To the Sources: Retrieving the Christian Theological Tradition
(This essay is adapted from a presentation given by Jackson Watts at the 2014 National Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society)
Arguably the dominant mark of the 15th and 16th centuries was the call of ad fontes (lit. “to the fountains”). This period witnessed a resurgence of interest in Greco-Roman culture, as well as classical Christian sources from the Patristic period (roughly the first five centuries A.D.). This return to the sources was precipitated by numerous factors, including the influence of humanists, technological developments such as the invention of the printing press, distrust toward ecclesiastical hierarchy, and other forms of social change.
Many have observed that another return to the sources is afoot in the broader Christian community—particularly evangelicalism. In 1998, IVP Academic published the first volume in a 29-volume series called the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (ACCS). The project engages with church fathers like Clement of Rome (2nd Century), to John of Damascus (mid-8th Century). Project editors included Lutherans, Catholics, Southern Baptists, and scholars from many other traditions. As series editor Thomas Oden argues, “For evangelicals, a truly catholic reading of Scripture is a reading carried out with the mind of the early church.”[1]
Further evidence that this interest in tradition is a significant trend is the Reformation Commentary on Scripture (RCS) and Ancient Christian Texts series (ACT), both published by IVP Academic. Other evangelical publishers such as Baker Academic and Crossway are engaged in their own parallel “retrieval projects” as well.[2]
Why Go Back?
What is the impetus behind this ad fontes in Christian publishing? Though Protestants emphasize the authority of Scripture over church tradition, a resurgence of interest in classical Christianity, the history of exegesis, and ancient sources is occurring. Publishers’ willingness to initiate such large-scale projects is surprising in an increasingly “e-book culture.” The origins of the ACCS may explain these developments.
General Editor Thomas Oden observes that the idea for the series arose as he was preparing a sermon. He realized that his practice as a theologian of going to pre-modern sources for insight (like a pastor’s use of commentaries today) could also be applied to the preaching task.[3] This perspective will seem counterintuitive to many ministry practitioners. After all, pastoral leadership is perhaps frustrated most often by the phrases “We’ve never done it that way before,” or, conversely, “We’ve always done it this way.” In other words, tradition often seems to be a problematic and counter-productive influence in the church as opposed to an instructive one.
Yet the return to the sources transpiring today signals that there is another way in which tradition may provide insight and guidance. This is especially significant for pastors and church leaders who desire to situate contemporary faith and practice in the broader cloud of witnesses who have preceded them. Here and in a subsequent post, we’ll consider three reasons why publishers, scholars, and church leaders are returning to the sources, and some implications of this trend for the church.
The Failures of Modernity
Many scholars have debated the exact beginning of the modern period. However, a consensus from the literature suggests that modernity can be seen as the intellectual and social environment of the Enlightenment (17th-18th centuries) that came to full fruition in the 19th and early 20th centuries. So modernity is not so much a single ideology confined to a specific date, but an attitude toward knowledge and human potential that manifested itself in Western thought, practice, and institutions.
In modernity, confidence soared in the ability of the human subject to comprehend and overcome the world. This means that modernity is constituted by a particular view of reason and experience (i.e. epistemology), an unbridled optimism about the human condition, and a preoccupation with the prospects of progress. Modernity also pushes religious belief to the margins as it has also had a secularizing (or privatizing) effect.[4] This outlook has affected academic disciplines, the arts and humanities, as well as religious thought.[5]
In the 20th century, many attempted to confront the various “-isms” of modernity, such as Kantianism, Darwinism, Marxism, and Higher Criticism.[6] A number of Christian intellectuals expressed doubt and disdain for the modern project, and ultimately rejected it. However, despite the benefit of these critiques, most didn’t come from those who had themselves experienced the bitter disappointments of modernity. Yet one notable figure who was educated and nurtured in modern thought in the mid-20th century who has since argued for the intellectual and spiritual significance of classical Christianity is Wesleyan theologian Thomas Oden.[7]
In No God But God, Oden narrates something of a conversion experience during his academic career. Though a movement-chaser in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Oden followed the advice of a colleague to read the classical Christian sources. In reading a fourth century treatise, it dawned on him that a better critique of “modern narcissistic individualism” could be found in ancient [premodern] wisdom.[8] This change in perspective led him to begin urging his students and readers to flee modern idols that replace true belief and recover the ancient evangelicalism that can “lead to the renewal of evangelical life through the spirit.”[9]
Oden elsewhere summarizes what he calls “the defining hallmarks of modernism”: (1) autonomous individualism; (2) narcissistic hedonism; (3) reductive naturalism; and (4) absolute moral relativism.”[10] In their own ways, each of these hallmarks influenced has people to choose their own beliefs (as would a heretic) as opposed to receiving an inheritance, deposit, or tradition (paradosis) of consensual truth.[11] The disenchantment with modern theology that many experienced during the mid-20th century was a by-product of the promises and assumptions of modernity that shaped modern expressions of so-called Christian faith and practice.
These characteristics of late modernity are exactly why Oden contends that a new agenda for theology must be advanced. He states,
The agenda for theology at the end of the twentieth century . . . is to begin to prepare the postmodern Christian community for its third millennium by returning again to the careful study and respectful following of the central tradition of classical Christian exegesis.[12]
Not long after writing this “agenda,” Oden became involved with the ACCS.[13] These commentaries provide unique patristic reflection on the Scriptures from a range of sources. Oden states in the series’ general introduction, “[H]ere the interpretive glosses, penetrating reflections, debates, contemplations and deliberations of early Christians are ordered verse by verse from Genesis to Revelation.”[14] In providing such material, the ACCS has three goals:
(1) “the renewal of Christian preaching based on classical Christian exegesis”;
(2) “the intensified study of Scripture by lay persons who wish to think with the early church about the canonical text”; and
(3)“the stimulation of Christian historical, biblical, theological and pastoral scholarship toward further inquiry into the scriptural interpretations of the ancient Christian writers.”[15]
Thomas Oden’s legacy is a significant example of why modernity’s failures have contributed to the recovery of ancient Christianity.
