What We're Reading
- God and Race in American Politics: A Short History
by Mark A. Noll - It Happened in Italy: Untold Stories of How the People of Italy Defied the Horrors of the Holocaust
by Elizabeth Bettina - Tradition: Concept and Claim
by Josef Pieper
Our Blogroll
« "How Great Thou Art" & the 100-Year-Old Bass | Main | Marsden Discusses "Short Life of Jonathan Edwards" »
Department of Oxymorons: Ten "Hot Issues" in Christian History Today
We moderns (and even we postmoderns) love top-ten lists. David Letterman has even managed to prop up a wilting career by providing one daily.
This list reaches fearlessly into the land of the oxymoron - you know, those lovely self-contradictory statements: "jumbo shrimp," "airline food," "Microsoft Works™." The oxymoron for today: "Hot issues in history."
That was the topic put to me a couple of years ago when my seminary's sister undergraduate institution, Bethel College, was looking to spiff up the Christian history content of its Western Civ course. Would I come talk to the course's cadre of professors about what's "new and exciting" in this field of history? So I took my best shot.
I can't say my colleagues in the guild of Christian historians are staying awake nights wrestling with any of the following 10 issues. But these are all matters that I've recently seen discussed - some of them with some heat - by historically conscious evangelicals. If there is a theme to the list, it is this: How does our history define us, and how should it?
So here goes:
1. Should we uncover and renew "lost Christianities" that early believers found valid (i.e. Gnostic options, Eastern Christianity), but were "squeezed out" for various political as well as theological reasons? See for example Christian History & Biography Issue 96: The Gnostic Hunger for Secret Knowledge, Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity.
2. Have Roman Catholics always believed in justification by grace through faith alone? This is one historical component of Mark Noll and Caroline Nystrom's modern question: "Is the Reformation over?"
3. Should conservative Protestants in today's fragmented postmodern world recover a role for tradition alongside Scripture? See for example D. H. Williams, Evangelicals and Tradition and, for engagement along more specific lines, Ancient Faith for the Church's Future, ed. Mark Husbands and Jeffrey Greenman.
4. More generally, did the Reformation - as modern Catholic critics have claimed - destroy medieval theological and social ideals that we desperately need to reclaim in the modern church? See not only Catholic writers such as G. K. Chesterton (his "distributism," with Hilaire Belloc - on which see this article) and Christopher Dawson (e.g. Religion and the Rise of Western Culture), but also Anglicans such as C. S. Lewis (e.g. The Discarded Image), Charles Williams (his "affirmative way" and "romantic theology"), and Dorothy L. Sayers (who insisted that what the world needed now was Dante - see especially the marvelous intellectual biography by her friend Barbara Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect).
5. Should Western Christianity seek to learn from, and correct itself from the resources of, Eastern Christianity? See for example Daniel Clendenin's Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective or Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church.
6. Was Celtic Christianity a purer, gentler mode of faith that can be used as a template to correct all of the problems in the modern church? See for example the discussion of this in Robert Webber's Younger Evangelicals.
7. Is some sort of "new monasticism" a good idea? See for example this article, or Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's New Monasticism.
8. Has evangelicalism, as historians like Donald Dayton and theologians like the late Stanley Grenz have claimed, been too narrowly defined in terms of a Reformed heritage - and do we need to rediscover Pietist and/or Wesleyan roots if we are to move forward in the postmodern world? See Stanley Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology.
9. Is there anything in American evangelical history or theology that should legitimately prevent us from reclaiming (1) ecumenism and (2) social action as our own crucial concerns and arenas for action? See James S. Cutsinger, ed., Reclaiming the Great Tradition: Evangelicals, Catholics & Orthodox In Dialogue, Donald Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage.
10. Have Christian faith and science been always and fundamentally at odds? See the work of David Lindberg, especially his introduction and first two chapters of David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, ed., When Science and Christianity Meet, along with the interview with Lindberg in Christian History Issue 76: The Christian Face of the Scientific Revolution.
So, what thinks the blogosphere? Are these really "hot issues" today? Where, beyond my brief bibliographic suggestions, are these issues being discussed most helpfully? What obvious issues did I miss in this list?
I look forward to hearing from folks on this - because after all, that's what a blog's for: to foster conversation.
recent posts
Archives
March 2010February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 |
Comments
Well, you're writing a Christian History blog, apparently a paid endeavor. You mention your seminary's sister college ... clearly you aren't mainstream, probably living the cuckolded life of a Christian historian/educator.
I find it difficult to imagine your perspective on the world - and clearly you don't have that reciprocal vicarious ability either.
But at least you have a sense of humor!
