All posts from "December 2009"

Campus of Moody’s School for Poor Girls Resurrected as Christian College

by David Neff

A few days after Christmas I caught up with some news stories about the sale of the boarding schools evangelist Dwight L. Moody founded for poor children in 1879 (the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies) and 1881 (the Mount Hermon School for Boys). Hat tip to Philadelphia journalist W. G. Shuster for the links.

The basic facts according to news reports:

• The Massachusetts schools had gone co-ed in 1971, consolidated on one campus in 2005, and needed to find an appropriate owner for the unused and deteriorating Northfield Campus.
• Hobby Lobby, a privately held retail chain with a Christian vision, purchased the property for a nominal $100,000 and a commitment to preserve the historic campus and building. They are planning to spend about $5 million in operations and capital improvement projects over the next few years.
• Hobby Lobby then donated the property to the C. S. Lewis Foundation, which since its founding in 1986 has been looking for a way to start a great books college based on a Christian educational vision.
• The C. S. Lewis Foundation (which earlier purchased and refurbished Lewis’s Oxford home known as “The Kilns” and holds periodic seminars there) plans to launch C. S. Lewis College on the Northfield campus in 2012 with an initial entering class of 400, a faculty of 40, and a staff of 45.

So what is the story behind the schools Dwight L. Moody founded and the campus that will soon take the name of C. S. Lewis?

As someone with only a rudimentary education, Moody quickly learned the value of practical learning. He was not interested in educational theory or systems. He was interested in equipping people who did not ordinarily have access to education—women, the poor, ethnic minorities. And with his passion for evangelism, he saw that with a little education, they could reach others with the gospel that the seminary-trained preachers never could.

In Moody’s day, there was a lot of progressive educational theory in the air. The ideas of the American John Dewey and the Europeans Herbart, Pestalozzi, and Froebel permeated the air, wrote Virginia Lieson Brereton in Issue 25 of Christian History. Although he was not interested in ideas, Moody no doubt picked up the eagerness for experimentation and the passion to connect education to real life, to motivate students, and gear the content of learning to student understanding.

Rather than studying theory, Brereton reports, Moody studied the experiements of others in England and Europe: the deaconess institute at Mildmay, Charles Spurgeon’s London college for poor and ill-educated Baptist pastors, George Müller’s orphanage-school at Bristol, and H. Grattan Guinness’s East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions.

After reading the news accounts of the purchase of the Northfield campus, I called Moody Bible Institute historical theologian Gregg Quiggle for some perspective. I met Professor Quiggle in October, when he read a précis of his dissertation-in-process to a group of visiting scholars. His dissertation examines Dwight Moody’s social vision and contradicts David Moberg’s claim in The Great Reversal that Moody bears a major responsibility for evangelicalism’s abandonment of its 19th-century commitment to social justice.

I asked Professor Quiggle what the significance of the Northfield Mount Hermon School was in the ministry and legacy of Dwight Moody. Without a moment’s hesitation, he fired off these six bullet points:

• The Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies was Moody’s initial foray into education. It is significant that Moody’s first school was for women. It shows his commitment to the role that lay women could play in Christian ministry.
• A Bible institute developed there later that was a forerunner of Moody Bible Institute. The school was Moody’s initial foray into Bible institute-style education (as opposed to providing a general education from a Christian perspective).
• The Mount Hermon School for Boys is where Moody began educating young men. It developed after the Northfield school, but both schools were intentional in their commitment to poor children of any ethnicity. These schools reflect Moody’s commitment to the poor and to diversity in gender and race. In fact, Quiggle wrote in a follow-up e-mail, “Moody actively recruited Native American and African American girls for the first class at Northfield. He actually sent a woman out to the reservations to find Native American girls who could benefit from the education and would go back to their people to teach. That is what Northfield was about. He also insisted Bibles be placed in the foundation of the buildings at Northfield. That is also what it was about.”
• The Northfield campus is also the site of the Northfield Bible conferences (which began in 1880). These became significant for evangelicalism generally as a rallying point where significant evangelicals from both sides of the Atlantic came to speak. These meetings cemented the links between British and American evangelicalism that had begun in the colonial period with transatlantic preachers like George Whitefield and John Wesley. That Anglo-American evangelical connection continued its influence down through the 20th century, symbolized for example by the cooperation of John R. W. Stott and Billy Graham in the Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization.
• Mount Hermon was also the site of the beginnings of the Student Volunteer Movement. At the Northfield Conference (July 1886), 251 students met to study and pray for nearly a month, and from their fervor developed a movement that supplied much of the energy for the unfolding missions movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• The sale of the Northfield campus to the theologically orthodox C. S. Lewis foundation is full of irony. After the days of Dwight Moody, the Mount Hermon and Northfield schools came under the influence of liberal Christianity, whereas Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute became a point institution by fundamentalism. This divergence reflects the trajectory of the two major strands of North American Protestantism.

