Page 1816 – Christianity Today (2024)

In An Autobiography, published in 1939 on the eve of World War II, English philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) reflected on the historical legacy of World War I. “[A] war of unprece-dented ferocity,” wrote Collingwood, “closed in a peace-settlement of unprecedented folly, in which statesmanship, even purely selfish statesmanship, was overwhelmed by the meanest and most idiotic passions.” The war, Collingwood conceded, “was an unprecedented triumph for natural science,” a triumph that also “paved the way to other triumphs: improvements in transport, in sanitation, in surgery, medicine, and psychiatry, in commerce and industry, and, above all, in preparations for the next war.” The Treaty of Versailles had nevertheless failed, on Collingwood’s account, to restore the human side of affairs to any semblance of good order. The “power to control Nature” had overrun man’s “power to control human situations,” and the treaty gave way to a reign of natural science with the power to convert Europe “into a wilderness of Yahoos.”

By 1939, Collingwood had been embarked for two decades on a quest to develop a philosophy and methodology of history that might awaken history as “a school of moral and political wisdom.” This journey had taken Collingwood along a garden of forking paths. He broke away from the philosophical realism prevalent in Oxford in his youth to seek a philosophy of mind that allowed moral theory to make a difference in moral action. From those who believed that an understanding of “the human mind and its various processes” would be best attained through the science of psychology, Collingwood also departed. Dismissing the encroaching materialism of psychology that saw reason and will as mere “concretions of sense and appetite,” Collingwood turned to history as the arena through which human affairs might best be investigated and understood. Here, he had to blaze yet another trail. He dismissed the “scissors-and-paste” methods of examining the past as a dead object of inquiry and conceived of history as the investigation of a living past, a past from which the purposive actions of men continue to generate echoes and resonances into our own time.

Conceiving of history as the study of the self-knowledge of the human mind, Collingwood proposed a question-and-answer methodology by which the historian re-enacts in his own mind the thoughts of those whose history he is investigating. The possibility generated by this approach to historical study was that the historian may then gain both self-knowledge (an awakening to the range of thoughts it is possible for him to think) as well as insight into the broader world of human affairs in his own time. “We study history,” wrote Collingwood, “in order to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act.”

This understanding of the history and possibility of human affairs required Collingwood to part ways once again, this time from English statesmen who misread the growing turmoil in Europe and sided with fascism during the Spanish Civil War and in the Czechoslovakia crisis. Though he would be derided as a Communist for his outspoken opposition to what he saw as England’s betrayal of its own parliamentary system, Collingwood concluded An Autobiography with a ringing renunciation of his “pose of a detached professional thinker”:

I know now that the minute philosophers of my youth, for all their profession of a purely scien-tific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight.

In History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood, Fred Inglis has opened a window on that fight, providing us an opportunity to revisit Collingwood, to seek to understand the questions for which he was seeking answers, and to reconnoiter the history of the bloody 20th century to ascertain whether we can in fact come to a better self-understanding of its legacy for the moral and political questions for which we need answers today.

Inglis introduces us to Collingwood’s early years in the English Lake District, where his father, Gershom, served as a secretary of sorts to the great and aging John Ruskin. Collingwood’s was an idyllic childhood, filled with the making of art and music and poetry alongside his parents and three sisters. He was homeschooled to age 14 in the very atmosphere where Charlotte Mason was working out her pedagogy and Beatrix Potter would soon take up residence to immortalize a naughty rabbit named Peter. The natural beauty of the Lake District provided the backdrop for this life with opportunities for sailing and walking. Immersion in the archaeological and folklore pursuits of his father rounded out a full engagement with the past, present, and future of England.

Through Inglis’ lens on the life of the Collingwoods we can see the advantages of Collingwood’s upbringing against an emerging re-cognition in our own time of the family as the first and most important school of youth. Matthew Crawford, in Shop Class as Soulcraft, has recently lamented also that modern education has too divorced our heads from the work of our hands and the mastery of our tools.[1] Crawford’s observation that our technologies seem to master us rather than we, them—when was the last time you actually fixed a household appliance rather than replaced it?—resonates with Collingwood’s exposure of modern man’s pretense that we have mastered science well enough to use it to master men.

In 1903, Collingwood took a scholarship place at Rugby School, where he was inducted into the formalities of England’s academic and ruling classes. It is here, in Chapter 2, that Inglis hits his stride as biographer-historian. He not only walks us through the landscape of Collingwood’s life at Rugby but also enlightens our historical imagination with a mini-discourse on the history and “moral point” of English public schools. He leaves us with a glimpse of how the social roles of English public schools have changed—and how, both for better and for worse, the sort of experience Collingwood gained at Rugby is no longer replicable.

Inglis continues this pattern of blending biography and history throughout the book, exploring “how certain key threads of narrative in the tapestry of a national tradition were taken up, recoloured, and extended by this one man’s life.” He proposes to depict for us how Collingwood took up and battled to integrate a “complex, contradictory inheritance of roles … scholar-genius, sportsman, intellectual, Lakelander-‘stateman,’ gentlemanly Oxonian, public professor, local figure, lover, parent, sailor, mortal invalid, and a dozen more.”

This historical attention to settings and social roles serves the biographer well, especially when he deals with Oxford, the environment in which Collingwood completed his education and took up his professorial life. Inglis situates Collingwood in the Oxford immortalized by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited. Instead of deconstructing the novel’s nostalgia for the place and time, Inglis uses our familiarity with it not only to illuminate Collingwood’s serious writings on the philosophy of art but also to help us better understand that work of fiction. He shows us that for Waugh’s Charles Ryder, the “love of art and of Oxford are interchangeable” and reminds us that Ryder takes up a mature place in the world as “a serious architectural painter of the noble houses of England.” Collingwood, who took his early tutelage on such questions in the presence of Ruskin, would likewise become a serious practitioner and philosopher of art.

Inglis explains Collingwood’s distinction between the arts and the crafts, the former being an open-ended act of discovery and the latter, a purposeful pursuit of a pre-determined end. The more important distinction, however, may be Collingwood’s differentiation of “amusem*nt art” from “magical art” in his 1937 book The Principles of Art. For Collingwood, the amusem*nt arts (he names football, radio, cinema, p*rnography) provide for “the discharge of emotions in such a way that they shall not interfere with the concerns of practical life.” By contrast, magical arts are those that harness the emotions for the business of living. Magical arts encompass the formal arts—literature, painting, music, sculpture, theater, and the like—but also include propaganda, necessary as a motive social force, but corruptible, as the Nazi’s grand theater in Nuremberg was already demonstrating.

This is to get ahead of ourselves, however. Collingwood’s meditations on art during his early years at Oxford (he matriculated in 1908) were enveloped in his studies of history and philosophy. Neither discipline at the time much lent itself to Collingwood’s way of encountering the world. The emerging realism of the philosophers engaged the world as something outside men and distanced man from his past. Logical positivism joined the fray, divorcing “is” from “ought.” Collingwood, the artistic creator and the archaeological investigator, ultimately took up the cause of the fading side, supported by a Christian faith that could not lightly confine mind to mere materialism and the parlor games of logic that seemed to diminish any relationship between morality and metaphysics.

Inglis reports on Collingwood’s turn to Anglicanism at Rugby School. This conversion and baptism came as something of a shock to the family, whose father “was lapsed from the Brethren.” Collingwood seems to have taken his baptism seriously, writing in Religion and Philosophy (1916) that “the self-dedication of the will to God is not the end of the individual life, but the beginning of a new and indeed of a more active life.” Inglis suggests that Collingwood was in fact exercised by the same sorts of questions T. S. Eliot was posing about the prospects for Christianity in Western culture, and that Collingwood’s defense of historical knowledge was a more pugilistic effort against the imperialism of positivism, which left no room for faith.

Inglis nevertheless underestimates the potential for Collingwood’s continuing relevance in these matters, supposing that Collingwood’s fervor is “likely to stick in the gorge of his unchurched admirers.” This moment is likely the weakest for the biographer, who has declared an intention to “take from the bequests of the past lines of force for transformation” (italics in the original). The revelation that Collingwood received and enacted in his own mind and heart the Christian faith casts another line of access to Collingwood’s thought and weaves more strongly the lines of force for transmission to our present age, so hungry for a thinking and feeling Christian witness. More important, the connection between Collingwood’s reflections on faith and his reflections on history might be more fruitfully explored.

It was Collingwood’s pronouncements on the philosophy of history that would ultimately establish his philosophical legacy. Inglis shows how Collingwood’s archaeological investigations—he collected around five thousand Roman inscriptions, which were still being catalogued and published long after his death—helped inform his distinctive question-and-answer approach. Delving into the remains of Roman Britain, Collingwood recognized the ruins and inscriptions as the artifacts of men who were engaged in purposeful action. Inglis persuasively draws the connections between the work of the archaeologist and the philosopher who presents a five-part “invention” consisting of the elevation of history above all other sciences, the development of question-and-answer logic, the theory of the re-enactment of past thoughts, the insight that thought depends upon metaphysically grounded “absolute presuppositions,” and the unification of theory and practice.

This was the set of ideas that Collingwood would work on for most of his tenure as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford between 1935 and 1941. Inglis gracefully takes us more deeply into each of these themes and sets each against a backdrop of academic discourse, teaching, publication, politics, family life, and finally the chronic illness (high blood pressure and strokes) to which Collingwood succumbed in 1943, only 53 years old.

We consider this today to be a life cut short, and if Inglis the biographer has a pervasive weakness, it is to have written a book haunted from the earliest pages by the foreshadowing of Collingwood’s untimely demise. By the end of the first chapter we have already been confronted with Collingwood as “tragic hero,” and Inglis, clearly out of deep admiration and affection for his subject, continues to hint that we will be asked to mourn for Collingwood sooner than we would like. The sensibility of tragedy, however, seems slightly out of context when recounting a life lived through a century when so many lives were wasted so prematurely on the battlefields and in the concentration camps and killing fields. Inglis’ theme of tragedy at times detracts from his effort to recover the tour de force that was Collingwood’s philosophical production. To characterize Collingwood’s early death as tragedy rings true, but the appellation of tragic hero does not fit well the man or his legacy. Inglis works too hard to recover Collingwood’s life and legacy to leave us looking across the distance at a tragic figure.

