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.