  But that divergence also reflects the broad tolerance of Dwight Moody. He disagreed with the modernists’ approach to Scripture, but as long as they were people of faith and integrity and spoke positively about Jesus, he appreciated the devotionalism of the early modernists and welcomed them to his conferences. Thus modernists and proto-modernists like Henry Drummond, George Adam Smith, Washington Gladden, and Harry Sloane Coffin were invited to preach alongside R. A. Torrey, C. I. Scofield, F. B. Meyer, A. A. Bonar, Hudson Taylor, G. Campbell Morgan, and A. J. Gordon.

  That list reflects not only the modernist-fundamentalist spectrum, but also the transatlantic nature of his network.

How appropriate then that the new educational institution to inhabit the premises will be named after and built on the ethos of the UK’s pre-eminent Christian apologist of the 20th century. Best wishes to Stan Mattson and the folk at the C. S. Lewis Foundation as they launch this new Christian college.

Links for further reading:

News articles about the sale of the Northfield campus in the Daily Hampshire Gazette (requires subscription) and The School Library Journal

Virginia Lieson Brereton’s article on the Northfield Schools from Christian History issue 25 (requires subscription)

The history page at the Northfield Mount Hermon School website

Website of C. S. Lewis College

Press Release about Hobby Lobby’s purchase of the Northfield campus

Photo of Dwight Lyman Moody circa 1900 from the U.S. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division under the digital ID cph.3c22752 via Wikimedia Commons.

Oberman Is Over-Hard

by Elesha Coffman

I’ve been in this field for some ten years now, but this fall was my first opportunity to design and teach my own church history course. It was actually a lot harder than I expected it to be. My degree is in religion, but my job is in history, so usually my problem is not knowing enough about the subject matter I’m teaching. (The XYZ Affair? Um, let me look that up.) With church history, though, I had entirely too much material to work with—too many books I wanted to assign, too many possible interpretations, too many people and events I felt obligated to mention. The class was, shall we say, an experiment. So, for any of you who teach church history or would like to learn the good parts of my class without the guinea-pig travails, a few insights:

1. Heiko Oberman’s biography, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, is outstanding, but it assumes the reader already knows something about its subject. My students did not. They knew basically nothing about church history—but, as I should have remembered, neither did I as an undergraduate. Next time I’ll go with Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand instead.

On the other hand, I was very pleased with the other texts I used: Mark Noll’s Turning Points, Paul Maier’s translation of Eusebius’s Church History, and Tia Kolbaba’s The Byzantine Lists. The last of those just went out of print, but the other two would be great choices for spending your shiny new gift cards.

2. Because the Noll text ends with the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference (a centennial well worth marking in 2010!), I pretty much ended the class at the turn of the century, but I allowed my students to write their final papers on more recent events. This turned out to be a bad idea.

Recent history is tough—there are often too many primary sources available, there’s insufficient historical distance to separate blips from trends, and the secondary literature tends to be written by people with a personal stake in the events about which they write. Of course, no history is impartial, but when people are writing about their own lives, or their own (literal or metaphorical) parents, it’s especially important to evaluate the literature accordingly. I got three papers on events from the 1960s, and I felt bad that I hadn’t given students better critical tools to tackle them.

3. Historical dialogues are a riot. I borrowed this assignment idea from Alan Jacobs, my literary theory professor at Wheaton. Instead of asking his students to write summaries or, heaven help us, analyses of modern literary theorists (more than a few of whom were purposefully abstruse), Dr. Jacobs asked us to write dialogues between the figures we studied. The idea was that a student must really understand where a writer is coming from to be able to put words into his or her mouth.

I modified the assignment slightly for my class but definitely kept students’ freedom to place their characters in the setting of their choice. I got Eusebius lounging in a coffee shop, Thomas Aquinas driving through rural Pennsylvania, Patriarch Michael Cerularius attending a kindergarten graduation, and Martin Luther watching a home shopping channel (and angrily calling to protest the deals on “grace” offered by Johann Tetzel). This was not just a successful academic exercise; it’s a fun game for history buffs to play along at home, too.

4. I know that the best pedagogy is to facilitate students’ discoveries, rather than to serve an elegant platter of one’s own insights, but I had a terrible time holding back this semester. The study of church history has changed me in so many ways, including how I read the Bible, how I understand the human condition, how I define the church, how I relate to other people. A 20-year-old who has just met Constantine for the first time simply cannot absorb all of that, nor will knowledge and experience mix for anyone else the way they mixed for me. Real learning doesn’t fit well into a 15-week space.

