Responses to A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future
Good observations all. What, one might ask, is there not to like?
Well, in the first place, there is a word that is never used in this document. It is conspicuous in its absence. I kept waiting for it to appear, and it never did. That word is authority. Yes, the Scriptures are here described as an â??authoritativeâ?? record, but that is merely sending an adjective to do a nounâ??s work.
There is no locus of authority being proposed here. This omission is especially strange in light of the documentâ??s expression of the â??pressingâ?? question: â??Who gets to narrate the word?â?? This would seem to be precisely a question of authority. The document calls on Evangelicals to â??restore the priorityâ?? of the biblical story in their lives, which the writers insist upon calling â??Godâ??s narrative.â??
But who is to do the restoring? After all, the story does not tell itself (which is, of course, precisely one of the reasons literary scholars use the verb â??narrateâ??). The history of the Church is a history of all the different, and sometimes violently conflicting, ways of telling the story. I have no doubt that both James Dobson and Stanley Hauerwas could each tell the story convincingly and faithfully. But I suspect their accounts would differ.
In short, there is no escaping from the need for structures of authority in the Church. This same aversion to authority is behind the condemnation of â??propositionsâ?? as tending to be â??reductive.â?? This is of course entirely true up to a point. But the great creeds the authors are so anxious to affirm are, in fact, more propositional than narrative in character.
One sometimes suspects that the authors are really pushing a variant on an old adage: â??doctrine divides, but narrative unites.â?? If we can concentrate on â??telling the story,â?? to the point that we completely inhabit it, the quarrels and conflicts of the past two millennia will simply evaporate. And isnâ??t it pretty to think so.
Also, what does it mean to â??take seriouslyâ?? the visible Church? Does it mean a Church that disciplines, rebukes, and even on occasion excommunicates? If not, then what? Does the talk about catechesis mean that Evangelicals will start requiring confirmands to have thoroughly learned, for example, the Westminster Confession and Shorter Catechism? Why are the authors so much more interested in vague appeals to the ancient Church than in their own Evangelical traditionâ??s more proximate fathers?
Of course, the very mention of the word father points to a profound problem in the whole undertaking: the problem of language. If we are to root ourselves in â??Godâ??s word as the story of the world,â?? it will make all the difference what words we use to describe what we are doing. In our choice of language we should try our very best to use Godâ??s rather than ours.
A Text Avoided
The use of concepts like â??narrativeâ?? and other such academic terms is not necessarily self-undermining, so long as it serves merely to aid and amplify. But when the concepts of â??storyâ?? and â??narrativeâ?? appear as frequently and centrally as they do in this document, one cannot help but conclude that they are being used as a way to evade questions about what is actually there, behind the storyâ??about the actual referents of the Christian faith, the things that the story is about.
Nor is the language of â??narrativeâ?? the vocabulary with which the biblical God narrates. There is no glimpse hereâ??not a oneâ??of the actual and authoritative language of Scripture as generations of Christian worshipers in North America have known it and experienced it and proclaimed it.
Arguably the single greatest strength of Evangelical Christianity is its reverence for the Word, its lively attention to the text, its loving embrace of the actual words and verses of Scripture. But we donâ??t get any of that here. Instead, we are being offered a boatload of stale seminary talk: the â??storyâ?? of â??Creation, Incarnation, and Re-creation,â?? the notion of â??Christâ??s recapitulation of history,â?? worship that â??enacts Godâ??s story,â?? and so on.
As I read the document, I found it curious that the authors repeatedly spoke with such abstractness of the â??Triuneâ?? or â??Trinitarianâ?? character of God. Then it dawned on me why. They were doing so to avoid using the inflammatory word Fatherâ??another word that never once appears in this document. Nor do they ever use the masculine personal pronoun for God.
The authors have done this self-editing skillfully, even tastefully. You might almost not even notice. But they have done it quite intentionally, and their doing so shows why they have not yet come to grips with what is entailed in appropriating the authority of the pastâ??which means the whole history of what the Church has been, and not merely what has been going on in a few North American seminaries since 1968.
If one radically edits the past before appropriating it, then it is no longer the past that one is appropriating, but a version of the present. Language matters, and the preference for academic over Scriptural language in this document is powerfully indicative of which worldview actually gets to do the trumping.
How will one utter the Nicene Creed when the word Father has been proscribed? But if one substitutes some other termâ?? Creator, or Mother, or Dominatrix, or whatever word is in fashion this weekâ??how is one doing anything other than rejecting the past, and extending the sway of the status quo? That indeed is what I would call a very serious form of â??cultural captivity.â??
Wilfred M. McClay What lies Behind Touchstone Forum Back and Forth to the Future