Certainly other factors have also had a contributing effect to this renewed interest in the past more generally.[16] There have also been many trends within Protestant denominations that could be understood as “renewal movements.” In such instances, liberalized colleges and seminaries, which were theologically conservative (at least historically), have been key sites of reclamation and reform. But even these reforms have largely been part of larger reform efforts in church bodies themselves (here one thinks of the “conservative resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s and early 90s). Though examples differ in their contours as renewal projects, the trends are certainly considerable.[17]
Confronting and Engaging a Postmodern World
Like modernism (or modernity), one may ask if postmodernism should be primarily understood as a period of time, a worldview, a philosophical mood, cultural artifacts in transition, or some combination of these. The latter best surmises how most evangelical assessments have understood postmodernism.[18]
It’s no exaggeration to say that most evangelical works treat postmodernism as a threat. This isn’t surprising given the three-fold emphasis of postmodernism: (1) the cultural situatedness of the subject; (2) a rejection of absolute truth; and (3) a rejection or extreme suspicion toward metanarratives.[19] Yet there are some who are more sanguine about the prospects of ministry in postmodernism, arguing that the intellectual and spiritual conditions created by postmodernity provides a distinct opportunity for Christian faith to flourish, some of which we’ll consider in part two of this essay.[20]
One significant figure who linked this opportunism to an emphasis on antiquity and the Christian tradition is the late Robert Webber. Webber was a professor of ministry at Northern Seminary at the time of his death, but spent much of his career at Wheaton College. Webber’s background perhaps positioned him as well as anyone to write over 40 books on worship and the early church. The son of a Baptist minister in the 1950s, he pursued his undergraduate studies at Bob Jones University. He later earned graduate degrees from Reformed Episcopal Seminary and Covenant Theological Seminary, and his doctorate from Concordia Seminary.[21] Such ecumenical experiences conditioned him to envision how the diversity of Christian expression might forge a vibrant faith in a postmodern world.
This post continues with Part 2 on Wednesday.
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[1] “An Interview with Thomas Oden, General Editor, ACCS,” accessed on 25 March 2014, https://www.ivpress.com/accs/oden.php
[2] The Baker series (Evangelical Ressourcement) consists of four volumes presently, while Crossway’s includes 11 volumes (Theologians on the Christian Life). It should be noted that following the original public presentation of this paper in November 2014, I learned of a volume entitled Theology as Retrieval which is slated for a June, 2015 release by IVP Academic. Yet my usage of the retrieval language was not derived specifically or generally from another publication.
[3] Ibid.
[4] The secularization thesis, first advanced by sociologist Peter Berger, certainly has appeared to be accurate in reference to the European context, though in America the thesis has undergone significant revision.
[5] Manifestations in this latter area include existentialism, process thought, and liberation theology—to name a few.
[6] J. Gresham Machen may be the most notable biblical scholar/theologian to confront modernism in the first half of the 20th century, followed by C.S. Lewis across the Atlantic in the mid-twentieth century.
[7] Though I draw from different sources concerning Oden, readers should be aware that Oden’s memoir was published in recent weeks entitled A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir (IVP Academic, 2014).
[8] Thomas Oden, “On Not Whoring After the Spirit of the Age,” in Os Guinness & John Seel, eds. No God But God: Breaking with the Idols of Our Age (Chicago: Moody Press, 1992), 190-191.
[9] Ibid., 191. More recently, Oden has published a memoir entitled A Change of Heart (IVP Academic, 2014) in which he more fully develops his transition from being an intellectual bed-fellow with modernism to being a convert to classical Christian thought and spirituality.
[10] Oden’s first developed critique of modernity can be found in After Modernity…What? Agenda for Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 1990), 43-57.
[11] This argument is advanced in part by sociologist Peter Berger in The Heretical Imperative; Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1979).
[12] After Modernity, 34.
[13] In his memoir, Oden also notes the integral role that Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus) played in encouraging the advent of these commentaries.
[14] “General Introduction,” accessed on 17 November 2014, http://www.ivppress.com/title/exc/1470-I.pdf
[15] Ibid.
[16] The publication of David Steinmetz’s 1980 article entitled “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis” has been another influential part of this overall trend.
[17] Another contribution of Oden’s worth attention to further substantiate the narrative I have provided in this section include his chapter “The Faith Once Delivered,” in Evangelicals and Nicene Faith: Reclaiming the Apostolic Witness, Timothy George, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011).
[18] For a fairly comprehensive list of such assessments, can contact me at jacksonwatts@hotmail.com
[19] I should acknowledge that while I did not adopt this list from a specific source, my years of reading evangelical assessments of postmodernism give rise to this summary of those sources. Whether these are sufficiently nuanced in definition is another question. But I am simply describing the conventional evangelical assessment of postmodernism. These latter two features are those that are seem to be most problematic for Christian faith.
[20] James K.A. Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin College, would be a good example of this. It is additionally significant that Smith has authored Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004). Here Smith describes another significant theological community that is especially interested in “returning to decidedly premodern sources” (43).
[21] “Robert E. Webber, Theologian of ‘Ancient-Future’ Faith, Dies at 73,” accessed on 17 November 2014, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/aprilweb-only/118-12.0.html
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