Oh well, I tell myself. I’m sure I accomplished something this semester, even if neither I nor my intrepid students could quite articulate what in this post-finals haze. I have faith that church history will grow on them.

Top(?) Ten Christian History News Stories of 2009

by Ted Olsen

As the managing editor for news and online journalism at Christianity Today, I’m constantly watching out for religion news. As a church history fan, I pay particular attention when today’s developments intersect with yesterday’s.

We’ve recently finished putting together our list of the top news stories of 2009 (we haven’t released our list yet, but Religion Newswriters Association, Baptist Joint Committee, Catholic News Service, and Time have.) I have to say, for pure news value, it seemed like a slow news year in religion news.

It was a bit of a slow news year in Christian history news, too, but I was able to put a list together of some notable events. Still, I can’t help but feel I’m missing something rather significant. Consider this, then, a non-authoritative, preliminary list.

1. A year of anniversaries
The “restoration movement” celebrated the 200th anniversary of its founding document of sorts, Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington.” Baptists celebrated the 400th anniversary of the first Baptist congregation by Thomas Helwys and John Smyth.  The 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth drew renewed attention to his “enigmatic” faith (Charles Darwin, born the same day, got similar treatment.) But, probably due to the growing popularity of the “young Reformed movement,” the 500th birthday of John Calvin got the most attention.

2. Archaeologists find Israel’s largest artificial cave near Jericho
University of Haifa Archaeologist Adam Zertal told reporters he thought the site might be Galgala (Gilgal)—or perhaps just a place where later Christians thought Gilgal might have been. But at the very least, the 31 cross markings on the pillars and the suggestion that the site may have been a monastery or early Christian refuge during periods of persecution remains intriguing.

3. Discovery announced of a Byzantine church near Jerusalem with “breathtakingly beautiful mosaics”
The good news: A church from the sixth or seventh century was discovered at Moshav Nes-Harim, near Jerusalem. Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Daniel Ein Mor said the excavation “supplements our knowledge about the nature of the Christian-Byzantine settlement in the rural areas between the main cities in this part of the country during the Byzantine period, among them Bet Guvrin, Emmaus and Jerusalem.” Among the findings: “breathtakingly beautiful mosaics” and an inscription: “O Lord God of Saint Theodorus, protect Antonius and Theodosia the illustres [a title used to distinguish high nobility in the Byzantine period] - Theophylactus and John the priest [or priests]. [Remember o Lord] Mary and John who have offe[red - ] in the 6th indiction. Lord, have pity of Stephen.”

The story does not have a happy ending: “In November [2008], during the first excavation in the site, archaeologists exposed the church's narthex—the broad entrance at the front of the church's nave. It was filled with a carpet of polychrome mosaics that was adorned with geometric patterns of intertwined rhomboids separated by flower bud motifs. Unfortunately, at the conclusion of that excavation, the mosaic was defaced and almost completely destroyed by unknown vandals.”

4. Pope Benedict XVI confronts Holocaust denial
The Pope’s decision to lift the excommunication of four bishops associated with the Society of St. Pius X, including Richard Williamson, caused an uproar. Williamson had denied the extent of the Holocaust, saying, “I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them in gas chambers.” Pope Benedict acknowledged “mistakes” in handling the lifting of the excommunication, including not “consulting the information available on the internet.” The debate, which became a focus of Benedict’s May visit to Israel, gave opportunity for pundits to call attention to the longstanding discussion over whether Vatican did enough to save Jews during World War II and to the history of Catholic-Jewish relations.

5. Did the “authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls” exist? Some critics of Dead Sea Scroll scholarship didn’t.
Rachel Elior made headlines with her claim that the Essenes were merely an invention by Flavius Josephus and that the efforts to tie the sect to the Dead Sea Scrolls are thus doomed to failure. But her claim was overshadowed by the arrest of Raphael Golb, son of Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Norman Golb, on charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. Norman Golb is one of the most vocal critics of the Essene-authorship theory (though he apparently believes they existed). Raphael Golb apparently created many internet aliases and trolled the internet to promote his father’s work and smear critics. Did either Golb or Elior significantly change Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship this year? Maybe not. But it gave people something to talk about, anyway.

6. Texas board of education fight shifts from biology to history
David Barton of Wall Builders and Peter Marshall of the “America’s Christian Heritage” books were among the new appointees to the Texas Board of Education, which is currently debating changes to the statewide social studies curriculum. For the last several months Barton and Marshall (along American University professor Daniel Dreisbach ) have been arguing for more recognition of the role Christianity played in American history, from the role the Great Awakening played in the founding of the republic to Billy Graham’s shaping of the 20th century.

"We're in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it," Marshall told The Wall Street Journal.

