The Evangelical Hypothesis

The Evangelical Hypothesis: Recovering the Counterimperial Promise of Evangelicalism

A lecture given on November 17, 2011 in the course, “Introduction to Systematic Theology,” at Princeton Theological Seminary. The lecture is a version of the blog essay, “The Evangelical Hypothesis,” published online at Two Friars and a Fool on August 16.

I begin with a fact: there is no consensus about what the word “evangelical” means today. The word comes of course from the Greek New Testament word euangelion, meaning “good message.” In Germany, the word evangelisch simply means “Protestant.” As German theologian Oswald Bayer notes, “evangelical” was “mainly a concept in imperial law,” referring to the body of Protestant churches within the Holy Roman Empire—the corpus evangelicorum. In the North American context, the word has a very complicated and diverse history. The Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, established by historians Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch, distinguishes between three senses of the word “evangelical.” First, there is a doctrinal or thematic definition, most often associated with the fourfold definition provided by David Bebbington. In this sense, evangelical refers to a commitment to: (a) conversionism, the notion that lives have to be changed; (b) activism, the expression of the gospel in practical action; (c) biblicism, a high regard for scripture; and (d) crucicentrism, the emphasis on the cross of Christ as the doctrinal center of faith. This definition has more recently been revised by the Canadian evangelical theologian, John Stackhouse, who changes activism to the broader conception of mission and adds the fifth category of “transdenominationalism.” I’ll return to this later. The second sense of evangelical is a kind of style, rather than a set of beliefs. Here the emphasis is on an individual piety that is not restricted to any one denomination or community. So this could include everyone from Catholic charismatics to the Dutch Reformed. The third understanding of evangelical refers more specifically to the coalition of religious groups that formed after the Second World War in response to the fundamentalist-modernist controversies, which includes the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Seminary, and the publication Christianity Today.

The lesson to take away from these different meanings of the word “evangelical” is that the attempt to provide a universal definition of the word is impossible and runs contrary to evangelicalism’s own diverse history. In the time remaining, I want to articulate what I call the “evangelical hypothesis.” I take the language of hypothesis from Alain Badiou’s book, The Communist Hypothesis. Just as he refers to the “idea of communism,” so I will refer to the “idea of evangelicalism.” By this, I do not mean to give a definition that encompasses any empirical group of self-described “evangelicals.” My goal is rather to articulate what I take to be one idea or truth that comes to expression in evangelicalism. My claim is that this idea or truth is radically counterimperial, and it is because of this idea that I think evangelicalism, despite its near-total capitulation to empire, remains the best hope for a subversive theopolitical praxis in a post-Christian world.

Before I state what the evangelical hypothesis is, let me give you some of my family history. I am a direct descendent of Jonathan Blanchard, the founder of Wheaton College, one of the flagship schools in American evangelicalism. Blanchard was a pupil of Charles Finney, a leader in the Second Great Awakening and the second president of Oberlin College. Finney is, to put it mildly, a radical figure in American Christianity. He lived from 1792 to 1875, during which time the United States experienced major religious and political transformations. The Second Great Awakening is the origin of most of contemporary evangelical or nonconformist religious trends. Many of these we find problematic, if not repulsive, today, such as the end-times fervor that arose with the dispensationalism of John Nelson Darby (1800-1882). Others are intriguing or amusing for one reason or another, such as the rise of Seventh-Day Adventism or the creation of the Mormon faith. In the midst of these developments, a group of Calvinists came to reject many of the Reformed doctrines with which they were raised in light of what they saw to be a new situation for the church. The old doctrine of predestination was unable, in their view, to either (a) account for the kinds of personal changes and conversions they experienced in this period of revival or (b) fund the kind of social and political activism they believed was essential to becoming a Christian. Charles Finney was the most outspoken member of this group, and his publication in 1835, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, sparked a national debate over these issues. Finney proclaimed himself a proponent of what he called “the new measures,” referring to new church practices guided by this new cultural situation. In these lectures, he made what was then a shocking statement: “The proper end of all doctrine is practice. Any thing brought forward as doctrine, which cannot be made use of as practical, is not preaching the gospel” (184).  He not only got rid of predestination on this ground, but he reconceived conversion itself to mean that one “becom[es] as ‘useful’ as possible in the world” (Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, 18).

(A fifty-page “review” of this work was written in the journal Biblical Repertory and Theological Review—the precursor to the Princeton Theological Review—by Albert Dod, a professor of mathematics at what is now Princeton University and professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. You can find the piece in its entirety in the seminary library’s digital collections online, as well as its counterpart from the previous issue of the journal, another fifty-page piece on a collection of Finney’s sermons.)

How did Finney’s ideas translate into everyday life? Here I will have to be brief. In his Lectures on Revivals, Finney argues that “revivals are hindered when ministers and churches take wrong ground in regard to any question involving human rights” (Lectures, 265).  By understanding the gospel in terms of the universal involvement in sin and the universal offer of grace, Finney drew the logical conclusion that all people are understood to be equal before God. As a result, restrictions on who can participate in the work of the church are nullified, and hierarchical divisions are no longer viewed as theologically legitimate. Long before feminism ever became accepted in American society, much less in the mainline denominations, these revivalist evangelicals were openly egalitarian. Not only that, but Finney was one of the country’s most vocal abolitionists. Prior to his involvement, the abolitionist movement viewed its work as a slow, gradual process. But Finney and his disciples preached “immediate emancipation,” and he worked toward this by having new converts walk from the altar call to the back of the church where they would sign up for the abolitionist movement or some other reformist group. Finney refused communion to slaveholders and openly preached against it as a social sin. Finney’s most well-known convert was Theodore Weld, who became one of the major leaders in the abolitionist movement. His tracts on the issue were the catalyst for many of the later political developments. When Finney was offered a job as professor (and later as president) of Oberlin, he made it a condition of his arrival that the school would be open to both women and African-Americans—making it the first such school of its kind in the country. Blanchard founded Wheaton on this same principle.

Finney is, of course, only one person, and he is by no means uniformly worthy of praise, as Ted Smith brilliantly explores. I bring him up as an illustration of what I see as a red thread running through the entire history of evangelicalism, in both its European and North American manifestations. We can track this thread from its origins in the Anabaptist opposition to the magisterial Reformation’s tacit (and often explicit) affirmation of Christendom all the way to contemporary nonconformist efforts, such as New Monasticism. Ecclesial developments as varied as the emphasis on parachurch organizations, the formation of the so-called “emerging church,” and the move of Christianity to the global South are all indicative of this evangelical idea—despite the many problems associated with these developments. What is this thread, this single idea? Here I want to return to Stackhouse’s two notions of mission and transdenominationalism. By mission, he means a socioeconomic and political engagement that is basic to the gospel itself; by transdenominationalism, he means a conception of the church’s work that transcends institutional structures and fosters ecumenical partnerships. I think we can and should radicalize Stackhouse’s vision of evangelicalism.

The evangelical hypothesis that I wish to put forward is what I call “mission without churches,” which is a play on the phrase often used by Badiou to define his version of communism, viz. “politics without parties.” By “mission without churches” I mean that evangelical faith brings to expression, however obliquely and indirectly, the truth that the mission of God is subtracted from the logic of religion. Christian faith is absolutely independent of any and every religious structure (or “church”) that would attempt to legitimize it. Evangelicalism, properly understood, is an anarchic mode of Christian existence. Just because I speak of religious institutions does not mean that I restrict the word “church” to denominations and other self-identified religious groups. In the same way that Luther declared “god” to be whatever one worships, so too whatever provides the ideological support or social matrix for one’s identity is “church.” For many self-described evangelicals today, for example, the “church” takes the form of the Republican party and the American empire. But these evangelicals betray the radical insights that come to expression in the actual history of evangelicalism—a history marked by a refusal to let tradition control the exigencies of the moment, a refusal to let abstract doctrine control practice, a refusal to let secular and religious authorities control the movement of the Spirit within the margins of society.

In short, a mission without churches means a mode of worldly praxis that neither undergirds nor can be assimilated into any given power structure. The evangelical hypothesis is, I argue, a counterimperial form of Christian existence.

For Further Reading

• Bebbington, D. W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
• Benson, Bruce Ellis and Peter Heltzel, eds. Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2008.
  
• Dayton, Donald W. Discovering an Evangelical Heritage. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
• Dayton, Donald W. and Robert K. Johnston, eds. The Variety of American Evangelicalism. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991.
• Finney, Charles G. Lectures on Revivals of Religion. 2nd ed. New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1835.
• Heltzel, Peter. Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
• Loveland, Anne C. “Evangelicalism and ‘Immediate Emancipation’ in American Antislavery Thought.” The Journal of Southern History 32, no. 2 (1966): 172-88.
• Marsden, George M. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991.
• Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• ———. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995.
• Olson, Roger E. How to Be Evangelical without Being Conservative. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008.
• Pally, Marcia. America’s New Evangelicals: Expanding the Vision of the Common Good. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011.
• Smith, Ted A. The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Stackhouse, John G., Jr. “Defining ‘Evangelical.’” Church and Faith Trends: A Publication of The Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelicalism 1, no. 1 (2007): 1-5.
• Webber, Robert. The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2002.

Impossible Possibilities: On Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible

The most talked-about book of 2011 among evangelicals ought not to be Rob Bell’s Love Wins, but rather Christian Smith’s provocative and insightful attack on biblicism, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. I have a more formal, academic response to this book that I hope to write and publish in the near future. In the meantime, I want to take this opportunity to respond to Robert Gundry’s review in Books and Culture, and through that lens, to address some of the pros and cons of Smith’s book.

First, a few brief words about Smith’s thesis. The book is divided into two main parts: the first is his diagnosis, the second is the prescription. Smith argues that the position of biblicism is an impossible reading of scripture. By “biblicism,” he means “a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability” (viii). He elsewhere identifies a “constellation” of ten assumptions or beliefs that constitute biblicism (4-5):

1. Divine Writing: the Bible is inerrantly identical with God’s own words;
2. Total Representation: the Bible communicates the totality of what God has to say;
3. Complete Coverage: all issues are contained in the Bible;
4. Democratic Perspicuity: any rational person can correctly understand the text;
5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: the meaning is available through a plain, literal, face-value reading;
6. Solo Scriptura (vs. sola scriptura): theology can be built directly out of the biblical text with no extrabiblical texts or frameworks;
7. Internal Harmony: each texts is internally consistent with every other text;
8. Universal Applicability: the teachings contained in the Bible are universally valid;
9. Inductive Method: all Christian teachings can be learned by deriving them directly from the text taken in isolation; and
10. Handbook Model: the Bible functions as a handbook for every aspect of Christian life.

Smith’s central claim is that this biblicist program is impossible to fulfill, and he demonstrates it through what he calls “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” The argument goes something like this:

1. biblicism requires that the Bible’s teachings constitute a unified, coherent worldview for the entirety of Christian faith and practice (#2, 3, 7, 8, 10);
2. biblicism further requires that these teachings are accessible to any rational person, apart from faith and apart from any religious tradition, who reads the text with care (#4, 5, 9);
3. ergo, biblicism states that everyone ought to be in agreement about what the Bible teaches.

While (3) is obviously false, Smith piles on the examples of pervasive pluralism ad nauseam. He supplements his case with numerous additional problems, including the arbitrary ways biblicists relativize certain passages, the ineluctable need for extrabiblical concepts, and the way biblicist practice deviates from biblicist theory. The conclusion is clear: biblicism, as defined by Smith, is theological nonsense. It has no ground in scripture itself and is thoroughly self-defeating.

In the second part of the book, Smith presents his response to the problem. He doesn’t give a solution—though it occasionally reads like one—so much as present possible aspects of or avenues toward a more responsible evangelical hermeneutic. The primary suggestion is to adopt Barth’s christocentric hermeneutic, that is, to make the gospel kerygma of our reconciliation in Christ the lens by which we understand God’s word for us. Smith even affirms the need for a “canon within the canon” (116), to which I can only say: yes and amen! He even has a section titled: “Learning from Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics” (121-26). Other suggestions include, for example, accepting ambiguities in scripture, refusing the temptation to harmonize, distinguishing dogma from doctrine from opinion, rejecting epistemological foundationalism, embracing elements of speech-act theory, and broadening the notion of biblical authority. All of these are good suggestions, though they fall short, in my opinion, of the kind of robust theological hermeneutic that evangelicals need.

Before turning to my own critiques, let’s take a look at Robert Gundry’s huffy response in Books and Culture, published under the title, “Smithereens!” To call this a review is being a bit generous. It has no intentions of being an honest analysis of Smith’s argument. Gundry opens by saying the book will “sizzle before it fizzles,” and then he goes on to talk about why it should fizzle. The reader of this review who hasn’t actually read the book might be misled into thinking that Gundry actually surveys Smith’s argument fairly, but this is false impression. Gundry spends all of three paragraphs describing Smith’s diagnosis of the biblicist dilemma, while spending the next 15+ paragraphs criticizing his “solution” to the problem. That’s not to say a three-paragraph summary isn’t potentially valid; Smith’s criticism of biblicism is indeed very simple. But it gives the impression that the point of the book is to give a systematic answer to biblicism, when this is most definitely not the case, as the book states explicitly. As Smith put it in his response to Peter Leithart, “In short, the first half of my book needs to be addressed and answered directly for its main critical argument. The second, constructive half of the book might be temporarily ignored, as far as I’m concerned.” Gundry asks: “How then does Smith propose to solve the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism?” But this completely overlooks Smith’s qualification at the start of the second half: “The ideas in the following pages do not offer a fixed package of solutions to the problems raised in previous chapters” (97). Suffice it to say that Gundry’s piece is an untrustworthy guide to the book purportedly under review. It is a very smug essay, full of the self-congratulatory “gotcha” moments that one finds in the writings of reasonably intelligent people who dismiss works critical of their views by distracting their readers from a book’s forceful and valid insights. Readers are advised to judge Smith’s work for themselves.

Where Gundry is wrong, he is dead wrong. He seems to endorse deriving universal ethical laws from the Bible. He finds it suspicious that “Smith repeatedly cites the fate of the unevangelized as an open question and refers again and again to the gospel of God’s reconciling the world to himself through Christ but says nary a word about divine judgment and the lostness of unbelievers despite the apostle Paul's declaring that for their salvation people have to believe in Christ.” Why do conservatives persist in making mercy and judgment antitheses in God, as if God is bound to the kind of antinomies that govern creaturely life? Not surprisingly, he is appalled to hear Smith question the dogmatic status of the “penal satisfaction” theory of atonement: “Sorry, but victory without the penal is pyrrhic.” But this only confirms Smith’s point, that evangelicals have illegitimately elevated what are doctrines at best into infallible dogmas. Gundry is also wrong to side with Van Til against Barth, but that goes without saying.

One of the snarkier moments occurs when Gundry claims to show how Smith employs in his own book the very Scottish commonsense realism and Baconian inductivism that the latter criticizes. “Welcome to Scottish commonsense realism and Baconian inductivism redux,” Gundry writes. “Thanks to Smith they've made a comeback.” This is one of the worst “gotcha” moments in the review, since it is both factually wrong and misses the point. First, to demonstrate that Smith is employing these very methods, Gundry would have to show that his approach actually claims to achieve a purely objective (non-subjective) truth about the world. But Smith nowhere claims such a thing. Gundry equates these methods with an extremely broad scientific method of examining data. If Gundry were correct, then every scientific study would have to be committed to a Baconian philosophical framework, which is of course ridiculous. Not only is Gundry’s attempt at a comeback factually wrong, it is also useless. Simply showing how these methods might be found in the book says nothing about the validity or invalidity of these methods for biblical interpretation. Gundry admits as much when he adds, “To say so is neither to deny nor to affirm his thesis.” Okay, so what’s the point? There is only one point: to distract from the real argument of the book with a banal observation meant to impress the Books and Culture reader (Gundry must assume such readers are not very intelligent), so that he or she forgets Smith was trying to make a serious observation.


But even broken clocks are right twice a day. Some of Gundry’s blows actually hit their mark, and it would be unfair not to point out where he’s right. But let’s be clear: Gundry provides nothing to undermine Smith’s critique of biblicism in the first half of the book. The review’s criticisms all pertain to the “solution” that Gundry thinks Smith is trying to propose. On that, Gundry is quite right to question whether a “christocentric hermeneutic” would really curtail pervasive interpretive pluralism. “You also have to ask whether a christological reading doesn't produce its own such pluralism,” he says. Gundry essentially makes this one point again and again in different ways. The ancient creeds “haven’t put a stop to pluralism outside biblicist circles any more than inside them. Nor has a strong teaching office. Not even pronouncements of the Roman Catholic Magisterium have stopped it among theologians, clergy, and lay people of that communion, not to detail disagreements among Roman Catholics on the Magisterium itself.” And later, he responds to Smith’s point about Christ being present outside of scripture by asking, “are these extrabiblical presences of Christ any less subject to pervasive interpretive pluralism than is biblicism?” All of this is quite true, and I’ll come back to it later.

Gundry is also entirely correct to question Smith’s claim that his recently becoming Roman Catholic is “only partly related to the issues raised here” (xiii). While it is true that the critique and the constructive suggestions are both valid for evangelical Protestants, it is certainly suspect when a book like this appears the same year that Smith publishes another book with the title, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in 95 Difficult Steps (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011). It’s hard to read The Bible Made Impossible and not feel like it is a covert argument for why evangelicals should become Catholic. For instance, at one point Smith says that American evangelicals need to “spend the time needed to think matters through carefully, creatively, and in interaction with the larger, longer Christian tradition. . . . The last thing American evangelicalism needs is more autonomously impulsive reformist action and more organizational and identity fragmentation” (96)! Combine this with his concluding remark about the need for “a stronger hermeneutical lens and ecclesial teaching office” (177; emphasis added), and you have the basic building blocks for a conversion to “evangelical Catholicism.”

As true as these criticisms are, they are not by any means the most important points to raise in objection to Smith’s book. First, Smith’s diagnosis, while generally on target, fails to zero in on the real source of the biblicist dilemma. He admits that not everything on the long list of biblicist characteristics falls under his critique. And he often appears to confuse issues that need to be differentiated more sharply, giving the impression that kitschy books like Gardening with Biblical Plants can be placed alongside the “Three/Four/Five Views on X” that Smith rightly sees as more problematic for biblicism. Second, the constructive suggestions that he provides, while helpful, do not nearly go far enough. He acknowledges this, but that’s not sufficient. We need something more robust. But it’s more serious than that. Not only do they stop short; they also go in the wrong direction. Let me explain.

Both Smith and Gundry, if I’ve understand them correctly, are opposed to pervasive interpretive pluralism (hereafter PIP). Though I must admit that it’s not entirely clear for either one. Certainly Gundry thinks that Smith is against PIP, and he seems to share Smith’s concern about this problem. But is Smith opposed to it himself? Throughout the book he refers to PIP as a problem for biblicism. To use analytic terminology, PIP is a defeater for biblicism. The question is whether PIP is a problem as such for Smith. I agree with Gundry that this is the general impression from the book, and it seems to be confirmed by the conclusion, where Smith says that “biblicism collapse[s] under the weight of the pervasive interpretive pluralism that biblicism itself generates” (173; emphasis added). This is one of the many slips in the book. It is a factually erroneous statement. If biblicism generates PIP, then it would have to be as early as the biblical text itself—more than that, as early as human civilization! If anything, biblicism is a (failed) response to PIP, not its cause. Gundry goes so far as to suggest that PIP might be caused by too much nonbiblicism in the past—as if everyone would agree with his paleofundamentalism if only ancient Christians had been more biblicist!—but that’s equally as erroneous.

The real issue is the assumption by both that PIP is a problem at all that needs to be “fixed” or curtailed. What is perplexing about Smith’s book is that he fails to draw the logical conclusion that PIP itself needs, in some sense, to be embraced. For surely this is what the book leads the reader to expect at numerous points. For instance, he rightly affirms, over against the pursuit of pure objectivity, the active role of the reading subject in the interpretation of scripture: “How else could humans possibly know truth, other than to involve themselves as personal subjects in the discerning and understanding of it?” (114). He seems to acknowledge in these pages the fact that subjective involvement is a universal feature of interpretation. But if that’s the case, then PIP is simply the natural consequence of allowing everyone to read and interpret scripture—which it is. Consequently, on Smith’s own terms, the only way to combat PIP is to fully submit one’s subjectivity to the normative authority of an ecclesial magisterium, or to keep Bibles out of the hands of the laity. Put simply, if Smith really thinks we must overcome PIP, then his argument necessarily requires that one “become Catholic (as I have done) or Eastern Orthodox.” However, if he’s only concerned about moving past biblicism—and thus embracing PIP within a postfoundationalist christocentric hermeneutic—then many of these problems disappear, including the basis for most of Gundry’s criticisms.

Pervasive interpretive pluralism is not a problem to be fixed; it is a fact to be accepted, even a blessing to be embraced. Smith comes so close to making this very point, but he holds back. He has an entire chapter on the need to accept the Bible as it is, with all its ambiguities and complexities and contradictions. He writes about the need to embrace the subjective nature of all interpretation. It ought to follow that PIP is itself something to affirm as part of the creaturely relation to God. This is what Smith should have argued in his book. Not only that PIP is a defeater for biblicism, but that we need a hermeneutic which embraces the radical multiplicity and heterogeneity of our interpretations.

As helpful and insightful as Smith’s book is, it falls short of what the book could and should have argued. Throughout the book he criticizes the “handbook” attempt to derive universally-applicable ideals and principles from the biblical text that will govern every aspect of our life. And yet there is no corresponding suggestion that our understanding of scripture ought to embrace the plurality of historical contexts in which scripture is read and interpreted. Opposing biblicism is one thing; affirming a radically open hermeneutic that gives a positive place to “pervasive pluralism” is something quite different. The pieces are in place for making this move within Smith’s book. A christocentric “canon with the canon” is indeed the correct starting-point. One only needs to recognize that that which remains “outside” this inner canon are the multiplicity of cultural-historical contexts and conceptual forms. If christocentricity constitutes the “inner” canon, then a kind of pneumatocentricity must constitute the “outer” canon. Put differently, the kerygma of Jesus Christ establishes the unity, while the cross-cultural movement of the Spirit establishes the diversity. Together, we have the theological basis for a hermeneutic that embraces pervasive pluralism without resulting in a vicious relativism.

The real impasse in the debate over Rob Bell

Mark Galli’s book, God Wins—a response, obviously, to Love Wins—was the topic of discussion last week. The book has been available on Kindle for a few weeks, though it doesn’t appear in print until August 1. In it, Galli explains why he thinks “love wins” is an insufficient understanding of the gospel, because it bypasses the question of God’s judgment and wrath. Hence, “God wins.” One almost wants to ask Galli whether he’s forgotten 1 John 4:8. But that’s a cheap shot. Since I haven’t read the book yet—and since I’ve already written a few thousand words on Galli in my series responding to his deeply misguided and misinformed review in Christianity Today—I defer to the recent blog posts by Roger Olson, a man I highly respect and deeply admire.

Olson, a friend of Galli, wrote about God Wins on July 7. There he made a number of ambiguous remarks that were clearly an attempt to praise the qualities of the man while criticizing the claims of the book. He begins by stating that “Mark is a serious evangelical scholar with an irenic approach to controversial material.” He then goes on to say, “I get the sense that Mark felt things that I did not feel and that I felt things Mark (and others) did not feel.” And later: “I think that may be because Mark is a member of a denomination struggling with rampant liberalism in which conservatives (by which here I mean people who value traditional, orthodox, biblical Christianity) feel embattled. I, on the other hand, have been beset by fundamentalists and aggressive neo-fundamentalist heresy-hunters.” The rest of the review is just filler: Mark is a great guy, but he’s approaching this book from a perspective I do not share. Translation: his criticisms of Love Wins are not really about Bell; they are instead about Galli’s own issues within his ecclesial context.

Olson followed up that review of God Wins with another post on “Why I defend Rob Bell’s Love Wins (and other controversial books).” In this fascinating post, Olson puts forward the claim that what is really driving a book like God Wins is the whole Calvinism-Arminianism debate. He then states:

I think SOME evangelical Calvinists are so allergic to both Arminianism and liberalism that they tend to lump them together and not see their differences.  There’s something in American evangelical Calvinisms’ DNA that makes it see a trajectory from Arminianism (or anything like it) to liberalism.  I deny that trajectory and, in fact, tend to think it is the other way around (if anything): Calvinism leads to liberalism.

Olson compares Love Wins to the books related to the open theism controversy. He observes that the attacks made against both by Calvinists are the very same arguments used by Calvinists against Arminianism. What happens in these debates is that the particularities of open theism and Bell’s “open eschatology” (if I may put it thus) are lost amidst polemics about divine sovereignty and human free will. In Olson’s words, “the crux of the debate has to do with two different interpretations of 1 Timothy 2:4,” and “the deep, inner logic of the attacks on Love Wins” are rooted in “Reformed assumptions about God rather than out of Arminian assumptions about God.” Olson then makes a very interesting comment that warrants further reflection:

Simply to respond that God Wins is to raise some questions from the Arminian side.  In what sense does God win?  Does God get everything he wanted?  Does God want hell–antecedently as well as consequently?  If you say no, then why does hell exist?  It has to be because of free will and that has to be because of God’s loving self-limitation.  If you say yes, then that raises a host of questions about God’s goodness.  There don’t seem to be alternatives.  Either God wanted hell antecedently, in which case God is a monster, or God only wants hell consequently (to the fall) and that means God doesn’t exactly “win” in every sense, right?  But love can still win IN THE SENSE that love wants free response and not coerced or programmed response.

There is much here worth examining in detail, but in the interests of brevity, I will summarize my thoughts with the following points. These are not meant to be exhaustive. They only hit on some of the key issues for the sake of further discussion.

1. The Calvinist-Arminian debate is an old one, but it seems blissfully unaware that there are serious alternatives to this rather stale binary opposition. It might seem a bit obvious, since it’s been suggested many times before, but a really compelling alternative is that of Karl Barth. Why? Well, it all comes down to understanding what we mean by freedom. The problem with both Calvinism and Arminianism is that freedom—whether the freedom of God or the freedom of the human being, respectively—has been defined in the abstract. The Calvinist freedom of God (i.e., the absolute sovereignty to determine the elect and the reprobate) and the Arminian freedom of humanity (i.e., the free will to determine one’s eternal identity in response to the gospel message) are both known prior to and apart from how God has actually exercised freedom in the person of Jesus. In other words, both are metaphysical conceptions of freedom. They are abstract notions not determined by the concrete particularity of God’s self-revelation. Now it may be that both sides simply don’t care; they like their metaphysics and cling to it tightly. That could very well be the case. But it’s important to point out just what is being assumed on both sides. In both cases, Christ is not definitive for what divine and human freedom means theologically.

2. Of course, to lift up Barth as a possible solution to the debate is not new, nor is it very persuasive to hard-core adherents of both positions. I suspect Calvinists and Arminians want their abstract conceptions of freedom, not because they care about the debates over metaphysics but because they are both deeply afraid of what it mean to go a different route. To put it directly, both Calvinists and Arminians are afraid of universalism. Calvinists need an abstract divine freedom (that is, an abstract decision of predestination) because their commitment to irresistible grace and the efficacy of God’s election means that a divine freedom determined by Christ’s reconciling promeity would result in the salvation of all people. Arminians need an abstract human freedom because their commitment to God’s universal desire for all to be saved (see Olson’s reference to 1 Tim. 2:4 above) would mean, again, that all humans would be saved were it not for our ability to thwart God’s will. But maybe—just maybe!—the problem is the presupposition by both sides that the salvation of all people is absolutely prohibited as a possible option in theology. Maybe our abstract commitments to a non-universalist eschatology and to certain notions of what freedom means for God and for human beings are at the root of the problem. Maybe we should let the reconciling mission of Christ determine what we can say about freedom and eschatological consummation.

3. In other words, the following claim by Olson is a false binary: “Either God wanted hell antecedently, in which case God is a monster, or God only wants hell consequently (to the fall) and that means God doesn’t exactly ‘win’ in every sense, right?” The answer is no and no. I agree with Olson that God would be a monster for willing hell in advance. The old doctrine of double predestination is indeed a diabolic position to hold. But the Arminian alternative fares no better. Is a God who sends people to hell really much worse than a God who is impotent in the end to save those who reject the gospel (or never hear it in the first place)? The former is a God who is sovereign but cruel; the latter is a God who is weak but loving. The former is protologically monstrous, while the latter is eschatologically monstrous. But it’s unacceptable either way. If all are not finally saved, then God cannot be said to have “won.” And a God who does not “win”—who does not fully and finally accomplish God’s own perfect will—is simply not the God attested in scripture.

4. We can put the problem another way: for both Calvinists and Arminians, love and justice have been defined in the abstract, i.e., apart from God’s concrete self-communication in Christ. Thus both pit love and justice in a competitive relationship. Calvinism grounds the competition in God’s eternal predestination—so that God determines where love will “win” and where justice will “win.” Arminianism grounds the competition in the conflict between a loving God and a sinful humanity: God loves everyone, but this loving divine will is overpowered by a human refusal of this love that, according to the rules of the game, forces God to exact justice. If we begin with Christ, however, it turns out that love and justice are non-competitively related, since it is precisely the love of God for all that God’s cruciform justice serves to accomplish. Justice is simply the form that God’s love takes in the event of the cross. The notions of love and justice are not theologically meaningful independent of and prior to the actualization of God’s just love in the concrete reality of Jesus Christ. The attempt to define them in advance and then figure out how they relate theologically results in this intractable debate.

5. This whole debate also seems to take for granted the notion that eschatology refers to something “beyond death,” that is, beyond each person’s individual perishing. Maybe that’s something we need to reconsider as well.

On the new universalism: a response to James K. A. Smith

Thanks to the likes of Rachel Held Evans, Rob Bell, Gregory MacDonald/Robin Parry, and many others, the debate over universalism is all the rage today. In a recent blog post, Calvin professor James K. A. Smith has weighed in on this new development. He begins with the following promising description:

This ain't your Grandma's universalism (if your Grandma was, say, a Unitarian). The (relatively) old universalism was a liberal universalism of "many-roads-to-God-who-is-a-big-cuddly-Grandpa" (or, more recently, Grandma). Such a universalism was generally embarrassed by Christian particularity and any claims to the divinity of Christ. Instead, Jesus was a kindly teacher like so many others pointing us all to that great kumbaya-sing-along in the the "beyond." 

In contrast, the "new" universalism is an evangelical universalism, a Christocentric universalism. If all will be saved, they will be saved in Christ, because of the work of Christ as the Incarnate God who has triumphed over the power of sin and death (the new universalist Christ is a victor, not a redeemer).

We can let the overly simplistic typology slide for the moment. The notion that there are two universalisms—a liberal Unitarian version and an evangelical christocentric version—is historically dubious at best. I’ve been reading the new special edition of John A. T. Robinson’s 1950 classic, In the End, God . . . , and I’ve been struck by how evangelical this text really is. Robinson is (in)famous for his provocatively liberal work from 1963, Honest to God (which has gotten a far worse reputation than it deserves, in my opinion), which questions the traditional realist conception of God. But his earlier work is badly in need of new readers. It is a perfect example of how the liberal-evangelical binary is entirely unhelpful. Robinson really breaks those stereotypes, and Trevor Hart’s new introduction very helpfully shows why T. F. Torrance’s rejection of Robinson’s universalism was mistaken on basically every point. Robinson is just as christocentric—and in some ways, even more so—than the new evangelical universalist. I recommend this work highly. Nevertheless, Smith’s basic point is valid: the new universalism is centered in Christ in a way that pluralistic forms of universalism (such as that of John Hicks) never were. The particularity of Christ’s claim to be the way, the truth, and the life is firmly upheld. That much Smith gets right, and it’s a crucial observation.

But problems emerge already at this point, for what could Smith possibly mean by the statement that “the new universalist Christ is a victor, not a redeemer”? Is there an either-or here? Does Christ-as-redeemer require rejecting universalism? How is the triumph over sin and death not an act of redemption? This is the first of many theological problems with Smith’s post. The ambiguities and assumptions continue to mount from here. See what Smith writes next:

The question, then, is just what compels one to be an evangelical universalist? Some resort to prooftexting, operating with a naive, selective reading of Scripture. I'm going to do the evangelical universalist a favor and ignore such a strategy, only because I think it can be so easily refuted. (Many of these evangelical universalists would pounce on such selective prooftexting in other contexts.) 

No, the motivation for evangelical universalism is not really a close reading of the Bible's claims about eternity. Instead, it seems that the macro-motivation for evangelical universalism is less a text and more a hermeneutic, a kind of "sensibility" about the very nature of God as "love" (which includes its own implicit sensibility about the nature of love).

The problem with Smith’s emphasis on psychological motivation—and the implied notion that universalism is a pathological condition—has already been dissected by Halden. I want to raise the issue of Smith’s bifurcation between exegesis and hermeneutics. Notice that he says evangelical universalism is motivated by a “hermeneutic” rather than “a close reading” of biblical texts. This, of course, is naive at best. Every act of exegetical interpretation is itself already an exercise in hermeneutical understanding. The close reading of scripture is inseparable from a hermeneutic that guides this reading, even if it is never actually articulated or reflected upon by the exegete herself. What the evangelical universalists ought to “pounce on” is not the claim that they are proof-texting—which is frankly just silly and is not borne out by any of the representatives of the new universalism—but rather the even more egregious claim that their position is not grounded in the text at all but remains at a macro level of abstract analysis.

The truth is that the opponents of any kind of Christian universalism are more often than not the ones engaging in proof-texting. They tend to be the ones who point to Matthew 25 or (if they really aren’t paying attention) John 14:6 as if these are somehow knock-down arguments against all versions of universal reconciliation. The non-universalists are equally guilty, if not more so, of a “naive, selective reading of Scripture.” When you take into account works like The Inescapable Love of God and The Evangelical Universalist—as well as the collection, “All Shall Be Well,” to see that universalism has a long history in the church—it becomes plainly obvious that there is deep textual analysis going on, at a level that many of their opponents simply cannot match. So that whole charge is a moot point, and Smith should not have raised it in the first place. It’s a cheap shot that he then condescendingly leverages, by way of doing the universalist “a favor,” into rhetorical brownie points, in the form of an ironically supercilious ethical appeal (“I’m so magnanimous that I will overlook this flaw to make my opponent’s case appear stronger”).

In fact, not only are non-universalists often guilty of proof-texting passages about hell and eternal judgment—but Jamie Smith himself is guilty of such proof-texting a little later in his post. In the context of discussing why one’s personal hopes have to be governed by the authority of scripture, he relates a hypothetical situation regarding his hope for marriage in the afterlife. He then cites the following statement from Jesus, “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). Talk about proof-texting! Smith just quotes this passage and says that his hope has to be disciplined by the truth of scripture. But where’s the exegesis? Where is the careful analysis that contextualizes this passage? Where is the hermeneutical reflection to ground one’s interpretation? Answer: it’s non-existent. This is a perfect example of what I criticized Mark Galli for in his review of Rob Bell’s book in Christianity Today: shifting the goalposts. Like Galli, Smith seems to think that he is “above” such criticisms, that he can attack proof-texting when it leads to universalism (even though none of the universalists I know actually engage in such proof-texting), but he can freely do it himself because he is maintaining some “orthodox” position on salvation and damnation. This is a recurring problem among conservatives. They allow themselves more liberty because of what appears to be a misguided sense of moral and intellectual superiority, while those who propound “radical” views are placed within far stricter limits. (There’s an analogy here to various disparities within the American justice system, but that’s another topic for another time.) The delicious irony here is that many of the universalists already recognize these higher standards and freely place themselves within them in order to bolster their argument!

But we’re not done here. Look at how Smith uses the word “hermeneutic”: as a “sensibility.” This is a subtle instance of begging the question, in that he has loaded his description of the universalist position in such a way that his critique is already included within it. Where is the argument that the theological hermeneutic of the new universalists is merely a “sensibility” (which reads with an air of snobbish disdain) that God is by nature “love.” (Why the scare quotes on “love”? As if only sentimental, bleeding-heart liberal universalists make such silly statements, and not the author of 1 John?) Is there any proof that the new universalists do not have a robust theological hermeneutic? Is it really true that they do not have a consistent, clear way of understanding how competing passages ought to be interpreted? Is it really just a matter of personal feeling about who God is? If Smith’s outlandish claims are to be even remotely acceptable, he has to actually make some concrete arguments. Making abstract assertions about a general group of scholars and pastors, with no actual argumentation in sight, is irresponsible. One could more justifiably charge Smith with being guided by a “sensibility”—a sense that these universalists are just woolly-minded liberals with no real theological sophistication. It’s always a lot easier to attack inner feelings, motivations, and sensibilities than actual texts. With the former, there’s no way to disprove your statements. Of course, there’s no way to prove them either.

The rest of Smith’s post is full of more assertions about  “imagination” and “hope” as the two strategies or sensibilities determining the new evangelical universalism. One says that “I can’t imagine” so-and-so being in hell, while the other says that “I hope” this is how things turn out. Halden has already deconstructed the first notion as a bogus charge, since the implied converse—“I can’t imagine so-and-so being in heaven”—is “no less anthropocentric and Feuerbachian than the (imagined) argument it is designed to counter.” It’s also worth pointing out the strange path that Smith has taken in this post. He began by saying the new evangelical universalism is not like the old liberal universalism because it is “christocentric.” And yet now he is leveling the charge of being “Feuerbachian” at the new universalists. You can’t get much more liberal than that!

This further reinforces the oddness of the whole piece. Smith begins and ends by stating that the new universalism is not the old one. Fine. But I challenge anyone to lop off the beginning and the end and read only the main content of the post. I doubt there is anyone with any knowledge of the subject-matter who would not summarize the thesis as: the new universalism is exactly like the old one. It appears to me, rather, that the qualifications at the start and end of the post are more examples of a rhetorical posturing on the part of Smith in the attempt to win a favorable hearing among readers. But the whole thing is a sham, because he does not actually provide any material support for this qualification in the body of the post. In fact, he seeks instead to undermine it at every turn. So he draws the reader in by making this distinction between old and new, only to subtly tear that distinction down with no actual argumentation or textual analysis to back it up.

For example, he states up front that the evangelical universalists are christocentric: all are saved in Christ. That is true. But if that’s the case, then why is there absolutely no reflection on christology and soteriology anywhere in the post? Why does he then claim that certain personal sensibilities are what drive the new universalists? Does he think that their christocentric claims are disingenuous on their part? Does he think that all universalist claims are inevitably based on psychological motivations, regardless of what they may say about Christ and scripture? Or does he simply find the reference to Christ meaningless in itself, such that Smith is simply unable to understand what christocentrism even means in this case? One has to wonder where the pathology really lies here.

The other charge, regarding hope, is even more befuddling. First, has no one told Smith that to hope for everyone’s salvation is not actually universalism? This would seem to be a rather elementary point. The very definition of universalism is the knowledge that all will be saved. To not know is to not be a universalist. Would Smith accuse Hans Urs von Balthasar of being a universalist simply because he affirmed that we can indeed hope (but no more) for the salvation of all?

But the real error of Smith—what makes it clear that he has no grasp of what it means to be christocentric—is how he handles the nature of universalist hope. He writes:

I'm firmly committed to the particularity of Christ, the evangelical universalist will emphasize. I just hope that God's salvation is not so particular that he only saves some. And it is precisely God's love and mercy that make me hope in this way.

This betrays a fatal misunderstanding of the new evangelical universalism. Smith, putting words in the mouth of a universalist, sets up a completely erroneous competition between the particularity of Christ and the hope for universal salvation grounded in God’s love and mercy. It is precisely this kind of thinking—which places John 14:6 in conflict with Rom. 11:32—that the new universalism seeks to overturn. Only the old universalism could place hope for salvation in conflict with Christ’s particularity. The new universalism makes them coterminous: it is precisely Christ’s particularity that grounds our hope for all to be saved, because Jesus Christ himself, crucified and risen, is the love and mercy of God. He is the concrete actualization of God’s judgment against sin and God’s mercy and grace unto new life. In the same way that Christ does away with all competitive conceptions of love and justice—since the judgment of sin on the cross is the eternal love of God for the reconciliation of the world—so too does Christ abolish all competitive conceptions of particularity and universality. For the evangelical universalist, the universal hope that God is “making all things new” is posited not in spite of but rather only because of the particular claim that Jesus is the exclusive source of salvation. Jesus is the new reign of God irrupting into the world for the sake of its radical—and radically inclusive—transfiguration.

So when Smith says, “Let's stop making this just about passages that mention ‘hell;’ [sic] at issue here are all passages that discuss judgment,” I can only respond: Yes, let’s. It is the claim of Christian faith that all such judgment has to be understood in and through the particularity of Jesus as the once-for-all judgment of God for the reconciliation of the world. Jesus is himself the hermeneutical key for understanding the biblical texts about judgment and hell. To extract these texts from the larger canonical-messianic context is thus to engage in the kind of selective proof-texting that Smith rightly disparages. Understanding these texts christologically—i.e., christocentrically—is not to replace exegesis with a hermeneutic or sensibility; it is instead to read these texts rightly, that is, theologically, within the broader scriptural witness to God’s covenant action in Christ for the sake of the world. Because, to repeat my earlier point, there is no such thing as exegesis without a hermeneutic, no interpretation without a method (however implicit) for making sense of a text.

