Long confused with fundamentalism by most of the academy and dismissed as intellectually inadequate, evangelical theology has in the last two decades become one of the liveliest and most creative forms of Protestant theology in America. Not long ago the Lutheran theologian Carl Braaten noted that “the initiative in the writing of dogmatics has been seized by evangelical theologians in America. . . . Most mainline Protestant and progressive Catholic theology has landed in the graveyard of dogmatics, which is that mode of thinking George Lindbeck calls ”˜experiential expressivism.’ Individuals and groups vent their own religious experience and call it theology.”
Evangelicals generally believe theology is reflection on what comes from outside their experience as the Word of God. For that reason””that they talk not primarily about themselves but about a transcendent God whose self-revelation must be wrestled with””they not only have more to say than mainline Protestantism, but more interesting things to say.
Hi Kendall+, I think your link takes us to the wrong article.
The link leads to the NY Times blog on elderly Muslims, not to First Things.
Correct link [url=http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/03/evangelicals-divided]here[/url].
[blockquote] “If history is a guide, the present divisions between Meliorists and Traditionists will widen. In another twenty years, Meliorists may not be recognizable as evangelicals, and, like the liberal Protestants they resemble, will likely have trouble filling their pews. Traditionists will grow in numbers and continue to challenge Catholic doctrine even as they learn from it while they explore the Great Tradition.” [/blockquote]
Seems like a reasonable prediction.
[blockquote] The only evangelical theology likely to survive and flourish will be that which renounces the triumphalism that has heretofore treated Church history as little more than darkness before the Reformation, the eighteenth-century awakenings, or the postmodern movement of the late twentieth century. But the future is still uncertain. It remains to be seen whether evangelicalism as a whole, and its theologians in particular, will adopt an attitude of intellectual humility willing to submit to a vision of the whole that can be found only by living in the whole (theological) tradition. [/blockquote]
I hope so. But its unfair to blame just evangelicals for the pervasiveness of this view. Over the years, it has also suited many on the “Catholic” side of the spectrum to promote the idea of Luther and other reformers as making a clean break with the past, as they see this as a means of minimising the historical legacy of protestantism. Yet it has also suited many protestants to do the same thing, in order to emphasise their distance from “dead tradition”. Thus both groups have ended up denying any continuity between the medieval church and the reformation church, for different reasons.
The reality is rather different – the Reformers saw themselves as living in continuity with their ancient and medieval predecessors (as did the Counter Reformers). I agree that evangelical protestantism has to rediscover this knowledge and heritage.