Evangelicals and weak views on Baptism

As someone who has no interest in the baptism debate, this was a nice little post to wake up and read.

Robin Parry:

It has always seemed to me that evangelicals have a very take-it-or-leave-it approach to baptism. Indeed, so much so that when we preach the gospel the message is reduced to "repent and believe the gospel" and baptism does not so much as get a look in.

I suspect that the reason is that evangelicalism has always been transdenominational and evangelicals from different denoiminations have differing views on whether babies can be baptised. We have decided to set aside such issues for the sake of evangelical unity. As a result you will never hear the likes of Billy Graham say, in NT fashion, "Believe and be baptized."

But because baptism is now politely removed from evangelical understandings of how one responds to the gospel evangelicals struggle to know what to do with it.

 For the rest, enjoy it here.

--Nick

Evangelicals & Self-Criticism

Brick by Brick:

When it comes to evangelical disenfranchisement from the academy and wider culture, we are frequently our own worst enemies.

Please, don’t misunderstand me.  I don’t mean to suggest that there is not anti-religious and naturalistic bias in much of academia.  I am well aware that Christianity’s exclusive claims are unwelcome in our would-be pluralistic universities and are not tolerated in our would-be tolerant society.  But I have come to the conclusion that there are a number of Evangelical intellectual habits and material positions that are serious liabilities for us as we try to faithfully engage the academy and the wider culture:

1. Academia progresses by a process of critical peer review.  Academics are used to the fact that we learn more about the world by refining our analyses, revising our conclusions in the light of new data, tightening up our logic, moving on from discredited ideas, and so on, and the fact that this learning process is propelled by academics’ scrutinizing and criticizing each others’ work, showing where their survey samples were too small to support their conclusions, where they had conveniently ignored problematic data, where they had committed non sequiturs and so on.  It’s nothing personal.  It’s just how things get done.  Evangelicals have more or less opted out of this process in order to protect some of our more intellectually vulnerable (i.e., dubious) stances from serious criticism.  That’s not to say that Evangelicals do not “engage” with the questions and issues raised in academic settings.  But we tend to “engage” only when we can do so on our own terms, publishing almost exclusively in our own sectarian publishing houses and journals for a generally sympathetic and/or uninformed readership who either won’t or can’t argue with our conclusions.  Such “academic engagement” tends to be highly selective about what data and questions it deals with (which is a bit disingenuous), and thus amounts to little more than shadow-boxing with straw-men.  So long as we Evangelicals absolve ourselves from serious (self-)critical engagement, we neither deserve a seat at the academic table, nor should we expect to be offered one.  But we can do better than that.
2. When we Evangelicals are criticized, we have a tendency to prematurely assume a defensive posture, circling the wagons and sounding the “the gospel’s at stake” alarm.  And this goes for criticism coming from within the Evangelical community as much as (if not more than) for criticism from without.  When someone from within our ranks raises questions–however commonsensical or data-driven they might be–our tendency is to automatically make such people out to be outsiders, questioning their Evangelical credentials (as though Evangelicalism had a credentialing office) and painting them as traitors or apostates or worse.  (e.g., Read this, this, this, this, this, this, this…).  This sort of knee-jerk reactionary mode of response serves only to shut down important in-house conversations and to disengage our community from, well, reality.   To say the least, this is not a productive pattern of behavior.  But we can do better than that.
3. The “scandal of the Evangelical mind” persists.  Most of the intellectual maladies diagnosed by Mark Noll in his landmark book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind have not really been addressed by the wider evangelical community.  Our quirky, a-historical, literalistic biblicism, our paranoia about science, and our shallowly partisan political reflection are all intellectual paradigms long overdue for nuance, revision, critique, and even replacement.  The brighter lights within Evangelical academia have moved past these paradigms, but their thinking tends not to get much press and does not really filter down to the people in the pews (not least because of point 2 above).  But we can do better than that.
4. Evangelicals generally lack credibility within the wider academic world because the evangelicals who speak loudest are generally those who are guiltiest of problems 1, 2 & 3 and they generally go unopposed by others within the Evangelical community.  I don’t know of any other way to counteract this problem than by speaking up and encouraging others to do likewise.  Otherwise people in the academy and in the wider culture will be justified in assuming that the Ken Hams, Al Mohlers, and Jerry Falwells of the world speak for all of us on every point.  We need Evangelicals to regularly say to each other and before the wider world, “No, those people do not speak for me.  I think they’re wrong, and I am a Christian too.  I think we can do better than that.”

There are lots of reasons why we increasingly find ourselves on the margins of our society and the academy.  Scientistic reductionism, methodological naturalism, secularism, creative antirealism, and a host of other cultural and intellectual forces have combined to create a general atmosphere of bias against traditional Christianity.  But I believe that the hard truth is that by acquiescing in the bad habits enumerated above, we have become our own worst enemies, undercutting our ability to credibly counteract the corrosive cultural and intellectual trends of our time.  Until we develop a capacity to engage in and receive constructive (self-) criticism (particularly from within our community), the Evangelical community will have little right to claim a seat at the academic table or to expect much of a hearing in the public square.  If we fail to do this, I fear we will fail the next generation worse than have we failed the last.

This strikes me as overly pessimistic. But, something to think about.

For the rest, click HERE.

--Nick

Peter Enns Interview, "Young Evangelicals"

The Christian Post:

Theologian Peter Enns believes that some – mostly young, evangelical Christians today – want to rethink what it means to be evangelical but the movement's leaders are resistant to talking about the issues for fear of repercussions.

"People within evangelicalism desperately want to question the very foundations that made evangelicalism what it is, which is, basically, defending the faith, defending the Bible against the bad guys," Enns told The Christian Post in an interview at the Pastorum Live Conference hosted by Logos Bible Software earlier this month.

The Bible raises some difficult issues that these young evangelicals want to talk about, he said. But some "old guard" evangelicals make it difficult to have those conversations. These younger evangelicals don't want to leave evangelicalism, but they want to maintain their evangelical identity while transforming it.

"What they're saying is what some of the bad guys say about the Bible makes sense, whether its evolution, whether it's Canaanite genocide, whether it's human sexuality, whatever. They're saying they want to rethink some of those issues, but they're doing it from the point of view of having a deep connection with the tradition they were raised in. They don't want to just leave it. ... They want to transform and continue the evangelical journey," Enns said.

The biblical studies professor at Eastern University in Philadelphia, Pa., said he has spoken to many fellow theologians who wanted to also address some of the issues that are presenting challenges to evangelical thought, but did not for fear of losing their job.

"I should keep a list of the people I've talked to over the years who were like, 'I'd like to talk about X, but I can't because I'd be in trouble,' because it's all about protecting the system and it's not about saying, 'hey, that's a good point, let's talk about it,'" Enns said.

For the rest, click HERE.

--Nick