Imagine that as you are flipping through the pages of today's New York Times, you come across a story about the town in which you live. Your first reaction is a mixture of surprise, delight, and curiosity, but as you begin to read, other emotions take over: deep puzzlement mingled with mounting irritation. For while the writer of the article has clearly visited your town, and while some of the details of his report are factually accurate, the overall story utterly misrepresents both the history and the current reality of the place you know so well. Indeed, so radical is the discrepancy that by the time you finish the article you're not merely puzzled and irritated but also deeply unsettled. You may even decide to take a walk around town, just to reassure yourself of its familiar reality, warts and all.

Such were my reactions when I read the Spring 1997 issue of Partisan Review, a special issue on "Breaking Traditions: Fin de Siecle 1896 and 1996," based on a symposium held in November 1996. The strong lineup of contributors includes a number of PR regulars writing on predictable topics (Edith Kurzweil, for instance, on psychoanalysis, and Robert Wistrich with "A Comparison of the Situation of the Jewish World As It Was a Hundred Years Ago and Today"). But also present is a figure I wouldn't have expected to see in this context: James Davison Hunter, director of the Post-Modernity Project at the University of Virginia and author of several influential books that no doubt can be found on the shelves of many B&C readers. Hunter's talk, "The Changing Locus of Religions" (pp. 186-97), turned out to focus on American evangelicalism. And so with considerable anticipation I began to follow Professor Hunter's account of the community I know best--an account that promised to be all the more interesting for being delivered to an audience for whom evangelicalism is largely terra incognita.

Space does not permit a detailed summary of Hunter's talk, and I urge you to read it in its entirety. But the news from where Hunter stands is not good. Religion in the modern world, he tells us, is reeling under the impact of "privatization, fragmentation, and subjectivization," as a consequence of which "we are seeing the emergence of a functional nihilism in public culture." Yes, yes, there are churches aplenty, and people in them singing hymns and taking Communion--but all this appearance of active faith is deceptive. "Religion persists at the end of the twentieth century but its authority has been fundamentally transformed. It persists but is hollowed out."

To drive his argument home, Hunter takes American evangelicalism as a test case--precisely because it is perceived (wrongly, in Hunter's judgment) as having been "remarkably resistant to the corrosive effects of late modernity." Thus it should be clear that Hunter's thesis bears on all orthodox Christians, and that the interest of his talk is by no means confined to evangelicals.

This dire reading of the state of the American church is not novel, of course; it bears a strong resemblance to the judgment passed in David Wells's No Place for Truth: Or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? Is Hunter's then a prophetic voice--the measured voice of the historian, the "social scientist," telling us uncomfortable truths that we had better face up to? I don't think so.

Hunter, like Wells before him, contrasts our fin de siecle with an ahistorical vision of the past: a past that never was. So, for example, while conceding that "in principle Evangelicals still remain committed to the belief that the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God," Hunter suggests that the reality is quite different. How so? Well, you see,

major differences of opinion have emerged over the past half century, differences most noticeable among Evangelical theologians. While Evangelical theologians insist that the Bible is the sole authority in spiritual and religious matters, as a profession, they are unable to come to any agreement on what the Bible says.

To anyone familiar with the history of evangelicalism, this observation must appear willfully, almost comically, obtuse. For of course what has distinguished evangelicals from the beginning is, on the one hand, a passionate commitment to Scripture and, on the other, an inability to agree on what it says--hence the endless proliferation of denominations, sects, storefront churches.

Hunter's analysis suffers throughout from this absence of basic historical perspective. So, for example, he proclaims, "In the end, belief has not dissolved but the feeling of serene certainty has. Truth is no longer something unconsciously assumed but is something to which the individual must consciously and intellectually assent." As I reread those sentences, I wondered how many in Hunter's original audience recognized that he had gotten the history of evangelicalism absolutely wrong. Read John Newton, for starters, or any of the classic evangelicals, whose conversionism demands precisely that "the individual must consciously and intellectually assent" to the saving truth.

Is the church in trouble today? Yes--as it always has been, whether we set our time-machine for the Reformation or the first century. Made up of sinners--people like us--how could it be otherwise? There is never a good time for triumphalism.

But neither are we helped by the blurry pessimism typified by Hunter's talk--which, like all too much intellectual discourse, is conducted too far from the ground. Hunter makes much of Nietzsche's prescience, a century ago. I doubt that my grandmother had ever read Nietzsche when, several decades after his death, she went to China as a missionary. But thanks in part to such missionary ventures, the faith that Nietzsche despised is blooming in China, even under persecution.

So also when I go to church next Sunday, I will not give too much thought to the acids of late modernity. If a first-century Christian could be plucked out of time to join me there, he would find the setting strange, the music unfamiliar. And yet he and I would be worshiping the same God.

John Wilson, Managing Editor

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books and Culture Magazine. July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 4

7B4lm7B40047627