Evangelical Landscapes , livre ebook

Evangelical Landscapes
Facing Critical Issues of the Day
John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
© 2002 by John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
Published by Baker Academic a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-4188-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Scripture quotations identified KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations identified NASB are from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE ®. Copyright © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations identified NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.
To Mark and Marty
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Perpetual Adolescence: The Current Culture of North American Evangelicalism
2 The “Parachurch”: Promise and Peril
3 A Double Copernican Revolution: Leadership and Membership in the Church
4 Evangelicals and the Bible: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
5 A Complicated Matter: Money and Theology in North American Evangelicalism
6 The Christian Church in the New Dark Age: Illiteracy, Aliteracy, and the Word of God
7 A “Paradigm Case”: Billy Graham and the Nature of Conversion
8 Women in Public Ministry: Five Models in Twentieth-Century North American Evangelicalism
9 Why Johnny Can’t Produce Christian Scholarship: A Reflection on Real-Life Impediments
10 Evangelical Theology Should Be Evangelical: A Conservative, Radical Proposal
11 Speaking in Tongues: Communicating the Gospel Today

Index
Preface
There are the great landscape painters: those who meticulously study a view, prepare themselves with discipline, and then render detailed and insightful representations of what they see and feel so that the rest of us can see and feel in new ways. Luminaries such as Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet can depict the same subject, even from the same vantage point, again and again, each time expanding our vision and deepening our connection with what is portrayed.
The history of North American evangelicalism has been blessed with some superb artists, especially in this last generation or so. Timothy Smith, William McLoughlin, George Marsden, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, Harry Stout, Edith Blumhofer, Grant Wacker, Randall Balmer, Donald Dayton the list goes on. The portraits these scholars have rendered have helped thousands of readers to view evangelicalism in new ways some of them profoundly new. Even the greats, however, do not see or feel all there is to see and feel. Lesser artists can make their own contributions as they interpret subjects painted by the masters.
The essays of this volume are collected from my own sketchbook, and I offer them for what understanding they might give to important subjects, several of which have already been treated by the luminaries in North American evangelical historiography. These articles are indeed essays: sweeping portrayals of large matters, offering analysis and opinion in roughly equal measure. Some are festooned with citations and notes; others bravely make their way almost bereft of academic apparatus. The objective of each one, however, is the same: both to inform and to persuade. As painters, so essayists: We do not intend to offer dispassionate data for the viewer’s or reader’s disinterested ingestion! We want people to see and feel differently about things that matter because they have encountered our portraits.
North American evangelicalism is the community-of-communities in which I have made my own religious way. I present these essays, therefore, with the love of a family member critical, yes, but fundamentally loyal to this tradition that has tried, and often succeeded, to portray the image of Christ.
Acknowledgments
I wrote these essays with a lot of help. Student assistants at Northwestern College, the University of Manitoba, and Regent College performed invaluable service. I gladly recall the diligence and creativity of Michael Haverdink, Jena Dukes, Crystal Dykstra, Mary Massel, Patricia Janzen Loewen, and Keith Grant. Elizabeth Powell, the latest in this succession, worked with me on the preparation of this volume with cheerfulness and grace.
Scholarship requires money, and I acknowledge the support of the following agencies over the years: the Canadian Studies Program of the Canadian Embassy to the United States of America; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals; and the Abilene (now Georgetown) Foundation.
Scholarship also requires time, and I affirm the board of governors, administration, and faculty of Regent College for agreeing that Regent’s professors must have time for research and thus making sure that we do. I am particularly glad for a research leave in the autumn of 2001 that allowed me to compose this book.
I render thanks also to editors Robert N. Hosack and Melinda Van Engen at Baker Academic, who supported this project with both encouragement and skill.
My mentors Mark Noll and Martin Marty likely will recognize in these essays a few of their own brilliant ideas, categories, and provocations reflected dimly but enthusiastically in my efforts to extend their great contributions to the understanding of North American religion. To them I gratefully dedicate this book.
Finally, my beloved Kari and my treasured Trevor, Joshua, and Devon make all of my work possible because they make my life good.
Earlier versions of some of these essays appeared in print in the following locations:
“Women in Public Ministry in Twentieth-Century Canadian and American Evangelicalism: Five Models,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religeuses 17 (fall 1988): 471–85; “Billy Graham and the Nature of Conversion: A Paradigm Case,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religeuses 21 (1992): 337–50; “Perpetual Adolescence: The Emerging Culture of North American Evangelicalism,” Crux 29 (September 1993): 32–37; “Speaking in Tongues,” Crux 35 (December 1999): 2–12; “Faith and the Media,” Crux 35 (March 1999): 26–32; “Money and Theology in American Evangelicalism,” in More Money, More Ministry: Money and Evangelicals in Recent American History, ed. Larry Eskridge and Mark A. Noll (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 406–18; “Evangelical Theology Should Be Evangelical,” in Evangelical Futures: A Conversation on Theological Method, ed. John G. Stackhouse, Jr. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 39–58.
1
Perpetual Adolescence
The Current Culture of North American Evangelicalism

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child” (1 Cor. 13:11). This apostolic testimony ironically has been the experience of many of us in a Christian church even as adults, not just in our literal childhoods. Many of us know what it is like to think and act like a child, and to be treated like one, in a religious community. In such a community, a certain select few function as “parents.” Usually they have clerical titles and credentials, but they also may be important laypeople. Sometimes they are theological professors or Bible teachers; other times they are popular authors who live far away or long ago but whose writings continue to exert unquestioned authority. These “parents” have all the status, all the knowledge, all the wisdom, and all the power. The rest of us do as we’re told if we’re good children or perhaps resist and suggest changes, acts that stigmatize us as bad children.
Life is clear, starkly clear, for “children” in such a situation. Rules govern all of life, and rewards and punishment are meted out in strict proportion to one’s dutiful observance of them. Originality is not sought; creativity is feared; and initiative in any direction other than compliance with the established patterns is condemned as downright subversive. It is also true, to be sure, that in this system one always knows where one stands. At the end of each day, you can measure yourself against the parental standards, and if you’ve been a good boy or girl, you can rest easy that is, at least until tomorrow morning, when you’ll have to get up and behave yourself all day all over again.
This is the world of fundamentalism, of sectarianism, of certain kinds of conservative Christian religion. And, for many Christians, it is a world they are happy to have escaped. Now they don’t have to kowtow to authority figures. Now they don’t have to mindlessly agree and joylessly obey. Now they are free. They are free from an authoritarianism that kept them in perpetual spiritual childhood. But this freedom marks only a beginning, an opportunity. What are they free now to become and to do?
There are signs all around us that such Christians are in a state of adolescence. Adolescence is an appropriate phase to pass through, but many are not just “passing through” it. As certain Christians even whole communities of them have left behind the childhood of fundamentalism, many have opted for a perpetual adolescence and therefore are dangerously poised to conform completely to much of contemporary popular culture, a culture that has made a virtual cult of adolescence.
In the book Dancing in the Dark, a provocative study of contemporary youth culture, Quentin Schultze and his colleagues describe the emergence of the concept of adolescence. [1] At the turn of the century, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall popularized the concept of adolescence as a way of unde