The impending evangelical crisis

The evangelical church stands on the brink of a real crisis. Modern culture, with its 'soundbite' ideology, its consumerism, and its emphasis on 'feeling good' rather than thinking correctly, is making massive inroads into a church eager to attract people from the outside.

The result is, in many quarters, an uncritical abandonment of doctrinal emphases, of hard-headed theological thinking, and of historical evangelical identity, for an emphasis on experience over doctrine, and the 'feel-good factor' over thoughtfulness. In such a climate, theologians should have a key part to play in calling the church back to the Bible, and in helping it to think critically about its practices and agenda.
In theory, this should be entirely possible. Earlier this year, I attended a conference of evangelical scholars where we were told that the gains made by evangelicalism in the academy, as represented by the number not just of university posts but of university chairs held by evangelicals, far outstripped anything earlier generations would ever have dreamed possible. And yet, like Mark Twain who commented that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated, I find myself regarding reports of evangelical scholarship's life to have been blown out of all proportion. Some of the claims for the gains made by evangelical scholarship are undoubtedly true, but some are based more upon sleight of hand rather than upon real achievement. As a member of the 'academy' and an 'evangelical', it saddens me to write this - but at least coming from an insider, my assessment cannot be dismissed as the ramblings of an anti-intellectual bigot.

Shifting definition

In Oliver Barclay's reflections on the history of evangelicalism, he points to a distinction which once existed but which has now all but vanished from our vocabulary: that between conservative evangelicalism, which emphasised Scriptural authority, substitutionary atonement, and the need for new birth, and liberal evangelicalism which did not maintain, and often repudiated, the authority and sufficiency of the Bible, denied substitutionary atonement, and de-emphasised the new birth(1). In the evangelical scholarly world, this distinction is now meaningless. Any individual who takes the Bible seriously at any level and regards Christ as having some kind of ill-defined perennial significance is entitled to call themselves evangelical. One has only to look at the membership lists of scholarly evangelical fraternals linked to the UCCF to realise that, despite the need for all to subscribe to the clear statement of faith, some members simply do not take it seriously or understand it in diametrically-opposed ways. Constitutional stability is no antidote to theological anarchy.

Collapse of consensus

Nowhere is this anarchy more evident than in the collapse of doctrinal consensus in the world of scholarly evangelicalism over recent years. This is most obvious in the discussions surrounding the doctrine of Scripture. One need only look at many of the works emerging from contemporary evangelical scholars to find that the notion of Scriptural authority as understood in any of its classical, orthodox ways has in general been replaced either by the language and concepts of the neo-orthodoxy or simply by silence on the most prickly issues. The enemies are too often Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, and Carl Henry; the allies, even at their most conservative, G.C. Berkouwer and Karl Barth(2). Many evangelical biblical scholars ignore the issue entirely, professing faith in historic evangelicalism but then treating Scripture as if it were a completely human document. The problem is that there is an intimate connection between the doctrine of Scripture and that of God, of Christ, and of salvation - to dispense with the orthodox tradition on one point and claim to hold to orthodoxy on the others is at best inconsistent, at worst impossible. Scripture is thus the most obvious point of diversity in the evangelical scholarly world, but it cannot be the only one, and fundamental disagreements over the person of Christ and salvation come more and more to the fore in debates among evangelical scholars. One simply cannot divorce presuppositions, method, and content - start with liberal, human presuppositions and one must inevitably end up with a God who is merely humanity writ large.

Lack of accountability

Then there is the lack of accountability which scholars feel towards the church, a problem not confined to the universities but which is also found throughout theological colleges. This attitude was symbolised by a paper given to the Tyndale Fellowship in 1994, where a prominent scholar and evangelical put the case that scholarship was now so specialised that only other scholars were qualified to judge it. If this is true, then a number of consequences follow.
First, the biblical notion of church government collapses, as the activities of certain church members, the scholars, are no longer under church discipline. They are simply no longer accountable to the church for what they say and do, and that solely on the grounds of their technical expertise.
Second, given the historic role of scholars within the church - as those who, to use the image employed by J.I. Packer, act as sewage farms, filtering out error and articulating the truth in a coherent fashion - then setting scholars and scholarship above the church's discipline can only mean that the church's testimony comes to be determined by the latest scholarly consensus. This, as anyone acquainted with the history of scholarship knows, is a very unstable and volatile thing indeed.
In short, the need for ecclesiastical accountability, difficult as it may be given the technical nature of much scholarship, cannot be ignored or shrugged off by the scholars. The fact that genetic research is highly technical does not mean that the scientists in this field should only be accountable to each other; they too must answer to the wider standards and expectations of society. Theological scholars, then, should not make the technical nature of their work an excuse for unbridled freedom, but see their work in the context of the church as a whole. They need to be working members of the local church as much as anyone else.

Significance of scholarship

Some may well regard all this as irrelevant. It is one thing, they might say, for scholars to abandon or redefine the doctrine of Scripture or atonement or justification, but that has no impact upon the church. In reply, I can only say that working among young people for the last five years has persuaded me that the greatest threat to classic evangelicalism comes not from the liberals - they are open about their views, and students are rarely taken in by them. It comes instead from the trickle-down effect of the writings of those who not only question classic evangelical positions (and I am not averse to raising such questions, I desire only that those who subsequently abandon the classic evangelical positions make this clear), but who are also re-writing history in a way which destroys the distinction between classic and liberal evangelicalism, and marginalises, if it does not remove from the picture altogether, those who hold to historic, classic evangelical positions(3). It is this kind of scholarship which, in my experience, does most damage, misleading and confusing young people through its vague discussions of Scriptural authority and its highly selective and tendentious reading of history.
The saddest thing in this context is that few of the elder statesmen of evangelicalism are prepared to point out what is happening, apparently happy to allow the heirs presumptive to overthrow their legacy. Surely if the emperor has no clothes, it is more appropriate for a member of the imperial household to point this out than to leave it to the cheeky young boy in the crowd? We need to realise that scholarship which robs young people of Hodge, Warfield, and Henry, with all their human faults, inadequacies and mistakes, and puts in their place Barth, Berkouwer, Lindbeck and Frei, not only robs the church of its past but also denies to it future leaders who really understand the nature of evangelicalism.

Disaster pending

To return to the start, I believe there is an evangelical disaster pending. What form it will take can only be a matter of speculation at the moment. In my worst nightmares, it involves a church which has abandoned theological thinking in favour of vacuous human experience or mindless doctrinalism, and a leadership which has little knowledge of its past and no sound foundation in Scripture. Such a church will need theologians to guide it back to the right pathway; but in my nightmare, the evangelical scholars are too busy telling each other how well they are doing, and dancing to the tune of the academy, to have the time, the energy, or the theological backbone to help rectify the situation.

Dr. Carl R. Trueman
Lecturer in Historical Theology
University of Nottingham

1. Evangelicalism in Britain: A Personal Sketch , Oliver Barclay, (IVP, 1997), p.12.

2. Significant in this context is Carl Henry's comment on an evangelical post-liberal colloquy at Wheaton College, where a number of respected evangelical leaders were involved: 'Not a single representative of historic evangelical orthodoxy committed to the unbroken authority of the Bible was featured.'

3. See, for example, the claim of Alister McGrath that evangelicalism has 'always resisted the temptation to identify the text of Scripture itself with revelation'. A Passion for Truth (IVP, 1996), p.54. This is a book intended as a standard resource for future evangelical thinking.