Evangelical addenda
As soon as I hit “Publish” on the last post, I felt some unease about how it might come across. I re-read it, and let me offer a few further comments, especially before I go read what anybody else makes of it.
1. My remarks there are meant primarily in a descriptive register. I’m trying to get at a dynamic I feel like I constantly observe, whether in person, in conversation, or in written form.
2. In that sense my post is one more mini-entry in a sort of sociology of American evangelicalism. What is going on with this community? is the founding question. Given that I live in Evangelical Land, I have a few thoughts.
3. I’m continually thinking about this question, since my students are mostly evangelicals, and I want to teach them well. Evangelicalism also (obviously) interacts with our politics and culture in significant ways. I’m thinking of this recent essay, as well as this one from a few years back; the latter essay I take to be one of the best and most succinct analyses of evangelicalism in the past few decades.
4. I imagine my rhetoric sounds more critical in tone than I meant it to be. I’m all aboard for educating anyone, not to mention evangelicals, in the faith and doctrines and ethics of historic Christianity. What I was wanting to recommend, though, is twofold. On the one hand, an awareness, on the part of those who belong or half-belong or once belonged to evangelicalism, that letting go of the evangelical hermeneutic just is to let go of a crucial, perhaps a fundamental, piece of what it means to live and move and have one’s being as an evangelical Christian. If that hermeneutic is a sine qua non of evangelical being, then it is worth admitting and accepting that the loss of one is the loss of the other.
5. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean a chasm separates former from current evangelicals. It doesn’t mean conversation is impossible. What it means it that, even more than awareness, what is required is explicit acknowledgement that one’s aims in teaching, writing, and argument are ordered to, or dependent upon, the student, reader, or listener rejecting the evangelical hermeneutic. It entails as well that one’s arguments that do not operate in accordance with that hermeneutic will just to that extent fail, falling on dear ears, at least for dyed-in-the-wool evangelicals; and thus that if one’s arguments are to succeed, even with the goal of persuading one’s audience to reject said hermeneutic, they must operate on its terms.
6. I am not myself an evangelical, though once or twice I’ve been mistaken for one. But because my own ecclesial tradition is currently in process of being absorbed by evangelicalism; because most of my students and neighbors are evangelicals of one sort or another; because I’ve gotten to know some thoughtful evangelicals over the years; because my research focuses on the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture (a hobbyhorse of evangelical scholarship); and because evangelicalism is such a potent force in American culture and politics, I find myself reflecting, even perseverating, on evangelicalism just about every day. Hence these observations.
7. Evangelicalism is undergoing what appears to me an epochal fracturing in our time, before our very eyes. One sees it everywhere. I see it especially in the relationship between church leaders (pastors, professors, writers) and church members, i.e., the rank and file. That relationship is frayed and fraying. It is often a function of class and/or education. Running parallel with those divisions is theology. Over and over I see the theology and ethics of leaders and of members drifting apart. Neither reflects or represents the other. In effect you have two different churches within a single church: the faith and morals of leadership versus the faith and morals of the pews. That is a real problem. In the case of the original post, I was trying to put my finger on the, or at least one, source of that divide. The presence or absence of the evangelical hermeneutic in leadership/membership is one such source, or so it seems to me.* My goal was to draw attention to that. If I didn’t, allow this post to rectify that error.
*A related but distinct problem that I see is not that either party rejects the evangelical hermeneutic, but that each holds to it on paper but in fact adverts to some other hermeneutic (typically, though not always, experiential, political, or cultural in nature) as determinative of theological judgments. If the second essay I linked to above is right, this dynamic follows the trajectory of Protestant liberalism overtaking, eventually, all churches and Christian institutions, however traditional or evangelical they may have begun as or may continue to claim to be. That phenomenon is worth reflecting on further in greater detail some other time.