When the forces of fascism—aided and abetted, even if only passively, by positiv-ism—threatened the entire world, Collingwood came out swinging. He would not hide his disdain for the irrelevance of the English academy in the present crisis and his government’s appease-ment of fascism “over there.” Collingwood saw the threats to freedom clearly and named them. Returning to his assessment of the Treaty of Versailles, we can see better the continuity with his life’s work. In 1939, Collingwood was asking Englishmen to revisit their presuppositions and assess where they were in history. The confidence they had placed in science to lead them toward progress was misplaced. History was the mode of thought most suitable to enable men to unite moral and material progress as a whole. Inglis quotes from Collingwood’s notes for the posthumously published The Principles of History:

A scientific morality will start from the idea of human nature as a thing to be conquered or obeyed: a historical one will deny that there is such a thing, and will resolve what we are into what we do. A scientific society will turn on the idea of mastering people (by money or war or the like) or alternatively serving them (philanthropy). A historical society will turn on the idea of understanding them.

There is perhaps tragedy that Collingwood was not around after 1945 to help the Anglo-American victors navigate the treacherous waters of the Cold War, but his insistence that human action is and must be purposeful, thoughtful, and moral may still have something to say to us. The self-knowledge we can glean from history may help us be clear-headed about whether our projections of economic and military and humanitarian might are merely grasping endeavors borne of idiotic passions or honorable enterprises that will in fact advance freedom and peaceful cooperation.

Lenore T. Ealy is executive director of The Philanthropic Enterprise, a research and educational institute that seeks to strengthen our understanding of how philanthropy and voluntary social cooperation promote human flourishing. She is also founding editor of Conversations on Philanthropy and holds a PhD in the history of moral and political thought from Johns Hopkins University.

1.Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin, 2009).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

If you think Glenn Beck dislikes Progressives, check out Christopher Lasch. This legend among American historians on the Left—once their leader, then their target, finally an object of their bemusem*nt—made a career out of criticizing the class of reformers who arose under the first Roosevelt and soared with the second to become, on Lasch’s telling, the custodians of the American Establishment.

Without being able to manage the rhetoric, Beck would recognize the gist of Lasch’s indictment: Progressivism represented the ascendancy of secularized, deracinated élites enamored of the state, dismissive of tradition, suspicious of community, hostile to the traditional family, and antipathetic to the America that had endowed them with privilege. Hell on earth, Beck would agree with Lasch, would be a “society made up of intellectuals.” Up with “the people” instead—hard-working, common sense folk who want to protect their families, their neighborhoods, and their inherited wisdom from the meddling of arrogant experts.

True, Lasch’s critique proceeded from deep study while Beck is the gunslinger going by his gut. The president who embodied that particular style, George W. Bush, Beck urged on, Lasch would have excoriated. Nonetheless, the appearance of this first full-length study of Lasch coincidentally with the rise of the Tea Party allows us to see how the fragmenting of American liberalism abetted the rise of the Right—and bequeathed it its own image.

Eric Miller, a historian at Geneva College, has written here less the “life” indicated by his subtitle than an intellectual biography. He mines the personal correspondence of Lasch with his parents and an old high-school flame but nothing of his wife, Nell Commager, daughter—not incidentally—of one of the most influential American historians and ardent academic liberals of the mid-twentieth century. In view of the importance Lasch’s mature work assigned the family, it would be appropriate as well as interesting to read more about, and from, Lasch’s children. That said, Miller follows the central quest of Lasch’s life and unfolds its motives, sources, contexts, and complexities with accuracy, thoroughness, and admirable clarity. This will long remain the go-to Lasch study.

In taking on Progressivism, Lasch was excavating native soil. His parents (Robert, a Rhodes Scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Zora Schaupp, Robert’s one-time philosophy professor at Nebraska) were the classic iteration of the 1920s-’30s type: secular rationalists and ardent New Dealers who took art and politics as their religion. Entering Harvard in 1950 and then the top-notch doctoral program at Columbia, the precocious “Kit” spent his apprenticeship in American history coming to doubt these confidences. By the time that Herman Kahn’s “surreal” nuclear “realism” met the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lasch was radically at odds with Cold War liberalism and went gunning for its forebears. The result was The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963 (1965), the book that made him a star. Its thesis was that, in pursuing a psychic agenda of vital experience to the neglect of structural questions of power, the founders of Progressivism blazed a path into rather than keeping critical distance from the new corporate order.

The rest of Lasch’s career amounted to extending that critique to successive waves of the progressive development. For the moment, the Cold War establishment attacked his book just as the emerging ranks of a newer left found in it a revelation and a mandate. This launched Lasch’s political-activist period across a succession of university posts, before the lure of joining a cluster of radical historians being gathered at Rochester by Eugene Genovese landed him there for the rest of his days. But not “for good,” one might say, for the two leaders of this pack soon fell out despite their shared animus against the now fully fledged New Left. The much bruited counterculture was simply the cult of experience in new garb, Lasch charged, while its apocalyptic sensibility foreclosed the hard organizational work needed to sustain a radical project over time. Which institutions might form the base of a genuine movement constituted Lasch’s next question, and his answer marked his permanent break with his erstwhile comrades. It was in the family, the neighborhood, and the traditional culture of work and craft that people might find the resources to defy the hegemony of consumer capitalism. By contrast, the rise of careerist feminism, the universities’ new mantra of diversity and exploration, and the triumph of the “helping professions”—the hot spots of the American Left going forward—in Lasch’s estimation severed the root of resistance, even as they championed the notion in increasingly abstruse jargon.

Lasch laid out this argument most concertedly in Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977), and the bestselling Culture of Narcissism (1979). That is, at the dawn of the culture wars he came out on the side of some sort of family values. Exactly which sort got obscured in conversations on the Left and went unheeded on the Right. For all its success and for all its debt to an embattled Freudian psychology, The Culture of Narcissism owed much to the neo-Marxist dons of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Miller adds some nice comparisons of Lasch to Red Tories in other times and places: socialist in economics, traditionalist in culture, ascetic in style, and quite more open to religion than Marxists of the old Left. Lasch felt kinship with Marxists gone Catholic, like Alasdair MacIntyre, who became an important guide, and Dale Vree, who published some of his later work in The New Oxford Review. He preferred his Protestants off the Augustinian page, albeit in secular translation: Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacques Ellul, eventually Jonathan Edwards. He published in the radical southern Christian voice of the civil rights movement, Katallagete. In sum, Lasch’s defiance of the conventions of the culture wars and his tapping of deep and disparate conceptual wells were the qualities that made him attractive to searchers from both Christian and secularist sides amid the polarizations of the 1970s and ’80s.

Perhaps this very complexity explains why Lasch’s later following never matched the size of his first. Miller brings out some other difficulties too. A traditionalist who liked Foucault, Lasch never finally defined a position on the epistemological battles of postmodernism. This, to me, is par for the historian’s course; we’re almost all realists operationally whatever our formal doubts on the level of high theory. Miller’s theological critique, though charitably delivered, is more telling. “Atheists for Niebuhr” sooner or later have to decide whether to stay with the atheism or accept an irreducible substrate of theistic teaching. In Lasch’s case, he bought original sin, the divided self, the need to accept—even to rejoice in—human finitude beneath a transcendent sky. But does that sky house a personal being traditionally known as God? Can one be Edwardsean without believing in the incarnation and resurrection of Christ? Sin is easy for historians to grasp; salvation is the rub, and here Lasch was finally more of a Stoic than anything else.

To me Lasch’s greatest shortcoming in the last phase of his career lay in a certain shortsightedness on the issue of class. In the Reagan-Thatcher ’80s, with the attack on labor unions and the acceleration of income stratification in American society (one reason that divorce rates were climbing and that all sorts of women, not just careerist feminists, were entering the paid work force), was it strategically most important for Lasch to keep on belaboring the “new class” of progressive professionals? A new class was aborning indeed, one that is now fully ensconced in multinational corporations with their helping professionals on Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the White House-Capitol-K Street circuit of Washington, D.C. Admittedly, the scale of this hegemony became apparent only in and after the foreign policy and financial disasters of the second Bush Administration, but Lasch first distinguished himself as a seer of where old liberals had gone wrong. The later equivalent for him would have been to predict where the neoliberals known in America as “conservatives” were bound to land.

His last great work, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), takes up this theme in its final section. Perhaps this would have been Lasch’s swelling chorus had not metastatic cancer claimed him in 1994 at 62 years of age. A tighter focus on social class would have saved the volume from the perception that its eclectic assemblage of American voices amounted to less than the coherent “populist” tradition Lasch claimed it to be, and more an anxious effort on his part to find as many precedents as he could for the hope he held in the face of all contemporary evidence to the contrary.

As it is, the model of a good society left by True and Only Heaven shows how fully American evangelicalism forfeited its potential for being a truly alternative community. A politics genuinely of the people needs to be by and for them, Lasch repeated after Lincoln. It would require Christians to build local churches for neighborhood needs, not follow celebrity preachers to exurban megachurches to worship under high production values. It would shun the Christian version of helping professionals whose books and media plays are the dominant industry in evangelical conversation. It would in its politics need to recognize limits: the limits of American power, as opposed to willful invasions of nations halfway around the world, and the limits of wasteful growth, instead of adamantly denying global warming. Perhaps out of the detritus of this conformity something is being salvaged in the emerging wave of post-evangelicals’ community building. Its leaders could do worse than read up on Christopher Lasch.

James D. Bratt is professor of history at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The annual Beloit College Mindset List helps professors see the world through the eyes of their incoming 18-year-old freshmen. The List features factoids such as “Ferris Bueller and Sloane Peterson could be their parents” to sketch how dramatically different the world is for these youngsters. We have mined Beloit’s new Class of 2015 list, for advice on how to freshen your preaching. If you’re over 40, odds are this list can help you choose which pop culture references might need to join the VHS player in the dustbin.

• Cheers. They don’t remember the theme, so scratch “where everybody knows your name” when describing church.
• Godless communists. What communists? The Politburo was dead before they were born, and China has a market-driven economy.
• Women. With two women always on the Supreme Court, skip stories about women’s lib, inequality, and the glass ceiling.
• Family. Make your fond memories about the Food Network. Their Grandma lives four states away, and she specialized in the drive-thru. If today’s freshmen cook, they learned it from Emeril.
• Sexuality. Gay was never an emotion—or as much of an issue—for today’s kids. Ellen came out when they were in preschool. As Beloit said, “We have never asked, they have never had to tell.”
• Tech. “Don’t touch that dial!” What’s a dial? Also delete “beeper” and “floppy disc.” And nothing ages you faster than referencing your “home phone.”
• Sports update. The only Montana they know is Hannah. Their legendary players are ?LeBron and Kobe. And Arnold Palmer is a drink.

Slow-motion Moral Collapse

“These riots were not about race. These riots were not about government cuts … And these riots were not about poverty. No, this was about behavior … people showing indifference to right and wrong; people with a twisted moral code; people with a complete absence of self-restraint.

