Here’s a few samples:

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.

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.

It’s a quote from his “Inquisition into Faith” from his Colloquies, which was essentially a book meant to teach people how to have Latin as good as Erasmus’. It’s from this collection of Erasmus’ writings, which I’ve enormously enjoyed. If you haven’t read Erasmus, you really must. I’ve gotten the vibe that he’s generally ignored in evangelical circles, even moreso than Luther or Calvin, which is really sad because he’s certainly a brother and in terms of scholarship, he’s remarkable.

Plus he’s just an enormously talented writer.

This quote from his biography says it all, “Bucer was at a crossroads, and sensing this, on April 30, 1518, he formally drew up a will in the form of an inventory of all his books.”

Coolest. Idea. Ever. I’m totally stealing this someday.

If you’ve seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, then you’re already familiar with a few lines of Pope’s poem: “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!/The world forgetting, by the world forgot./Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!/Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.”

What’s more interesting though is reading lines 145-146: “Thy eyes diffus’d a reconciling ray,/And gleams of glory brighten’d all the day.” If you’re at all familiar with any of the Indelible Grace hymns, that line will sound familiar. Something very similar to it is found in Charles Wesley’s, And Can It Be?:

“Thine eye diffused a quick’ning ray/I woke the dungeon flamed with light.”

The interesting thing is Pope’s poem was written in 1717, Wesley’s hymn in 1738. Given the enormous popularity of Pope in his day, it’s highly unlikely that Wesley had never read him. In fact, it’s far more likely that he had read him and lifted that line from Eloisa and Abelard and used it in And Can It Be?

So here’s a couple questions to consider: How should Christians approach the way we use language in public worship? I’m reluctant to be too harsh on Wesley because there are many evangelical preachers who do very similar things in their sermon every Sunday, using quotes from other preachers or commentators without ever attributing them. And to a degree, it makes sense. You hear a powerful phrase, you want to use it. But is it ever justifiable to use a phrase from someone else without crediting them?

Does this change your attitude about Wesley’s hymn at all? If so, why? If not, why not?

Here’s the money quote, coming from Whitefield himself:

““I’ll tell you a story. The Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 1675 was acquainted with Mr. Butterton the [actor]. One day the Archbishop . . . said to Butterton . . . ‘pray inform me Mr. Butterton, what is the reason you actors on stage can affect your congregations with speaking of things imaginary, as if they were real, while we in church speak of things real, which our congregations only receive as if they were imaginary?’ ‘Why my Lord,’ says Butterton, ‘the reason is very plain. We actors on stage speak of things imaginary, as if they were real and you in the pulpit speak of things real as if they were imaginary.’”

More response to this talk will be coming in a few days, but I need to gather my thoughts first.

1. It creates a sense of longing. There is a beautiful already/not-yet sense to seasons like Advent and Lent. We are looking back on something that has occurred, but also longing for the future as we look toward Christmas and Easter. This tension is where we as believers should live, and it challenges both our culture’s tendency to think that the past is “all in the past” while also keeping us from feeling like we have arrived and there’s nowhere else we need to go, nothing else to look forward to.

2. It teaches us to slow down. We live in a culture of frenetic activity, and this often translates into our spiritual lives. While we might know better, we have a sense that if we haven’t made substantial gains in my battle against sin by next week (at the latest), we must be spiritual failures. But the church calendar refuses to bend to this busy spirit. It measures the spiritual life in terms of years, not mornings of missed Scripture reading.

3. It teaches us to celebrate. One of the biggest failures we as Christians have is our idea that it’s spiritual to put on dour faces, eat meager fare and say “Thank the Lord” while doing it. However, the church calendar calls us to truly celebrate. After a month of longing, Christmas is supposed to last for 12 days, climaxing on Epiphany. This sort of radical, sanctified celebration ought to be one of the things the Church teaches to the world, not the other way around.

4. It connects us with our historical story. One of the beautiful things about the church year is the saints’ days. While I obviously don’t believe in any special saintly standing before God which certain individuals have, I do think we should give deep thanks for those believers who God has used mightily in the past. To that end, having days to remind us of people like Athanasius, John Chrysostom and Augustine is a helpful tool, particularly as we strive to teach children about the story God has told so far in His church.

If anyone is interested, here is an accessible summary of the liturgical year. As far as saints, I tend to use those individuals from the Episcopal church calendar that I appreciate and ignore the more denomination-specific or modern ones.

I didn’t realize at the time that I was meeting someone who would embody the roles of pastor and friend to me in ways no one else ever had. Over the course of spring semester last year we got lunch a few times (always at Doozy’s) and I told him I would like to get involved with ministry team in RUF the following fall. Once I was on MT, we started having one-on-one’s every other week. And at some point, I’m not sure if it was last spring or last fall or perhaps gradually over both semesters, I think our relationship became more of a friendship than a discipler/disciplee sort of thing.

If I took the time to say everything I admire about Bart, this post would get really long and everyone would stop reading. (Sadly, I think the only blog where I regularly read every word of every post is 22 Words… Yes, I have awful reading habits.) But I do want to try to say a few of the things I appreciate.

First, if you spend anytime in the Moseman house, you quickly come to the conclusion that there is great happiness to be found in family and that you someday hope to have a marriage and family like Bart and Carrie’s. I’ve thought this myself and I can think of at least six other students from RUF who have told me the exact same thing.

Second, Bart’s a normal person. I mean that as a compliment. He’s not an uptight Christian who will freak out over the occasional profanity or Family Guy reference, and that’s extremely enjoyable because it means I’m free to be totally real with him about who I am, what’s going on in my life, and what I believe. Further, it means I can crack a fundamentalist joke and his most likely response is to make one of his own.

Third, he’s passionate about the gospel, the church, and the world. And you can tell when you listen to him or talk to him. Listen to his talk on Rahab here or his final talks on the resurrection and the breakfast Jesus had with his disciples after the resurrection and you can hear it in his voice. He, like Schaeffer, knows what it means to care about people.

Fourth, he’s honest. There’s no topic off-limits and if he struggles with the issue, he’ll be honest and admit it. He’s open about the fact that he’s a people-pleaser. He’s honest enough to say, “I’m not always a good parent or good husband,” and then he’ll talk about specific struggles.

Fifth, Bart and I have very similar convictions about how to interact with culture. Actually, check that: I stole my convictions about how to interact with culture from Bart. We both see the church as existing alongside the non-Christian world as resident servant aliens - we live in the world, but we’re not of the world, and we’re working for the good of the world. And Bart exemplifies this attitude in the way he engages with students and the way I’m sure he’ll engage with people in Minneapolis at his church plant.

Sixth, he’s a great listener and asks good questions. I think I’ve probably talked about more personal things with him than just about any other friend I’ve ever had. And he’s always offered the best possible feedback in response to whatever I was saying. (Put simply, he has been the primary person responsible for me overhauling my ideas about Christian engagement with culture, denominational issues, and dating.)

Plus, he introduced me to the amazing Terry Tate and the Flight of the Conchords.

And I think the biggest thing is probably this: I’m prone to meloncholy. I’m also prone to quick bursts of anger. And I don’t really fit in with most contemporary Christian sub-cultures. That causes me to often have a really bad attitude toward my fellow Christians. Sometimes I even feel like the church is an adventure in wasting time. I feel like God draws most of us to himself despite the church, rather than through the church. But then I get together with someone like Bart or I go to RUF and I’m reminded of what the church can and ought to be.

And when I see that breath-taking beauty of the bride of Christ in action, I realize the only reasonable response is to say, “Isn’t she beautiful?”