Papers and responses from the first annual Theology Conference at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, in October 1999 have been gathered in a volume edited by John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Evangelical Futures: A Conversation About Theological Method (Baker Books), with contributions by Stanley J. Grenz, Trevor Hart, Alister E. McGrath, Roger E. Olson, J.I. Packer, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, and Stephen Williams. Books & Culture asked Harriet Harris and Richard Mouw to respond to this volume, with an eye to what it says about the current state of evangelical theology.

As a student, I was booed in an evangelical church in Oxford for saying that I studied theology. In Evangelical Futures, Kevin Vanhoozer reminds us of Bernard Ramm's alarm when he realized that instead of a theology he had a rag-bag collection of doctrines. These anecdotes suggest that in recent times evangelicals have weakened their own theological awareness and practice.

Two factors help to explain how this happened. First, evangelicals became preoccupied with the nature and interpretation of Scripture and their concern to be "Bible people" (cf. Evangelical Futures, pp. 9, 46). Second, they developed a narrow conception of the theological task, understanding it in terms of "biblical induction." According to this conception, the systematician collects relevant biblical texts on a given topic and develops from them general conclusions. Insights from the Christian community down the ages are not integral to this task, and the purpose of systematic theology is hard to imagine other than that it enables us to teach ourselves and others what the whole Bible says. In other words, theology is deemed worthwhile because it helps us to know the Bible better. This view of theology resulted in the doctrinal rag-bag that so appalled Ramm.

Contributors to Evangelical Futures seek to enrich evangelicalism for the future by attending to theological method. They take us beyond biblical induction, though still a key issue between them is whether theology does more than enhance Bible-reading. Kevin Vanhoozer says theology need not always begin from scratch, with the collecting and arranging of biblical verses into given topics (p. 62). For theology to be more than a doctrinal hodge-podge, he argues that it must look for connections among doctrines and develop a cumulative understanding, drawing on the past.

His proposal involves giving a greater role to reason and tradition than some evangelicals would accept. For example, Vanhoozer happily locates "the ultimate authority in theology" in the Triune God and in Scripture as God's "communicative act" (p. 105). Similarly, Stanley Grenz writes, "At its core the content of Christian theology consists of a witness to, as well as participation in, the narrative of the being and act of the Triune God" (p. 131). But John Stackhouse holds that we should take more explicit biblical guidance in addressing issues, rather than beginning with an almost scholastic set of presuppositions regarding the Trinity (p. 49).

At issue is the old question of whether one can look beyond Scripture for sources of theological reflection. Of all the contributors, Grenz comes closest to giving theological authority to the church. He takes what he calls a communitarian approach, seeing theology as a conversation in which the primary voice is Scripture, but the participants are the entire faith community, past and present (pp. 121ff). He criticizes the way in which Luther's sola scriptura principle became distorted so that Scripture was transformed from a living text into the object of exegetical and systematizing scholarship (p. 124). He makes tradition basic, not in the medieval Roman Catholic sense of treating it as a second source of truth, but rather by seeing tradition as the whole enterprise by which the Christian community interprets Scripture (p. 126).

Alister McGrath has a slightly different attitude toward tradition. His stress is not on learning from the understanding of past theologians but rather on observing how their cultural and philosophical assumptions affected their reading of Scripture. The image one gets from McGrath is that Scripture is basic, and perhaps somehow solid, while culture and philosophy are shifting. By contrast, the image one gets from Grenz is that theology is shifting, because its very basis is not a solid Bible but the biblically informed understanding of the Christian community.

This book is about the future of evangelical theology. Those who are ringing the changes are Grenz, Vanhoozer, and Trevor Hart, who writes a final response promoting theological imagination. They best fit Roger Olson's claim that this volume is "postconservative," a characterization that the editor John Stackhouse resists. Postconservatism is a trend among some evangelicals that transcends conservative-liberal disagreements over the place of Scripture and experience. Vanhoozer defines postconservatives as canonical-linguistic. This distinguishes them from postliberals who, following George Lindbeck, posit a cultural-linguistic understanding of the context of faith (p. 77). A canonical-linguistic approach looks to the canon of Scripture for the shaping of our norms, whereas postliberals see all our norms, including the acceptance of an authoritative Scripture, as culturally shaped.

Both postliberals and postconservatives see that neither Scripture nor experience can be isolated and used as primary raw data, and so both set about dismantling foundationalism in modern theology. Foundationalism in liberal theology treats human experience as basic. Foundationalism in evangelical theology looks like this: it requires an authoritative Bible at the base of its system; otherwise, it says, there is no sure ground for faith. It then infers doctrines from Scripture, seeking first to interpret the meaning of the text, and then apply that meaning to our own cultural context.

Some contributors to Evangelical Futures remain within this mindset. Stackhouse points out that J.I. Packer is hardly a postconservative. Hardly, indeed. Packer is still fighting an evangelical-liberal battle (pp. 183, 186) and working with a model whereby meaning and understanding precede application. He holds that we need to "move on from knowing about God to a relational acquaintance with God himself" (quoted by McGrath, p. 19), as though our knowledge about God were not already shaped by our affections. He also calls for "surefooted application of Bible teaching to the life of today's church" (p. 187). He must feel uncomfortable with postconservative attempts to wean us away from sure-footedness, but he will not argue the point. He contributes to the volume more as an elder statesman than as a significant participant in debate.