“We have been too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong. We have too often avoided saying what needs to be said-about everything from marriage to welfare to common courtesy.

“What last week has shown is that this moral neutrality, this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore.”

—British Prime Minister David Cameron after riots and looting in major U.K. cities (ChristianPost.com, Aug 2011)

Sunday, Bloody Stun-day

At New Welcome Baptist Church in Alabama an irate minister of music “Tased” a pastor who had just fired him, and a deacon stabbed the musician’s mother.

The shocking incident occurred after Pastor Darryl Riley told worship leader Simone Moore that he was being let go. Moore disputed the amount of his final paycheck and blasted the pastor with a Taser gun.

Several church members rushed the dueling clergymen. In the melee that followed, Deacon Harvey Hunt pulled a knife and stabbed the musician’s mom. “I said, ‘Oh my God, he done cut me,” Agolia Moore told a local television station. Moore suffered a gash on her arm that required 19 stitches. She claimed church leaders ganged up on her son when he was fired. “They owed him,” Agolia said. “He asked them for his money. That was the big thing right there, wasn’t no more or no less.”

The music minister wanted an additional $600.

—Based on a report from NY Daily News, 8/12/11

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

This fall more than 90,000 students across the United States and Canada are pursuing graduate theological or ministry training. Twenty years ago such students had one big decision: which school to choose. Then you typically had to relocate and enroll in a residential program for two to four years of full-time study.

Fast-forward two decades and the options have increased dramatically. Seminaries have been joined by Christian colleges and universities in offering graduate theological degrees. The Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree is now one of dozens of master’s-level options, including specializations in counseling, cross-cultural ministry, youth ministry, children’s ministry, worship leadership, and executive leadership, to name a few.

Meanwhile, the internet has radically changed the way education can be delivered. Distance education options include online programs, satellite campuses and extension programs, and hybrid programs that combine online interaction with on-campus instruction. These allow students to remain involved with their current ministries while earning an advanced degree or certificate. The growth of options has made further education more accessible but also more confusing. There is no longer one standard path for continuing education. The myriad choices can make it difficult to compare and decide.

So how should a ministry leader choose?

No one answer will apply to everyone. But let’s take a look at the stories of three leaders who faced this dilemma. Each chose a different path. Perhaps their experiences will equip you to make better decisions about educational options.

Going “ALL IN”

When Chris Shinnick began considering additional education, a distance program might have been the logical first choice. After all, Shinnick was entering his seventh year of full-time youth ministry in Hawaii, where there were no accredited seminaries nearby.

But Shinnick knew he did not study well on his own. He also knew he was ready for a short break from the pace of full-time ministry. Therefore, the best route for Shinnick and his wife was the traditional one: resignation from his job and relocation to Denver Seminary for a full-time M.Div. program. It was a move that Shinnick calls going “all in.”

“I wanted an immersive experience,” explained Shinnick, who now serves as connections pastor at Manna Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina. “I lived on campus, I worked on campus as a janitor. I once went 10 days without leaving the campus. I soaked it all up.”

While some leaders want to continue in ministry while pursuing additional education, Shinnick felt the exact opposite. “I felt a borderline conviction to not do anything ministry-wise at least the first two years; we just attended church,” Shinnick said. “It was a great season. I would sometimes think, There are others out there feeding the poor and I have to work on a paper about James, but I knew that school was part of a bigger picture call on my life.”

Shinnick concedes that for some, disengaging from ministry while in seminary isn’t the right move. But he viewed his situation differently. “I had done 50-plus hours a week for seven years straight. I felt as if I had completed a healthy season of ministry. I knew that’s what I would do the rest of my life. A little time in the library wasn’t going to hurt. It was part of my call.”

That big-picture perspective that led Shinnick to pursue his M.Div. degree. “It seemed like the most comprehensive approach for the pastor role I felt called to walk in,” he said. “In my sixth year of being a youth pastor, I finally realized: If I’m going to do this for the rest of my life, I should be as responsible as possible and learn as much as I can about this stuff.”

Shinnick said that responsibility toward his marriage also influenced his decision to pursue an immersive seminary experience. “My wife and I had been married three years and I felt like the pace of full-time ministry was putting a strain on our marriage,” Shinnick said. “All my mentors and especially their wives had mentioned how great their seminary experiences were, especially for their marriages, so that was an incentive as well. It was our first big ‘us’ decision.”

Having graduated with his M.Div. in 2010, Shinnick has no regrets about his path, listing a number of benefits: “We got away to a new and neutral location. It was great for our marriage and we started a family. My wife feels like it was the best season of life so far for us, and that’s saying a lot.”

Shinnick also enjoyed the intensity of the experience. “As a former college football player, being ‘all in’ was key. If I knew anything about myself by then, it was that I sure get focused on the task or season at hand. I can certainly multi-task, but having one ‘big idea’ for a particular season of life is where I flourish.”

Home Sweet Computer

Like Shinnick, Lisa Welter initially decided the best way to pursue additional education was to enroll in a residential M.Div. program, in her case at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. She chose Bethel’s evening degree program, moved into on-campus housing, and began attending classes two nights a week. But Welter soon realized the program was not the right fit.

“I had a call to ministry but I didn’t know what I was looking for,” explained Welter, who currently serves as the ministry director for the Blaine, Minnesota, campus of Eagle Brook Church. “I quickly found out that I did not have the time to sit in class like that. I struggled with the amount of time it took for discussion. I needed my education to be simple and streamlined.”

As a 28-year-old single mother at the time, Welter realized she needed to maximize the limited time she had available. “The best utilization of my time for school was a long-distance program where everything was funneled down for me,” she said.

Meanwhile, as Welter progressed through her first year of M.Div. studies, she also questioned whether the degree was the best fit for her. “I just thought if I jumped into a program that it would work, but that was not the case,” she said.

A spiritual gifts class Welter took at her church that year revealed that she had strong leadership gifts. As she considered other options, she was delighted to learn that Bethel offered a Master of Arts (M.A.) in Transformational Leadership and that the program could be completed primarily online with a few intensive sessions on campus—where she already lived.

“I lived on-campus, worked full-time at another job, and volunteered at the church,” Welter recalled. “I did [on-campus] intensives two times a year, one week at a time; everything else was online. Lectures were videos so I could rewind the professor and play it back. I could do my schoolwork in the evenings in my pajamas, when my kids were in bed.”

Three years after starting her first M.Div. course, Welter graduated with her M.A. in Transformational Leadership in 2008. Last summer she began working toward her Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) degree in Servant Leadership, also at Bethel.

While the majority of students in graduate theological degree programs are male, the gender ratio is growing more balanced each year. For Welter, the alternative delivery method of an online program provided an opportunity she may not have had ten years earlier. And Welter understands the tensions for a female seeking to juggle family, school, and ministry involvement.

“Your top priority is your family and kids,” she said. “Find a program that matches your family’s pace. Ask what they need and how you can fit them into that process, and what kind of time you can devote to school at this point in your life. However long this is going to take is how long it’s going to take.”

Sprint To The Finish

Michael Nieves began his ministry education in a traditional manner. After graduating from Lancaster Bible College (LBC) with a degree in Bible, Nieves moved to the Chicago suburbs where he enrolled in a full-time M.Div. program at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS). However, the financial expenses were more than he anticipated. In addition, Nieves was tired of school and eager to engage in hands-on ministry.

“My academic passion was fading compared to the thrill of actual ministry, which I was experiencing at Willow Creek Community Church,” Nieves explained. “I was having a tough time reconciling the educational minutiae with the urgency and excitement of seeing actual lives changed by the gospel.”

Nieves withdrew after two semesters at TEDS and he and his wife eventually moved back home to Buffalo, New York, where in September 2002 they planted CenterPointe Community Church. The next eight years were a blur of church-planting and child-rearing, as CenterPointe and the Nieves family both grew.

In 2010, Nieves decided he needed to finish his graduate education. “I didn’t want to look back at a life gone by in ministry and wonder what additional skills or insights might have been leveraged for the kingdom if I’d only had the gumption to push myself through school,” said Nieves. “Anything worth doing is going to be hard. I felt I had built enough margin in my life to take on the challenge.”

I can multi-task but having one ‘big idea’ for a particular season of life is where I flourish.

Nieves considered many options in light of his life situation. “First of all, I had to come to terms with my age,” he said. “I had just turned 40 and the option of being able to put off degree completion indefinitely was becoming unrealistic. My youngest child was out of diapers so I knew there would be some relief of home responsibilities. In addition, church life had moved into a manageable rhythm.

“Programmatically, I looked for ministry relevancy,” Nieves continued. “After attempting a program with a lot of theory and academic rigor, I wanted a program that addressed the needs of ministry professionals ‘in the trenches.’ I knew that in order to balance the needs of church life and family, I would need an accelerated program that could accommodate those factors.”

Nieves found what he was looking for at his alma mater, Lancaster Bible College, which was launching a Master of Arts in Ministry (M.A.M.) “Fast Track” program designed to be completed in one year through a combination of online coursework and five intense, four-day on-campus residencies.

“As an LBC alumnus, I received regular mailings and one of those mailings included an advertisem*nt for the brand-new Fast Track program,” Nieves said. “It was ministry-relevant, distance-learning based, compressed, academic without being strictly scholarly, and just geographically close enough that I could meet the on-campus requirements. It also passed the spouse test. My wife took one look and told me I should do it.”

In May 2011 after 12 months of intensive study, Nieves graduated with his M.A.M. degree. He remains the lead pastor at Center-Pointe, thankful for an educational experience that allowed him to complete a graduate degree while remaining engaged in full-time ministry.

As grateful as Nieves is that he completed his education, he has a caveat for other church leaders about the limits of classroom education. “Don’t expect any degree to make up for the learning that happens from every emotional and spiritual wound you will encounter in ministry,” Nieves advises. “No amount of education will prepare you for the maturity needed to respond as Christ would have you respond.”

Angie Ward is director of The Leadership Lab in Durham, North Carolina, and a pastor’s spouse. She is completing her Ph.D. in Ministry Leadership via a hybrid program at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

For several years Jay Green, John Fea, and I worked on coediting a collection of essays that has recently been published by the University of Notre Dame Press, Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation. The three of us were classmates at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the early 1990s, where we studied with the historian John D. Woodbridge, and in January 2010 we presented a copy of it to him at a symposium in his honor. But at what might have been a moment of sweet consensus and warm reflection, the three of us spent the evening following the symposium in earnest, at times heated debate about what the historian’s vocation actually is and what the present moment requires of Christian historians in particular—this despite hundreds of hours of conversation on this very topic in the years preceding the book’s publication. After our evening of argument we decided to each take a swing at the question, So what is the historian’s vocation?, and the essays that follow are the result.

