Christian message and the doctrines and frameworks we have borrowed from various Western philosophical traditions.

These challenges are especially poignant because they come, not from our musings on what we should be learning from contemporary intellectuals who often are hostile to the faith, but from people who have been brought to Christ by our own evangelizing efforts. What this suggests is that while we should continue to grapple with the deliverances of our secularist neighbors in the philosophy and literature departments of North America, we should also be sure to spend some time listening carefully to the uncomfortable challenges posed by people who are questioning many of the presuppositions of the folks who brought them the gospel, even as they are in the midst of reflecting critically on their own inherited world-views, to which that gospel came as a refining fire.

Richard J. Mouw is president and professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author most recently of The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals Can Learn from Their Fundamentalist Heritage (Zondervan).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following books, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase: • Evangelical Futures, edited by John G. Stackhouse, Jr. • The Smell of Sawdust, by Richard J. Mouw, Jr.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

How Should Evangelicals Do Theology? Delete the Post from Postconservative

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Evangelical Futures

In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture, by Alister McGrath, Doubleday, 328 pp.; $24.95

Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired, by Benson Bobrick, Simon & Schuster, 366 pp.; $26

The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy: Muting the Masculinity of God’s Words, by Vern S. Poythress and Wayne A. Grudem, Broadman & Holman, 377 pp.; $19.99, paper

The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is now only one among many Scripture translations widely available to readers of English. Although sales of the KJV in the United States are topped only by sales of the New International Version (NIV), the status of the KJV as the overwhelmingly dominant translation has been fading for at least a century, heralding the end of a well-defined historical epoch that lasted from about the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century.

It was an era decisively marked by the assumption, often unspoken, that the Bible in English was simply the version first published in 1611 by order of King James I. This assumption meant that when readers or hearers of Scripture came to the end of the 23rd Psalm, they expected to find, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” It was immaterial that at least one alternative rendering had remained more popular in England and America for at least a generation after 1611 (the Geneva Bible’s “Doubtless kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall remain a long season in the house of the Lord”). Nor did it register that several translations produced at about the same time were favored by significant groups of English speakers. Regardless, most English readers would have heard something amiss in any alternative, like the Douai-Rheims version of 1582 (“And thy mercy will follow me all the days of my life. And that I may dwell in the house of the Lord unto length of days”).

The three books noticed in this review testify in different ways to how significant it was in British and American life for the KJV to prevail so widely and so long. Alister McGrath’s In the Beginning and Benson Bobrick’s Wide as the Waters join a long line of volumes treating the circumstances leading to the KJV, the nature of the translation itself, and the effects of this version on the English language and Anglo-American culture. If neither volume is likely to replace F. F. Bruce’s indispensable History of the Bible in English (3d edition, Oxford University Press, 1978), both are still attractive volumes. Together they explain why, in the well-considered assertions of Debora Shuger, “The Bible remained the central cultural text in England” as “it continued to generate knowledge and narrative” and as it “operated as … the site where the disciplines converge.”

There is some overlap between the books by McGrath and Bobrick, but it is an edifying redundancy. Both are especially good on the importance of pre-KJV translations, particularly William Tyndale’s first complete New Testament of 1526. They also show how much the KJV translators were influenced by the Geneva Bible (first published by English exiles in 1560), an extremely popular version eventually undone by its extensive, violently anti-monarchical notes. (The desire to get those notes out of circulation was one of the main reasons that James I agreed in 1604 to commission a new translation.)

Both books also comment on an unfortunate precedent set by the Geneva Bible, which was the first English-language version published with verse divisions. Segmenting the text like this—a practice that has thankfully been overcome in many recent translations—may have been a boon for checking references, but it was otherwise a disaster; it encouraged prooftexting, obscured the integrity of narratives, and dismembered cohesive discourses under the control of the inspired authors into fragments manipulated by uninspired readers. Among many other riches, the two studies also reveal the roots of Sunday morning confusion over public recitation of the Lord’s Prayer arising from differing results from Tyndale (“forgive us our trespasses”) and his successor Miles Coverdale (“forgive us our debts”) in rendering Matthew 6:12.

McGrath, as befits his expertise as a theologian, provides expert commentary on the technical and mechanical aspects of the translators’ task. His detailed description of the physical labor required to print such a big book in the pre-digital age is especially illuminating. But his assessment of Greek texts underlying the translation, principles employed by the translators, and results on specific passages are equally solid.

As befits his experience as an author of accessible popular histories, Bobrick excels on the human dimensions of translation work. His accounts of John Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer (the crown officials who began the process of preparing “authorized” versions), and the KJV translators themselves are exceptionally able. They reveal especially the extraordinary depth of commitment that drove translators in their efforts to clarify what the Bible said.

At the end of his own lucid discussion of the translators and translations of the sixteenth century, C. S. Lewis paused to note that, if we but had our wits about us, we would realize that “all translations of scripture are tendentious: translation, by its very nature, is a continuous implicit commentary.” So long as the KJV enjoyed supremacy, it was easy to forget that truth. The passing of the KJV thus bears directly on the energetic, sometimes angry, debates over Bible translating that have washed over the English-speaking world during the last 50 years. Heated reaction to the appearance of the Revised Standard Version in 1952 drew attention to the inherently tendentious character of translation itself, though readers of McGrath and Bobrick will smile at knowing that criticism of equal severity greeted the KJV in 1611.

Of recent translation traumas the freshest for most evangelcals is the fury over the proposal by Zondervan Publishers and the International Bible Society to bring out an American printing of the NIV Inclusive Language Edition that had been published in Great Britain in 1996. This proposal immediately generated a spate of charge, rebuttal, and counter-charge: Was the NIV caving in to militant feminism? Was the NIV committee merely responding to altered language usage? And so on. A short review cannot address the course of the debate or expound on the issues involved, but it can recommend the volume by Vern Poythress and Wayne Grudem as a beneficial product of the fray. The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy is an opinionated book, since Poythress and Grudem were leaders opposing the new translation. But whether or not readers agree with where the authors come out, they should benefit from following their arguments.

The great benefit of this book is to disentangle the many complicated issues involved in producing an English-language Bible for the ideologically charged climate of our day. So, for example, readers will find careful discussions on translating most of the words that in past versions appeared as men, man, or brother (including anthropos and aner). There is also extensive consideration of “generic he” (as a singular pronoun referring to any one person).[1]

It is extremely unlikely that the dominant cultural place held for so long by the KJV will ever be filled by another version. If, however, translators and publishers of the multiplying versions that now pour from the presses are able to act with the same seriousness that drove the KJV translators and their predecessors, the spiritual power that attended the KJV will enjoy undiminished vitality. The compelling message of books about translations of the Book is that Bible translations matter precisely, but only, because the Bible matters.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Protestants in America (Oxford University Press) and American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Blackwell).

1. For a full consideration of relevant issues, the truly engaged should read able books written from other points on the partisan compass, such as D. A. Carson’s The Inclusive-Language Debate: A Plea for Realism (Baker, 1998).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following products, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase: • In the Beginning, by Alister McGrath • Wide as the Waters, by Benson Bobrick • The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy, by Vern S. Poythress and Wayne A. Grudem

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Englishing the Book

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In the Beginning

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Wide as the Waters

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The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy