A little too much coffee and Roberts' Rules.
by Jon
Clark makes one point worth mulling in the future: is neo-evangelicalism’s focus opposed to revivalism? Or is it the latest incarnation of feel-good revivalism?
the neo-evangelical project … was always organized around great personalities and the successor movements are just as dependent upon them. They are still children of the First and Second Great Awakenings.
But the biggest question Clark raises is about vitality of this movement; he compares confessional evangelicals with what he calls “tansdenominational” evangelicals.
RSC sees Pietism, Revivalism, and Confessionalism uniting in the late 19th Century, to fight against the Rationalism and Enlightenment that swept the universities. But he says leaders of the early fundamentalists were tied to churches (like J. Gresham Machen), whereas the children of fundamentalism went consciously transdenominational:
The great hero of the early fundamentalist movement, J. Gresham Machen, was dead and some of those who had studied with him wanted to retain his high view of Scripture, but they also wanted to move on. They wanted to influence the broader culture and to leave behind his commitment to the Westminster Standards and his Presbyterian view of the church and sacraments. Scholars call this movement, led by Carl F. H. Henry, Henry Ockenga, and Bill Graham, among others, neo-evangelicalism. This movement would seek to be both faithful to a small number of core theological commitments and culturally influential.
RSC says neo-evangelicalism lasted about thirty years, before its children split into “emergent” and “YRR” streams. The Emergent stream was more critical of the past. But “the YRR movement … sought to get the old neo-evangelical band back together.”
And perhaps it was no coincidence that the neo-evangelicals and the YRRs were optimistic, post-war coalitions. The Henry-Graham coalition took off about a decade after World War II; Christianity Today was founded in 1956. John Piper’s Seashells sermon, in 2000, came about a decade after the USSR and Fukuyama’s jubilant End of History. Both, in a sense, became the church of Western values.
Clark contrasts trandenominational pietism with “confessionalism.” He sees John Williamson Nevin, B.B. Warfield and Charles Hodge as adjacent and critical to 19th Century transdenominational revivalism but tethered instead to confessions and ecclesiology. It was those tethered to ‘confessionalism’ that were the heirs of the Reformed tradition of sola scriptura, yes, but also Sola gratia and sola fide.
So, Clark says it’s strange that Wax calls out to personalities (Stott, Graham, Packer) as examples of evangelicalism, and contrasts them with “Fundamentalism” (presumably of the Bob Jones variety). The Confessionals of the Warfield and Machen variety are missing. Confessionals, Clark says, remain tethered to a church and ecclesiology with deeper commitments than Christ transforming Culture. “Certainly, Christians want to engage the culture from a Christian perspective, but the outcome of that engagement does not belong to us.”
All this suggests the occasional hubris of “neo-“ pietism might start out with the hubris of people “on the other side of history,” where all the old conflicts are over. But it becomes a holding pen for children critical of their elders on some point, who need a new coalition to ‘get over’ some point of ecclesiology, theology, or politics. When the Henry-era coalition split, the smaller YRR coalition is set to split again: the relationship between truth and authority, and the role of gender and authority. We never manage to get the fundamentalists’ questions behind us.
As a Baptist, I’m only half sure Clark would accept us as “confessional.” But where he says the key “is a holistic theology, piety, and practice lived out in the context of congregations and in the life of the broader institutional church,” I agree.
Transdenominational movements and websites don’t reproduce. They are “platforms, not institutions,” in the language of Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build. Even the institutions built by the neo-evangelicals turned into platforms, not institutions. It is fascinating to watch Evangelical personalities engage with Levin; they decry the loss of Western institutional authority, but don’t see how they’re the voices on platforms built on the wreckage of the once-great-institutions they’re speaking from.
