I got an e-mail from Eric on Monday letting me know that he was done blogging here at BtT and I was able to read his post and have a few days to decide what to do before his post dropped.
And I decided that I’ll follow his lead and stop blogging at BtT as well.
I’d been thinking about quitting since January, when the blog was down and I found I didn’t miss blogging at all. I became more inclined to stop after reading a recent blog post that described the “And You Are? syndrome” in which the author argued that there’s a sort of epidemic amongst young white middle-class reformed dudes to be too self-assured, to confident in their own understanding of the world. And when they’re done pontificating on a given subject, anyone with the least bit of maturity or wisdom can only respond with a quizzical, “And you are… who?”As I read that description, I saw much more of myself in it than I would’ve liked. So that became added incentive to step away.
Blogging, and to a lesser extent Facebook and Twitter, has given an interesting forum to young aspiring writers and church leaders like Eric and myself, and I know that it’s been helpful to both of us as we try to develop as writers and thinkers. However, I can’t help but think of past eras in church history when young guys like us were basically locked up in seminary for a few years where we had all the pride and naive self-confidence beaten out of us before we could do too much damage in our youthful zeal. Blogging allows us to circumvent that system. Sometimes it’s for the better, but there’s a lot of dangers with giving a large public voice to inexperienced people, and that’s where much of my discomfort with blogging has come from.
And the final reason I’m stepping away as well is that this space has always been ours, both Eric and mine. I remember rooming with him at the L’Abri conference my freshman year and talking about blog management/formatting. And as hard as it is for me to believe it, that was two and a half years ago. This has been a wonderful space and (for the most part) I don’t regret anything I posted here, but I feel like this space has accomplished what it needed to, and it’s time to pack it in.
So to those who have been reading, thank you for your time. Hopefully you’ve found something resembling life and health in the discussions here. I hope you keep reading Eric’s new blog, I probably won’t be making a new one, but I’ll still have my weekly column in the Daily Nebraskan. (Search my name in the field on the top right to find my columns.)
And to Eric, it gives me great joy to call you brother. It’s been a unique pleasure to share this space with you and I will miss it.
Well, it’s been a good run, but the time has come. Those of you who are regular readers know that, for a variety of reasons, I’ve been slowly fading in my posting regularity over the last few months. Platitudes about my busy life aside, I think the time has come to make a decision and let you know, rather than simply disappear from the internet world.
So, as of this week, it’s official. I’m retiring from Between the Trees. I’m turning the blog itself over to Jake to do with as he pleases; if he keeps it up and running, if he brings in another author, or if he simply moves on, I’m not going to be a part of the equation.
I’ve had some sort of blog or internet outlet since I was in high school, and the thought of not having such an outlet still terrifies me, so I will have a blog hosted by Wordpress which you can read here. Don’t expect regularity, however. It will just be an outlet for some of my writing.
As far as why I’m retiring, it’s a complicated question. In some ways, I’m just worn out and unable to keep up with the almost-daily posting schedule Jake and I kept to a year ago when Between the Trees was in its heyday. However, there are a couple of other reasons.
The first is content. While there’s always been a great deal of variety in our posts, there were also some natural limits created by our shared interests. I’m increasingly falling into a pattern of writing posts and deciding not to post them, primarily because the things they’re about don’t fit here.
Secondly, I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of my own merit as a “blogger.” I’m a lot more uncertain about what I think than I used to be. It’s terrifying to realize that, looking back over our two-and-a-half years, we’ve had more unique visitors than many published Christian authors sell books. I realize that many of these people are just “dropping by,” but I’ve also known plenty of people who regard blogs with the same sort of authority and trustworthiness as the books they read. In reality, I’m a 23-year-old with a minimal theological education who has read a few books. I don’t trust myself to communicate deep truths. This doesn’t mean that I have nothing to offer the body, but simply that the amount of content a regular blog demands is putting forward far more ideas than I’ve really thought through.
And last, I’m increasingly finding myself in process about a number of ideas (no, not like I’m leaving the faith or anything, don’t be alarmed). I’ve seen a number of my political ideas shift and some of my convictions about Scripture be deconstructed. In the midst of rebuilding, I don’t think the sort of running commentary that makes blogging unique will be helpful, or for that matter sensible. That said, if you want to keep up with what I do write, check out the aforementioned new blog.
That said, this has been a great experience. I’ve loved working with Jake, who I consider a dear brother. Jake, you continue to encourage and provoke me. Don’t you ever stop, you long-haired hippie. And I’ve enjoyed interacting with those of you who read. Thank you for bearing with my half-baked ideas and poor editing, and thank the Holy Spirit for those times when these very ideas have helped, encouraged or taught you. You’ve been great.
In the past year there has been no shortage in controversy amongst evangelicals about language and particularly the issue of obscenity/profanity. And with Derek Webb’s latest announcement that his record’s release is being held up due to a disagreement with his label about a particular song (rumored to contain profanity stronger in nature than that used in his previous works), the discussion has been fired up yet again.
Check out this guest post by Michael Bell over at the iMonk. Then come back and reread Eric’s excellent post from last fall dealing with similar issues.
So yesterday we left our heroes - Machen, Scofield, Sunday, and the rest - in an awkward coalition whose primary commonality was a shared disdain for the liberalism - which was termed “modernism” in their day - that had taken over northern churches. And we said the theology that emerged was essentially the basic points on which they could agree.
