Beyond Bebbington: The Quest for an Evangelical Identity

The title of this post is also the title of a recent article written in the autumn 2008 edition of the quarterly journal Churchman. The author, Brian Harris, principal of Vose Seminary (formerly the Baptist College of Western Australia), has written a piece concerning the relevance of Bebbington's quadrialteral for the twenty-first century context. He asks several interesting questions, the central one being:

'is contemporary evangelicalism characterised by the priority placed on conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism, and if so, is this a valid characterisation of both belief and practice?'

B. Harris, who recently completed a PhD interacting with the thought of Stanley Grenz and the nature and future of evangelical identity, believes that other descriptors might prove more accurate and desirable for contemporary evangelicalism. He argues that contemporary evangelical communities 'might be better characterised as being a community of "passionate piety"'. I will leave the reader to assess whether or not his argument is persuasive in applying that particular descriptive term to contemporary evangelicalism.

My reason for writing about this article by B. Harris is because I think his title is misleading. His real difficulties concerning the Bebbington quadrilateral appear to be with the way in which others apply it to contemporary evangelicalism. The quadrilateral is a combination of priorities which _have been_ the special marks of evangelical religion. Claiming, therefore, that we need to get beyond Bebbington needs to be qualified or rewritten. One alternative title for his article might be: 'Getting Beyond the Application of Bebbington's Quadrilateral to Contemporary Evangelicalism'.

Bebbington's quadrilateral has its difficulties (see an earlier post here), but one of the things that The Emergence of Evangelicalism has shown is that the quadrilateral remains relevant to the interpretation of evangelical religion in the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Whether or not this is true for the twenty-first century context remains to be seen.

Thoughts?

Recent Publications by (a few of) Bebbington's Students

The most recent edition of the Evangelical Quarterly journal (July 2008) has an excellent article by Jon Yeager titled: 'Puritan or Enlightened: John Erskine and the Transition of Scottish Evangelical Theology'.

Perhaps Jon will grace us with his presence on this blog by answering any questions that arise after everyone rushes out to read his article--which everyone should do!

On another note, Lionel Young has a review of Todd Magnum's The Dispensational-Covenantal Rift (Paternoster, 2007) in the winter/spring 2008 edition of Fides et Historia.

Congrats fellas.

Absence of Blog Posts and John D'Elia

My apologies to those who tune in to this blog. My wife and I have relocated to the US (from Edinburgh) where we have taken up jobs for Wheaton College in Illinois. My wife will have teaching duties in the department of anthropology and I will be working with the fine folks at the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE). Both of us will continue to work on our phds while returning to the UK every so often for research.

While packing and unpacking I happened to come across a blog which had a nice post on John D'Elia's new book on George Ladd. There are several interesting (and perhaps uninformed) comments at the end of the post as well. You can read about it here.

I hope to be able to blog a bit more in the coming weeks. As always, feel free to make comments or update the readers on how your own research is progressing.

Cheers.

Andy

New Books on Evangelicalism

Here are a few books that have appeared recently which might be of some interest to all of us:

The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism by Garth M. Rosell

Evangelical vs. Liberal by James K Wellman

Jesus Made in America: A Cultural History from the Puritans to the Passion of the Christ by Stephen J. Nichols

A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America by John A. D' Elia (one of David's former students)

Fundamentalism and Evangelicals (Oxford Theological Monographs) (New Paperback Edition) by Harriet A. Harris

Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't by Stephen Prothero

Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670-1789 by W.R. Ward

Reinventing English Evangelicalism, 1966-2001: A Theological and Sociological Study by Rob Warner

The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony and Postmodernity: 1950-2005 by Gary J Dorrien

The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America by Thomas S. Kidd

Cosmopolitan Evangelicals

So this post is more in the realm of sociology than history, but there is a significant amount of overlap. I wondered if any of you had seen or read D. Michael Lindsay's book Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. He contends that the major division in the American evangelical movement is not between those who support the political right and the political left, but between "populist" evangelicals and "cosmopolitan" evangelicals. In an interview conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Lindsay comments:

"I differentiate between two kinds of evangelicals. Populist evangelicalism has been what a lot of attention has been devoted to. This is the domain of, “We’re going to take back Washington.” A lot of Patrick Henry [college] embodies populist evangelicalism. Principally seeing politics as the arena where you have to bring about cultural change using mass rallies.