The question is not whether a person is submitting to the authority of scripture. That much, I think, we can all agree is essential. The question is rather: which hermeneutic is operative in one’s theological reflection and biblical interpretation? The evangelical universalists have a very clearly christocentric hermeneutic. It may be articulated in different (not always compatible) ways, and it may be employed for different (not always compatible) ends, but the basic hermeneutical conviction remains the same: Jesus Christ is the subject-matter of Christian faith, and we only know God’s love and God’s justice in him, in the particular event of his crucifixion and resurrection. Our knowledge of divine mercy and divine righteousness is grounded solely in the saving-event of Jesus Christ. All other sources for such knowledge have to be subordinated to this critical norm of our faith and mission. It is the reconciling self-disclosure of God in Christ that makes one a universalist—and that alone. No other reasons are finally determinative, and therefore no other reasons are worth addressing. Smith’s entire post is a distraction from the real conversation about universal salvation. He misses the point altogether, and the result is an abstract attack on “straw men” of his own fabrication.

Where is the meaty, substantial debate over atonement and the efficacy of Christ’s death? Where is the discussion of passages like Romans 5? Where is the historical-grammatical analysis of the Greek words for “hell” and “eternal”? Where is the hermeneutical debate over theological presuppositions? Where is the nuanced discussion of divine and human freedom? Where is conversation about the relation between christology and pneumatology? Where is the analysis of the logic of hell and damnation? Where is the theological reflection on the nature of God as attested in the canonical biblical witness and its relation to questions of eschatology? Where are any of the actual questions driving the dialogue about universal salvation today? When compared with the real issues in the debate, Smith’s post appears misinformed and superficial. It hovers in the realm of the hypothetical and fictional, and never actually touches the concrete conversation “on the ground.”

Here are suggestions for future critics of the new evangelical universalism:

1. Lay bare your hermeneutical presuppositions. When you confront the conflict between universalist and dualist texts in scripture, what drives your interpretive conclusions?
2. Explain the relation between Christ and salvation. Is there a difference between reconciliation, salvation, redemption, and other concepts? In what sense is Jesus our savior? What is the relation between past, present, and future? Is salvation finally realized in the cross and/or resurrection, in a pretemporal act of election, in the present-tense decision of faith, in some future eschatological act of God, or in some other way?
3. Get your terminology and distinctions correct. Christian universalism is different from pluralistic universalism, but evangelical universalism is not the only version of Christian universalism. There are various ways of articulating a Christian universal salvation, and the evangelical model is not the only “new universalism.” If this is news to you, then start to read up on the debate before you make pronouncements that might come back to hurt you.
4. Stop with the overly simplistic and superficial dichotomies—for example, exegesis vs. theology, text vs. hermeneutic, love vs. justice, particularity vs. universality, grace vs. judgment, etc. These are the theological equivalent of biblical proof-texting. They are a sign of, to borrow from Eberhard Jüngel, an “unwillingness to read and an inability to think.”
5. Recognize the distinction between the old and new universalisms—but don’t treat it as a meaningless distinction. Recognize that the differences are crucial, that the basis for the new universalist claims is not the same as before. But at the same time, open yourself to seeing ways in which even the older liberal universalists were a lot more biblically- and theologically-nuanced than perhaps you were led to believe. Not every liberal universalist is a Unitarian, in case that’s news to you.
6. Finally, for the love of God, please stop breaking out the old rusty hatchet that claims universalists are unwilling to be disciplined by scripture or that they do not recognize the authority of scripture. This is bogus and frankly offensive. It impugns the faith of brothers and sisters in Christ and shuts down any possibility of meaningful dialogue.

Beyond Binaries: A Response to Mark Galli, Part 5

Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Having analyzed the details of Mark Galli’s review of Rob Bell, it’s time to step back and assess the big picture. First things first, it cannot be emphasized enough that Galli’s review is without question the best review I have yet seen. In fact, it is precisely because it is so good that I have felt compelled to respond to it. Most of the blogosphere has been dominated by superficial engagements that have already ruled out the possibility of a universal hope for salvation prior to any actual historical, exegetical, or theological inquiry. What distinguishes Galli’s review is the far greater knowledge that he brings to the table. Unfortunately, in the case of Bultmann, for example, it still remained on a fairly superficial level. This series of posts has been an attempt to probe the matters raised by Galli in a more thorough and critical manner. The goal has never been to criticize Galli himself; rather, my intention has been to engage in a critical conversation with his review for the purpose of facilitating an ongoing dialogue that needs to take place within evangelicalism today.

In this concluding post I want to review the ground that I have covered and pick up bits and pieces along the way that I either overlooked or held off discussing until now. I will treat these under the headings of the previous sections of this review: (1) universalism, (2) the cross and atonement, and (3) liberalism, evangelicalism, and orthodoxy.

I. Universalism: Love and Justice

Near the conclusion of his review, Galli writes the following:

Most Christians grasp that to demythologize one doctrine is to make the others less coherent. They recognize that a Christianity that teaches about "a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross" (H. Richard Niebuhr's classic summary of liberalism) does not reflect the thickness of biblical revelation nor lived reality. And they see that when all is said and done, there is no painful contradiction between the love and justice of God. That in the end, not only does love win, but justice, too.

First, to get on my academic soapbox for a moment, if Niebuhr’s famous quote is the definition of liberalism, then Bultmann is most definitely not a liberal. Neither is Schleiermacher for that matter. Demythologizing has nothing whatsoever to do with the neutering of the gospel and the watering down of the faith. These kinds of statements completely misconstrue the theologians of the past, effectively denying their significance for the future. For our sakes, they deserve better. (Soapbox over.)

What I am more interested in is the final statement about love and justice. He speaks of there being no “painful” contradiction between the two, such that both love and justice win in the end. This, unfortunately, does not go far enough. If liberalism is defined as love without justice, then (Galli’s) evangelicalism is love and justice. But neither of these are adequate. Theology properly recognizes that if God is love and if God is just, then Christian faith must speak of love as justice and justice as love. The problem with so much of the traditional literature about love and justice is that it treats these as reified objects that compete with each other. “Love wins” is taken to mean that “justice loses.” Galli wants to say that both win, but what does he mean by this? He says that there is no painful contradiction, but does he still not have some kind of contradiction? It’s not painful because love and justice are being applied to two sets of people—those who are saved, and those who are not. By splitting up humanity in this way—either through double predestination or through allowing human beings to decide for themselves—he allows love and justice to counter each other, but in a painless way.

The problem is that love and justice are not “things” that exist “out there.” To say that “love wins” or that “justice wins” are simply two ways of saying the same thing: God wins. But it’s precisely because love and justice are defined by God’s being and act that we cannot separate them. God’s gracious action in Jesus Christ is the event of love and justice. God is just precisely in submitting to death on a cross, and God is love precisely in carrying out this act of divine justice on behalf of all humanity. This is what Galli seems to have missed altogether. He seems to think that universal salvation requires a God who does not judge. But that is entirely untrue. It is the judgment carried out in Jesus Christ that makes universal salvation both possible and actual. If Jesus does indeed stand in our place, as Galli clearly wants to say, then there is absolutely no reason why the judgment of sin on the cross cannot be—and perhaps even should be—understood as being effective for all people. Love wins at the same time that justice wins, because love and justice—being two aspects of the same christological event—are finally identical.

II. The Cross: Substitution and Ontology

I want to return to the problem of substitution. I think there are some serious theological issues that are simply not on the radar for people like Galli. Perhaps the most crucial one is the question of ontology. In my discussion of substitutionary atonement, I briefly raised the question: what does substitution mean?  Is it an ontological connection between Jesus and the rest of humanity? This is, I think, a question that needs to be addressed.

The “orthodox” position is based, by and large, on an ancient ontology. The ancient church of the early ecumenical councils presupposed a substance ontology in which divinity and humanity were essences that had certain properties and could be treated like substantial objects. In the case of God, the divine nature was ascribed certain properties presupposed by classical Greek philosophy (e.g., uncreated, immortal, impassible, etc.). In the case of humanity, the human nature was understood to be something in which all individuals participated. It had an opposite set of properties (e.g., created, mortal, passible, etc.). We have to remember that when the church was figuring out what to say about the two natures of Christ, they were presupposing this Greek ontology. Their understanding of salvation was a deification in which the human nature came to participate in certain properties of the divine nature (e.g., immortality and impassibility). The Chalcedonian Formula was constructed to ensure (a) that the two natures qua natures remained absolutely separate due to the metaphysical antithesis between divine impassibility and human passibility, and (b) that the two natures qua person were in unity, in order to preserve the eschatological possibility of a future deification in which humanity came to participate in divinity. These were the concerns of the church at that time, and they cannot be understood apart from the ontology that they presupposed.

Within such an ontology, the language of Christ as substitute makes a lot of sense. In the incarnation, the Son assumes a human nature or essence in which all other human beings necessarily participate. There is a common ontological essence that unites every particular person. By and large, it is this abstract philosophical essence that is presupposed when speaking of substitution. But the question is: are we obliged to adopt this ontology simply because it was so important to the church in the past? Is this ontology itself essential to the gospel? Can we think of Christ being “in our place” in a new way today? Can we think about Christ in a postmetaphysical manner that dispenses with substance ontology altogether? These are the kinds of questions that Galli entirely overlooks. By identifying substitution as the biblical position without giving any attention to ontology, he gives the impression that Greek metaphysics is itself the biblical position; conversely, he implies that to think differently about substitution (i.e., to rethink our relation to theological ontology) is intrinsically a liberal move that is no longer faithful to Scripture.

This is a crucial issue. I think evangelicals need to spend a great deal of time critically examining to what extent they have baptized and deified a past philosophical ontology. Unlike Roman Catholics who are quite explicit about their baptism of Greek philosophy, evangelicals have no such commitments. We need to strictly differentiate between the gospel and all philosophical conceptualities. While theology is necessarily always appropriating philosophical concepts for the sake of bearing witness to the gospel, those concepts are always dispensable. The subject-matter of Christian faith is infinitely translatable from one conceptuality to another. If we do not make this distinction, we run the risk of idolatrously deifying a philosophy as itself the gospel and so making the message of Jesus Christ a sacrificium intellectus.

III. Towards a Missionary Orthoheterodoxy

What is orthodoxy? What is heterodoxy? Are we really so sure that we know what these words mean? Evangelicals have traditionally avoided rigid doctrinal formulations out of a pietist concern for an authentic faith that responds obediently to the message of the gospel. For this reason, evangelical organizations have generally had very limited statements of faith. They tend to be limited to (1) the affirmation of the triune nature of God, (2) confidence in the authority of Scripture, and (3) belief in the divinity and saving significance of Christ. Beyond these fairly general statements, most evangelicals are unwilling to lay down a specific doctrinal law to which one must assent. This is an impulse that stems from the Reformers themselves.

