Keeping the Evangelical Edge
Had an interesting discussion with one of the profs here @ Regent recently, a mainline evangelical seminary in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada). The gist of it was: as a professional academic (or professional student for that matter) in at times hostile environments (I think of the demythologizing atmosphere of most liberal theological schools), how does one keep one’s evangelical heritage and faith intact? Now it’s not the losing of faith that I’m concerned with, but more so the maintaining of theological commitments and convictions. His answer was simple; remember. Remember your context, community, and charter, all the whiles being fully aware of your environment; (actually he didn’t put it like that I’m just synthesizing – he just said something to the effect of “remember”) but I think that’s a good reason why many of the strongest orthodox theologians stayed in the safe via media of orthodox thought; their contextual faith communities. And in my theory, most of these are largely pietistic in origin.
Additionally, we need to remember that theology is primarily for the church, not for the academy. The academy has much to offer us, but it does not own theology and biblical studies. I think it is a mistake to glorify, as we sometimes do, the great academicians as if they “really” know the Bible, as if huge amounts of knowledge of an academic field gets you closer to God. Without dismissing that knowledge… let’s keep the focus on the church.
James Barr attacks evangelical scholarship as “phoney” and evangelical piety as “pathological”: http://ow.ly/LirH via Twitter
I probably agree in great measure with Barr (of course, he famously called biblical scholars to account for their sloppy use of biblical words. I talk about this in my book on Herman Utics), but additional, who gets to define “scholarship”? I’m going to do a post on this, or somewhat related. @Wayne