Similarly to Packer, McGrath and Stackhouse treat theology and piety as separate activities which we somehow need to unite (e.g. pp. 26, 51). One wonders how wisdom will ever develop in such a world, where the discernment of meaning is held separate from spiritual attunement and our development as disciples of Christ.

Vanhoozer and Grenz are more conscious of the role of the affections in shaping our understanding. They draw on the Reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff and extend the notion of properly functioning cognitive faculties to the idea of interpretive virtues that enable us to read Scripture aright. Grenz understands this in terms of being nurtured within a Christian community. He identifies "the specifically Christian experience-facilitating interpretive framework" as basic for theology (p. 131). Vanhoozer is more individualistic: we are to pray for the interpretive virtues and to curb our sinful will- fulness to go against the grain of the text (pp. 87-88). He emphasizes God's calling on the individual as prior to our entry into the church (p. 86).

Two aspects of this volume reflect, sadly, a lack of accountability and self-scrutiny within the evangelical world. One is the manner in which academic theology is discredited. McGrath says that much academic theology is elitist, and he criticizes a "theology that cannot be preached" (pp. 155-56, p. 18), although one might ask how the endless evangelical writings on biblical inerrancy could profitably be preached. Stackhouse writes that "evangelicals properly distance themselves from a liberal methodology that feels 'free' to ignore, and even contradict, express teachings of Scripture in the name of the putative superiority of current opinion" (p. 48). Packer accuses liberation and feminist theologians of displacing the Christ of Scripture (pp. 186-87). No explanation, example, or reference is given to support these characterizations, so they are not responsibly made, and perhaps the judgments underlying them were not responsibly reached.

The second aspect is the complacency with which Stackhouse notes that all the contributors to Evangelical Futures are North American or British white men. (They are, indeed, a familiar lineup.) "For this unhappy narrowness of field," Stackhouse says, "we can only plead in defense that the state of evangelical theology today is itself dominated by such demographics." But that works as a defense only if your conception of evangelical theology is so narrow that you screen out African American theology, European evangelical theology, and various African, Latin American, and Asian theologies. Even then, if it turns out that evangelical theology is dominated by Anglo-Saxon men, these men should ask themselves why, given that the body of Christ is as diverse as humanity itself. "Evangelicalism has yet to produce a substantial theology written from a feminist perspective" (pp. 47-48), Stackhouse writes. But he then dismisses exponents of feminist theology who "preoccupy themselves with secular matters: who occupies which position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy or domestic economy, and more general questions of how women are to function and be treated in a just society." Women who expect theology to relate to social justice, and who recognize that resistance comes from those wanting to maintain the status quo, will not write with Stackhouse's vision of evangelicalism!

One might hope that Stephen Williams's essay would help address unacknowledged partiality, because it calls for moral accountability in theology. But Williams seems lacking in empathetic imagination. He draws on Bonhoeffer but makes the reader acutely aware that neither physically nor spiritually has he been where Bonhoeffer has been. Happily, Williams has not suffered under Nazism, but nor can he enter into Bonhoeffer's struggle. It is for him a matter of cool assessment whether Bonhoeffer should have been politically complicit in a plot to assassinate Hitler (pp. 171-72). Perhaps there is a lack of empathy more generally among evangelicals, which helps to explain why many are so unmoved by liberation and feminist theologians.

A possible path to moral accountability in theology lies in Grenz's definition of objectivity: as the objectivity of the world as God wills it. True reality is not what we can see with our eyes and understand with our ears, but what God intends for the world. We could add that the struggle to disclose truth is not just an epistemological or hermeneutical one, to do with interpreting Scripture correctly. It is a moral and spiritual one, involving training our eyes and ears to perceive that which is not very visible or audible. Attentiveness to people and to possibilities that frequently go unnoticed is a moral and spiritual practice.

I have always thought it a strength of evangelicalism that, while it may not choose the term "sacrament," it promotes a sacramental view of the Word: of Christ made present through reading Scripture and through preaching. One of my favorite parts of this volume is Vanhoozer's insight about seeing "the silhouette of Jesus Christ in his living body" when the gospel is celebrated (p. 103). This is an insight that could be made more central to evangelical theological method. Making Christ present is how Christians are called to live; and this makes us properly Christocentric rather than bibliocentric.

Evangelicals are sometimes criticized for putting the Bible in place of Christ. Stackhouse faces this charge but continues to insist that "the kernel" of theology is "the unique and supreme authority of the Bible" (pp. 46-47). Behind such statements lies an epistemological point: that we know about Christ primarily through the pages of Scripture. Evangelicals can tend to speak as though Christ is no longer among us, and we have been left with the Bible instead (cf. Grudem's Systematic Theology, ch. 1). Herein lies the problem that has beset evangelical theology: the possibility of doing theology has been thought to hinge on establishing Scripture as the reliable foundation of our faith.

Vanhoozer's insight is a potentially powerful corrective to this way of thinking. Christ is still among us. This is why faith and theology are possible. Scripture is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, but it is not what our theology depends on. God in Christ is what our theology depends on, and we cannot pin God down as a sure foundation. God will not be so manipulated, but God calls from us a response to seek and live in the divine presence. In this presence we should hopefully grow in wisdom and relax over sure-footedness.

Harriet A. Harris is chaplain of Wadham College and of the University Church, Oxford, England. She was formerly lecturer in theology at the University of Exeter, and is author of Fundamentalism and Evangelicals (Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following book, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:

• Evangelical Futures, edited by John G. Stackhouse, Jr.

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