It is for this reason that I am deeply concerned about the rush to define orthodoxy in a way that restricts the circle of evangelicalism. In many cases, this results in ironically having to exclude some of our evangelical ancestors in the faith from evangelicalism. But what really concerns me is the missiological problem that I raised in the previous post. The attempt to nail down what orthodoxy means according to specific doctrinal formulations inevitably requires that the mission of the church be one of mere diffusion. It identifies the gospel with a particular cultural form, i.e., with a particular conceptuality rooted in certain cultural, historical, political, and philosophical presuppositions. The gospel is then turned into a worldview, one that is universally valid in advance and in the abstract. I firmly believe that Christian faith must distinguish itself from every worldview in as strong a manner as possible. The result of confusing the gospel with a worldview is always some form of legalism. An ethical worldview results in an ethical legalism that makes conformity to a universal moral code the measure of faithful obedience to God. A doctrinal worldview results in a doctrinal legalism that makes intellectual conformity to a universal dogmatic code the measure of “right belief.” Either way, the gospel has been distorted. The good news of God’s love becomes the old news of a past culture or a static system of belief.

In the end, I want to propose an orthoheterodoxy. By this I mean we need to be able to “think differently” (hetero-doxy), but in the “right” way (ortho-doxy). Orthoheterodoxy captures what I referred to in my earlier post as the relation between indigenization and pilgrimization. The gospel must continually become indigenized within specific historical contexts. It is this ongoing process of indigenization that constitutes the diverse history of the church community. Despite the infinite variety of cultural forms—and here just think about the amazing array of contexts into which the gospel has been culturally and linguistically translated—there remains a singular message of divine judgment against sin and divine grace and mercy through Jesus Christ. This message, captured in the kerygma of the cross and resurrection, is what we must proclaim again and again, and in ever new ways. This gospel cannot be constrained to one particular form; it must not be frozen in one time and place. If we believe that the Word is living and active, and if we believe that Christ is truly present with us in the Spirit, then we must confess the freedom of the gospel to indigenize itself in new contexts and to radically transform them in light of a hope that is far greater and more glorious than anything we can imagine. To “think differently” means to think from one context to another, from past to present, from one situation to the next. But we must engage in this work of missionary translation responsibly, always allowing the kerygmatic message of God’s grace in Christ to be our critical norm. It is this norm that illuminates our reading of Scripture (clarifying which passages are to be privileged over others) and funds the infinite diversity of the Christian community. In holding rightly to this norm, we must also think freely and differently. That is the task of evangelical Christianity today.

Beyond Binaries: A Response to Mark Galli, Part 4

Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

3. Liberalism vs. Evangelicalism. We arrive finally at the major section of the review, wherein Galli presents his strongest criticisms of Bell. The thesis of this section is that Bell stands within the tradition of Protestant liberalism. And even though “liberalism is a tradition that has enriched the church in many ways,” and even though “many liberal themes have found their way into evangelical life,” Galli’s conclusion is that Bell has gone too far. He has stepped beyond the bounds of evangelicalism. In contrast to Bell, Galli believes that “orthodoxy will show again that it has the truer and thicker grasp of the Bible and of life.” Bell, by implication, is thus heterodox, despite the fact that he raises many good questions that “we would be foolish to ignore.”

What I want to interrogate in this part of my review is the criteria by which Galli distinguishes between liberal and evangelical, and the way he then expounds on this distinction. He begins the section with the following paragraphs, which clearly and succinctly articulate the problem:

That Jesus is divine is crucial for Bell. And he does a wonderful job of challenging the skepticism of those who find the incarnation impossible to believe. And he has no intellectual concerns about the reality of Christ's bodily resurrection. 

But it's here that we run up against Bell's hermeneutic, that is, the principle by which he decides if a biblical teaching is relevant. Why, for example, is blood atonement a time-bound explanation of the Cross, but the divinity of Christ is a deep mystery we shouldn't shun? Why are Paul's statements about the universality of salvation taken literally, but his teaching on substitutionary atonement as mere creative writing? 

If there is a criterion driving these distinctions, it seems to be based on what Bell thinks contemporary people can swallow. I couldn't see any other criteria at play. Given the complete lack of quotes from any other writer or tradition, one is led to the unfortunate conclusion that what makes one extraordinary biblical claim a time-bound metaphor and another literal truth is that Bell says so.

This is a serious charge, and it may very well be true. But can we look at the question of relevance in a different way? Is there a way to provide a hermeneutic that will accomplish Bell’s purposes while remaining firmly evangelical? That is what I hope to argue in this part of my essay. To begin, I first want to point out an issue in Galli’s second paragraph above. He asks why blood atonement is time-bound while Christ’s divinity is not. There are at least two ways of answering this. The first is that the divinity of Christ was the first and most basic of all the church’s conciliar decisions; without some form of its affirmation, one can hardly call oneself a Christian at all. By contrast, there has been no dogma of the atonement, no position that the ecumenical church decided was the right position to hold.

The second reason brings us to the hermeneutical problem. There are many different ways in which the NT speaks about the cross-event: ransom, reconciliation, substitution, judgment, etc. The point is simply that the cross is saving in some sense; it is the event of our reconciliation with God, however that is to be conceived. Similarly, the NT uses many different expressions for Jesus: Son of God, Son of Man, Lord, Messiah, Lamb of God, Logos, etc. The point here is that this man Jesus is in some kind of intimate relationship with the one he calls “Father,” so intimate, in fact, that our relation to Jesus constitutes our relation to God. Are we obliged to make one of the titles used for Jesus the controlling one in our understanding of him? Moreover, these titles have their origin in a particular cultural-historical context. “Son of Man,” for example, has its origins in the apocalyptic texts of Second Temple Judaism, appearing in 1 Enoch and Daniel 7. The use of “Lord” and “Son of God” in the NT had political connotations—as many scholars, such as Richard Horsley, have pointed out—since they involved denying these titles of honor to Caesar and others. Other contexts for other titles could be mentioned as well.

I bring this up only to point out that the metaphors and ideas used in the Bible have a particular historical provenance. While it is important to know the context in which they arose, our use of them today does not depend upon replicating the original cultural conceptualities and presuppositions. We can speak of Jesus as God’s Son without having to adopt the notions of Second Temple Judaism. In order to capture the political overtones of the NT imagery, it may be appropriate to use different titles altogether, such as when Martin Niemöller said that “God is my Führer.” In that context, the word “Führer” carried the scandalous and subversive implications that “Lord” would have in the time of the early church. Can we not do something similar with the atonement imagery in the Bible? Are we required to speak and think as if we are first-century Jewish-Christians? Is the task of understanding the message of the NT simply a matter of replicating an ancient historical context? Is it merely what Mark Alan Bowald calls “hermeneutical archaeology”? When it comes to the cross, are we finished with the task of interpretation when we’ve uncovered the cultural context and cultic logic of the biblical writers? Or—to take a far worse approach—are we simply supposed to repeat the words of the Bible without any critical historical and theological reflection? Does our evangelical identity depend upon the avoidance of hermeneutics? Are we supposed to assume that every biblical text coheres with every other because of some divine superintention of the Bible to say exactly what it says? Is this what an evangelical has to mean by the word “revelation”?

I raise these questions because Galli’s review seems to present us with two options: either one is an evangelical who simply repeats what is generally viewed as orthodox or what we read on the surface of the text, or one is a liberal who engages in a hermeneutical dialogue with the text in order to critically assess how to communicate the message of Scripture in a new time and place. I’m not saying that these are the two options Galli intends to present us with, only that his review gives the impression that we have to make such a decision. If that is the case, then I want to argue that the most evangelical decision is to become a liberal—at least in the sense that to be a faithful evangelical ought to mean the freedom to think hermeneutically and theologically about the gospel of Jesus Christ. I will assess Galli’s discussion in this section in three parts: (1) first, I will analyze his presentation of certain Protestant “liberal” thinkers and the definition he provides of liberalism, then (2) I will examine his main definition of liberalism as making Christianity relevant for today and how an evangelical hermeneutic might offer a better way forward than Galli’s alternative, and finally (3) I will conclude by analyzing the problem of the particularity and exotic nature of Jesus Christ.

A. The Problem of Liberalism. Galli says that Bell “correctly notes in the preface that many have taught what he teaches or hints at in the book.” Now, I’m guessing Bell was referring to people like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, since his book is dealing with questions associated with universal salvation and the scope of God’s saving love. But Galli makes a rather interesting (and, arguably, uncharitable) move:

Names that come immediately to mind include Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich. Schleiermacher was keen on mining our innate religious sensibilities (the things we've intuited are true) to ground Christian faith. Ritschl celebrated the kingdom ethics of Jesus. Bultmann argued that first-century metaphors and worldviews should be abandoned. Tillich wrote of faith as accepting our acceptance. All these themes run through Bell's book, sometimes in compelling ways.

While it’s almost certainly true that some of these themes are running through Bell’s book, I highly doubt this is what Bell had in mind when writing that sentence! Galli has creatively turned Bell’s words into an opportunity to discuss the problem of liberalism. But before I address the hermeneutical problem that Galli highlights, I want to examine his presentation of these “liberal” thinkers and question the definition of liberalism.

What do we mean by the term “liberal”? The term is fraught with historical baggage. My interest in this conversation is due to the fact that my own research is focused on the theology of Rudolf Bultmann. I wish to recover him—as crazy as this may sound—for an evangelical audience. I think he is wrongly classified as a liberal, or at least this label cannot be used in a univocal sense for Bultmann as it is used for Tillich, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Harnack, and others. Let me explain. Bultmann’s theology can only be adequately understood as the rejection of 19th-century German liberal theology. From about 1922 until the end of his life, he stood with Karl Barth in opposing the central tenets of liberal theology, as it was understood in their context. Throughout his works, he stands resolutely opposed to the likes of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Troeltsch. We can define liberal theology here as the attempt to speak about God on the basis of certain historical or psychological “givens”; that is, grounding our God-talk on personal experience, historical research, religious piety, etc. What Barth initiated, and what Bultmann joined, is referred to as dialectical theology. By this, they mean that knowledge of God can only be given by God in the event of God’s self-revelation by grace and for faith. It is an event of God’s self-disclosure. There are no givens within the world by which we can reach some knowledge of God or meet God half-way (i.e., no apologetics, no rational proofs, no natural theology). Barthians often claim that Bultmann turned away from his early agreement with Barth toward a kind of existentialist natural theology, but this is a gross misunderstanding of Bultmann. The program of demythologizing is an extension of dialectical theology into the question of the relation between gospel and culture (to which I will return below). I will clear all this up in my forthcoming dissertation, though others like Christophe Chalamet have already made the essential defense. In any case, when Galli goes on to say that “Bultmann reinterpreted the New Testament as existential philosophy,” one can only repeat the famous response of Barth: Nein!