Posted By: Gertrude Stein | February 7, 2009 11:32 AM
i have never thought about most of those , i have however thought about the need for holiness (not by rules ,works or law but thru faith ) and the need for separation from the worlds ways of luife and strife !!!!
Posted By: fred mertens | February 7, 2009 1:50 PM
sorry life does nothave a U in it i just have fat fingers !!
Posted By: fred mertens | February 7, 2009 1:52 PM
one debate that would be timely right now would revolve around prosperity and gods way vs the americam way !!!flounting what one has complete with mcmanisons vs a more mosdest conservitive life style with more emphises on caring for the poorer oneself with giving to foreign missions ????
Posted By: fred mertens | February 7, 2009 2:06 PM
I would like to add to the list of oxymorons: "human resources." As for the list, for the questions Professor Armstrong poses, I think they frame several underlying issues, one big one being that modern American evangelical culture, so called, is, in the main, virtually indistinguishable from the surrounding culture. Perhaps it must begin to tilt more toward "traditions" in order to recover some semblance of "church."
Posted By: Peter | February 7, 2009 3:41 PM
There is a growing movement back to ancient Christianity (Roman Catholicism, etc.). There is still much hate and ignorance within Evangelical circles regarding this. The issues that separate need to be focused on and understood accurately. I also agree with another blogger that holiness (by God's grace in us)is a huge issue for today. Evangelicals must move beyond the Reformed thinking that there is not relief from sinning in this world.
Posted By: John | February 7, 2009 4:17 PM
It seems to me that most of these Ten "Hot Issues" are really different angles on One Hot Issue: Do contemporary evangelicals benefit from exploring traditions of Christianity other than the last 150 (or 500?) years of evangelicalism for the purpose of adopting those traditions to some measure? I would add another angle on this Hot Issue: Is spiritual theology through non-evangelical lenses ripe for consideration and adoption? (Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline was kind of a pioneering work pertaining to this question.)
Posted By: Cory Hartman | February 7, 2009 9:50 PM
To the oxymoron list I would add two favorites of late:
"progressive evangelical"-- Like unicorns, I like to think they exist, but I've never seen one.
"green car" oh! and
"clean coal"
In line with #10 on Christianity and science: maybe some exploration of the Theory of Evolution's great contribution to science and humanities (it recently was the 150th anniversary of Darwin's theory), and its great impact/implications for Christianity and its message. I realize there is virtually no debate in scholarly circles and that the theory is considered to be very solid, but for the average evangelical, the debate is still raging and many are 'anti-evolution'
I would like to see someone with serious scientific credentials who takes evolution seriously in their theology develop a coherent approach that unifies these two 'fields' and make it accessible (without being too dumbed-down) for people to understand. I'm fed up with seeing Christianity pitted against science and the discourse dominated by sectarian militants on both sides.
Posted By: JF | February 18, 2009 12:27 AM
JF: Amen on the whole WWF-like "evolution vs creation" thing. Yuck.
Posted By: Chris Armstrong | February 19, 2009 11:25 PM
I just finished reading Phyllis Tickle's 'The Great Emergence' and found its panoramic perspective on the evolution of the Church (and its predictions about where we're going) very compelling. There's plenty of 'hot' food for thought in there, and well worth mulling over.
Posted By: Martha Balmer | February 21, 2009 5:01 PM
Two comments:
First - We can always benefit from looking at past revivals and schools of thought to gain fresh insight for our faith. Growing and moving forward doesn't mean re-inventing the wheel but finding the best plan of God for my life and my situation.
Second - To Cory, I'm not sure where you heard that "scholarly circles" consider the debate closed on evolution but it simply is not the case. It's hard to prop up a theory with that many holes in it. And the reason it's a raging debate for Christians is because our need for and understanding of salvation is based on God's Words, beginning in the very first verse of scripture. The foundation of evolution is the anti-thesis of all God is, says and does; and it's very hard to make Christianity fit into this world view without losing truth along the way.
How do millions of years of sin, disease, death and decay add up to the perfect, sinless, 'very good' world that God says He created? Or do we not believe that part of the Bible? Why would a loving God use the torturous route of mutation and death to create the 'apple of His eye' and then make His son endure the suffering He did to 'redeem' it back? Redeem it from what? Sin? Death? Suffering? But these were His own tools, why would He need to destroy them? I encourage you to prayfully consider this and continue your study of His Word.
Posted By: Valerie | April 13, 2009 1:11 AM
I apologize, I misread the blog names. My comment was directed at JF's entry, not Cory's.
Posted By: Valerie | April 13, 2009 1:13 AM