In a recent forums discussion at Sharper Iron, I came across some insightful and I thought quite helpful comments on what I call “generational patricide”. We were discussing Phil Johnson’s recent post explaining the demise of Neo-Evangelicalism. He wrote off the entire movement with nearly the same fervor he showed when declaring that the independent fundamentalist (mostly Baptist) movement is dead.
Now, it is common for former fundamentalists, like myself, to write off our former movement completely, just as Johnson dismisses Neo-Evangelicalism as just a mistake. I do grant Phil much more academic credentials than the average young fundamentalist (or reforming fundamentalist). Still, the tendency to write off the previous generation seems to be a normal human reaction. This is evidenced by how the emergent movement disdains the evangelicalism that birthed it.
Anyway, I think the following comments by Joseph are spot on. They should give us all pause, and encourage us to think more deeply about the movements we have left. Hopefully it can help us carefully step out into the future in a more charitable spirit toward our forebears.
First, it is a common historical occurrence that one group will emerge or coalesce as a reaction to a set of concerns, and when those concerns seem less relevant or are a matter of history, many within that group will criticize the group itself as being a mistake, as having serious problems, etc.. What happens here is that people ignore the fact that much of their criticism is only possible because of the successes of the original reaction.
Fundamentalism was, truly, a disaster for a robust, more-than-merely-orthodox Christianity; having a powerful intellectual and social testimony is not something unusual in Christianity. From the witness of the early church’s social practices to the likes of theologians like Augustine, it has historically not been that case that orthodox Christianity has to place itself within a cultural and intellectual ghetto. So, Fundamentalism, itself an important reaction to modernism with many successes, truly had the weaknesses New Evangelicals saw in it.
Now, a couple generations later, it’s easy for Fundamentalists and people like Johnson to criticize New Evangelicalism, even though, if we imagine it away, the vast majority of our textbooks in conservative seminaries and colleges as well as some of our best theological and historical thinking as conservative Christians gets imagined away as well.
So, like the New Evangelical reaction to Fundamentalism, this reaction to the New Evangelicalism is predicated on the inadequately acknowledged successes of New Evangelicalism. In that sense, it’s no better off, structurally, than Emergents or anyone else, for all these groups, in their failure to properly acknowledge their debt to those things that they criticize, react in an unbalanced way, and therefore produced equally if not more narrow slices of the Christian pie that only appeal to an equally narrow constituency. I think most of the criticisms of New Evangelicalism are sound; but I think they are also wrong in that they often them stem from a profoundly imbalanced conception of their significance and meaning, when the fact of the matter is that the clarity of the intellectual hindsight that produces such cogent criticism is often enabled by the successes of that which is being criticized (e.g. David Wells, sitting in his perch at Gordon-Conwell, issuing some of the best and most powerful criticisms of evangelical Christianity as a whole, is a good example; he’s right, but if you’re not balanced, you miss the obvious implications of his being paid to study and write by Gordon-Conwell and other funding institutions).
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The tendency of every group and generation is to kill its father, which it can only do after it has been nourished and supported by and gained some independence from that which it later attacks. The only way such patricide can be mitigated is through the balanced integration of sharp, necessary criticism with a profound acknowledgement of its indebtedness — and the implications of such indebtedness — to that which it criticizes. That is something too often lacking in criticisms of any movement, in this case New Evangelicalism. And this imbalanced criticism comes down on our heads when the generation following us rises up, as the Emergents and many others have done, to decry a lack of balance, etc. in those groups that fostered them and to repudiate them with a breathtaking recklessness and ungratefulness. If we wish to avoid that, we must model the better way. [from this comment]
I’ve been thinking about what I wrote for a long time, and Phil’s comments were the occasion for putting them down. What you highlight is really important, I think, especially as a critique or warning for anyone who founds their identity on a movement; generally speaking, that’s just not a good idea – it will only maintain itself for a generation, and in order to survive it naturally institutionalizes; but the institutions that result are often reflective of concerns, emphases, and modes of expressions that passed with the original founders of the movement, and thus they often represent a kind of rigid, narrow, a provincial outlook if they fundamentally seek to ground their identity in the original movement.
If I ever wrote on either Fundamentalism or New Evangelicalism, my titles wouldn’t be about how they are dead, they would be: “After Fundamentalism” or “After New Evangelicalism.” Not stark repudiations, but recognitions that history has changed, new problems have emerged, and what we should gain from these movements is not a rigid commitment to their historically particular expressions, but to the fruit they bore and to the commitment they manifested to the principles, truths, and the one institution (the Church) that don’t pass away with history. Anything more than this and we’ll inevitably lapse into (unnecessary) provincialism and undercontextualization to our current context, a problem that, as Keller as noted, is no better than over-contextualization, for it simply means one is contextualizing to a different era or culture than the current one. [from this comment]