7. Father Damien officially becomes a Catholic saint
The Belgian “leper priest” is widely admired by Protestants and Catholics for his incarnational ministry to the outcasts of Molokai in the 19th century. Such wasn’t always the case.

8. As Codex Sinaiticus goes online, a new discovery
“An online project by the British Library has reassembled the surviving pages of the world's oldest Bible,” the CBC and other news agencies reported (not entirely accurately) in July. “The Codex Sinaiticus, written by Greek scholars in the fourth century, exists in four separate pieces in Britain, Germany, Russia and Egypt. But all of the extant text of Codex Sinaiticus went online Monday, along with interpretations in modern Greek and in English, for those who cannot read the ancient language.”

Well, not so fast. A month later, a Greek Ph.D. student announced that he accidentally discovered a previously unseen section of the manuscript in the binding of another codex at St Catherine's Monastery in Egypt.

9. Lucas Cranach the Elder painting gets brief (unfortunate) attention
There was brief attention to one of the most important (though not always remembered) figures of the German Reformation, Lucas Cranach, as his painting, “Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me,” was stolen from a Lutheran church in Norway. The painting, worth between $2 million and $3 million and in the church since 1677 was quickly recovered.

10. James Ossuary trial rolls slowly onward
Really. Four years after the trial began, and seven years after the headlines, this thing is still going on. We’ll wake you when it’s over.

Other stories worth considering:
Greece's new Acropolis Museum fights over apparent reference to Christian vandals.

Shroud of Turin stuff: Researcher claims to find faint writing as research on first-century leper casts doubt on the shroud’s early origin.

President Obama’s various speeches spark historical reflections on crusades, Reinhold Niebuhr, just war theory, Turkey’s Halki seminary, civilization’s (and America’s) “debt to Islam,” and many other church history topics.

Archaeologists find 2,000-year-old synagogue in Migdal, where Jesus may have preached. (I omitted this from the above list simply because there’s little connection to church history after Jesus. But what a find!)

The Mideast’s historic Christian communities are still leaving.

Okay. That’s my list. What did I miss? (Remember the rules for such things: All responses must be written in an incredulous tone and generally should start or end with an insult and the words “I can’t believe you…”)

Forgotten 'Father of Biblical Science'

by Collin Hansen

After returning from the most recent meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, noted New Testament scholar Dan Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary raised a longstanding concern. Qualified graduates of evangelical seminaries find it difficult to gain admission to prestigious biblical studies programs in the United States. The critical assumptions of the modern academy prohibit many evangelicals who regard the Bible as authoritative from being accepted by the scholarly guild.

This problem is certainly now new. But more than 500 comments on Wallace’s blog indicate that it still elicits strong reactions. Since the early 20th century, evangelicals have been treated as outcasts by some of the very schools their forebears founded. This reversal has obscured the historic role of evangelicals in bringing America up to date with German and British advances in biblical scholarship. Andover Seminary’s Moses Stuart in particular earned the title “Father of Biblical Science in America” for his distinguished career teaching generations of pastors and scholars at America’s first seminary.

Born in Wilton, Connecticut, in 1780, Stuart graduated first in his class from Yale in 1799, three years before the Connecticut college would welcome its first major revival under the leadership of president Timothy Dwight. During this revival, one-third of Yale students converted. Stuart himself was converted shortly after returning to New Haven to work as a tutor and study law in the fall of 1802. Divinity became his passion, and Stuart sought opportunities to study theology with Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan Edwards would mentor several luminaries at Yale, including theologian Nathaniel William Taylor and pastors Lyman Beecher and Asahel Nettleton.

When he was just 29 years old, Stuart was hired by Andover to teach sacred literature. Andover had been founded just one year earlier in 1808. He would serve at the northeastern Massachusetts school for nearly 40 more years until 1848. At the outset of his career, Stuart faced an almost impossible task. He was charged with teaching biblical languages, exegesis of both testaments, and various other subjects related to critical Bible study. But Stuart had received no advanced training in the biblical languages at Yale. Nevertheless, Stuart devoted himself to meeting this challenge. During 1816 and 1817, he learned Syriac, Aramaic, and Arabic. He excelled in Hebrew study, eventually writing six books in the field. He also wrote a book about biblical Greek. But it was Stuart’s decision to learn German that helped determine the trajectory of his scholarship. Less than 18 months after Stuart began reading German, he had mastered the language.

Stuart did not uncritically accept all the conclusions of German critics, but he recognized how their methods aided biblical studies in ways the Americans and British had not anticipated. He was at the forefront of trends that would eventually preoccupy North American biblical scholarship. He was an articulate advocate for the grammatical-historical school of biblical exegesis. He argued that the manner of Scripture is human while the matter has divine origins. The Bible is authoritative but open to interpretation according to commonly held principles of exegesis.