But a bit more framing of these debates may be helpful. I sparked the argument that evening by claiming that since the conventions of the contemporary academy lead historians into disturbingly reductive conceptions of the past, Christians must seize the opportunity postmodern theoretical frameworks afford to construct narratives that capture more fully the Christian story. Both Fea and Green find this stance problematic, perhaps dangerous. Fea contends that history is not a handmaiden of moral philosophy but an encounter with the past designed to relieve us of our narcissism and teach us the virtues of humility, intellectual hospitality, and empathy for people whom we can only understand through the sources they have left behind. Green insists that even though traditional historical study is capable of yielding only limited kinds of knowledge—which should restrain our expectations about its use as a moral or theological arbiter—its unique facility to root, enrich, and chasten our vision of life in the world makes it indispensable and worthy of our efforts.

We hope these essays give a sense of both the diverging perspectives our book seeks to capture and the kinds of inquiry we suspect will preoccupy Christian historians for years to come.—Eric Miller

Eric Miller, Geneva College

I take the historian’s vocation to center on telling the deepest truth possible about the past. This is a claim self-evident and fraught at once. If historians can’t discover the truth, why bother? But if they can, why such reflexive skepticism?

On this matter of truth, American historians seem invariably torn between Christlike assertion and Pilatesque despair. Confidence about the way, the truth, and the life runs headlong into What is truth? at the first possible sign of epistemic boundary-crossing, and an unseemly proportion of our scholarly societies’ organizational energies are directed toward patrolling these borders. Any truth claims a “professional” historian makes must be properly circ*mscribed by the very particular, contingent, rock-solid set of governing beliefs about the nature of reality the contemporary academy honors and asserts.

Still, the truth claim Hayden White classically made in his 1972 essay “Interpretation in History” stands. An intellectual historian and theorist of considerable influence across the humanities, White proposed that a historical narrative is “necessarily a mixture of adequately and inadequately explained events, a congeries of established and inferred facts, at once a representation that is an interpretation and an interpretation that passes for an explanation of the whole process mirrored in the narrative.” But he didn’t stop there. Insisting on the primacy of interpretation over the historical profession’s fixation on what he called simply “explanation,” White contended, more controversially, that “there can be no proper history without the presupposition of a full-blown metahistory by which to justify those interpretative strategies necessary for the representation of a given segment of the historical process.”

Although the hermeneutical spiral has since White’s essay was published swept up increasing swaths of the academy, free-ranging discussion of the metahistorical dimension of the historian’s task—and of the past itself—has usually been nipped in the bud by first-order skepticism, which in effect has permitted the established metahistory, scientistic materialism (or what George Marsden terms “exclusivist naturalism”), to continue its unyielding hold. It’s not that historians have failed to notice the regnant epistemological challenges to “objectivity.” It’s rather that to most historians there seem to be no real alternatives to existing interpretive, narratival pathways. Summing up the current state of affairs in Confessing History, William Katerberg notes that “Historians may agree that true objectivity is not possible …. But only rarely do questions about the use and meaning of history shape the thousands of books, dissertations, and essays that they produce in a direct, defining, determinate, and substantial way.”

Is this not a scandal? If for Christians intellectual life centers on the question of the meaning of history, then getting the meaning of history into the heart of our accounts of the past would seem to be a matter of prime vocational importance. The impasse at which the profession finds itself on matters epistemological reflects the triumph of convenience and the failure of imagination. And Christian historians, poised at this impasse, suffer a failure of nerve.

Methodological circ*mspection cannot mask the reality of metahistorical presence. Our narratives do assume, always, a particular stance on and posture toward reality. If postmodernity’s great, perhaps signal achievement is to have crashed the door of “objectivity,” historians (along with academics in allied disciplines) wishing to push past current disciplinary boundaries face what amounts to a political obstacle. Today the question that confronts us is not whether “theory” matters but rather whose theories and which methodologies we should heed.

This, of course, is the kind of political circ*mstance that historically has not been particularly amenable to reasonable argument. There’s too much at stake to allow intellectual consistency to rule. Still, as the journalist Richard Manning writes, “quality is subversive.” Or as Dostoevsky put it, “beauty will rule the world.” If Jesus Christ did indeed rise from the dead on the third day, and if the heavens do declare the glory of God, and if someday we will indeed beat our swords into plowshares, then we must summon the intellectual integrity, rhetorical vision, and literary verve to render such realities through narratives that seek to unveil this world—this real world, with its real past.

How might we move more fully in these directions? How might we do what John Henry Newman imagined Catholic writers and academics attempting a century and a half ago: “create a current in the direction of Catholic truth, when the waters are rapidly flowing the other way”?

First, we must take full advantage of the philosophic and rhetorical space created by such influential contemporary Christian philosophers—our “theorists”—as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and John Milbank. They have arrested attention and commanded respect, making possible the imagining of a form of historical reflection and analysis that fits within their broad historical and theoretical arguments. Christians need not write as if Marx, Weber, Foucault, and Derrida have had the last word about the nature of our world and our circ*mstance.

Second, we must take full advantage of the institutional strength that today undergirds the Christian intellectual project. Our colleges, universities, publishing houses, societies, and journals are capable of, and indeed are currently providing a fundament for, serious theoretical, analytic, and narratival experimentation—of the sort that can have a significant, consequential existence apart from mainstream institutions yet also the power to speak into them. Although tiny in relation to this other realm, the world of Christian institutions is not so small as to preclude real effect beyond it.

In a trenchant essay recently published in Christian Scholar’s Review, the philosopher James K. A. Smith compellingly envisions a scholarly program in which the “architectonic is governed” not by generic secular paradigms but “by Trinitarian faith and the Scriptural narrative.” In response to the retort that this vision of the world would rapidly diminish the audience of scholars brave enough to render it, he poses a question disarming in its simplicity: “But what if it is true?”

If it is true, it will yield light, a worthy end for any scholar charged with illuminating this present—and past—darkness.

John Fea, Messiah College

What is the historian’s vocation? This question can be answered in many ways depending upon the setting in which a particular historian works. As a college professor who teaches American history, my vocation is to teach undergraduates how to think historically and, in thinking historically, how they might grow intellectually and, ultimately, in their love of God.

An encounter with the past in all of its fullness, void as much as possible of present-minded agendas, can cultivate virtue in our lives. Such an encounter teaches us empathy, humility, selflessness, and hospitality. By studying history, we learn to listen to voices that differ from our own. We lay aside our moral condemnation of a person, idea, or event from the past in order to understand it. This is the essence of intellectual hospitality. The act of interpreting a primary source with students becomes the equivalent of inviting a person from the past into the classroom. By taking the time to listen to people from a “foreign country,” we rid ourselves of the selfish quest to make the past serve our needs. The study of the past reminds us that we are not autonomous individuals, but part of a human story that is larger than ourselves. Sam Wineburg, in his masterful Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, sums it up well:

For the narcissist sees the world—both the past and the present—in his own image. Mature historical understanding teaches us to do the opposite: to go beyond our own image, to go beyond our brief life, and to go beyond the fleeting moment in human history into which we have been born. History educates (“leads outward” in the Latin) in the deepest sense. Of the subjects in the secular curriculum, it is the best at teaching those virtues once reserved for theology—humility in the face of our limited ability to know, and awe in the face of the expanse of history.

I regularly ask my students if we are willing to let history “educate” us—to lead us outward.

Wineburg’s reference to theology is worth further exploration. In A Theology of Public Life, Charles Mathewes argues that Christians today are afflicted by the sin of escapism—the desire to flee from God and each other. God wants us to turn toward him, but he also wants us to turn toward each other. In the process of loving our neighbor—for Mathewes such a practice goes to the heart of civic life—we grow as Christians.

What if we viewed the study of the past as a form of public engagement? Even if the person we engage is dead, we can still enter into a conversation with the sources that he or she has left behind. If we take the Imago Dei—the notion that all human beings are created in the image of God—seriously, then we should also take seriously the idea that those who lived in the past were also created in God’s image. The very act of studying humanity—past or present—can be what Mathewes calls an “exploration into God.” A genuine encounter with history “provides more than enough opportunities for humility and penance, recognition of one’s sin and the sins of other, and a deepening appreciation of the terrible awefulness of God’s providential governing of the world. Indeed, involvement in public life today may itself increasingly need some such ascetical discipline.”

In other words, history is not only a discipline, in the sense that philosophy or sociology are disciplines. It is also a discipline in the sense that it requires patterns of behavior, such as the denial of the self, that are necessary in order to meet the “other” in a hospitable way. Doing history is not unlike the kind of “disciplines” we employ in our spiritual lives—disciplines that take the focus off of us and put it on God or others. If this is true, then prayer, a reliance on the Holy Spirit’s power, and other spiritual practices should provide help in the pursuit of the kind of self-denial, hospitality, charity, and humility needed to engage the past in this way and allow ourselves to be open to the possibility of it transforming us.

Like any type of public engagement, an encounter with the strangeness of the past “inevitably leads to contemplation of the mysteries of providence, the sovereignty of God, and the cultivation of the holy terror that is integral to true piety.” It forces us to love others when they at first glance seem to be unlovable. Failure to respect the people in the past is ultimately a failure of love. It is a failure to recognize the common bond that we share with humanity. It is a failure to welcome the stranger. Moreover, when we uncover sinful behavior in the past it should cause us to examine our own imperfect and flawed lives. This kind of engagement, as Mathewes puts it, “brings us repeatedly against the stubborn, bare thereness of the people we meet in public life; it teaches us again and again the terrible lesson that there are other people, other ideals, other points of view that we can see and appreciate, even if we cannot inhabit them and remain ourselves.”

The discipline of history requires us to apply James 1: 19 to our lives. We must be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. This does not mean that we have to agree with every idea we encounter in the past. Sometimes we cannot “inhabit” an idea and still “remain ourselves.” But education—”to be led outward”—does require a degree of risk. Without risk, without being open to transformation, liberal education cannot happen. “Self-denial,” writes historian Mark Schwehn, “is a willingness to surrender ourselves for the sake of a better opinion. Wisdom is the discernment of when it is reasonable to do so.” A Christian who studies the past must be prudent. She must be slow to speak and quick to listen to the people she meets in the past. And she must pray for wisdom.

This dimension of history is what gets me up each morning to stand before groups of students and “profess.” A worthy vocation indeed.

