Reforming the Evangelical Conscience
The Unformed Conscience of Evangelicalism: Recovering the Church’s
Moral Vision
by J. Daryl Charles
Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2002
(277 pages; $20.00, paper)
reviewed by Hans Boersma
Taking his cue from Carl Henry’s 1947 The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, Evangelical scholar J. Daryl Charles sets out in The Unformed Conscience of Evangelicalism to inject a moral corrective into the life of Evangelicalism. The author’s passion makes clear that he regards the current situation no less desperate than the lack of social concern Evangelicals faced in the 1940s. Where Henry worried about fundamentalism being reduced to a “tolerated cult status,” Charles warns that Evangelicals are in danger of devolving into a “large sect” that is irrelevant to the purposes of God and the needs of culture.
A number of factors have contributed to the decline of Evangelical ethics. Drawing on the papal encyclical Veritatis Splendor (1993), Charles laments the current alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which, he argues, may well lead to totalitarianism and has already led to a loss of character. The sentimentalism that has elevated tolerance to the ultimate norm is no longer capable of recognizing that to tolerate intrusions of evil onto the public square is a vice: “The strongest advocates of tolerance insist on the idea that the public square is morally neutral. But, of course, as we know, there is no such thing as neutrality, just as we know that those voices screaming the loudest for neutrality are not neutral themselves.”
Furthermore, Evangelicals have bought into the “therapeutic model,” in which subjective feelings consistently trump concern for theology and truth. Appealing to Paul Vitz, Charles argues that therapists have usurped the role of the clergy, so that Americans have effectively installed a new priesthood. Along with this, a biological determinism has eroded Americans’ sense of accountability and responsibility. If genetic makeup determines human behavior, it is impossible to make moral judgments about criminal activity. On this view, “ethics reduces purely to biology and neuroscience. Murder? Well, blame it on the knife.”
Some Evangelicals, moreover, have drunk deeply from the anti-intellectual well of pietism, which combines a distrust of learning with a stress on subjective experience. A final contributing factor, insists Charles, is the Evangelical knee-jerk reaction to anything that is vaguely reminiscent of works-righteousness. Luther’s distrust of the books of James, Jude, and 2 Peter has had the effect of separating theology and ethics, with Evangelicals focusing on the former at the expense of the latter. “Authentic faith,” insists Charles, “must be demonstrated, active and ‘completed’, which is to say, evidenced by attendant works; otherwise, it is not true faith at all.”
As part of his diagnosis of the problems, Charles outlines a number of biblical polarities or paradoxes. In each case, he sees us running into problems when we choose either side of a polarity over the other: We need to affirm both divine transcendence and condescension, holiness and accommodation, justice and mercy, law and grace, truth and love, human dignity and depravity, tolerance and absolutism, freedom and responsibility. To play one against the other is to run into serious theological—and consequently also ethical—problems.
Theological Medicine
Charles does more, however, than present a lament on the current state of Evangelicalism. His book contains a number of emphases that combine into a medicinal potion meant to restore Evangelicalism’s vibrancy. The first of these is a return to natural law. He considers the eclipse of natural-law thinking a result of the Enlightenment. Without a return to natural law, argues Charles, it is impossible “to equip the church effectively in terms of its cultural mandate.” He appeals to Carl Braaten and argues that ecumenical dialogue on the place of natural law can assist us in countering the deconstruction of the “classical model and legal principles on which Western culture is founded.” Charles also presents a carefully constructed explication of Acts 17:22–31 in defence of his plea for natural law.
A second emphasis is the Reformed understanding of the relationship between law and grace. Taking Matthew 5:17–20 as his launchpad, Charles sends missiles into the dispensational separation between law and grace and insists that the law was God’s gracious gift; that in neither the Old nor the New Testament was it something by which people could earn their own salvation; that the moral law consists of eternal and timeless principles; that the need to do good works continues to be important in the New Testament; and that the Sermon on the Mount presents a private ethic, not a public policy.
In short, Charles wants us to reaffirm the significance of the law as the expression of God’s will for our lives: “Contemporary Protestants have tended to underestimate greatly the value and role of law within the wider scope of divine revelation. The early Christians, by contrast, traced their ethical teaching back to revelation contained in the Torah—a source and ethical standard reiterated by the prophets.”
Hans Boersma is the Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Professor in Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary.
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