Post-evangelicalism describes, and proposes solutions for, many of the perceived shortcomings of modern evangelical Christianity. It is of obvious interest to us, therefore, and should be evaluated in some detail. Here I will simply mention some general areas of concern regarding its relation to more traditional forms of evangelicalism.
1. In what sense does this movement intend to be post-evangelical? Post-evangelicalism is to evangelicalism what, in many respects, post-modernism is to modernism. Just as the term post-modernism fixes ‘modernism’ as a particular historical and cultural state of affairs, so ‘post-evangelicalism’ appears to fix ‘evangelicalism’ as a particular historical and cultural movement. But, of course, post-modernism is also a very ‘modern’ phenomenon: modernism necessarily updates itself; it sloughs off the old restrictive skin, and for a while appears new and original again. In a similar way, post-evangelicalism does not simply leave evangelicalism behind. It may turn out to be no more than a modish dead-end. More likely it is symptomatic of cultural and intellectual changes that post-evangelicalism itself – insofar as such a self-conscious entity exists – only imperfectly understands. But in any case, evangelicalism, as a theological commitment to the person of Jesus and to the evangel, will always be up-to-date. Post-evangelicalism, in the end, will either prove to be only a renewal of evangelicalism or it will become something else entirely.
2. Post-evangelicalism presents both a critique of evangelicalism as a stifling and immature intellectual system and an alternative epistemology, one that is very suspicious of certainties. The question is whether it can offer, or even whether it intends to offer, a coherent theological and epistemological alternative to evangelicalism. The critique has opened up a new door for many disaffected evangelicals, but on the other side of the door are many different paths and it is not clear which, if any, of these paths is the ‘right’ one. If post-evangelicalism remains true to its post-modern proclivities, then the likelihood is that there will be no correct way to represent the truth about Jesus Christ in the world.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it poses two serious problems, one theoretical, the other practical. It seems to me, first, that to be understood and communicated properly the gospel requires a coherent and shared epistemology – essentially a more or less objective and realistic grasp of the truth about Jesus Christ. At least, I think that the most appropriate response to the narrow and neurotic epistemology of modern evangelicalism is not a broadening of options but a more focused emphasis on something like historical-critical realism – not just any truth but a more open and intellectually confident approach to the truth that evangelicalism has always kept locked away in the safe of dogmatism.
Secondly, without a coherent understanding of what constitutes truth I suspect that post-evangelicalism will find it increasingly difficult to address the question of what the ‘gospel’ is and how it determines the faith and life of the church. Evangelicalism has been successful largely because it has given a rather simple and consistent answer to those questions. A post-evangelical church that outgrows that simplicity may find that it no longer has the same emotive and rhetorical resources to draw upon. That, I think, would be regrettable.
3. Building on this concern, I have some doubts about how post-evangelicalism will deal with some of the basic Christian parameters, especially those such as corporate worship, intercession, and evangelism which have been central to evangelicalism?s self-understanding. My fear is that post-evangelicalism will be so absorbed with the task of differentiating itself from evangelicalism, so focused on the spiritual needs of disaffected believers, that it will be unable to embrace these central commitments. Will post-evangelicalism ever become the big tent? Or will it remain an outpost on the fringe of things?a first-aid tent for the victims of intellectual asphyxiation?
4. ‘Post-evangelical’ as a defining concept is even less meaningful to the uninitiated than the term ‘evangelical’. That so much of the current debate revolves around these esoteric notions is indicative of the extent to which the church is preoccupied with the convoluted workings of its own digestive system. As with so many theological and ecclesiological discussions, the church has lost touch with external cultural and intellectual reality.
Post-evangelicalism
There are some good points you make here Andrew and I too have been wrestling with these in my own mind. I will try to add what I can to the discussion here:
1. At this point I do think that post evangelicalism is involved more in the process of stripping away things about faith that feel too dominated by a modern paradigm to boil taith down to its essense. What we do see is that some begin to reject all notions of historical faith, while others only have a feeling of new found freedom to explore areas that were dogmatic taboos under the modernist paradigm. I too have not seen much of a rejection or turn from some of the basics of evangelicalism and I too believe that basic faith in Jesus will not change in a post evangelical movement. Yet I wonder if this is a process of getting rid of all the added legalisms to the basics of the faith or if it is something different than that.