Jay Green, Covenant College

“You may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with you.” This bit of folksy wisdom is repeated throughout Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film Magnolia. The film’s meandering journey through the anguished lives of his brilliant ensemble cast reveals how each character’s dire circ*mstances can be traced to a troubled, abusive past. While all of these poor souls have clearly been free to ignore, suppress, and forget their past experiences, in the end, none can escape the profoundly destructive legacy of their personal history. If they are ever again to live whole or healthy lives, they must engage in the painful, sometimes cathartic process of remembering.

Here we have a useful synopsis of the historian’s vocation. Historians traffic in memory. Within a craft devoted to the recollection of past cultural expressions, social processes, technological innovations, economic catastrophes, and personal achievements, the historian’s vocation is most simply understood as a project of organized remembering. Our work isn’t exactly the same as the therapist’s—which the Magnolia reference might suggest—but it isn’t altogether different either. To the extent that contemporary societies need and benefit from honest, sober-minded connections to their own pasts, historians serve a vital public interest as custodians of social memory.

The discipline of history requires us to apply James 1:19 to our lives. We must be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.

For individual persons, memory involves far more than the mere retrieval of information about the past. It is the mental faculty that makes personal identity possible. The real tragedy of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia lies in an ignominious annihilation of the self, forever severing victims from the relationships, places, and communities that had always otherwise given their lives grounding and direction. The process of losing one’s memory is, in the truest sense of the word, dehumanizing.

Memory functions in a similar fashion for communities, nations, and every kind of institution. These social entities might display an outward appearance of functionality and strength, but if they proceed in a state of willful amnesia or, worse, by perpetuating self-justifying myths, they will be no more capable of sustaining long-term civic health than the advanced Alzheimer’s patient is of carrying on a meaningful conversation with an old friend. Social organisms must have within them historically minded individuals who will help cultivate an honest, ongoing, sometimes uncomfortable relationship with their pasts if they ever hope to develop in responsible ways.

The divine command to remember, which recurrently punctuates the biblical narrative, seems especially attentive to the link between social memory and identity preservation. God regularly pleads with his people to remember who they are, from where they have come, and by what agency they will continue to survive. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.” “Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other.” And, not least, “Do this in remembrance of me.” God has endowed humankind with a capacity for collective memory that is both essential and in constant need of maintenance. Those who devote themselves to restoring and upholding such memory are doing holy work.

And so, whether they recognize it or not, historians occupy a theologically critical office when they practice their craft: when they ask refined and penetrating questions about the past; when they are compelled to comb through and carefully read archival sources; when they resist the all-too-human urge to indulge their standing presuppositions about their subjects; when they instead allow encounters with the past to chasten and revise their assumptions; when they find clear and compelling ways to communicate their results; when they open pathways that enable ordinary people to visit the strange and complex worlds of the past; and when such encounters heighten the ability of such visitors to experience a present existence filled with texture and nuance. In the seemingly simple work of allowing the dead past to inform to the living present, historians support a divinely sanctioned vocation given to all God’s children: the vocation of remembering.

But some reticence is in order here. We should be careful not to exaggerate the power or potential of historical study. Although the work of reconstructing social memories may have great theological implications, the historian’s task is qualitatively different from that of the theologian or the moral critic. There are questions about the human condition that the historian as historian cannot answer and depths of experience and meaning that she cannot plumb. As Harry Stout has argued, the limits that circ*mscribe the historian’s purview require her “to settle for something less than ultimate explanations.”[1] The careful historian must resist the alluring temptation to use the record of the past to advance preexisting moral, ideological, or theological convictions; rather, she should exercise restraint, saying no more and no less than the limited documentary record of the past and the profession’s procedural norms allow.

Even so, the comparatively modest—but still deeply moral—demands of faithfully reconstructing the past remain vital. I have come to believe that, while the historical profession plays a vital role in the refinement of social memory, the calling to think and act in historically minded ways is a more broadly human assignment. And for the disciple of Jesus Christ, the calling to historical awareness is an indispensable category of faithfulness. Regardless of whether we enjoy reading fat histories of the American Civil War or the latest biography of Cleopatra, I believe that we’re all responsible for bearing witness within our communities, our churches, and our institutions to the ways current patterns and practices can only make sense when they are viewed as part of a longer, deeper story. Though we may never feel any special attraction to formal historical study, the demands of active remembrance should be borne by us all.

1. Harry S. Stout, “The Reviewers Reviewed,” Banner of Truth (March 1995), p. 8.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

One of the worst kept secrets of the historical profession is what I am going to call Ambrose’s Law, after American historian Stephen E. Ambrose. Ambrose’s Law states that the more popular a historian is, the more other historians will criticize him or her. There is usually a good reason: Ambrose’s chief crime was plagiarism, Joseph Ellis misled the press, David McCullough misquoted Thomas Jefferson, and Simon Schama barely noted the existence of Wales in his History of Britain. But these reasons are not the whole story.

Cynics would say Ambrose’s Law is testament to professional envy. There’s surely something to that. Then there are the perils of greater exposure that fame brings. (Other historians took aim at Ambrose long before the issue of plagiarism arose.) There are, however, more fundamental issues at stake, namely, can history that people actually enjoy reading or watching be respectable, accurate, and honest? Can popular history be good history? The question is about loyalty as much as anything: are these TV historians truly committed to what their guild values above all, careful study and truth-telling? Or have they sacrificed their integrity in order to pursue the wrong type of audience?

Confessing History suggests that there is a Christian version of Ambrose’s Law, which the editors would probably call Marsden’s Law. Their objects of concern are historians such as George Marsden and Mark Noll, who have won the respect of their profession. The worry is that by seeking success with that audience, Christian historians have failed to be sufficiently Christian. Again, the question is one of loyalty to one’s fundamental commitments, but this time it is commitment to Christ that matters. One contributor to the book finds it “difficult to accept the ease with [which] colleagues at Christian colleges seem to regard the status, respectability, power and glory … that [come] with ‘making it'” in academia, and wants “to figure out if the ‘foolishness’ of the Gospel … offers any insights into what a Christian intellectual might look like.”

Confessing History begins with George Marsden, perhaps the most accomplished historian to come out of Christian collegedom in the last several decades. Marsden believes that Christian historians should study what all other historians do: what they can see in the historical record, and not what God might be doing behind the scenes. Eschewing providentialism, Marsden became a star, going on—after two decades at Calvin College—to teach at Duke Divinity School and then the University of Notre Dame. Many Christian historians took the same approach and did well.

But a younger generation are not sure this is the right path. In the introduction, Eric Miller summarizes their concerns in a series of questions:

Is something beyond the current consensus, as represented, for instance, in the work of George Marsden, possible? Is the mainstream historical profession truly the locus of the deepest wisdom and brightest hope for the practice of history? Have our lives as professional historians—and as middle-class professionals—become so straitjacketed that resistance to the status quo is futile? And what within the present moment holds most promise for the advance of a deeply Christian practice of history, whether through writing or teaching?

It would be too much to say that there is a new consensus among younger Christian historians, Miller goes on, but there is “at least a common inclination,” which he describes as follows:

The modern search for explications of causality and agency through the analysis of “observable cultural forces” [Marsden’s words] has proven to be an inadequate approach to the past for many in this generation of Christian historians, and, accordingly, an unsatisfying means to the fulfillment of our vocations. We seek instead to clothe history in rumination, conjecture, meditation, and judgment, all rooted in Christian visions of reality and all in the service of fostering moral intelligence and spiritual vigor in the communities we serve. Moreover, rather than turning to leading theorists of the modern academic disciplines alone for guidance, we find ourselves in consequential and intimate conversation with the work of theologians and philosophers, joining a tradition of reflection with ancient roots and one that continues strongly to this day, with or without the historical profession.

Two sections of the book put flesh on all this. The first is theoretical, and has five chapters that together present a call for Christian historians to care more about shaping their students and societies. Thomas Albert Howard seeks to marry history and virtue ethics, arguing that we should encourage students to face the moral questions raised by the past. William Katerberg makes a forceful argument for history that is useful for society. It should change students’ hearts, not just the historiography. Michael Kugler surveys the histories written by David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Mary Wollstonecraft, Enlightenment figures who wrote with a sense of social purpose that belies their era’s reputation for facts alone. Bradley J. Gundlach calls us to assimilate moral insights from the likes of Christopher Lasch, Robert Bellah, and Jackson Lears. Christopher Shannon advises an overhaul of almost everything, including the abandonment of “the futile effort to build a better monograph” and “a complete reorganization of the undergraduate history curriculum” that would emphasize memorization and historiography.

The second section addresses what it would mean for historians to do this in the communities to which they belong. John Fea describes a class he taught at Messiah College in which he and his students struggled to come to terms with the moral issues raised by the American Civil War. Lendol Calder’s chapter tells the story of a mountaineering disaster to show how shoddy assumptions often lead to educational disasters, and calls us to work harder at our teaching and thereby love our students more. Jay Green wants Christian historians to use their understanding of the past to address the public, thereby taking on the role of society’s conscience. Robert Tracy McKenzie urges historians to win the ear of their local churches, rather than speaking only in the academy. Douglas A. Sweeney’s chapter challenges us to see colleagues not as competitors in the academic stakes but as people we are called to serve.

The book contains great learning, mature reflection, and (most of the time) plenty of humility and nuance. Every Christian historian should read this book. I found the emphasis on teaching especially refreshing. Much of the discussion about Christian scholarship has focused on how to be faithful in the wider academic community; this book recognizes that many Christian historians spend a lot of time in the classroom, and challenges them to use the past to encourage their students to pursue wisdom and righteousness. Yet by the end of the book I felt that the sum was less than its parts. Many chapters sparkled, but the attempt to advance a new direction for Christian historians did not.

For one, there are chapters that strike startlingly discordant notes. Mark Schwehn says he still believes that the quality of his scholarship “should only be determined by [his] professional peers.” James B. LaGrand argues that “preaching through history” is “an unsatisfactory model of Christian history.” There are also chapters that bear an uneasy relationship to the project as whole, namely those by Una M. Cadegan, Beth Barton Schweiger, and Wilfred M. McClay. A book with evenly balanced groups that disagree can be fascinating and rewarding, but this one, with a central thrust and a handful of outlying chapters, has an awkward feel.

Then there is the question of how new this new inclination is. Some of the engagement with postmodern thought is indeed new, but Christian historians have been committed to loving students and addressing society for a long time. In his chapter, Doug Sweeney pays tribute to an older scholar who did just this and yet elsewhere in the book falls foul of Marsden’s Law. The book is dedicated to John D. Woodbridge, who taught all three editors church history at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and who cared deeply for his students and produced books for non-academic audiences. There is a long history to the argument over whether a Christian historian’s first job is to move people or move the scholarly debate. Greater discussion of that history would have been useful.

