The reflowering of evangelical intellectual life has justifiably received much comment in the past two decades. That reflowering, however, has focused largely on the disciplines of philosophy and history. Whither theology, once known as the queen of the sciences and presumably a key discipline for colleges devoted to scholarship in an explicitly Christian mode?

It is a not-so-well-kept secret that a couple of generations of evangelicalism's brightest thinkers chose history or philosophy as their fields of study partly because evangelical institutions have crimped and cramped their theology departments. Exactly because theology (and biblical studies) most specifically address doctrinal issues, the work of theologians has been largely conservationist. While evangelical historians, philosophers, and others have intrepidly addressed current issues and debates within their disciplines—and in some cases ascended to the top ranks of those disciplines—evangelical theologians have had to try and make do with conceptualizations and positions essentially set forth a century ago by the Princetonian Hodges and B. B. Warfield.

Now, suggests a sympathetic outsider taking measure from beyond the evangelical camp, that is changing. Gary Dorrien is a self-professed "Anglican social-gospeler and dialectical theologian." But he has been paying serious attention to evangelicalism for some time, as is obvious from his detailed and clear-eyed reading of the tradition in The Remaking of Evangelical Theology.

Dorrien singles out three main branches in the evangelical family tree: classical evangelicalism, rooted in the Reformation and Radical Reformation; pietistic evangelicalism, based in the eighteenth-century German and English pietistic movements and the Great Awakenings in America; and fundamentalist evangelicalism, derived from the fundamentalist-modernist conflict of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But as the title of his book suggests, the focus is on contemporary evangelicalism. Consequently, Dorrien devotes his pages to a recounting of twentieth-century evangelicalism, dominated by fundamentalist-evangelicalism, and concludes with the detection of an emerging fourth branch in the tree: postconservative evangelicalism. (Full disclosure: the present writer is included among favorably discussed postconservative thinkers.)

Dorrien's account includes close readings of founding fundamentalist evangelicals (the Hodges, Warfield, J. Gresham Machen), reformers of fundamentalism (Gordon Clark, Cornelius Van Til, E. J. Carnell, Carl Henry), and innovators who most immediately paved the way for incipient postconservative evangelicalism, both in terms of more supple renderings of biblical authority (the later Bernard Ramm and Clark Pinnock) and openness to salutary Arminian, Catholic, and neo-orthodox emphases (William Abraham, Robert Webber, Donald Bloesch).

Dorrien's perspective helps map out crucial potential directions in the intellectual development of current evangelicalism. Again, the evangelicalism of twentieth-century America has been dominated by fundamentalist evangelicals. Institutions are essential to the endurance and prospering of any tradition, and all of us, whether or not we identify ourselves as fundamentalist evangelicals, owe an ongoing debt to that wing of the evangelical tradition. Its schools, publishing houses, and mission agencies formed the infrastructure on which we traffic to this day. Yet I think Dorrien is generally correct that fundamentalist evangelicalism is based on an "antimodernist modernism." That is, it forged its identity by responding negatively to modern (evolutionary) biology, modern (higher) criticism of the Bible, and many aspects of modern culture. In these respects it was antimodern. But it responded to modernism on the basis of a modern evidentialist and rationalist epistemology, exemplifed by strict biblical inerrancy. In that respect it was and is itself markedly modern.

None of this is to deny for one moment the achievements of fundamentalist evangelicalism. As Dorrien notes, the theologian-builders of this evangelical house toiled with "unsurpassed intellectual energy and spiritual passion." And they worked, as do we all, within the limits of understanding set by their place and time. Only the fool and the ingrate, then, can think that we best forget and deny fundamentalist evangelicalism. But it seems true and fair enough to assert that fundamentalist evangelicalism, defined as it is by a response to a particular historical period (modernity), is not at all necessarily the final, once-for-all embodiment or culmination of evangelical possibilities.

So the question of the moment settles down to this: Should the limits of discourse within current-day evangelicalism be set by contemporary fundamentalist evangelicalism? Dorrien is an outsider and has no direct stake in the answer to this question. But he clearly sympathizes most with and places the most hope in postconservative, progressive evangelical theologians such as Stanley Grenz, Miroslav Volf, Nancey Murphy, Henry Knight III, Roger Olson, Philip Kenneson, Brian Walsh, and J. Richard Middleton. Such thinkers remain anchored in classical and/or pietistic evangelicalism, but they are not preoccupied with the "hierarchy of topics" assumed by fundamentalist evangelicalism. Postconservative evangelicals take very seriously the work of Karl Barth and have listened hard to postmodern criticisms of foundationalist epistemology. They tend to be socially concerned and promote egalitarianism in male-female roles. Thus, as Dorrien puts it, these evangelicals are "seeking to rethink the claims of gospel faith apart from the counter-modernist assumptions of past evangelical theologies."

Their labors are not met with universal approbation. Dorrien does not overstate when he reports, "To fundamentalist evangelical leaders, the rethinking of evangelical claims currently under way is a disaster." A recent case in point was the 1998 meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. There talks were under way about proposed revisions to the society's doctrinal confession, written especially to exclude progressive theologians. Along such lines, a prominent fundamentalist evangelical theologian paraphrased "A Mighty Fortress," saying, "Let goods and kindred go, / Some memberships also." And the presidential address denounced several theologians by name. Such retrenching may peak two years from now, when the ETS meeting's theme will be "Evangelical Boundaries."

Surely, as Dorrien allows, ferment under way in evangelical theology is in some respects "a symptom of present theological and philosophical confusion." And so the fundamentalist evangelicals see it. But it can also be seen as a sign of health and vitality in the evangelical tradition. Evangelicals are a modern enough species that they still can find it difficult to admit evangelicalism is a tradition. Yet it undeniably is. However true to heaven, it has not just dropped from heaven. It has a history, a colorful and ongoing human story. It is, as Alasdair MacIntyre would have it, "a socially embodied argument" extended over time.

And since times change, traditions develop. They certainly develop in some kind of continuity with their past (and so there assuredly should be a conservatizing element to evangelical theology), but they develop nonetheless. It seems to me that much of the conflict in recent evangelical theology revolves around understandings of tradition. If tradition is dynamic and organic, it will grow and, in a sense, mutate new forms. Of course, some mutations do, with time, prove misguided and harmful to the organism as a whole. Such mutations must be repudiated and redressed. But if the organism is to live on for generations and even centuries, mutations can not be generally disallowed. It's messy, but apparently the God of history doesn't mind a little messiness.

From Dorrien's vantage point, and that of postconservative evangelicals, fundamentalist evangelicals have fixated on an earlier mutation of the tradition. Adaptation is needed, not primarily to a new age, but to the new ways the living God may be working in this different age. Postconservative evangelical theology need not—and in my view should not—attempt to exclude fundamentalist evangelicalism from current debates and discussions. Instead, postconservative evangelicalism is at its best as a constructive theological and missiological project, one that, in Dorrien's words,

reconnects modern evangelicalism to the polyphonic orthodox tradition of Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Hooker, Wesley, and Barth. … Today, within a significant segment of evangelical theology, the conception of theology as polemic or tournament is receding. The confrontational spirit of fundamentalist evangelicalism is giving way to the discourse of [what Hans Frei called] a generous orthodoxy. If the quest for the kind of orthodoxy that Frei envisioned is to be fulfilled in the churches and seminaries of a new century, the evangelicals need to play a significant role in bringing it about.

May it be so.

Rodney Clapp is the editor of The Consuming Passion: Christianity and the Consumer Culture (InterVarsity).

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