Stuart occasionally confronted critics directly, as he did with Unitarian pastor William Ellery Channing. Stuart urged his opponents to consider that whatever doubts they might harbor about Scripture, the Old Testament in particular, divine authority compels all to trust. If you think the New Testament originated with God, Stuart argued, then in order to be consistent you must follow the New Testament and recognize the Old Testament’s authority. Indeed, Christ and the apostles, commissioned by God, received and taught the Jewish Scriptures as originating with God.

Stuart occasionally clashed with conservative scholars, too. But Princeton Seminary titan Charles Hodge appreciated Stuart for advancing the cause of philology.

We have, therefore, long been in the habit of regarding Professor Stuart as one of the greatest benefactors of the Church in our country, because he has been the principle means of turning the attention of the rising generation of ministers to this method of studying the Bible. This, we doubt not, is the great service of his life; a service for which the whole Church owes him gratitude and honour, and which will be remembered when present differences and difficulties are all forgotten. We do him, therefore, unfeigned homage as the great American reformer of biblical study, as the introducer of a new era, and the most efficient opponent of metaphysical theology.

Andover and even Princeton would eventually succumb to the trends bemoaned by Stuart and Hodge. But Stuart’s work, particularly his commentary on Romans, has stood the test of time. And his students, at least, recognized his momentous contributions to American scholarship. They honored him in death with a tombstone inscription that captures his professional achievements and profound faith.

A meek and earnest disciple; a fervid and eloquent preacher; a generous and cordial friend; a lover of all good learning; versatile in genius, adventurous; in research, quick in acquisition; an enthusiastic and attractive teacher, devoting himself with patient and successful toil to the revival and cultivation of Sacred Literature, he is justly called among the Scholars of his native country, The Father of Biblical Science. The Word which he loved in life Was his light in death. He now sees face to face.

Evangelicals at a Crossroad: A Dialogue

by Chris Armstrong

This past summer two professors at Bethel University, St Paul, Minnesota and one at sister institution Bethel Seminary (me!) were invited to participate in a recorded dialogue that would become a printed piece in the schools’ magazine. The three of us, guided by questions posed by a moderator, considered where evangelicalism is today and where it may be headed.

Though somewhat longer than our typical blog posting, we offer the full edited article (“never before published,” as the marketing wallahs might say) in hopes that it will spark some conversation among our readers who care about the historical movement called evangelicalism:

Moderator: Scott Wible / Editors: Scott Wible, Heather Johnson, and Holly Donato

Are you an “evangelical”? For 60 years, the word has been useful as shorthand for “born-again and Bible-believing, and more open to dialogue than a fundamentalist.” It’s allowed like-minded people to select churches, colleges, and even reading material that line up with their brand of Christianity.

Now, though, many fear the evangelical movement is in disarray due to deep differences among its members, and a new generation with relativistic, postmodern beliefs. Others still see a solid core of common theology that has held strong for more than 500 years, a healthy and growing activism, and hope for the future. What does the word “evangelical” mean now, and where is the movement going?

For the benefit of Bethel Magazine readers, three Bethel professors with interest and expertise in the subject—and who all attend churches considered “evangelical”—agreed recently to exchange ideas. They converse on evangelicalism’s starting point, places of intersection, and diversion, and then offer insightful road signs on where to go from here.

• Phyllis Alsdurf is director of the Johnson Center for Journalism and Communication and an associate professor of English in the College of Arts & Sciences. Her dissertation research was on the role of Christianity Today magazine in the development of modern evangelicalism. Sharing worship with her young adult daughter, she attends Substance Church in Fridley, Minnesota.

• Chris Armstrong teaches church history at Bethel Seminary. He has been managing editor of Christian History & Biography and continues to write for that publication as well as for Christianity Today, Leadership, and christianhistory.net. His doctoral research focused on the 19th century holiness movement. Armstrong attends Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota., and has recently written a “group biography” titled Patron Saints for Postmoderns (IVP, 2009).

• Bernard Walker teaches philosophy and ethics in the College of Adult & Professional Studies/Graduate School. His philosophical interest in the evangelical movement is aimed at separating “what is the work of the Spirit from the work of human tradition” through a process of dialogue among the movement’s diverse voices. His home congregation is Church of All Nations in St. Anthony, Minnesota.

Here are edited excerpts of their discussion.

When in church history do we see the first strands of evangelical beliefs?

