.
to their own sex filling slots on the elder board.
And that’s the way it was through my college years (I attended Drew University from 1975–1979, with my junior year in Oxford, England) and first career as a newspaper reporter (initally for a Connecticut weekly and then a small Delaware daily): Bible-thumping born-again Jesus Freaks were gracious and fun. Most were suspicious of Jerry Falwell even if they voted for Ronald Reagan. My agnostic and atheist friends snubbed them as hypocrites, then mauled each other in stomach-knotting office politics in go-for-the-jugular careers while playing musical beds.
No thanks.
I was happy to dump journalism after a year-long soul search in which I found that I was worshiping my career. I prayed a prayer of repentance on my bed in the summer of 1984 and something like electricity invaded my head and ran through my body. I felt cleansed. God was God again and I felt born-again again—and, despite myself, I was convinced that God was calling me into the ordained ministry. Friends confirmed it (one said he’d enlisted several people to pray for me so I’d finally get it). Five months later, I was unpacking my bags at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary near Massachusetts’ Cape Anne Peninsula.
Gordon-Conwell is one of several seminaries spawned by the evangelical resurgence, which began in the early 1940’s and was led by Harold Ockenga, Carl Henry, and (most famously) Billy Graham, among several others. Each was reared in fundamentalism, which initially heaved intellectual heft in its summons back to basic doctrines, but quickly slid into a separatist, legalistic, anti-intellectual cacophony—especially after the infamous “monkey trial” of 1925: Darwinist Clarence Darrow humiliated creationist William Jennings Bryan on a witness stand in Tennessee. Fundamentalists retreated into a fortress of “no’s”: no drinking; no smoking (not a bad no, really); no card-playing; no mixing with those apostate, Modernist-Liberal-Progressive mainliners adoring Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969), pastor of New York City’s Riverside Church. Most were Dispensationalists.
Ockenga began calling himself a “neo-evangelical” or “new evangelical” to distinguish himself from hotheaded fundamentalists. Henry, who emerged as evangelicalism’s informal academic dean, challenged back-to-the-Bible believers to abandon their cultural citadels in his 1947 landmark book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Graham ruffled feathers when he reached out to leaders in mainline and Catholic churches. Ockenga served as the founding president of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 and, in 1947, the troika joined radio evangelist Charles Fuller in establishing Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. The school remains post-conservative evangelicalism’s intellectual Mecca. Again, Ockenga served as the seminary’s first president—and he graciously manned its board even after the school veered away from strict biblical inerrancy (more on this later; Fuller now describes the Bible as “infallible,” a slightly looser word). So did Graham.
But Ockenga also fixed his eyes on the east coast and launching a Fuller-like institution there. He helped merge Gordon Divinity School and Conwell School of Theology in 1969 and took its helm in 1970. The seminary clung to inerrancy while employing more sophisticated exegesis than fundamentalists (inerrancy is often mistaken for wooden literalism, which is not necessarily the case). He led Boston’s prestigious Park Street Church in his spare time.
Graham, of course, traveled the world and led mammoth revival meetings, founded a relief organization, and spurred the publication of Christianity Today, over which Henry presided as its first editor. Meanwhile, neo-evangelicalism’s influence spread to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois. Weslyan-flavored Asbury in Kentucky also played a key role, and The Evangelical Theological Society was launched in 1949 in an effort to deepen sound scholarship. The organization’s publication, the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, or JETS, does not fly at supersonic speed and is no thrill ride, but it’s learned.
The term, “evangelical,” opened new vistas and panoramas for me. I could study the Bible from different angles without falling off orthodoxy’s edge—and I needn’t be anti-Catholic, anti-science, anti-women, anti-democrat, and anti-education. My professors relished the life of the mind (many did their graduate studies at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton). They took a dim view of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and dismissed the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition as passing fads.
Would that they had been right.
Most were Reformed, or Calvinist. I never came around to their view. I substantially agreed with Dutch theologian Jacob Arminias (1560–1609), who probed the Bible and found more latitude for free choice. John Wesley, Methodism’s founder, popularized the Arminian view in 18th-century Britain. But I’m thankful for these Calvinists. They rid me of fundamentalism. The now-late Old Testament Professor Meredith Kline, for example, showed how Genesis One could be read as a prose poem, with its days interpreted symbolically. Others showed how the biblical genealogies are intentionally incomplete, which meant they couldn’t be used to determine the Earth’s age. And they opened my eyes to an entirely different approach to eschatology (the study of the end times) courtesy the writings of the late George Eldon Ladd (1911–1982). Ladd and others explored a slew of biblical texts and found that the blessings of the eschatological age began in the ministry of Jesus; they’ll become complete at the second coming. We live between the already and not yet. Believers are meant to be tokens of the end times, a people of the future dwelling in the present. We’re the future’s harbingers, a people of “realized eschatology,” to use a phrase coined by British scholar C.H. Dodd (1883–1973). Miracles, such as healings, point to a future of absolute health and blessing. Tokens of love underscore a future of absolute love. Holy lives point to a future of total holiness. Social and environmental justice prefigure an era of total harmony.1
The future is now. Eschatology invades through us—and, incidentally, there’s no “there” there on the so-called Rapture. All the biblical proof texts supporting it can easily refer to the Second Coming itself. Perhaps that’s why no Christian thinker mentioned the event before the rise of Dispensationalism. It’s not in the Bible, so let’s leave the Left Behind series behind.
My professors also showed me the biblical tension involving women in ministry. True, some passages seemingly prohibit it, but there’s also Deborah, a judge over all Israel about 1100 years before Christ, and Huldah the prophetess (2 Kings 22:14–20; 2 Chronicles 34:22–28) and Phoebe in Romans 16:1 and Junias in verse seven of that same chapter. Most of my teachers supported ordaining women. I gladly followed them.
I was fascinated by the history of revivals, first with the 18th-century Great Awakening, led by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield in the American colonies and Methodist founder John Wesley in Britain. Converts wept and swooned and displayed other signs and manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s power. Church attendance plummeted in the later 18th century but sky-rocketed after an enormous camp meeting in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801. Again, there were those manifestations: Swooning and weeping, even barking and roaring. Some historians dubbed the 19th century “The Methodist Century,” which gave the era an Arminian hue. Many of its leaders helped spearhead abolitionism and moved into slums.2
Calvinism, of course, did not die. Some followers joined the Wesleyan fun and mingled with Methodists while remaining Reformed; a more cerebral branch lauded the scholasticism of Geneva theologian Francis Turretin (1623–1687) and found a home at Princeton Theological Seminary. The Old Princeton theologians—successively Archibald Alexander (1772–1851), Charles Hodge (1797–1878), AA Hodge (1823–1886), and Benjamin B. Warfield (1851–1921)—lobbed critical shells into the revivalist camp. They frowned on altar calls, the manifestations, and all the exhilaration. To their credit, they were intellectually rigorous and personally charitable, especially the elder Hodge, but they demanded stifling tidiness.
Thanks for the brain power, Old Princetonians, but do yourselves and everyone else a favor: loosen up; chill out; join the party. And Warfield: Could you walk beside the Pentecostals instead of disparaging them?
Sadly, the union of high spirituality and movement for societal reform dissolved in the later 19th and early twentieth centuries. Advocates of the Social Gospel, like Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), embraced Liberal Christianity, and Evangelicalism