Byrnesys Blabberings

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Thanks to Abraham who graciously pointed out in the comments (and in record time I might add) that I had misread the context of the article which was in fact notes from Matt Chandlers seesion at resurgence. I have ammended the wording below accordingly.

Abraham Piper (son of John…I wonder if he is tired of that title) posted his notes on Matt Chandlers session at resurgence who has made some good and not so good points on the shaping of evangelicalism. The Full post is here at the Desiring God blog.

Matt makes several good points I think, not least the title below: 

There is a thriving evangelical head, but a shriveling heart.

Liberalism often paints evangelicalism as morons. In response, evangelicalism seems to have over-emphasized the head at the expense of the heart. There are too many smart believers without the grace to try to overcome the baggage that comes with evangelicalism.

The above is a good historical (if anecdotal) survey of the progression of the evangelical response to liberalism, and it was what I was getting at the other day when I spoke about how liberal theology was described by Barth as inefficient. I noted that Evangelicals have given liberal theology ground because of the lack of social justice engagement, and compassion in ethics which should have been outworked from the Gospel that they have fought so hard to keep central to the Christian faith.

Evangelicalism has withdrawn where liberalism took over, and has its own institutions. Now we’re trying to re-engage. But the disengagement we want to come back from has created a lot of baggage. We who want to be missional try to engage, but when we interact with unbelievers we have to overcome that we’re from the church that has hurt people.

This too, I think is the reality which the church is waking up to, and it was sent home for me in the writings of Jamie Arpin Ricci who commented that we do not start our missional attempts in a middle ground, or in neutrality but in a setting where we have apologies to make and wrongs to right(apologies I would cite the specific post if I could find it, but it really impacted me).

But even if this difficulty arises from the way the church acted over the last decades, we must still diligently love fundamentalists. Without them we wouldn’t be here. If they hadn’t stood up to liberalism like they did, we would be Europe.

This paragraph starts well and ends, well, less than brilliantly. Firstly I appreciate Matt’s call not to allow fundamentalists to be ‘thrown into the fire’ and in the next section he articulates well what that looks like: "Instead, when we encounter fundamentalists who seem hard toward the work of Christ nowadays, we should be like the father who goes out and entreats the older brother. He doesn’t stay in at the Prodigal’s party and ignore him." Despite this valid call for reconcilliation of fundamentalism into the community of orthodoxy (which is the Church) I dont agree with his perception that fundamentalism made a positive contribution to the birth of evangelicalism, in my view the only way to see a positive contribution is that fundamentalism was a picture of what evangelicals should flee from in their practise, theology, and role as a witness to the culture.

Finally Matt’s passing comment (again thankfully clarified and contextualised by Abrahams comment below) of "Thank goodness we aren’t like Europe" shows that Matt probably lacks any real contextual experience of the theological and ecclesial setting of 21st Century Europe and has characterised it as a continent defined by the liberalism of Schleiermacher, or worse still as defined by pre-reformation errors. There are some implicit problems in stating in a point blank fashion that the Christian faith in the USA (which I presume is what he refers to when he uses "we") is more evangelical, and by that I mean faithful to the Gospel than believers in Europe have been. But these are thoughts for another time, and a more thorough treatement than I could ever hope to give in this post.

Just some thoughts, Please feel free to respond in the comments