Armstrong: Lutherans, the original Protestants, identified themselves as “evangelical.” Reformation doctrines—justification by faith, a high view of Scripture, the priesthood of believers—defined this first sort of evangelical, and these doctrines are still important in today’s evangelicalism. Some scholars argue that evangelicalism as we know it first emerged with the 17th-century rise of the Pietist and Puritan movements, though those movements didn’t use the label of themselves. They were interested in “heart religion”: a Christianity that was about personal relationship with God and that made people live differently. There’s one more element that arose in the 18th century with people like Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitefield: the strong focus on evangelism and religious activism. That’s where most scholars would agree you really have the birth of evangelicalism. They spread the message of justification by faith through grace alone and people were suddenly saying, “Well, wait a minute. Maybe I’m not okay. Maybe there’s something more required of me. I have to confess my sins. I have to cling to Jesus,” and a transatlantic revival took place. Out of this revival came on-fire conservative Protestants who became the Baptists and Methodists, the Churches of Christ, and so on.

What led to the phenomenon we call the evangelical movement of the 1940s and ’50s?

Armstrong: In the mid to late 19th century, you have a liberal stream of theology in Protestantism, a modernist stream that says you have to be willing to throw away certain old traditional teachings—the virgin birth, even the resurrection—because they clash with modern understandings of science. Darwinism and biblical criticism intensify this liberalism and worry conservatives, until you have a full-blown split between the liberal and the fundamentalist Protestants. The fundamentalists wanted to hunker down and defend those traditional beliefs. By the ’40s and ’50s, they had added young-earth creationism and a dispensational pre-millennialism to the fundamentalist platform. And at that point you’ve got some conservative Protestants saying, “You know, I affirm generally some of these things—the primacy of Scripture and so on—but I’m not comfortable with the whole package, or the anti-intellectualism that seems to go with it, and so we’re going to use another term. We’ll call ourselves ‘neo-evangelical.’” That term eventually became just “evangelical.”

What were these mid-century evangelicals like?

Alsdurf: They were on this kind of narrow line. They wanted to affirm the fundamentals but change the strategy and say, “Yes, we can give a rational defense for our faith and we can go to universities. We don’t have to separate ourselves.”

Armstrong: They said, essentially, “Let’s do it in a way that’s more willing to sit at the table with university professors and scientists and journalists, anybody who wants to come and talk with us.” The apt term is “engagement,” I think.

Aldsdurf: And yet, the very first editorial in Christianity Today magazine talked about evangelicals as, you know, this poor, despised group outside the cultural mainstream—subjected to prejudice and misunderstood. Well, does that apply to evangelicals today? Many people in mainstream culture would say, “We’re the ones who are misunderstood. Evangelicals are this army, this force!”

Considering that evangelicals distinguished themselves from both liberals and fundamentalists, how is the movement doing today on striking that middle ground?

Walker: I think it’s a spectrum. At one end you can say there is continuing fundamentalism—the view that we pretty much have a corner on truth and we’re going to be on a crusade to change the world. Even though it’s engaged in the world, this view is not really committed to a dialogue with, say, non-Christian world views. At the other end it’s more dynamic. It doesn’t suffer from this sort of anxiety. It’s more fluid, receptive to certain views. And I guess the shortcoming for them will be “What’s the threshold?” That’s a tricky question. I suspect a healthy position would be somewhere in the middle.

How has the race issue played out for evangelicals?

Walker: While the fundamentalist end of the movement may embrace history—theological history—it in some sense ignores history on most other matters. So you look at, say, the civil rights movement in this country back in the 1950s, Christianity Today published very few articles about that particular issue, which was very pivotal in our country. So evangelicalism as a whole did not engage the world in terms of the historical issues of the black community.

Armstrong: Which is a real difference from what happened in the 1800s, when evangelicals were on the vanguard of the abolition movement.

Walker: Exactly. So you have a historically black church within the evangelical church—although “evangelical” isn’t a self-applied label for most black churches, or at least it wasn’t. When Billy Graham was doing a revival in the South, I don’t know the year, and I can’t quote him exactly, but he said something like, “I didn’t come to change the morés that exist down here in the South. As far as I’m concerned, the Bible doesn’t say anything about segregation.”

Alsdurf: But also that’s early Billy Graham. I mean, think of our own selves, how much we change over time. You can’t really pigeonhole him and say he was always this way. In the 1957 New York crusade he chose a chairperson who was African-American. Now you can say, “Well that’s very little,” but it was a colossal step. You see Billy Graham now when he’s interviewed by someone like Larry King, a comment he makes is that one of the major problems in our country today is racism. And [Carl F. H.] Henry [the first editor of Christianity Today] put his finger on it when he said, “We’re culpable of being too conservative politically and socially. We haven’t done the things we were supposed to do. We haven’t been active in the civil rights movement and other movements for social justice.” This opens the door for Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, and other sorts of progressive, white evangelicals.

Is there a theological issue the evangelical church has navigated pretty well that may have threatened its unity?

