We Evangelicals and Our Mission. Lianna Davis
An old man, ninety-five years old or so, was blind and wanted to teach his great-grandson the art of weaving such carpets. It took six months sitting closely behind his great-grandson, whispering in his ear thread by thread what to weave when and where to depict the beautiful scene upon completion. The old man could not see, but in his mind’s eye, he could see clearly because he had woven that pattern thousands of times and could recall every step from memory.
This imagery shows the concern of an elder generation for a younger one to relay a lifetime of knowledge and wisdom. It establishes the historical context, defines motion, and surfaces meaning to a process. We as evangelicals have witnessed the passing of an elder generation of missiologists. We are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren listening as one generation whispers into our ears theological and missiological wisdom, meaning, and purpose.
Such is the book in hand. David J. Hesselgrave became a dear friend as he mentored me through my doctoral work at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the 1980s. I have highly valued his whispers ever since. He spoke with great learning, good historical understanding, and yet he did so with grace and humility. His words will ring true as you read. He wove together the threads of numerous theological traditions, and their impact on missions thinking, that have appeared over the last 500 years or so. That weave created a fine image of analysis and thoughtful critique that was always tethered to stable, inerrant truth from God himself and whispered into the ears of those eager to listen to things that are of eternal significance.
Four distinct patterns are outlined in this book. First, Hesselgrave sets evangelicals into the context of great traditions of thought, from the Reformation forward. Second, he demonstrates the trajectory of ecumenical thought as it intersected that of the evangelical traditions and altered them along the way. Third, controversial issues surface the ways evangelicals have wrestled with the intersection of ecumenical thought, and Hesslegrave cogently argued the issues with biblical conviction and reason. Finally, he points the reader to the significance of all these trends for the future of evangelicalism specifically and Christianity in general.
To demonstrate Hesselgrave’s keen sense of need to whisper in the ears of another generation, he invited his granddaughter, Lianna Davis, to write a concluding essay from the distinct point of view of a millennial. She carefully and transparently speaks of her own theological journey having lived life around her grandfather’s influence and her tussles of faith and understanding as she too studied in college and seminary. Her contribution shows she also sat weaving as the elder whispered into her ear the strands of thought from a wise grandfather.
Hesselgrave is gone now. Yet, his wisdom will sound loudly for at least another generation or two. To those of us touched by his weave of words, it will continually ring in our ears until we join him in eternity.
Keith E. Eitel
Preface
What happened to the church? The founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) provides some answers in his The End of White Christian America. Many erstwhile attendees of mainline denominations will indicate agreement. Evangelical answers will tend to be mixed, but it will perhaps surprise you how many will respond in terms of their particular experience and the “way things are going” in the church they attend now. Not all evangelicals have the larger picture in mind, especially when North America is in view.
Kregel Publications published my book Paradigms in Conflict: 10 Questions in Christian Missions Today. A second edition, enlarged and enhanced by contributions from a number of well qualified and well-known missiologists, is scheduled to be released this summer (2018). My chapters and most of the additional chapters in this second edition are given over to biblical analysis of important missions/missiological questions.
First, for reasons that will become apparent, this follow-up book complements Paradigms in Conflict—one might almost say is a companion to Paradigms in that it is not about “biblical analysis” but rather “historical analysis.” Second, it is also anecdotal, not in the sense that it highlights missionary stories, but in the sense that it highlights missionary/missiological relevance. All of Christian history has relevance and importance for Christianity(!), but some of it has special importance for evangelical mission/missiology. That is our special focus here.
I want to express profound appreciation to my granddaughter, Lianna Davis, for accompanying me over these last two hundred pages of history and commentary. She is a graduate student, wife of Tyler Davis (an actuary in the life insurance industry), and mother of two daughters. She is conservative but contemporary, and she and Tyler have been helpful in keeping me informed of current evangelical thinking and doings in missions. Without their help in summarizing, along with other endeavors, this book—short as it is—may have proved impossible.
Finally, I want to express gratitude to my son-in-law, Marty Kroeker, who helped to finalize the text.
Prolegomenon
Almost two thousand years after the coming of Christ and approaching five hundred years since the Reformation, two highly-placed Anglican clerics decided to debate the “essentials” of evangelical Christianity!1 Liberal David L. Edwards, provost of London’s Southwark Cathedral and former editor of the prestigious SCM Press, and evangelical John R. W. Stott, rector emeritus of All Soul’s Church in London and former chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen, were at odds on some of the most basic and defining doctrines of the Christian faith. Pressed by his protagonist, Stott ultimately resorts to some quite crude but illuminating metaphors to illustrate the fundamental difference between the evangelicals and liberals. He writes,
[The liberal] seems to me to resemble (no offence meant!) a gas-filled balloon, which takes off and rises into the air, buoyant, free, directed only by its own built-in navigational responses to wind and pressure, but entirely unrestrained from earth. For the liberal mind has no anchorage; it is accountable only to itself.
The Evangelical seems to me to resemble a kite, which can also take off, fly great distances and soar to great heights, while all the time being tethered to earth. For the Evangelical mind is held by revelation. Without doubt it often needs a longer string, for we are not renowned for creative thinking. Nevertheless, at least in the ideal, I see Evangelicals as finding true freedom under the authority of revealed truth, and combining a radical mind and lifestyle with a conservative commitment to Scripture.2
This book is all about the difference between liberal “gas-filled balloons” and evangelical “kites” viewed in terms of Stott’s metaphors: (1) the “stake” of authoritative Scripture, (2) the “tethers” of doctrinal/creedal statements that tie beliefs and behaviors to Scripture, and (3) the “cords” (or “strings”) that evangelicals employ to control evangelical “kites” of witness and work (my elaboration of Stott’s phrase “tethered to earth”).
1. Edwards and Stott, Evangelical Essentials.
2. Edwards and Stott, Evangelical Essentials, 106 (emphasis mine).
Part I: Evangelicals and the Great Tradition of Christian Thinking
A decade or so ago, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) published a Festschrift in honor of church historian John D. Woodbridge entitled The Great Commission: Evangelicals and the History of World Missions.1 In the Festschrift, Trinity’s associate professor of church history and the history of Christian thought, Douglas A. Sweeney, provides several definitions of “evangelical” as offered by scholars of other schools and backgrounds. He then offers a stipulated definition of his own. Each of the definitions/descriptions has something to commend it, but in this book, I prefer to adopt and adapt Sweeney’s definition because it is grounded in church and mission history. He says,
I prefer to describe evangelicalism with more specificity as a movement that is based on classical Christian orthodoxy, shaped by a Reformational understanding of the gospel, and distinguished from other such movements in the history of the church by a set of beliefs and behaviors forged in the fires of the eighteenth-century revivals—the