Bultmann’s stated purpose in his program of demythologizing was never to make the gospel more palatable for modern ears, but rather to discover and hear anew the true scandal of the gospel: the disruptive word of God’s judgment upon our sin and God’s justifying grace in Jesus Christ. In 1952, Bultmann states that demythologizing “exposes the real scandal that the Bible presents to us moderns just as to all other human beings” (New Testament and Mythology, 102). And in 1953, Bultmann writes:

The purpose of demythologizing is not to make religion more acceptable to modern man by trimming the traditional biblical texts, but to make clearer to modern man what the Christian faith is. He must be confronted with the issue of decision, be provoked to decision by the fact that the stumbling-block to faith, the skandalon, is peculiarly disturbing to man in general, not only to modern man. (Kerygma and Myth 2:182-83)

Finally, in his 1958 Jesus Christ and Mythology, we read:

Christian preaching, in so far as it is preaching of the Word of God by God’s command and in His name, does not offer a doctrine which can be accepted either by reason or by a sacrificium intellectus. Christian preaching is kerygma, that is, a proclamation addressed not to the theoretical reason, but to the hearer as a self. In this manner Paul commends himself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God (2 Cor. 4:2). Demythologizing will make clear this function of preaching as a personal message, and in doing so it will eliminate a false stumbling-block and bring into sharp focus the real stumbling-block, the word of the cross. (36)

Numerous critics of Bultmann over the years have argued that he was unfaithful to his own stated intentions. That is a possible line of critique that one is free to explore. I happen to think it is still wrong, in the end, but it’s at least an intellectually responsible position to take. What is not responsible is a mischaracterization of Bultmann work that ignores or obscures his intention. We can disagree with Bultmann, but he at least deserves to be treated fairly and accurately.

To be clear, I’m not accusing Galli of failing to anticipate my dissertation or of not being an expert in Bultmann’s theology. That would, of course, be entirely unfair to him. He is only repeating a general view of Bultmann that has been in wide circulation for many decades now. But that doesn’t make his statements any less wrong. They need to be corrected, because they perpetuate a false picture and do a great injustice to one of the great thinkers of the modern era. (I would also want to defend Schleiermacher and Tillich from misunderstanding, but their classification as liberal thinkers is much more apropos.) Does this mean Bultmann is somehow an “orthodox” and “evangelical” theologian? No, that would be overstating my case. But then again, those terms are not tidy and easily defined either. In fact, it is remarkable how similar the theological methodology of contemporary American evangelicalism is to the old German liberalism. Is it not the case that evangelicals largely emphasize personal experience and religious piety? And when someone like Josh McDowell and other apologists use historical data to establish the rationality of faith, is this not essentially the same kind of move that liberals employed when they tried to make historical data about Jesus the basis for faith?

The connections between liberalism and evangelicalism are far deeper and more intertwined than most ever realize. Both movements grew out of a common European reaction against Protestant orthodoxy and Enlightenment rationalism; the connection between pietism and liberalism is crucial. In fact, the one element of Bultmann’s theology that makes him the most liberal is precisely what also makes him the most evangelical! And that is his emphasis on the personal decision of faith as the basis for one’s saving relation to God. Bultmann rejects the liberal notion of experience (Erlebnis) or feeling (Gefühl) as the ground for one’s relation with God, but he maintains the emphasis on a personal decision. And this is perhaps what distinguishes evangelicalism above all else—the need to personally respond to God’s grace. What unites Bultmann, evangelicalism, and liberalism is the stress on individual freedom and the responsibility of the individual to respond to God in faith and obedience. The more recent turn towards a doctrinally-defined definition of evangelicalism is, in many respects, a betrayal of the originating insights of evangelical faith. It was the pietist opposition to the notion that faith is determined by one’s dogmatic commitments that spawned what we now know as evangelicalism.

I therefore want to strongly problematize the entire distinction between “evangelical” and “liberal.” I have written at length in the past about the possibility of providing a universal definition of evangelicalism. What I stated there bears repeating at some length:

While I support the attempt to specify as carefully as possible this particular group of people, I remain unconvinced that any definition will ever actually suffice. The basic problem is that even the most seemingly straightforward terms—such as “orthodox” and “biblicist”—remain irreducibly complex and diverse. These terms resist any singular meaning, and they are certainly not self-evident. There are very few evangelicals who actually agree on what these terms mean. [John] Stackhouse recognizes as much when he says that one has to abide by his definitions of these terms for the overall definition to work. But that just underscores the problem. The attempt to formulate a universal definition which will result in “accurate” polling data (as if that were even possible) requires that someone assume the role of evangelical magisterium. Someone has to determine what these words actually mean in order to specify who is in and who is out. 

But it is my conviction that evangelicalism, at its heart, resists precisely this kind of magisterial power. If it is anything, evangelicalism is the rejection of any singular form or tradition in favor of a concrete, personal, and anti-institutional faith. I suggest defining evangelicalism not as a type or movement but rather as an attitude, as a particular disposition. Evangelicalism is not a substance whose attributes can be examined; it is rather an actualistic mode of being which resists any definitional foreclosure and instead bursts open our concepts, pluralizing and multiplying the dimensions of Christian faith—though always under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. This helps to explain why evangelicalism is marked by transdenominationalism, and why talking about “evangelical Catholics” is a problematic use of the word. 

Certainly, there are many self-proclaimed evangelicals who seek to pin down a very narrow definition of evangelicalism in order to apply the label to themselves and to very few others, if any. But I contend that this kind of semantic violence is what constitutes fundamentalism—the redefinition of terms to validate one’s own ideas over against the ideas of others. That’s not to say that people like Stackhouse are fundamentalists. By no means! Rather, it is to suggest that the attempt to locate a universally applicable definition of what is “essentially” or “truly” evangelical is itself an anti-evangelical project. ... Any pursuit of a universally fixed meaning is an act of exclusionary violence which runs counter to the truest impulses of the evangelical spirit. ... 

Evangelicalism is thus, in a very real sense, anarchic in nature: it resists attempts to universally fix or define what is truly Christian. Instead, it remains radically open to redefinition and recontextualization. Its missional character flows from the fact that no institution or tradition or culture can possibly be the sole bearer of the truth. In its best forms, therefore, evangelicalism is simply the openness of the church to the radical interruption of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

What is truly “evangelical,” I want to say, is precisely this liberal freedom of the gospel to transcend particular cultural, institutional, political, and even religious forms that attempt to fix and stabilize God’s Word in a permanent, universal, and secure modality. Evangelicalism is the refusal to allow God’s revelation to be objectified and petrified within a single dogmatic formulation or cultural-historical expression. In other words, evangelicalism is intrinsically missional, in the sense that it recognizes the cross-cultural freedom of God’s message of grace that continually bursts open the limits we try to impose upon it. The gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be contained in a safe and secure form. It transcends our attempts to pin it down. In this sense, 19th-century German liberalism wasn’t liberal enough—by which I want to say, it wasn’t evangelical enough!

All of this leads us to the problem of hermeneutics and the question of a missional hermeneutic.

B. The Problem of Hermeneutics. I have been reflecting recently on this topic, and I cannot replicate all of my thoughts here; it would take far too long to explain. So I will simply throw out a few nuggets that I hope will get the conversation started.

The recognition that everything is historical is the origin of the hermeneutical problem. Once every text is seen to be historically conditioned, it becomes clear that the ideas expressed in a particular document are shaped by the presuppositions of a specific time and place. Bultmann calls this cultural-historical framework or paradigm of thought a Weltbild or “world-picture.” A Weltbild is the set of implicit general presuppositions about how to understand the world within which one lives. Every cultural artifact is shaped by a particular Weltbild. There is no ahistorical concept, no ahistorical text or object. Every idea, every judgment, every debate is situated within a nexus of social, cultural, and historical relations. That doesn’t mean every idea or event is reducible to these contextual factors; it only means that they are inseparable from them.

The task of hermeneutics is then to translate from one cultural Weltbild to another, from the cultural-historical context of the text to the cultural-historical context of the reader. This task of translation does not mean that we can violently impose our contemporary thinking upon the text and thus make it say whatever we want. Rather it requires that we differentiate between the subject-matter (die Sache) of the text and the “world-picture” within which this subject-matter comes to expression in the text. In biblical terms, this is the distinction between gospel and culture, between the kerygmatic word of revelation and the historically-situated witness of the prophets and apostles. All of this presupposes a distinction between revelation and the text of the Bible. I take such a distinction for granted for numerous reasons that cannot be elaborated upon here. Without such a distinction, though, we end up with what Tom Greggs calls “biblio-idolatry.” The Bible as religious object becomes God’s Word, when the Bible is instead the authoritative witness to the Word of God that is Jesus Christ.

So far, all of this may seem rather liberal and non-evangelical—and based on certain definitions of evangelicalism, that would be true. What I want to suggest is that we need to rethink the problem of hermeneutics as a problem of mission. Because this is something I am working to develop in much greater detail, I will only hint at the general contours of this position. Missiologists like Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh have stressed the nature of Christian mission as translation. Walls speaks of missionary translation by analogy with the translating movement of God into human flesh in Jesus. The incarnation is the paradigmatic form of mission-as-translation, in which God translates God’s own self into the cultural-historical form of first-century Palestine. Sanneh rejects what he calls a “mission of diffusion,” wherein the gospel is bound up with a particular cultural form, such that the spread of the gospel involves the spread of a particular culture. This also goes by the name of Constantinianism or cultural imperialism. By contrast, Sanneh holds up the notion of a “mission of translation,” where a distinction is made between gospel and culture so as to facilitate the freedom of the cross-cultural mission of God. Walls provides two principles to conceptualize this mission of translation: the principle of indigenization and the principle of pilgrimization. The first emphasizes the fact that the gospel indigenizes itself in each cultural context, freely entering into and embracing what we might call the Weltbild of a particular situation. The second emphasizes the fact that the gospel disrupts and transforms this situation in light of the eschatological vision of God’s kingdom. The gospel does not just leave us as we are. Finally, I want to lift up John Flett’s thesis that the confusion of gospel and culture turns the Christian message into propaganda.