Walker: Well, you have the issue of God’s foreknowledge, the debate about open theism. Does God know the future? For some people you just do not mess with the view that God is timeless. The question is, is that biblical or is it tradition? Evangelicals at the dynamic end of the spectrum would not suffer from any anxiety about challenging this view and saying God is in time, and there are certain things that God may be open to seeing what we do.

Armstrong: There is a very brief “doctrinal basis” that members of the Evangelical Theological Society subscribe to. And when they considered the issue, there was nothing explicit in that statement that said you cannot hold an open theist position. Now for those who were against that position, there were implications here. But it’s a fact that these evangelical faith statements are rarely more than about a page long—compared to the Westminster and Heidelberg catechisms, for instance, that go on and on. We have only a few basics, so that if we get in a room with other evangelicals, we can find a lot of common ground, and we can allow some of the edges to be fuzzy. We can allow translation of our core beliefs to take place without getting too nervous. The movement has fuzzy edges but we all look toward and salute the same central doctrinal experience. Now I know there are some evangelicals for whom that’s not true—on the static end of the spectrum.

Do you think there’s a danger that evangelicals could lose their distinctiveness?

Armstrong: David Neff, current editor of Christianity Today, poses that question: He asks whether we’re losing ground on conversionism, biblicism, cross-centeredness, because we’re so concerned with being in the culture for evangelistic purposes and dialogue purposes. Are we becoming increasingly of the culture? I think that’s a very important question.

Alsdurf: One of the things I sometimes do with students is ask them to write down some slang expressions they use. Part of it is to poke fun at me and show how out of it I am! But one word that comes up is “whatever.” I talk about how “whatever” was not an expression when I was growing up. Everything mattered. Expressions can be an outlook on the world, and is “whatever” the one we want to express? I think that “whatever” has really infused our theology: “This is true for me, but maybe not for you. Whatever.”

Walker: Once you factor in postmodernism, you do run into those kinds of epistemic issues, and it may not be a result of the church itself, but our culture. Our culture says there’s no truth with a capital T on most things, unless of course it deals with science. So for issues of values, ethics, and religion, culture says “of course you can’t use truth with a capital T.” So that “whatever” mentality is there. You have this younger generation who says “We can’t even discuss those issues because we don’t have access to how things really are.”

Alsdurf: But I think the pendulum is swinging away from that somewhat.

Armstrong: In terms of doing things for your faith, maybe we are moving away from the “whatever.” Maybe those same young people who have a very fuzzy sense of what they actually believe are incredibly active. They’re involving themselves in inner-city initiatives, or packaging meals to go overseas to feed the hungry. I think this is a significant trend within evangelicalism. It’s maybe negative in the sense that we’ve lost the reason why we’re being active in the first place, and we know where that trajectory leads—secularization. When you start making your entire faith experience be about feeding the hungry or doing some sort of social justice work that anybody can do, you can be Buddhist or Muslim and do that. You can be an atheist and do that. What’s distinctively Christian about it?

Walker: It could be an expression of just giving up completely and having a non-cognitive view of Christianity. But you do have individuals who are saying, “If we cannot resolve these [theological] issues, at least we can definitely get out there and change the world. We share a common goal and that is to get out there and affect people’s lives.” The black church would say, “Look, [heaven] may be promised to me by and by, but I got about 80 years before that happens so in the meantime I need to change some things here now.”

How are young evangelicals shaping the movement?

Alsdurf: I see students in the classroom—wonderful, evangelical Christian students—very active in their faith, who are much more tolerant than the previous generation on some social issues. A younger generation that doesn’t think in the same way I do. They understand different cultures in a way I never did at a much younger age, both through exposure to media and travel. And then, also, the influx of immigrants in the United States has enriched our faith experience.

Armstrong: Robert Webber put out his book in 2000, The Younger Evangelicals, which discerns three distinct phases within evangelicalism: The first one he calls “traditional,” which was much more doctrinally focused. The second he labels “pragmatic,” in which a concern for numbers and seeker sensitivity predominated—the Christian contemporary music movement, everything in the world having a parallel in evangelicalism, trying to look like the surrounding culture so we can get a bigger piece of the demographic pie. But even in 2000 Webber began discerning a third movement within evangelicalism. This is a movement of younger evangelicals who are tired of the apologetic arguments of the traditionalists and the big shopping-mall-like churches and rock-concert worship services of the pragmatists. People in this phase, said Webber, are trying to reconnect with stuff that’s distinctively Christian. They want to go back into Christian history and tradition and at least cherry-pick some aspects of what makes Christianity distinctive. Stained glass may be okay now; it’s okay to light candles. Maybe there’s some value to those traditional symbols because they train us and allow us to be more fully Christian. To me, if that’s true, then it at least allays some of my concern. I think maybe there’s some movement away from a relativistic outlook to, maybe, a revivalistic outlook—but a new revivalism that draws from our spiritual heritage.