That’s the basic idea, with an important siderail - where they disagreed, the revivalist view often won out. Why? Because they were the dominant group. So where Machen and the dispensationalists differed, the dispensational view won out. Part of the problem was that the major educational institutions of Machen’s tradition were largely wiped out by modernism. They took some steps to address it, but in the interval, the institutions of the other factions - like Moody and Biola - became dominant. So when young Christian men went to school to study for pastoral ministry, they landed at the revivalists’ institutions much of the time.
What was characteristic of this theology that came to be dominant from the 1930s-1970s in American evangelicalism? Here I’m going to highlight three basic theological tenets and two characteristics.
1) Inerrancy - They saw the Bible as the inerrant and authoritative word of God.
2) The exclusivity of Christ - Faith in Jesus was the only means of salvation.
3) Dispensational premillenialism - This view sees Israel and the Church as being completely separate peoples of God. Israel is God’s Old Testament work to whom certain promises have not yet been fulfilled. The Church is God’s New Testament work whose time in the limelight is essentially an intermission before God finishes his work with Israel beginning in the Tribulation. From this view came several key points - the idea that the church’s time was short and therefore evangelization was the foremost priority, the idea that the world will be destroyed and therefore social issues are not important, and the idea that Old Testament ethical standards are not meant for the Church.
4) A suspicion of the academic - Beginning with the creation/evolution debates, mid 20th century evangelicalism was generally suspicious of the academy. Going back to their southern revivalist roots and the low view of the church inherent in Baptist and Methodist theology, it was thought that people only needed to read the Bible and take it literally to discern truth.
5) An essentially adversarial relationship to the non-Christian western world. While mid 20th century evangelicalism had a very sympathetic relationship with non-Christians abroad, seeing them as essentially lost and needy people they could help, they saw non-Christians in the United States in very adversarial terms. There’s a variety of factors contributing to this - the fundamentalist/modernist riff, the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Red Scares, and their reading of certain biblical texts.
This was the general consensus amongst most evangelicals until the late 1960s and early 1970s when the rapidly changing world prompted a crisis in evangelicalism, which caused a significant shift beginning in the mid to late 1970s. We’ll pick up there tomorrow.
Note: This is part of an ongoing series. Part 1, Part 2.
First, we’ll need to describe the basic view-point Tullian is getting at in Unfashionable. The way of thinking espoused by Tullian is largely novel in the broadly evangelical movement in the USA so the discussion has arose as a result of this view’s challenge of the general status quo amongst evangelicals.
The difficulty here then is that before we can describe the view Tullian is getting at we need historical background on how the dominant evangelical view came to be what it is. So here’s a thumbnail sketch:
With the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, Baptists and Methodists became the dominant denominations in the United States. Congregationalism and Presbyterianism tried to hold on in the northeast with limited success with Presbyterianism also developing in a slightly different direction in the south, but by and large the Methodists and Baptists were dominant.
A tangential, but important, point: The basic theology of the Methodists and Baptists goes back to the Anabaptists, the basic theology of the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians goes back to John Calvin.
The key point with this is that both the Methodist and Baptist traditions represent a low view of the church - by which I mean an essentially congregational, or independent, church government and an understanding that the church is best defined as a gathering of justified individuals whose purpose is to evangelize. Due to this high emphasis on the individual, both of these traditions tend to be very egalitarian and populist by nature - this was often a reaction to the perceived excessive intellectualism of the northeastern Congregationalists and Presbyterians. The different attitudes toward intellectualism could also be seen as divided along geographic lines, with the north being the seat of a more urbanized, pro-academy form of Christianity and the south being more rural and skeptical of the academy.
Then, in the late 19th century as theological liberalism began to develop in Germany, it made its way into Congregationalism and northern Presbyterianism first. This isn’t at all surprising given the adversarial relationship between the Methodists and the Baptists and the academy and the relatively cozy relationship between the northern Christians and the same academy. As the 20th century dawned, theological liberalism became the dominant view in the northern churches. Conservative Presbyterians in the north - like J. Gresham Machen - reacted strongly against this trend, but fought a losing battle in their denominations.
Meanwhile, the Baptists and Methodists continued to thrive in the south. Additionally, other groups began to crop up, particularly in areas that had experienced many revivals where the experiential nature of the Christian faith was the primary emphasis. It was at this time that the teachings of an Englishman named John Nelson Darby began to become more prominent through his followers, the Plymouth Brethren. Those teachings, an early form of dispensationalism, became more prominent with the release of the first study Bible featuring the notes of Darby’s follower C.I. Scofield. There was also a burgeoning Pentecostal movement. However, the dominant group continued to be the revivalist Baptist and Methodists.
To simplify what happened next - Machen and other conservative northerners began to align with the southern groups. They had significant disagreements with them - principally on issues related to the End Times - but they saw those issues as being trivial when compared with the larger disagreements they had with liberals in their own denomination in the north. The result was a loosely-bound coalition of revivalists (like Billy Sunday), Pentecostals, dispensationalists (like Scofield), and the odd conservative Presbyterian (like Machen).
The result was that some of the views espoused by Calvin and his followers were generally marginalized. The primary points of emphasis became those issues where the conservative Presbyterians and the more experiential, revivalistic Christians of the south could agree. Those points, which form the foundation for evangelicalism up till the mid 1970s will be discussed tomorrow.