2. I like what you say here and I agree. I think that post evangelicalism should move towards a focusing of faith as I stated above. It is not that we just open up to all kinds of different and ‘new’ belief. To do so would be to move away from any kind of christian faith and its distinctives. I think the simple message of evangelicalism is good yet I think it may have communicated something that is only partially true. The gospel is not simply about getting into heaven. It is about a new life lived now. That opens up implications for how we live in culture, our purpose, mission, etc. I think the church has lost its mission in its search for propositional correctness. My hope is that there would be a simplifying of core faith propositions (these are needed) and a dialogical approach to those with different views as opposed to a win/lose apologetic approach.
3. I think it will remain an outpost if it spends all its time in intellectual deconstruction without looking towards praxis. The intitial reaction in any movement is to get rid of anything that looks like the old thing without really having any idea of what to do from there. So people want to get rid of basic Christian parameters as you state without any idea of the next step. It can become too reactionary and not practical. I think we need to think about bridge building and a humble respect for those who came before us. I too feel we could be in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
4. Agree totally. Faith needs to be worked out in context (culture and intellectual reality as you state). As long as we engage in studying trends while not attempting some kind of praxis we can become paralyzed by the amount of information and the quick pace of change.
good stuff
These are great remarks. I want to respond to one statement:
I definitely think we need to be sensitive to epistemology, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say we need “a” coherent and shared epistemology. I also think it would be a huge mistake to try to identify one particular approach (“historical-critical realism”) with post-evangelicalism. Where does that leave the non-realists? Or those who don’t think realism or non-realism are helpful terms? There is a danger of a new foundationalism: First you have to be a critical-realist, then you have to read The Resurrection of the Son of God, then you can be a Christian. Stanley Hauerwas warns against throwing our lot in with epistemological theory: “If you say you need a theory to know if it might be true that God raised Jesus from the dead, worship that theory, don’t worship the crucified and risen Jesus.” Now, I do think we need to work through epistemological issues, but I think we should do it in a nimble-footed way, not throwing our allegiance in with one particular perspective.
It's all about understanding
Steve, I take your point. There is a distinction here that needs to be clarified between a foundationalist epistemology and something that I have trouble putting a label on but which has a lot to do with coherence: is our reading of the New Testament coherent with other things that we know (eg. about the Old Testament, about first-century Judaism, about how historical texts work, about ancient language, and so on)?
What interests me about critical-realism is not that it provides us with better grounds for believing that God raised Jesus from the dead but that it gives us a better – and in some sense, therefore, a ‘truer’ – methodology for understanding what it means to say that God raised Jesus from the dead. I’m not trying to prove anything, just understand better. This is an important distinction. I have been part of a small local story-telling group. Today we looked at Propp’s structuralist analysis of fairy-stories. You can go a long way towards understanding how these stories function, how different conventional plot elements work together to produce a particular effect, without having to make a judgment about whether they are true or not. Of course, meaning has implications for reference: my own experience is that a better understanding of what the New Testament story means gives me greater confidence in the veracity of its details; a reading of the New Testament that appears to cohere well with its various interpretive contexts is bound to be more credible than one that doesn’t. But these are nevertheless distinct tasks.
There is also a pragmatic issue here. The argument for critical-realism at the moment is a counterweight to certain distorted or false hermeneutics that have held sway over both scholarly and popular biblical interpretation. There has been too much suspicion on the one hand and too much dogmatism on the other, and to that extent at least Tom Wright’s work provides a timely corrective: it is a ‘response to the narrow and neurotic epistemology of modern evangelicalism’. But it would be a mistake to make it an exclusive method of reading scripture or disallow subsequent developments or modifications to our core hermeneutic (‘core’ seems a better metaphor than ‘foundational’) as our thinking evolves. There are various legitimate and useful ways of reading scripture, but they do not necessarily serve the same purpose. If critical-realism is of particular importance at the moment (not least for an emerging theology), it is because it performs a particular task, it functions at a particular level of our theological thinking, it shapes a particular component in our belief system. It has a limited role, but I’m not sure that it’s wrong to seek some sort of consensus in this area. It seems to me that one of the distinctive traits of the emerging church is a growing commitment to understand our historical-theological origins better.
yes, but...
