The problem with evangelicalism
There’s not only one, granted. But this isn’t one of those posts. It’s not a beat-up-on-the-evangelicals manifesto in nine parts. It’s not about evangelicals and politics, or about that popular Christianity Today podcast, or about which marks truly define an evangelical, and whether they ought to be doctrinal or sociological or other.
This is a minor little comment about theology and hermeneutics. Here it is.
Evangelicalism isn’t merely a style (a way of being Christian) or a worldview (a set of beliefs). It’s a hermeneutic. It’s a path from here to there, a map for movement, a manual for drawing conclusions and making judgments about what Christian faith is, what Christian behavior entails, and how to inhabit the world. That manual occasionally takes written form but it usually operates in unwritten circulation, imbibed like mother’s milk from (successful) catechesis in active involvement in evangelical churches.
The substance of that manual may be summarized in a slogan: nuda scriptura. That is:
the Bible alone is for Christians the one encompassing and all-purpose practical guide to faith, ethics, politics, and culture;
the individual Christian is equipped and encouraged (perhaps required) to use the Bible in order to discover its normative teaching and guidance for him or herself regarding matters of doctrine and morals;
in principle no one and nothing—no person (a fellow Christian) or office (a pastor) or institution (a church) or text (past tradition)—is either better equipped or more authoritative with respect to reading the Bible for its normative teaching on doctrine and morals than the living baptized individual adult believer;
whatever the Bible does not speak about in clear, direct, and explicit terms is for Christians adiaphora.
Let me remind you again that few evangelical scholars would endorse this hermeneutic as a positive proposal. But it is unquestionably the default setting for numberless evangelical believers, churches, and institutions. And the main point I want to make here is that that is a feature, not a bug. Moreover—and this is the kicker—to cease to believe in and act according to this hermeneutic is in a real sense to cease being evangelical, at least as that term is embodied and enacted in concrete communities and the society at large.
This is why, for example, so many evangelicals who ostensibly remain evangelicals while earning graduate degrees and teaching in institutions of higher education no longer attend the kinds of churches in which they were raised but worship instead in Anglican or similarly liturgical traditions. Their on-the-page beliefs (inerrancy, sola scriptura, virginal conception, bodily resurrection, traditional marriage) remain the same, but the outward devotional and liturgical expression of those beliefs is different, indeed necessarily different, rooted as those external practices are in a crucial hermeneutical transformation.
So far I’m merely offering a description. This isn’t a critique. The title of this post, however, refers to a “problem.” Here’s the problem as I see it.
There are people who were raised evangelical and still claim, or at least do not repudiate, the title. But such people have migrated away from the evangelical hermeneutic in their studies, their experiences, their teaching and writing, and/or their ecclesial home. Nevertheless they still aim to speak to and for, if not on behalf of, evangelicals. They seek to persuade evangelicals to believe this or that, or reject this or that. Having unlearned or let go of the evangelical hermeneutic, though, they no longer speak from and to that hermeneutic; they don’t argue according to its premises; they write by different premises, rooted in a different hermeneutic.
Always—and I do mean always—the result is a failure to communicate (not to mention to persuade). The message is lost in translation. The speaker and listener, the author and reader, simply talk past each other. For they are not speaking the same language. They no longer share enough in common for their disagreements to be intelligible. Instead, their disagreements are an inevitable function of differing first principles, in this case, opposed hermeneutics of Christian faith and theology with respect to Holy Scripture.
Yet rather than this situation being seen as both obvious and unavoidable, the tenor of the constant miscommunication is, on both sides, rancor, distrust, and endless anathemas. I’m not so much concerned right now with the folks on the receiving end, those who still hold to the evangelical hermeneutic. I’m concerned with those who’ve lost or rejected that hermeneutic but who continue to speak to those who hold it.
It should be neither surprising nor frustrating if, should I say, “We as Christians ought to believe X doctrine because Y saint or Z tradition teaches it,” the response from a true-blue evangelical is, “Why should I care what Y or Z say? I don’t see X taught clearly, directly, and explicitly in the Bible.” For you are not seeking to persuade on the terms held by your listener or reader. The latter senses intuitively that what you are really asking him or her is to stop being the sort of evangelical they are, i.e., you are asking them to give up the evangelical hermeneutic. That may be a worthy endeavor—almost everything I’ve written as a scholar is in service to that endeavor—but that is a different task than making an argument by and for and among a certain community, on the terms set and shared by that community, that presupposes that those very terms, which in turn define that community, are wrong on principle. It’s a bait and switch, intended or not.
Furthermore, it’s important to see that you can’t have your cake (evangelical hermeneutic) and eat it too (sacred tradition). There are plenty of traditional doctrines that are plausibly compatible with the evangelical hermeneutic; there are fewer of them that follow, logically and necessarily, therefrom. Take divine simplicity, or the eternal generation of the Son, or the perpetual virginity of Mary, or even the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople. None of these is incompatible with the plain teaching of Scripture. Can each and every one, in each and all of its details, be generated (1) directly from scriptural exegesis (2) to the exclusion of all other interpretive options (3) in accordance with the evangelical hermeneutic? I’m not so sure.
Which is why evangelicalism is such a rambunctious, fractious collective. It’s built for incessant, indefinite dissent. Someone or someones will always raise an objection, and precisely in accordance with the rules for assent and consent stipulated by the evangelical hermeneutic.
Biblicism is a woolly, ungovernable thing. It has a life of its own, because (among other reasons) it empowers individuals to interpret the text for themselves, with unpredictable results undecided in advance of reading, discussion, and debate.
In my view, for those who would remain in the evangelical family, you have to choose. You can be a biblicist, and stay; or you can stop being a biblicist, and leave. The sharpness of that choice need not be a matter of literal church membership. But theologically speaking, in terms of ideas and writing and how we make arguments and to whom and according to what premises, it seems to me that the choice is indeed just that sharp. It’s one or the other. There is no third way.
