Back & Forth to the Future
A Critical Symposium on A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future
Issued in the September issue of Christianity Today, A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future notes that today “the church is confronted by a host of master narratives that contradict and compete with the gospel,” and calls Evangelicals to “strengthen their witness through a recovery of the faith articulated by the consensus of the ancient church and its guardians in the traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation, and the evangelical awakenings.”
The six sections of the Call’s “appeal to live the biblical narrative” describe the Church as “the continuation of the biblical narrative” and its worship as “telling and enacting God’s narrative,” with spiritual formation the “embodiment of God’s narrative.” Most begin with a general description of the Christian teaching and then a call to Evangelicals to embody it.
The Call was convened by Robert Webber and Philip Kenyon of Northern Seminary near Chicago, and had as theological editors Hans Boersma of Regent College, Howard Snyder of Asbury Theological Seminary, Kevin J. Vanhoozer of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and D. H. Williams of Baylor University.
The text of the Call and more information about it can be found at www.ancientfutureworship.com.
Back
and Forth to the Future:
A Critical Symposium on A
Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future
What Lies Behind by Wilfred M. McClay
Listen Closely by Russell D. Moore
A Gawdly Proposal by S. M. Hutchens
Born Again Free by D. G. Hart
Antiquity & Absence by Gillis Harp
A Call Too Vague by David Mills
What Lies Behind
by Wilfred M. McClay
Although in the end I come away less than enchanted by this Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future, I see a number of encouraging features in it, and it would be unfair and ungenerous of me to fail to acknowledge them. Indeed, each of its principal points is more or less on target, at least in broad outline.
The Gospel account of the world should trump all others in the minds of Evangelical Christians. Evangelicals need to “take seriously” the Church as a visible institution, and be respectful of its sacramental life, of deep and rooted traditions such as the church calendar, and of creedal and confessional affirmations.
Public worship should not be an arid intellectual exercise, nor should it be an exercise in narcissistic individual therapy. Spirituality should be molded and guided by a rigorous traditional catechesis. And the Church should be willing to “recover its countercultural mission to the world.”
Wilfred M. McClay holds the SunTrust Chair of Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and is the author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (North Carolina) and A Student's Guide to U.S. History (ISI Books). He is a member of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.
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