Denominations, for all their faults, are embodied institutional knowledge. They are proven to have the tools to pass knowledge and community from one generation to the next. Those tools can be destroyed and broken down; those tools might depend on cultural factors no longer present. But Baptist congregations have the tools to reach eight generations; each new generation of transdenominational pietism needs another ‘neo’ to stay alive. No one is baptized into the Church of TGC or CT.
Indeed, the healthiest of the YRR coalition were explicitly ecclesiological. You know what church they’re a part of. Mohler explicitly tried to make SBTS “as Baptist as possible.” John MacArthur is local-congregational. Mark Dever’s 9Marks rose to fame on “elders” at a time that “entrepreneur-founders” became the dominant corporate model; but Dever’s actual ministry is particularly, peculiarly congregational.
Wax’s call for neo-neo-neo-evangelicalism dovetails with his inability to grapple with Rod Dreher’s core thesis. In a throwaway line in his review of Dreher’s Live Not by Lies, Wax tosses out the sign he’s not really read Dreher’s earlier book, the Benedict Option, with care. Wax says Dreher is a breathless messenger of the alarm: “the culture is lost, so run for the hills!”
The Benedict Option was scorned by BigEva as a call to ‘retreat to the hills.’ But it wasn’t that – Dreher was reacting to the collapse of Christian reproduction and institutions. We need to figure out how to reproduce in our children and communities before we claim to offer cultural renewal. Our sick churches produce sick communities; our missionaries carry sick churches. So Dreher’s popular-level thesis isn’t all that different from Levin’s later thesis: our institutions don’t produce and build on the inheritance of prior generations. And it was not all that different from Dever’s ecclesiology-driven focus on “healthy churches.” Our culture’s ‘personality-driven’ evangelical platforms have eaten up generations of seed corn. Soviet agriculture had better harvests than the current crop of neo-neo-evangelicals.
That’s not to say I don’t want a strong evangelicalism. Evangelicalism is a “trasdenominational” phenomenon, but nobody is really a transdenominational evangelical. Rather, strong evangelicalism is a byproduct of denominations, not a goal.
CS Lewis famously analogized denominations to rooms off a Great Hall, but the goal was to leave the Hall.
“It is in the rooms, not in the hall that there are fires and chairs and meals. The Hall is a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For That purpose, the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable.”
“Above all, you must be asking which Door is the True One, not which pleases you best…”
Contrast Lewis’ vision with Wax seeking men and women who identify with the Hall:
For this reason, the question I’ve been asking lately isn’t if there are “real Christians” out there, but whether there are “classic evangelicals.” Is there a future for Christians in various denominations and different countries who share the instincts of leaders like John Stott and J. I. Packer…?
So, to mix the analogies, Wax sees the Hall as the safe middle ground between the rooms of Fundamentalism and the outdoors of Progressivism. He asks if the “debates of the last decade may have jeopardized one of the primary insights from this cross-denominational renewal movement—”: the gospel lets us avoid fundamentalism on the one hand, and progressivism on the other hand.” Fundamentalism is behind every door.
There are doors off the great hall that contains fundamentalists; they tend to be hard to open from the outside. If there’s an actual fundamentalist threat, the answer is to work on making the room less fundamentalists.
“Being in a room that isn’t fundamentalist” is dramatically different than imagining a class of “transdenominationalists” thought leaders, with a hand on a lintel and two feet in the Hall. Those men are the least like those in the room. They hear all the angry critiques from those who are passing out the door, back into the Hall. And so, the consensus in the Hall is that the rooms must be full of dangerous fundamentalists, compared to the Hall, full of people who don’t care about such things.
But the Hall is a mirage. It given a shape by the rooms; the rooms are not created by the Hall. And health comes from inside the rooms, not the Hall; in fact, the Hall is only full when people won’t (or can’t) go into the rooms.
If there’s a future for “evangelicals,” it requires each Christian to find a congregation and an ecclesiology and build it into something that can pass down the inheritance to the next generation. Putting a new set of institutions in the Hall will end in the same place: a wasted decade, and another neo-.