There were times when I worried whether some authors were being fair to Marsden, Noll, and company. Katerberg is, giving Noll credit for work that has distinctly Christian aims. But people who read only parts of this book might conclude that the older generation of Christian historians were more interested in their guild than God. The evidence of their work suggests otherwise.

Earlier this summer I was having dinner in a pokey Chinese restaurant in Oxford with two colleagues. One belonged to George Marsden’s generation, while the other was a similar age to the editors of this book. I had chatted with the younger one earlier in the week, and had heard him share a vision for scholarly work justifiable in terms of its usefulness to the church. Over dinner, however, the older scholar said that history had to be written with no eyes on the present. I don’t think he knew that what he said was controversial at that table. But both colleagues believe they are serving God’s good purposes. A few years ago, the same senior historian had told me of his hope that the books he writes will influence the church as teachers at theological colleges read his work and pass it on to future pastors. Just this spring, I heard of someone saying that Marsden’s A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards was one of the most formative books he had read.

I would also have liked to see more exploration of the idea that different historians have different vocations, especially in a book that deals with that very concept. Might God not call some historians primarily to address the world and others to nurture the church, just as he calls some people to work for the state department and others to ordained ministry? Or what about the idea that the same historian can have a vocation to do both these things? That might help solve one of the puzzles of the book: its call for something different is typically tied to teaching, but it is much less clear about what the new inclination might mean for research and writing.

In sum, then, at times the editors over-egged the pudding. But there is wisdom aplenty in this book, and it will do what all authors hope their books will do—stimulate conversation.

Alister Chapman is associate professor of history at Westmont College. His book Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement has just been published by Oxford University Press.

Rob Bell, as you may have heard, sympathizes with those who have left the church because of their discomfort with the doctrine of eternal punishment. Alas, he seems to lack sympathy for people still in the church who believe in a God who sends unbelievers to hell.

“How could that God be good?” Bell asks. “How could that God ever be trusted? How could the gospel be good news?”[1]

Bell’s critique has been a shot across the evangelical bow, sparking continuing discussion and a mini-publishing boom in response. Two books that answer Bell charitably and forcefully are God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News Is Better than Love Wins, by Mark Galli; and Erasing Hell: What God Said about Eternity, and the Things We’ve Made Up, by Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle. Both books agree with Bell that our understanding of hell hinges on what we make of God’s character.

Chan can relate to Bell’s discomfort with the traditional doctrine. “I have been embarrassed by some of God’s actions,” Chan admits in Erasing Hell. “In my arrogance I believed I could make Him more attractive or palatable if I covered up some of His actions. So I neglected speaking on certain passages, or I would rush through certain statements God made in order to get to the ones I was comfortable with. The ones I knew others would like.”

Galli, after counting 86 questions in just the first chapter of Love Wins, questions the fruitfulness of humans putting God in the dock. Christianity Today‘s senior managing editor reminds readers that

the really important question is not the question we ask God but the question he asks us … “Who do you say that I am?” The answer to that question is revealed on the cross. And until we embrace this answer, none of our questions even make sense, none of the questions raised in Love Wins can be properly addressed, and none of the answers the Bible supplies will satisfy. Until we comprehend who God is, all our questions are like chasing after the wind.[2]

Chan, a pastor and author of the popular book Crazy Love, and Sprinkle, a New Testament scholar, agree that we must be willing “to embrace a God who isn’t always easy to understand.” (Erasing Hell, though co-authored, is written in Chan’s voice.)

Both books bend over backwards to express appreciation for Bell’s role in bringing the uncomfortable doctrine of hell out into the open. To avoid the “tendency to recreate Jesus in our own image,” Chan and Sprinkle carefully examine what the Bible actually says about hell, suggesting that as faithful readers of Scripture we need to “soak ourselves in the Bible’s own culture.”

First, Chan and Sprinkle address Bell’s contention that hell isn’t an eternal place of torment for unbelievers after they die but is instead a catch-all title for the many “hells on earth” that people create. They call Bell’s description of the biblical hell (gehenna) as a literal garbage dump outside Jerusalem “misleading and inaccurate.” They demonstrate that Jesus’ contemporaries “believed that hell was a place of punishment for the wicked after they faced God’s judgment,” using “imagery of fire and darkness, where people lament,” and “a place of annihilation or never-ending punishment.” If Jesus had a different view, they tellingly write, “then He would certainly need to be clear about this.”

However, I find the authors’ discussion of the possibility of annihilation—largely based on the biblical word for destruction—to be unconvincing.[3] Destruction need not imply nonexistence. After all, a wrecking ball can destroy a building—leaving a large pile of rubble where the structure once stood—without vaporizing it. Couldn’t God also destroy sinners without making them disappear?

An online dictionary defines destroy as meaning “to reduce (an object) to useless fragments, a useless form, or remains, as by rending, burning, or dissolving; injure beyond repair or renewal; demolish; ruin; annihilate.” Annihilation is perhaps a possible conclusion about God’s judgment, but not a necessary one. In any case, these authors firmly reject Bell’s hope for a postmortem change of heart and say that fearsome suffering begins at death and ultimately awaits the unsaved on Judgment Day.

After marshaling the evidence, contra Bell, that hell is much more than the misery we create for ourselves on this earth, Chan confesses his own reluctance to believe it and preach it, admitting that his view of God needs expanding. “I really believe,” Chan says, “it’s time for some of us to stop apologizing for God and start apologizing to Him for being embarrassed by the ways He has chosen to reveal Himself.”

Galli agrees that the dominant metaphors for hell in the Bible are fire, darkness, destruction, and exclusion from God’s presence—though he says the exact nature of hell is unclear. Both books look at the account of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 and note that if the “eternal life” Jesus talks about lasts forever, then so does the “eternal punishment” (at least in its consequences). Galli makes the further point that it is Jesus who “is revealed to be the one through whom judgment will finally take place.”

Chan and Sprinkle excel in asking the “So what?” question. If hell is real, then what does it mean for our lives? Do we really believe? How do our lives point to our true eternal destination? Bell often presents people who believe in a literal hell as arrogant. Chan, however, is painfully introspective, asking whether he really cares about the people at the local Starbucks whose eternal destinies hang in the balance.

Neither God Wins nor Erasing Hell takes on Bell personally, leaving the question of whether he is a universalist to others. Galli simply discusses what Love Wins says. Chan and Sprinkle mainly engage Bell’s specific arguments in the notes. But while Bell styles himself as a radical who is uprooting conventional theological notions, Galli sees him as thoroughly evangelical—and thoroughly American, at that.

Bell asserts that life in God is about “stillness, peace, and that feeling of your soul being at rest.” In a brilliant insight, Galli notes that Bell is portraying God not as the Sovereign of the universe but as the Agent who gets things done for us. “I don’t want to disparage all this, because as far as it goes, it is pretty good news,” Galli writes. “God does marvelous things in our lives. But this is not the gospel. It leaves us trapped in self.” And this self-absorption seems a particularly American trait. “This problem is pandemic in evangelical Christianity,” Galli observes. Echoing John Piper,[4] Galli reminds us that God himself, not the stuff he gives us, is our ultimate good.

Another problem pandemic in American culture is the deification of individual choice, and Galli says Bell falls in line here, too, noting that Love Wins treats the human will as if it never fell.

Given such emphatic differences in our understandings of God, human nature, and scriptural interpretation, is there a way forward for evangelicals—including, I greatly hope, Rob Bell? How might love win in this situation? The answer, like our understanding of the afterlife, is necessarily clouded.

As many have noted before, evangelical religion is non-hierarchical. There are no popes or councils offering a definitive word on theological controversies. If you don’t like your church’s teaching, you are free to start a new one, one that emphasizes what you think are the key points in the biblical story. If a Christian publisher doesn’t feel comfortable with your book, you are free to take it elsewhere.

What about dialogue or debate? Might Wheaton College or Fuller Seminary, evangelical institutions where Bell has studied, organize a gathering—something we evangelicals are always good at? But Bell has proven himself to be maddeningly elusive when others have attempted to pin him down on precisely what he means—in print or behind the camera.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying. If Scripture is still a cornerstone of our movement, then doctrine matters, and so does clarity. But the last thing we need is a heresy trial (or the semblance thereof, conducted by self-appointed inquisitors). We could do worse than to take note of Galli’s appendix on charitable engagement in God Wins. Freely airing our differences, and our agreements, in a public forum might be the best way to lovingly honor the Lord we all claim.

Stan Guthrie, a Christianity Today editor at large, is author of All That Jesus Asks: How His Questions Can Teach and Transform Us (Baker), and coauthor, with Jerry Root, of The Sacrament of Evangelism (Moody). He blogs at stanguthrie.com.

1. Bell asks these questions in the promotional video for Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (HarperOne, 2011). They also appear in Love Wins.

2. For more on questions, see my study All That Jesus Asks: How His Questions Can Teach and Transform Us (Baker, 2010).

3. In a subsequent online conversation, Galli and Chan both express a “leaning” toward belief in annihilation rather than conscious eternal punishment while agreeing that the biblical witness leaves us with “agnosticism” on this point.

4. See John Piper, God Is the Gospel (Crossway, 2005).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“I am not a historian, and not a biblical scholar either. I am merely a Christian theologian. That is to say, I am a Christian who struggles with his experiences of God: with the experience of God-forsakenness and with the experience of having been found by God when I was lost.” Thus Jürgen Moltmann describes himself on the first page of his chapter on “Shekinah” in this book. His experience as a pow in World War II, and the religious pilgrimage which has undergirded his theological writings ever since, remain fresh in his mind, and what he has asked and said about God over the years has been constantly lively, never detachedly academic. Sun of Righteousness, Arise! is typical Moltmann.

He has been a major theological influence for what is now getting on for half a century. His work is not passé, but he is a sign of times gone by, when younger Protestant theologians from the German-speaking world were internationally influential. In this respect, no one has arisen to succeed Moltmann and Pannenberg, Jüngel and, perhaps, Ebeling. There has been a marked consistency in Moltmann’s writing: despite conceptual shifts and theological developments, Moltmann’s accents have been much the same over the decades—Trinity, eschatology, the poor and oppressed are amongst his characteristic themes. His formal series of dogmatic explorations is now complete, and this volume is supplementary, putting together lectures or essays presented over the last decade.

