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.

During the course of some recent travels I carried the Evangelical Futures volume around as my "heavy" reading. For a change of pace I would switch over to Ben Rogers's fascinating recent biography of A.J. Ayer. At one point Rogers quotes a few lines from a 1956 review that Stuart Hampshire wrote of Ayer's The Problem of Knowledge. Hampshire saw "a certain tameness" in the book: "one can see from the beginning," he reported, "that none of the sceptical arguments are going to get out of hand; they are on a tight, light rein, familiar, domesticated animals which are taken out for a short run."

It struck me that Hampshire's characterization of Ayer's approach nicely captured my own sense of what was going on in the evangelical essays. To be sure, Hampshire did not intend his remarks to be words of praise; Ayer's book, he said, had "a lack of impulse, as in a school work." In my reading of Evangelical Futures, on the other hand, I actually found the taming patterns to be refreshing. While some of the familiar themes that we associate with postmodernity were taken out for a walk—communities of interpretation, the importance of narrative, language games, coherentist understandings of truth, and so on—they were kept on a leash. And the writers were not reluctant to tug on that theological leash at many points as they frequently introduced appropriate qualifications and identified genuine dangers.

Nothing in these kinds of discussions causes me to have deep worries about the future of evangelical thought. But I must confess that I do get a little nervous at times, especially when too much is made of the need for some sort of basic epistemological shift in our thinking. For example, I do not find the label "postconservative" at all attractive, mainly because I do not see myself as deviating all that significantly from previous generations of thinkers who thought of themselves as theological conservatives.

Frankly, I am not convinced that past generations of evangelical thinkers were quite as misguided as some folks seem to suggest in these discussions. In my own experience, many of the good emphases that I find in these "new" methodological approaches simply confirm for me lessons that I learned—long before I heard of postmodernism—from the likes of Cornelius Van Til, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, E.J. Carnell, Francis Schaeffer, and others. These evangelicals insisted that reason was not "neutral," and that all of our thinking is fundamentally guided by pre-cognitive commitments. They also argued convincingly that we cannot adequately interpret specific biblical passages without seeing them in the context of the overall drama of creation-fall-redemption-eschaton. To be sure, they would have been deeply offended by the contemporary rejection of a "metanarrative." But so am I. Nor would they have looked favorably on the notion that what drives all of our attempts to define our shared humanness is the desire to exercise power over others. But neither do I.

Past generations of evangelical thinkers paid considerable attention to some distinctions that I think are still important for our explorations of these matters—more important than is evident in the Evangelical Futures essays. Take, for example, the distinction between divine and human knowledge. What is going on when we talk in unqualified ways about how all efforts to know are constrained by cultural location? Or that a "foundationalist" account of certainty is simply wrong? Do we mean to be implying that God's own knowledge of things is "non-foundationalist"? Or that the Creator himself is obliged to be tentative in his claims to certainty? If we do think—as I think we ought—that God's grasp of reality is not susceptible to the limitations that the postmodern types insist on emphasizing, then we would do well to introduce some significant nuances into our epistemological formulations.

At the very least, the simple fact of the distinction between divine and human knowledge should be taken into account in Christian epistemological discussions. Surely it is relevant to our theories of knowledge that we believe that there is a divine consciousness whose ways are far above our own, and whose thought patterns are not plagued by the limitations that characterize our own cognitive strivings. To acknowledge the reality of divine knowledge is to believe in some fundamental sense that there is "objective" truth, and that it is possible for at least someone in the universe to have certainty about the way things are. And, as Wheaton's Arthur Holmes has long insisted in his writings, this kind of acknowledgment can provide us mortals with both "epistemic humility" and "epistemic hope." The humility comes from awareness that we are not God, that our claims to know the truth must always have a tentativeness about them. But the cause for hope is also important to emphasize: we can stay with the struggle because of God's promise that our cognitive condition will eventually improve greatly, when that day finally arrives when we will know even as we are known.

We would also do well to keep in mind the traditional distinction between pre-fallen and fallen human knowing. To what degree are our "non-foundationalist" limitations due to our sinfulness and to what degree are they endemic to the human condition as such? Our answer to this sort of question will tell us something about whether we are talking about human epistemology as such or about the ways in which our cognitive capacities have been wounded by our sinfulness. To be sure, past discussions of "the noetic effects of sin" were often highly speculative. But those thinkers who paid attention to this topic did manage to come up with at least a few emphases that parallel those which have been inspired these days by anti-foundationalist perspectives.

One important consideration that can sustain our epistemic hope is the firm conviction that we are constituted by our Maker with the capacity to get things straight. In emphasizing this conviction, the recent defenders of a "Reformed epistemology"—Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and others—have given us at least one good reason to exercise caution in the way we go about criticizing Enlightenment thought, since they have some of their inspiration from the writings of Thomas Reid, himself a Scottish Enlightenment thinker. In formulating his alternative to Hume's scepticism, Reid insisted that God has created us with certain epistemic dispositions—for example, the disposition to believe that causal relationships exist, and that physical objects exist apart from our perceptions of them, and that we are unified centers of consciousness and not mere bundles of transitory perceptions and feelings—and that it is legitimate to trust these sorts of dispositions as we make our way through the world.

For all of that, though, I am pleased that we evangelicals are taking these postmodern-type themes out for a walk. Indeed, my own motivation for wanting to do so is reinforced by a kind of conversation that gets little attention from the Evangelical Futures discussants. As many Christians from other parts of the world challenge our "North Atlantic" theologies, they too ask us to think critically about our own cultural location, as well as about how we have sometimes blurred the boundaries between what is essential to the Christian message and the doctrines and frameworks we have borrowed from various Western philosophical traditions.

These challenges are especially poignant because they come, not from our musings on what we should be learning from contemporary intellectuals who often are hostile to the faith, but from people who have been brought to Christ by our own evangelizing efforts. What this suggests is that while we should continue to grapple with the deliverances of our secularist neighbors in the philosophy and literature departments of North America, we should also be sure to spend some time listening carefully to the uncomfortable challenges posed by people who are questioning many of the presuppositions of the folks who brought them the gospel, even as they are in the midst of reflecting critically on their own inherited world-views, to which that gospel came as a refining fire.

Richard J. Mouw is president and professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author most recently of The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals Can Learn from Their Fundamentalist Heritage (Zondervan).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following books, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase:

• Evangelical Futures, edited by John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
• The Smell of Sawdust, by Richard J. Mouw, Jr.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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