An exemplar of this was, in 1980, there was a Washington for Jesus rally, which Bill Bright and a number of other evangelical leaders organized. It’s the idea that a radio commentator would get on and say, “You need to call your congressman today. They’re voting on an issue.” And the evangelicals would flood the phone lines on Capitol Hill. This is an important part of evangelical activism. But I think it’s actually [part of] the previous generation.

That generation is dying off, and it’s being replaced with what I call cosmopolitan evangelicalism. This is the evangelicalism of the establishment, where the edges have been softened. The cosmopolitan evangelicals that came up time and again in my research are those folks who interact regularly with people of different faiths and of no faith at all. They rub shoulders in the secular world all the time. And they don’t lose their faith as a result of that, but they interact with their faith in different ways.

So whereas populist evangelicals want to take back America or convert to the Christianization of this country, cosmopolitan evangelicals have a more modest goal. They simply want their faith to be seen as legitimate, authentic, and – they hope in the end – attractive and winsome. In the same way, they do want their faith to draw others, but [they use] different forms of mobilization [that are] far more subtle, more nuanced, and because of that, more significant."

Fuller Seminary's "Theology, News & Notes"

Liz thought it would be good to draw our attention to Fuller's Theology, News & Notes publication. The winter 2008 edition was dedicated to the topic of evangelical identity. There are several excellent articles, and most of them interact with an aspect of Bebbington's quadrilateral.

James Bradley, the Geoffrey W. Bromiley Professor of Church History at Fuller, carefully constructs a summary of evangelicalism in the issue. He parses evangelicalism's growth into four stages and examines "a single thread of evangelical theology, the substitutionary atonement, to show how different historical eras and contexts shaped evangelical emphases, and at the same time, how certain elements of the gospel became prominent in the evangelical tradition" (p. 4)

'Fundamentalist' and 'evangelical' as Terms of Public Discourse

There is an interesting (and good) article on Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism in the public sphere by Christopher Watkin in the latest issue of the Cambridge Papers over at the Jubilee Centre. You can read the article here.

Watkin begins the essay with these lines below.

'Question: What do British Parliamentarians most frequently associate with 'evangelicals'? 

Answer: Evangelicals are those who oppose the use of condoms. 

Shocked?  Perhaps not if you're a regular newspaper reader or television viewer.

Bothered?  You should be if you would describe yourself using this term.'

Thoughts?

The Emergence of Evangelicalism

I thought the first post should be dedicated to the appearance of a recent book evaluating David's descriptive definition of Evangelicalism: The Emergence of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities (Nottingham: IVP, 2008) edited by Michael Haykin and Kenneth Stewart. (You can find information on it here, here and here). Unfortunately--for all you US based folks--it is only available in the UK at the moment.

The Emergence of Evangelicalism is, as its subtitle suggests, a book which explores the continuity between the religion of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the evangelical religion that emerged in the eighteenth century. A whopping 18 scholars on both sides of the Atlantic contribute essays to the book. At the heart of the book is the question, 'Did Evangelicalism predate the eighteenth century?' This question was the title of an article by one of the editors (Kenneth Stewart) which appeared in the Evangelical Quarterly 77:2 (2005): 135-153 (it is available on ATLA Religion Database in pdf format for all of you who are, like myself, occasionally too lazy to go to the library!) The central question of the book is a good one, but it is not the first and only question concerning the adequacy of David's quadrilateral. Several other books have questioned the sufficiency of the quadrilateral (see Andrew Atherstone's recent work on Charles Golightly). One of David's former students, Timothy Larsen, has flagged up one of the problems with the quadrilateral: it assumes certain contextual information. He comments:
'For example, if no context is made explicit, an argument could be made that St Francis of Assisi was an evangelical. St. Francis, after all, had a clear, dramatic conversion experience; he was so committed to activism that he pioneered friars out itinerating amongst the people, preaching the gospel, and ministering to physical needs rather than being cloistered monks; his biblicism was so thorough that his Rule was made up mostly of straight quotations from Scripture; his crucicentrism was so profound that it reached its culmination in the stigmata.' (T. Larsen in The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2.)

Yet, no other definition of evangelicalism comes close to rivaling the scholarly acceptance of David's quadrilateral. I think many people get hung up on the descriptive/prescriptive qualifications when examining the definition as it is configured in the quadrilateral. As historians, we are not (or should not be) attempting to place a prescriptive framework on the past. We hypothesize but then look for data which will make or break our hypothesis. My own thought on the quadrilateral is that although it possesses a few minor cracks, it is a solid descriptive definition of Evangelicalism.

Thoughts?
Andy