Moltmann informs us that the contributions in this book cluster around “three fundamental Christian insights: God is the God of Christ’s resurrection[;] God is the righteousness which creates justice and puts things to rights[;] The traces and signs of God give the world meaning.” These insights are distributed over four parts. The first deals with the future of Christianity, Moltmann’s theses being reducible “to simple formulae: 1. The future of Christianity is the church; 2. The future of the church is the kingdom of God.” We have come to the end of Christendom, and the church now comes into its own “as an independent and resisting community.” So we need a new paradigm for the church, wherein—if I interpret him correctly—the charismatic paradigm supplants the earlier hierarchical and christocentric paradigms but, armed with Trinitarian insight, admits components from those in which Father or Son predominated. The claim that the kingdom is wider than the church, and that the church should be oriented to the kingdom, has long been familiar in Moltmann’s work and widespread in modern theology.

In dealing with “the God of resurrection,” in Part 2, Moltmann adumbrates his conviction that “what is distinctively Christian is the confession of Christ and belief in the resurrection.” This is reminiscent of his first major work, Theology of Hope, of which it has been rightly said that it could have been called a “Theology of Resurrection.” There has long been discussion of Moltmann’s orthodoxy with respect to resurrection: does he believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, or is resurrection a “symbol,” or is there an alternative conceptualization? Moltmann’s discussion in this book is doubtless approachable from a variety of hermeneutical perspectives informed by acquaintance with his other works: from a conservative standpoint, with the suspicion that surface literality may partially conceal subterranean skepticism; from a radical standpoint, with the suspicion that flashes of surface modernity mask residual traditionalism; and so on. In bringing this issue to the table, we are not indulging our a priori preoccupations; Moltmann himself, in this book, highlights traditional questions regarding the raising of Jesus’ body and the resurrection of our bodies. Not just the preoccupations, but the conclusions, look pretty traditional to me.

In entering the third part, we access the most substantial section of the volume. It is only a few pages short of being as long as all the three other parts put together. In his preface, Moltmann warns us about what is to come: “I am putting forward here an outline for an idea about the last judgment which has Christ at its center and no longer takes its bearings from the Egyptian judgment of the dead …. I am fully aware that here I am challenging, and putting up for discussion, ancient traditions in historical Christianity.” Actually, this occupies only one portion of this part. Moltmann also reiterates arguments familiar to his readers: the almighty God of patriarchal monotheism must be displaced by the Abba of Jesus; we want less power, more love, with power redefined. Moltmann’s explorations in Shekinah theology continue in connection with the rejection of monotheism, interwoven with reflection on the perichoresis. If we pause with the last judgment, it is because Moltmann rather invites us to pause here, although it is admittedly at the expense of engaging with his constructive Trinitarian proposals.

Moltmann holds that “[t]he different biblical traditions about judgment cannot be harmonized,” and he opts, on theological grounds, for the “theocentric universalism” of the deutero-Pauline epistles, Ephesians and Colossians, as opposed to the “anthropocentric dualism” of Matthew, the Synoptic Little Apocalypse, and Revelation. According to Egyptian perspectives, humans are the sum of their deeds, so the judgment of humans is the judgment of their deeds. Cognate thinking is found in the Old Testament, but, fortunately, it is overwhelmed by notions of God’s creative righteousness and justice. These felicitous notions are sometimes taken up in the New Testament, in the teaching that judgment is the rectification of injustice, not divine punitive action towards individuals, which is a spiritually and psychologically damaging idea. The basis of Christian universalism is God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ; this God cannot lose anyone for whom the Son of Man came—and he came for all. At the end, there will be cosmic triumph. Belief in the final separation of believers from unbelievers is disastrous. It entails “friend-enemy” thinking, whether in Christianity or in Islam: “Since for unbelievers there is no hope, they can already be punished with contempt or terror here and now …. To anticipate the last judgment by dividing people into believers and unbelievers (with the possible persecution of the unbelievers as God’s enemies) is wrong, because it is godless.”

What are we to make of this? Many readers will react to Moltmann’s theology according to the content of their beliefs about the last judgment, and who but the benightedly perverse philosophical theologian or the myopic lover of exegetical minutiae will react otherwise? I do not warm to being classified with the latter groups, and certainly harbor theological valuations, but this is not just any case for universalism. What Moltmann writes is irresponsible and damaging nonsense; I am afraid that it cannot be put more mildly. His claim that traditional theology constitutes a social and political threat by virtue of its very substance is on a par with the New Atheist allegation that any religion, including Christianity, which claims to possess distinctive soteriological truth is, ipso facto, a menace to world peace. Not so: if I am a pacifist and a convinced Christian, my convinced Christianity does not submerge my pacifism under a wave of terror; likewise, if I believe with sorrow that not everyone will be saved, my conviction does not overwhelm my sorrow with a wave of hostility. Moltmann has got carried away into irrationality, compounding a persistent habit in his authorship either to create false antitheses or—which is different—to proceed as though tertium non datur. In relation to Scripture, he chastises Elijah for slaying the prophets of Baal in the name of monotheism, and the only reason that he does not chastise Paul for saying that “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Cor. 5:10) is that he quotes only the first clause. It is possible to be a theological universalist and regret that Moltmann’s theology overrides Scripture as and when he chooses; possible also to deny any sort of traditional conviction that Scripture is a norm for theology and simultaneously regret that Moltmann’s theology stands in an arbitrary relation to logic. Even those disposed to defend robustly Moltmann’s general theological procedure and substantive conclusions should regret the form in which he serves up his fare here.

Part 4 trades in interesting material, but it is succinct. It concerns science and theology. Moltmann’s enquiry into the hermeneutics of nature leads him to repristinate some older positive attitudes, now often regarded as obsolete, toward viewing the cosmos as a system of signs. But the old can be made contemporary: “The ancient doctrine of signs can easily be translated into the modern informatics of nature.” Opposition to the empirical concept of nature is not the product of theological nostalgia, but is statable in current terms. The final chapter in this book expresses the author’s opposition to a Darwinian worldview and substitutes a cooperative for a competitive interpretation of nature. Moltmann’s thinking is nothing if not an attempt to integrate the scientific and the ethical under the aegis of a theological worldview. In this determination of principle and display of instinct, he is at his best. Having opened this review with his words, we close it with his concluding (and representative) words, without analysis, praise, or blame. “Between the God of evolution and the God of Christian faith there is contradiction: the general ‘struggle for existence’ knows only survivors and victims; but the God of the crucified Christ is the saviour of the victims and the judge of the survivors. Out of the victims in the history of nature and the victims of human history, God builds his coming kingdom of peace.”

Stephen N. Williams is professor of systematic theology at Union Theological College in Belfast. With Gordon McConville, he is the author of Joshua, a volume in the Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary series from Eerdmans.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Evangelicals have an ongoing love affair with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but we’ve never been sure of what to do with his theological mentor, Karl Barth. Bonhoeffer relished Barth’s return to “the tradition of Paul, Luther, Kierkegaard … , the tradition of genuine Christian thinking,” and the recovery of “the world of biblical thinking.” Barth, said Bonhoeffer, set aside mere “religious thinking” for thinking grounded in “the Word of God … , the revelation straight from above, from outside of man, according to the justification of the sinner by grace.”

What more could evangelicals ask for in a theologian? Apparently a lot. Starting in the 1930s, Cornelius Van Til, professor of theology at Westminster Seminary in Pennsylvania, set his sights on the German theologian, most famously in The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner (1946), Christianity and Barthianism (1962), and Karl Barth & Evangelicalism (1964).

Van Til made the surprising claim—given Barth’s actual writings—that Barth’s theology “is the diametric opposite of a theology that is based on a finished revelation of God in history.” The reason Barth’s theology sounds like traditional orthodoxy, argued Van Til, is that it contains many “verbal similarities to historic Protestantism.” But Van Til believed Barth’s theology was “in effect, a denial of it.”

Ever since, the relationship between Barth and evangelicals has been a rocky one. We are fascinated by his arresting talk of grace: “Grace is the incomprehensible fact that God is well pleased with a man, and that a man can rejoice in God. Only when grace is recognized to be incomprehensible is it grace …. Grace is the gift of Christ, who exposes the gulf which separates God and man, and, by exposing it, bridges it.” We enjoy a revivalist glee when he talks about mere religion: “No human demeanor is more open to criticism, more doubtful, or more dangerous, than religious demeanor. No undertaking subjects men to so severe a judgment as the undertaking of religion.” But coming as he does out of the cauldron of European liberal theology, we have our suspicions.

We’ve seen this played out on a popular level in the founding of Christianity Today. The magazine was conceived by its creator, Billy Graham, as an antidote to liberalism. When Graham wrote Carl Henry, the first editor, critiquing the first issue of the magazine in 1956, he noted how Barth and the movement he represented, Neo-Orthodoxy, needed to be confronted, however subtly:

I believe we are going to make a serious mistake if at first we drive a wedge between evangelicals and Barthians. What we want to do is to win the Barthian and the Neo-Orthodox to a more evangelical position, but if we use the terms Barthian and Neo-Orthodox in criticism, I feel it is going to be a red flag that will drive them away. There are a thousand subtle ways that we can attack Barthianism and Neo-Orthodoxy without actually calling it by name.

But even in CT’s early years, change was already in the air. One of CT’s early contributors was Geoffrey Bromiley, a conservative Reformed theologian who ended up at Fuller Theological Seminary and gave himself to the monumental task of translating Barth’s Church Dogmatics for the English-speaking world. This was the era when a number of rising evangelical theologians—e.g., Paul Jewett, Bernard Ramm, and Donald Bloesch—sat at Barth’s feet, often literally in his classroom in Basel, Switzerland, and became indebted to his theology.

With the turn of the millennium, evangelical appreciation of Barth has only accelerated. That includes no less than the world’s leading Barthian scholar Bruce McCormack of Princeton Seminary, as well as evangelical luminaries such as Alistair McGrath, Timothy George, and Kevin Vanhoozer. Even the conservative Reformed theologian Michael Horton acknowledges that Barth’s work represents a “Copernican revolution in the history of modern theology” in opposing the man-centered theology of neo-Protestantism and replacing it with “a thoroughgoing theocentricism that threw the light once again on divine initiative.”

In the last couple of decades, evangelical scholars have gathered repeatedly to discern what exactly is to be retrieved from Barth—so much so, it seems a new genre has emerged wherein evangelicals wrestle with the theological giant. And such is the purpose of Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism, edited by McCormack and Clifford B. Anderson.[1]

Among the Barthian themes that intrigue evangelical theologians, one of the most salient is the tension between his doctrine and his actual use of Scripture. Barth rightly reminds us that the Bible is not the Word of God in the same sense that Jesus is the Word of God. The relationship between Scripture and Jesus is dynamic and nuanced, which allows the Bible to be freed from the constraints of fundamentalist rationalism. For Barth, the Bible is less the Word of God than a witness to the Word; he went so far as to say that, as a human book, the Bible was subject to error, not just in history and science, but even in theology!