Alsdurf: I think you can even see that in the whole spiritual direction movement. There’s a strong interest in Dallas Willard and Richard Foster. Many people are getting connected through spiritual direction and going back to some of the Catholic saints. There are encouraging trends. I think even at Bethel, the [student] vespers services—which you may say is just worship—expresses a cry of young people’s hearts. It’s not coming from the top down, but from the bottom up saying, “We want something more.” There’s a cry that’s there.

Have evangelicals become too aligned with a certain political party, as many charge?

Walker: For Bible-believing African-American Christians, there’s a tendency for obvious reasons to be more progressive socially, whereas with white evangelical churches this side of fundamentalism in the 20th century, the tendency is to be conservative Republican. But that may be changing with younger evangelicals.

Armstrong: We have a media image of evangelicals as being about theocracy, and we do have a few extreme conservative evangelicals. But I think there’s still a deep-rooted stance of personal liberty and individualism, even among those Falwell-type contemporary fundamentalists. So I’m not sure if I buy that kind of stereotype of evangelicals. Certainly we want morality legislated in some sense, but theocracy? Are we really going that far?

Walker: I think some are. I mean, when you talk about this as a “Christian nation” and begin with certain Christian presuppositions and assumptions.

Armstrong: I think that’s true. But does that make a theocracy? A theocracy would be a state in which it’s the priests who run the show. It’s the ministers. Do we really want that or do we want a re-entry of Christian values into the dialogue?

Alsdurf: In terms of the whole political issue, and whether evangelicalism is being defined from without, I think this: In some ways one way to strengthen a movement is pressure—a common enemy. That’s what helped evangelicalism in the early days of Christianity Today—this woe-begotten, misunderstood, unrecognized group.

Armstrong: Friends of mine who are involved in new monastic communities would say that consumerism is in large part of that force, that common enemy of the church.

Walker: Materialism.

Alsdurf: Well, look at the economic collapse. I wonder what theological or evangelical outgrowth we’ll see from that. Good, hard-working, white folks who followed all the rules suddenly realize that if you’ve got crummy structures in place, no matter what you do, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps doesn’t work. Perhaps that will infuse our theology.

Walker: There is change in the whole debate about what is poverty and how has it come about. There’s still that kind of evangelical priority on soul winning, but there is an understanding at least that soul winning’s not enough. What we’re seeing today is a higher emphasis among evangelicals focusing on dismantling structures that may impact people’s pursuit of happiness. They’re expanding our concerns about those social, structural dynamics.

Armstrong: That’s not Republican, is it? That sounds very Democrat to me! But that’s a huge difference between black evangelicals and white evangelicals: how we vote.

The media have to some extent hijacked and distorted the word “evangelical” to have a socio-political meaning. Should we try to reclaim the term as a description of our movement?

Armstrong: I don’t think we should go to the mat for a term. I really don’t. And I say that as a historian who knows the value of terms and labels as carriers of tradition. But when I edited a magazine for Christianity Today International (CTI) and was writing regular e-newsletters every week, I’d use the word “evangelical” sometimes a dozen times in 500 words. And Marshall Shelley, the editor of CTI’s journal Leadership, said to me, “You know, we’re not really fixated on this word anymore here at Christianity Today.” I said, “What? Isn’t this everything you’re about?” “No,” he said, “we’re happy to talk about being ‘Christian’ or ‘Christ-followers.’” So there was already a sense within that organization, interestingly, that this wasn’t necessarily a word you had to go to the mat for.

What remnant of the term’s original meaning, then, should we care about?

Armstrong: Are there people, whatever we call them, who affirm Reformation basics of theology, the importance of a born-again experience, the centrality of the cross, a high view of Scripture, and some sort of activism based on that? I think that’s what’s important.

Alsdurf: And that’s why a place like Bethel is so important. I feel like it’s such a privilege to have influence with this generation and to help people really struggle through some of that. I think of a student this semester who is in South Africa as we speak, and she’s there as someone with a very alive, concrete, centered faith. She’s trying to understand herself as a potential, future journalist, an advocate for the poor. How does she live that out? I find many examples of this among this generation. Students who come in with a pretty thin theological veneer, but then as faculty members, we have the challenge and the privilege to really push them further to dig deeper into what separates plain activism from an activism motivated out of a deeply held evangelical faith. So, I would just say the fact that a place like Bethel is thriving in the postmodern world tells me there’s still a hunger for something more—a hunger for rootedness you’re not going to find in other kinds of institutions. I think there will always be this hunger, because I believe in the power of God working in the world. I believe that always, the core of our faith will be preserved.