The conversation over universalism (among many other issues) has stalled because one side says, “Look, this is what the Bible says!” or “This is what the authors meant!” And that may be well and true. But does this mean we are bound to repeat what the texts say or what the first-century historical context believed? Is the task of understanding limited to mere repetition, copying from past to present with no translation? If so, then I’m afraid any distinction between evangelicalism and fundamentalism is lost entirely. God’s revelation is then something static, fixed, revealed; it is not a living word that interrupts us here and now and conscripts us as missionaries for a new time and place. The other side responds by saying: Look, some of the ideas and concepts are rooted in cultural presuppositions that we no longer share, nor are they necessary components of the gospel message itself. We need to think together about how to understand and communicate the gospel in a new world. Otherwise we are left with a mission of mere diffusion and absorption. And this does not accord with what we see in Jesus Christ, or what we see occur in the translation movement from Jews to Gentiles in the story of Acts. Are there mythological notions within the biblical text? Yes, there are. The task of interpretation, as Bultmann stated in 1941, is not to eliminate myth but rather to interpret it. If we fail to do so, we turn revelation into propaganda. We transform the transcendent Word of God into a finite and culturally-confined word of human beings. The problem with both liberalism and evangelicalism—at least as they are presented by Galli—is that both are forms of propaganda, in the sense that both tie down the gospel to a specific cultural form and thus define mission as the universal diffusion of this form.

I want to make two claims here. First, I would (and will, in my dissertation) argue that Bultmann’s program of demythologizing is a missionary hermeneutic that encompasses the two aspects of indigenization and pilgrimization. It is faithful to the missionary impulse of the gospel. That is not a claim that I can explore or develop here, but it needs to be said in order to demonstrate the problems with classifying Bultmann and other hermeneutical thinkers as “liberal” in a facile manner. Second, and more relevant to Galli’s review, I would suggest that Bell is fumbling towards precisely such a missionary hermeneutic, even if he has failed to articulate it. I say this realizing that I don’t know Bell’s actual intentions. It is merely my attempt to provide an alternative narrative to the one that Galli has provided. Instead of distinguishing between evangelical and liberal, I want to suggest distinguishing between missionary and non-missionary. That, I believe, is a far more productive and helpful distinction.

Is there any evidence that Bell is thinking along these lines? Absolutely. In his earlier work, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, he uses the analogy of painting for the task of Christian faith and mission. He writes the following near the beginning:

Here’s what often happens: Somebody comes along who has a fresh perspective on the Christian faith. People are inspired. A movement starts. Faith that was stale and dying is now alive. But then the pioneer of the movement – the painter – dies and the followers stop exploring. They mistakenly assume that their leader’s words were the last ones on the subject, and they freeze their leader’s words. They forget that as that innovator was doing his or her part to move things along, that person was merely taking part in the discussion that will go on forever. And so in their commitment to what so-and-so said and did, they end up freezing the faith. 

What gets lost is the truth that whoever painted that version was just like us, searching for God and experiencing God and trying to get a handle on what the Christian faith looks like. And then a new generation comes along living in a new day and a new world, and they have to keep the tradition going or the previous paintings are going to end up in the basement. 

The tradition then is painting, not making copies of the same painting over and over. The challenge of the art is to take what was great about the previous paintings and incorporate that into new paintings. 

And in the process, make something beautiful – for today. 

For many Christians, the current paintings are enough. The churches, the books, the language, the methods, the beliefs – there is nothing wrong with it. It works for them and meets their needs, and they gladly invite others to join them in it. I thank God for that. I celebrate those who have had their lives transformed in these settings. 

But this book is for those who need a fresh take on Jesus and what it means to live the kind of life he teaches us to live. I’m part of a community, a movement of people who have been living, exploring, discussing, sharing, and experiencing new understandings of Christian faith.

My claim is that this “movement of people” goes by the name of evangelicalism. If someone wants to call this “liberal,” so be it, but it’s only the liberalism that is intrinsic to evangelical faith. It is the truly liberal freedom of the gospel that is “always reforming” (semper reformanda). An evangelicalism that is content with “making copies of the same painting over and over” is a stale, frozen, dead evangelicalism. It can hardly lay claim to being part of the same movement associated with the likes of Wesley, Finney, Edwards, Blanchard, and others—much less the original Reformers.

I’m not suggesting that Bell is free from criticism. By no means. I would certainly want to question certain ideas and presuppositions. He does not seem to have adequately engaged in the hermeneutical reflection that I think is necessary. He speaks above of taking “what was great about the previous paintings” and incorporating them into new ones. I would want to clarify that and speak of newly translating the gospel kerygma that is never captured in any painting, but rather remains an eschatological message to which our finite paintings seek to bear faithful, if fallible, witness. But the general thrust of Bell’s idea remains sound—and soundly missional and evangelical. For an accessible articulation of some of these themes, I recommend John Franke’s Manifold Witness.

C. The Problem of Particularity. Returning now to Galli’s review. He says that liberalism is guilty of two errors: (a) it undermines the particularity of the gospel, and (b) it undermines the exotic nature of Christian belief that makes Jesus so interesting. Let’s take these in order. First, the particularity of the gospel must not be conflated with the cultural-historical forms in which this gospel comes to expression. This means that the gospel authorizes new translations, new paintings, in the here and now. But here’s the point: it is precisely the particularity of the gospel that makes such translation possible. It is only when we turn the gospel into a universal worldview—in which one cultural context seeks to absorb and nullify all other contexts—that we lose the particularity, and thus the translatability, of the gospel message. Bultmann is the theologian of particularity par excellence! In fact, what’s ironic about using Bultmann as an example is that he was adamant in the opposition to universalism because of his strict emphasis on particularity. Bultmann opposed Barth’s universal scope of election because it did not take the particular decision of faith seriously enough, in his mind. So again, Bultmann is a witness for evangelicalism!

What I find very problematic about Galli’s review are statements like the following: “[liberals] believe it is no longer reasonable to hold to one or (usually) more core teachings of the New Testament”; “what novelist John Updike ... said about the Resurrection applies to all the central teachings of the New Testament”; “for liberals, the sensibilities of the age trump biblical revelation.” I want to ask Galli, what are these “teachings” of the NT? Galli gives the impression that the Bible presents us with fully-formulated doctrines that we either affirm or deny, as if faith is merely a matter of rational assent. (Faith as assensus, by the way, was a notion that the Reformers vigorously rejected in favor of faith as fiducia or “heartfelt trust.”) But the Bible nowhere gives us doctrine. It gives us contextual witnesses to a disruptive truth of God’s judgment of sin and God’s gracious reconciling love, both made actual and concrete in Jesus of Nazareth in the power of the Holy Spirit. The church rightly felt compelled to conceptualize issues like the relation between Jesus and YHWH and between divinity and humanity. These are crucial issues that have to be assessed again and again. But to say that the Bible “teaches” substitutionary atonement is incredibly misleading, if not simply false. The Bible doesn’t teach the Trinity, nor does it teach the divinity of Christ. These doctrines are “answers” that the church provided in response to the “questions” presented in the text. But the text itself does not give us the answer. Does that mean these doctrines are simply dispensable? No, because the question is there in the text and it compels us to give a faithful and responsible answer. But these answers have to be negotiated anew in every new time and place. The Bible, in other words, does not give us a “Christian worldview.” If there is anything that has misled evangelicalism in recent history, it is thinking in terms of worldviews. Few things could be more at odds with Christian faith.

Second, what about the “exotic” and “interesting” aspect of Christianity? Here I confess confusion. Does Galli really believe that orthodoxy is superior “because it is culturally exotic”? Does he think it is a mark of true faith when Christianity is a sacrificium intellectus? I wonder what he thinks about cross-cultural mission. Does he believe that missionaries to the Global South are supposed to impose Western religious forms? They would certainly be exotic! But is that faithful to the gospel? Is he emphasizing the exotic character for us because Christianity is often too domesticated? If so, does he really think that imposing an old Protestant orthodoxy is really disruptive to North American culture? Isn’t the deeply practical and concrete message that Bell is trying to emphasize actually quite a bit more exotic to a way of life that is so consumeristic and bourgeois?

It’s hard for me to see what Galli could mean by exotic other than a sacrifice of the intellect, the blind adoption of a set of doctrinal commitments for the simple reason that it appears alien and absurd. But is Galli then confusing the alien character of the gospel with the alien intellectual worldview of a particular time in the church’s life? Is he not confusing faith with an uncritical anti-intellectualism? Sure, the various parts of orthodoxy “work together and hold together in a way that makes sense,” but just because something is internally coherent, does that make it true? Does internal coherence plus intellectual bizarreness really equal Christian faith? A lot of systems are internally coherent but false to the subject-matter they claim to explicate. Could this not be the case for Protestant orthodoxy? Are we bound to either uncritically accept a system of beliefs and thus be counted as evangelical, or critically assess our faith and thus be labeled liberal? Are those the only two options? Is there not a way beyond this binary opposition?

I realize that Galli is trying to say that orthodoxy offers a more intellectually compelling narrative, because it doesn’t conform to what we naturally think ought to be the case; it appears as something novel and strange, something that makes sense according to a logic that is disorienting and yet persuasive. That’s Galli’s intention, and I get that. But as compelling as this may sound, Galli is on very dangerous territory. When the scandal of the gospel is being defined by how it contradicts our intellectual instincts, one is still defining the gospel according to a contemporary standard—albeit in a negative way, rather than the positive way for which he criticizes liberalism. This is a problem we see in metaphysics. Defining God as either omniscient or immortal are both forms of metaphysical thinking, because God is being defined according to the human person: the first is positive (we have limited knowledge; God has perfect knowledge); the second is negative (we are mortal; God is immortal). Both are two sides of the same problematic coin. Put differently, Galli’s version of orthodox evangelicalism is just the mirror image of liberalism. Neither properly grasps the missionary hermeneutic that distinguishes between gospel and culture. Liberalism collapses the gospel into a modern cultural form, evangelicalism into a premodern cultural form. Both need to be demythologized.

I have sought to problematize the definitions of “liberal” and “evangelical.” These terms have a wide range of meanings, and they are often used arbitrarily or uncritically. If evangelicalism hopes to have a future, I firmly believe it will need to move beyond these static terms that often replace the hard work of historical scholarship, theological reflection, and charitable dialogue. Their use tends to involve overly simplistic distinctions where a much more nuanced and complex relationship actually exists. I offer my missiological analysis as one way to rethink the relation between gospel and culture in a manner that brings the so-called “evangelical” and “liberal” insights together. I hope this is only the start of a much longer (and never-ending) conversation.