Evangelical Ressourcement
Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World
by Robert E. Webber
Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999
(240 pages; $16.99, paper)
Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious
Protestants
by D. H. Williams
Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Co., 1999
(243 pages; $16.00, paper)
reviewed by Addison H. Hart
There has been a concern within Evangelical Protestantism since the late 1970s to rediscover its own roots in ancient, patristic, and catholic Christianity. The watershed event for this effort can perhaps be found with the Chicago Call of May 1977, when a gathering of Evangelical leaders and scholars from various backgrounds signed a joint document calling for a return to “historic” Christianity. Among those who signed, one finds the names of Donald Bloesch, Peter Gillquist, Thomas Howard, and Robert Webber. Of these, Gillquist moved on to Eastern Orthodoxy and Howard to Roman Catholicism. Robert Webber, who now teaches theology at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary (and formerly at Wheaton College), became an Episcopalian, and was indeed the editor of a book during the 1980s about Evangelicals venturing forth on the so-called Canterbury Trail. Before that he had written a book entitled Common Roots (Zondervan, 1978), in which he exhorted Evangelicals to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the church fathers.
Since 1978 there has been some headway in the Evangelical rediscovery of the Fathers. To note just one encouraging sign (and one previously commented upon in these pages by Father Patrick Henry Reardon), InterVarsity Press has been producing its Ancient Christian Commentary series, under the editorial oversight of Thomas Oden. When it is complete, this series will run to 27 volumes, containing the text of the entire Bible (with the Apocrypha), along with a substantial catena of patristic commentary.
But despite such promising evidence, American Evangelicalism has mostly moved in a direction other than that proposed in the Chicago Call of 1977. Mark Noll and David Wells have been prominent among those most critical of their own tradition, revealing the unsettling extent of theological illiteracy among American Evangelicals in the 1990s.1 Before that, Philip J. Lee delivered a withering critique of what he termed “Protestant gnosticism”—that wide current of thought that had reduced a formerly robust Protestant theological tradition to individualism, subjectivism, anti-authoritarianism, escapism, emotionalism, and a sentimental “conversion” to a “Christ without content”2 (May American Catholics with similar leanings take warning!). The growth of the secularized mega-churches, for example, which cater to their consumers’ “felt needs” and are characterized by their “market-driven” and “state-of-the-art-ministry” mentality, illustrate the very worst of nightmarish American Evangelical religion. A visit to the Willow Creek mega-church near Chicago (which I made not too long ago) is to step into a version of “Christianity” that would seem surrealistic, or even somewhat traumatizing, to just about anyone but a modern American suburbanite who is already inured to the frenzied and hectic environment of an airport or shopping mall. The church fathers would flee such a place to find a true sanctuary for the worship of God Almighty.
Two new books have appeared this past year, sounding once again the call to an Evangelical ressourcement. Both books address the American Evangelical scene, and both authors still find the remedy for Evangelicalism’s culturally contracted ills in a vital appropriation of the patristic Tradition.
Robert Webber has returned to his earlier work, Common Roots, and has rewritten it entirely as Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World. The major new ingredient in this latest rendition is his engagement with “postmodernism”—something of no concern, obviously, back in 1978 when Common Roots first appeared. However, since then, a cultural shift has taken place, and postmodernism has supposedly come to dominate Western culture. In a nutshell, postmodernism is a worldview that denies the knowability of absolutes, asserts that all so-called truth is (really) subjective, denies any authority to language and insists instead on its radical relativity (that is, it has no immediate relation to universal truth), insists that the “meta-narrative of a particular community only speaks for that community,” and consequently sees “the demise of the subject/object distinction” altogether (p. 23). Webber claims that this emerging culture poses both new challenges and new opportunities for the mission of Christianity. Correctly viewing the older cultural paradigm of “modernism” (depicted as rationalistic, the product of the Enlightenment, Cartesian, etc.) as hurtful to Christianity, Webber finds some promising aspects of the emerging postmodern worldview, which he enumerates in the book. “Where do we find a Christianity that speaks meaningfully to a postmodern world?” he asks pragmatically. “The classical tradition appears to be the most productive,” he answers (p. 24). It is, it seems, “the kind of Christianity that attracts the new generation of Christians” (p. 27).
Rather surprisingly, then, this line of reasoning sounds starkly utilitarian (indeed, “modern”), similar to the sort of thing one might hear as an excuse for George Barna’s market-strategy version of “doing church” or for the Willow Creek emporium. The rationale here for restoring “the classical tradition” is, apparently, because it works. Sad to say, you can’t get a whole lot more untraditional than that. Webber does insist a few pages later, though, that “the primary reason to return to the Christian tradition is because it is truth that has the power to speak to a postmodern world” (p. 29, emphasis added). Still, I’m tempted to ask: What if this didn’t have the “power” (a more appropriate phrase might have been “perceived relevance”) to speak to our postmodern world, would it still be “truth” for us? That may seem an unfair question, but when we’re talking about postmodernism, such things get awfully slippery.
The underlying issue here is a serious one, and it concerns the nature of truth itself. In its very essence the Christian faith is unblinkingly realist (pace Ockham and his heirs), not nominalist. If such were not the case, St. Paul would not have had much to say on Mars Hill. He certainly would not have made such bold assertions about the unknown God who can really and truly be known. (And speaking of Mars Hill, did Paul’s truth prove to have the “power”—was it immediately effective—to speak to a premodern Athens? The results of his sermon suggest otherwise.) The New Testament simply assumes that objective, absolute, and knowable truth is real. The Fathers, the Medieval Scholastics, and even the Reformers do the same. I’m sure that Robert Webber does, too, and yet his fairly accepting attitude towards postmodernism and his aforementioned utilitarian streak lead me to suspect that he may not be entirely comfortable with Christian realism (what the Evangelical Francis Schaeffer used to refer to as “the true truth”). He does assert that the Christian “metanarrative” is true, and that we cannot negotiate this claim in a postmodern context; but true-blue postmodernists are not very likely to allow this one exception to their dogmatic perception of reality.
One must insist here, too, that those verities that postmodernism most stridently denies (the knowability of absolutes, the authority of language, a universal and normative “metanarrative” such as the gospel professes itself to be, the subject/object distinction) are not simply products of Enlightenment “modernism.” Rather, they are “the permanent things,” deriving from the eternal and authoritative Logos of God, who, through his incarnation, has definitively revealed to us the true God. Such a revelation has nothing whatsoever to do with the mind-numbingly dull nonsense foisted on us by “postmodernist thinkers.” The latter is little more than a radical distrust of God’s good gift of human reason. It is, quite possibly, the natural end result of modernism itself, the sort of sheer nihilism foreseen by Nietzsche. Postmodernism is something we Christians would all do well to leave alone just as surely as Brer Rabbit would have been well advised to leave the Tar-Baby alone. Despite Webber’s belief in its promising qualities, it is instead something to be corrected when it appears in our churches for the simple reason that postmodernism is fundamentally at odds with the “classical Tradition.”
Addison H. Hart is retired from active ministry as parish priest and university chaplain. He is the author of Knowing Darkness: On Skepticism, Melancholy, Friendship, and God and The Yoke of Jesus: A School for the Soul in Solitude (both from Eerdmans). His forthcoming book is a study of the Sermon on the Mount. He lives and writes in Norheimsund, Norway.
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