On the other hand, Barth used the Bible as if it were the “infallible rule of faith and practice.” Rarely if ever in the nearly 9,000 pages of his Church Dogmatics does he excuse himself from a text, saying it is in error on some theological point. He used the Bible as evangelicals want to use the Bible: as the final source of authority for the preaching and teaching of the church.

When evangelicals talk about Barth, then, they have tended to start by talking about his doctrine of Scripture. But the essays gathered in Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism suggest that evangelicals are ready to move on to other Barthian themes, including Barth’s relationship to Kantian philosophy, his Christology, and his ecclesiology, as well as his relationship to current theological trends such as Radical Orthodoxy. The chapters that most interested me concerned Barth’s doctrine of election (all are elect in Christ) and his so-called universalism (all will be saved).

The first doctrine seems naturally to lead to the second—or does it? Barth himself argued the first and denied the second. But some Barthians are not so sure, believing that his doctrine of election inevitably leads to universalism. Essays by Michael Horton, Bruce McCormack, and Suzanne MacDonald engage these immense themes in fruitful ways. Horton concludes that “Barth presupposes that the electing will of the single Subject, revealed in a single event of one covenant, executed in the one history that is eternal, encompasses every person.” His essay argues—persuasively, I think—that Barth is likely wrong on one or more of these presuppositions, and thus key aspects of his soteriology falter. McCormack concludes that in the New Testament there is a tension between passages that suggest limited atonement and those that teach universal salvation. If God has willed that this tension remain in Scripture, we can conclude that we are called, for reasons pastoral and theological, to live with this tension until the eschaton (while hoping, as does God apparently, for the salvation of all). MacDonald brings the dynamism of the Holy Spirit to bear on Barth’s somewhat static Christocentric doctrine of election, and concludes: “There are aspects of Barth’s pneumatology that are pulling in such a different direction to his Christology that his doctrine of election is at risk of imploding.”

I admit to a longstanding fascination with Barth’s doctrine of election. It not only exalts God’s grace, but seems to solve a number of theological problems that congeal around God’s soteriological justice (double predestination, divine wrath, eternal death, etc.). But these three essays in particular give one pause. I like the way German theologian Emil Brunner put it (quoted by Horton). Regarding Barth’s teaching that Jesus is “the eternally Elect Man,” or “the pre-existing God-Man, who, as such, is the eternal ground of all election,” Brunner said, “No special proof is required to show that the Bible contains no such doctrine.”

This naturally is the evangelical touchstone by which Barth, and all theology, is to be tested. By this criterion, all theologies will inevitably be found wanting in one way or another, and the problem with such collections is that, by their nature, they tend toward discovering that which is wanting. But the very existence of such a genre suggests that the subtext is in fact celebration. As Horton writes at the end of his essay, “Too one-sidedly focused on critique, my remarks have not adequately reflected my immense appreciation for the insights I have gleaned from Barth.”

Barth is already an inspiration for many evangelical scholars, but I believe he will increasingly be seen as a hero to evangelicalism as a whole—even more so than Bonhoeffer. Just when European theology had become bogged down in feeling and ethics, when it had become nothing but talk about man, Barth almost singlehandedly forced the theological world once again to take the Bible seriously, along with the great tradition of theology that had been discarded as irrelevant—from Athanasius to Augustine to Aquinas, to Anselm, to Calvin and Luther, to the scholastic Reformed theologians.

Graham’s instincts were right in one sense. We not only must not but simply cannot drive a wedge between Barth and evangelicals. For all their differences, they simply have too much in common.

Mark Galli is senior managing editor of Christianity Today magazine and author of Chaos and Grace: Discovering the Liberating Power of the Holy Spirit (Baker), as well as a forthcoming biography of Karl Barth for evangelicals.

1. Two other recent books in this vein are Karl Barth and Evangelical Theology: Convergences and Divergences, edited by Sung Wook Chung (Baker Academic, 2006); and Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques, edited by David Gibson and Daniel Strange (T&T Clark, 2008).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

This was a hard book review to write. You can only read so much elegant prose inviting you to pray before you feel guilty for not actually praying. Richard Foster notes this difficulty, quoting Thomas Merton: “You cannot learn meditation from a book. You just have to meditate.”

True enough, but good books help, and Sanctuary of the Soul is a good one. Not a sentence is misplaced, each drives you to the next with the expectation that good things will be waiting. Like all of Foster’s work since his landmark book The Celebration of Discipline, this one presents the spiritual disciplines to an evangelical audience as disciplines that are (not paradoxically) grace-filled.[1] If Ron Sider and Tony Campolo made it possible for evangelicals to speak of social justice, Richard Foster has done the same for spiritual disciplines.[2]

I wish I could say Foster’s work has actually changed the evangelical world. Speaking of meditation in particular, “Today,” Foster himself laments, “serious teaching and practice from a Christian perspective is minimal, if present at all.” He finds worship more commonly to be an experience of distractions strung together rather than an invitation to contemplation. This despite his own publishing success, the extensive conferencing and speaking circuit of his Renovaré organization, and the efforts of such gifted co-conspirators as Dallas Willard and the late Robert Webber. Foster and others may have changed the publishing landscape of evangelicals and offered arguments about why the spiritual disciplines are good things. But until evangelical churches are known for the depth and power of their meditative practices, his work remains incomplete.

The church I’m now privileged to pastor is an example. We have a longtime prayer ministry built on the American revivalist model. Dedicated prayer team members train and wait to pray with people after worship if they want a prayer partner. But hardly anyone ever comes for prayer. Why would they, unless they experienced a Billy Graham-style conversion? This tall steeple church in a college town hasn’t seen a live-wire conversion in decades. So the group met recently to imagine how to reconstitute its work. Someone timidly suggested, “I don’t mean to sound too Catholic, but couldn’t we do some meditation?”

It’s the description “Catholic” to which Foster puts the question. It’s hardly a Catholic (or faux Buddhist or whatever else) divine right to meditate. Foster’s work has been showing evangelicals for decades that this is their birthright too—for the simple reason that meditative prayer practices are biblical.

Perhaps my parishioner’s trouble is that she’s not been taught an evangelical version of meditation. And this would be the perfect book with which to teach such a thing. The Hebrew word for “meditate,” Foster notes, could also be translated as mutter, moan, rehearse, muse, or, my favorite, coo. And unlike some popular understandings of meditation, involving groovy music and hippie lettuce, a specifically Christian practice is shaped by Jesus’ own habits. When he hears a word from his Father, he obeys it. So too his followers when we meditate. Foster uses a favorite evangelical verse, “Behold I stand at the door and knock,” and points out that Revelation 3:20 was written to Christians, not as an invitation to unbelievers. Scripture constantly calls God’s people to open their hearts so he can eat with them, and they with him, in an “unbroken life of humble adoration.” We see here a kind of “mere Christianity” side to Foster: what follower of Jesus would not want precisely that?

Yet Foster also has a catholic side. He calls his readers into a multi-millennia conversation about prayer to which they’re invited to contribute. He does this occasionally by direct shaming: “How unfortunate that we today know so little of the vast literature on Christian meditation by faithful believers throughout the centuries!” But he more often gently introduces the reader to that tradition by sharing from its greatest luminaries. He quotes the magnificently named Theophan the Recluse to the effect that “to pray is to descend with the mind into the heart”—a perfect balance between respecting the mind and not worshiping it. Francis de Sales speaks of imagination “confining the mind”—more Romantic versions of imagination would have it unbound, but here it encompasses, borders, hems. Foster commends Brother Lawrence’s insistence that prayer and business are not distinct activities. And he lifts up Hans Urs von Balthasar’s insistence that prayer is not first listening to God, but beholding his beauty. What do these aphorisms mean? I’m not entirely sure, and that’s almost beside the point. The point is to enter into conversation with dead saints for the sake of living ones about the prayer they both join. By the time he gets to his own vision of God’s heart as “an open wound of love,” we see Foster rightly as joining a long line of faithful meditators or, to use language I don’t notice Foster much using, mystics.

The book is good enough to leave me with questions that Foster cannot be expected to have answered in a short volume. When he suggests that we all require much formation before we can “stand the fires of heaven,” I wonder whether there is a place for purgatory in his theology, and, if so, what it looks like. On one page Foster can insist that meditation is “utterly, utterly up to God.” A good, Protestant notion—God’s saving work is all grace. Yet on the very next page he suggests that “if certain chambers of our heart have never experienced God’s healing touch, perhaps it is because we have never welcomed the divine Scrutiny.” This seems true to experience in a way. In another it seems a direct contradiction to the prior page—is the transformation of our hearts up to us, or God, or both? In one section Foster explores the use of icons, agreeing with the 7th Ecumenical Council (AD 787) that Christians can draw pictures of the divine Son because of his incarnation. In a footnote, though, he says he himself doesn’t use icons in his prayer: “Icons have never seemed to speak to my condition.” Well, to be technical about it, the 7th Council said we must depict and reverence icons or else we will fail to worship the incarnate God (a ruling much more observed in the Eastern than Western churches). In another section, on the question of how we can know a voice we hear is God’s, Foster suggests we attend to “the Christlikeness of God.” A wonderful phrase. Yet I found myself longing here for a mention of the church, which finally must test the spirits of individual members for the presence of the Holy Spirit.

These questions hint at a weakness I find in this work of Foster’s, one perhaps owing to his evangelical Quakerism. Where is the church in his thought? In one way it is powerfully present in his use of the communion of the saints for wisdom on prayer. Yet I found few references to the sacraments or to the church as a doctrine in his thought. Quakerism, of course, has never been enthusiastic about the traditional Christian sacraments, and Foster leaves me wondering whether his personal catholic sensibilities or his Quaker eschewing of the physical win out in the end.

This criticism could be as unfair as the high bar I set for Foster above: transforming the prayer habits of evangelical churches in North America. We may now be seeing a moment of ressourcement among evangelicals akin to that enjoyed by Catholics in the last century. Our publishing houses are producing eminently useful volumes of patristic, medieval, and Reformation biblical commentary. Evangelical theologians are enthusiastically drawing on ancient Christian sources as they rarely have before. A critique of Richard Foster in an evangelical magazine, of all places, can fuss at him for failing to be sufficiently ecclesial or catholic. God may be renewing catholic sinews in the evangelical church yet. And if so, we will all have Richard Foster to thank.

1. I’m grateful to James Wilhoit of Wheaton College for this observation in personal correspondence.

2. And to Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove of the Rutba House in Durham, North Carolina, for this one.

Jason Byassee is senior pastor of Boone United Methodist Church in Boone, North Carolina and a Fellow in Theology and Leadership at Duke Divinity School.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.