I’m sympathetic to much of what you’re saying. But I wonder whether if replacing one dogma (“narrow and neurotic epistemology”) with another (“critical realism”) is the right way to go? Why not just critique the narrow neurotic stuff and leave room at the table for those of us who have read Frei or Lindbeck (on the one hand) or Rorty and Hegel (on the other)? Wright’s critical realism still relies on a correspondence theory of truth, though chastened and a bit more sophisticated than most. But he still (1) Maintains a distinction between the knower and the known, and (2) doesn’t adequately account for the crucial epistemological role of the community of interpretation (the church) in the present day. The existence and nature of the church justifies Christian claims about Jesus’ resurrection (if anything does).
I love the interpretive story that Wright tells, and it does give a coherence to the biblical story that is compelling in many regards. But when he goes methodological, we find the weakest aspect of his project, and the end of Resurrection of Son of God is no more than a slightly updated rehash of Evidence that Demands a Verdict. The naivety is the belief that attention to the historical record will justify Christian convictions. To the non-Christian historian, that is ludicrous. The burden of epistemological justification can lie nowhere but on the shoulders of the community charged with faithfully witnessing to God’s reign. If Wright would have left out the methodology, he would have left room for that. Now I’m not saying any of this to argue anyone out of Wright’s critical realism. It’s not a bad epistemology. But I think there are other ones that deserve a hearing, and it just seems like a bad place to strive for consensus.
last post is mine....
Sorry for the “anonymous” thing.
Anyways, you say: “What interests me about critical-realism is not that it provides us with better grounds for believing that God raised Jesus from the dead but that it gives us a better – and in some sense, therefore, a ‘truer’ – methodology for understanding what it means to say that God raised Jesus from the dead.”
I would say that it’s not the critical-realist methodology that provides a better meaning of “god raised Jesus from the dead.” It’s the particular historical story that Wright tells us, which is really, really good, despite his “critical-realist methodology.”
Despite his "critical realist methodology"?
This is odd because Wright makes his critical-realist methodology the basis for his reconstruction of the historical narrative (see the summary of his argument from NTPG). At least, I think he would see the critical-realist approach as providing a necessary safeguard against alternative epistemologies (eg., positivist or reductionist) that are likely to produce a serious misreading of the narratives. The question then would be whether the story that he tells about Jesus could have been derived without recourse, implicitly or explicitly, to the sort of hermeneutical tools that he defines in NTPG. I rather suspect that the story is precisely and intrinsically the product of a committed critical-realist epistemology/hermeneutic.
despite.
You might be right about what Wright takes himself to be doing. But it is easy to see that critical realism and the particular narrative Wright provides are independent. One could be a critical realist and tell an entirely different narrative about Christian origins (as non-Christians would). One could also be a non-realist and tell the same narrative Wright does. My point is that the strength of Wright’s work is the narrative he tells, and his second-order philosophy of history is more trouble than its worth.
You might be correct that critical realism is being employed (by Wright or by others) as a practical response to crude evangelical epistemologies, but that raises an even more important fear I have: that post-evangelicals, in giving so much weight to evangelical dogmas will legitimate and privilege evangelicalism to a degree that they will concede too much to evangelicalism. The result will be (both intellectually and practically) that they will sacrifice credibility in the wider (non-evangelical) world of practice and discourse. Evangelicalism is where we come from, but we need to be inclusive and broad in choosing our discussants, and evangelicalism shouldn’t be the privileged discussion partner. (Wright is commendable in that regard in his project).
but more to the point
In terms of the larger issues that you are raising in this topic, I think the post-evangelical label/phenomenon is a really useful one and captures a large number of people who don’t know where else to go to categorize themselves. I think it should be mined and explored for all it is worth.
Thoughts
This is an interesting discussion. I know all Christians are called to evangelize. I do it by nature, most in my writing. Not so much in my speaking…I appreciate the discussion on this issue. I for one do not have a conscious intention to evangelize…certainly not in casual conversation…I am actually kinda scared be the power of ‘evangelization’ and certainly by ‘evangelical’ Christians. I mean that is a certain denomination you know, and a very aggressive one at that.
I think we all have to think like missionaries and meet people where they are at. We can not impose our views on anyone…We have to listen to them and offer help where we can.
I think how we act best determines our Christianity, our ‘evangelism’.