Author's note: I have substantively revised this post because in its original form it was offensive and hurtful to many people. I apologize and also request that it not be reprinted or posted in the original form.
Traditionalist Christianity was not be fundamentalist, because evangelicals had recognized that fundamentalism was really part of the modern project. Instead, this emerging Christianity would be built on the witness of Scripture read within the authority of the Church and its ongoing life animated by Christ's Spirit. To call it fundamentalism is slanderous.
Like early Christianity the old/new Christianity would create its own world of discourse, its own distinctive culture and worldview. It would neither necessarily reject or affirm the insights into reality of other cultures and worldviews, (or for that matter science) but would judge them by its own knowledge and means of knowing.
Evangelicals, particularly British evangelicals, had been engaged in this project since the 19th century. The Inklings (Lewis, Tolkien, Williams) were looking for better soil than modernity in which the gospel could again take root. They realized that recreating the old European sea of faith was impossible, so they began to build from the ground up using narrative. But do not forget that they were all philosophers. They were deeply concerned with epistemology, philosophical theology, and in particular with questions of authority. They knew that moderns would demand "by whose authority" at every turn in their witness.
Teaching in British influenced Evangelical theological schools as I did for nearly 12 years I understood how obsessively concerned with epistemology and authority the modern Evangelical Christian really is. Newbiggen, Stott, Pinnock, Packer, Bruce.
It is quite logical then that Evangelicals would seek to make common cause with Christianity in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. It isn’t just about the numbers. It is about engaging a Christianity that is seen as untainted by modernity while being equally untainted by the pre-modern West. Pentecostalism offers the same attraction, as does Greek Orthodoxy.
But even if you want to avoid the bawdy house, if not bedlam, of modernity, can you find a community life in a cloistered world of discourse that can justify its rationality and coherence only from within? Can you find a community life apart from modernity that can justify its historical and global relevance, yet exclude culture and cultural differences as a factor in comprehending God’s self disclosure in Jesus Christ? Can you absorb both the past and the global present and never give the relationship between Gospel and culture serious thought? Can you go to Africa or Eastern Europe or Latin America and bring in their widely divergent cultures on the basis of agreement on a few doctrinal formulations and a binary gender system? Can you withdraw from the culture of modernity to create from whole cloth a new non-modern culture? Can you manage to regain the naiveté of uncontested belief in God?
This seems to me the weakness of the contemporary traditionalist approach to building, or rebuilding, a Christian community of faith freed from an admittedly problematic modernity. Eventually we must set down our well-thumbed versions of the Silmarillion or The Last Battle and step out into the world of Black Lives Matter, Vaxers and Anti-vaxers, billionaire rocket men, millions of refugees, climate change and the whole panoply of contested identities and existential problems of the world outside the cloister. Eventually the excitement of going into the world and finding lively worship music with its dancing and drumming, joining in exorcisms and healings, and generally enjoying life outside the strictures on the modern mind must give way to engaging contemporary problems of endemic poverty, communal violence, and corruption.
But it is notable that none of these are addressed on the websites of either the WCA or Firebrand. The closest one gets is the kind of statement made by David Watson that Christians are "resident aliens. . . . We necessarily participate in fallen political systems, and our involvement in them--any of them--compels our repentance." (https://firebrandmag.com/articles/when-the-church-loses-its-mind?rq=Immigration) It is little more than a call to shake off the dust of human conflict and misery and step back into the cloister. It perfectly explains why the traditionalists have a lot to say about human sexuality, which comes into their co-ed cloister in any case, and little to say about the political tempests that pollute the purity of their faith in Christ.
But here is the problem:
If modernity is simply seen as a particular cultural inflection that infected that portion of humanity found in the lands (and their colonies) bordering the North Atlantic then one can imagine a different option arising in cultures beyond its grasp, or a new culture escaping its grasp. One might even imagine a rejection and return to an earlier culture. But doing so would be to misunderstand modernity, and in a real sense, to deny the very tradition on which traditionalists want to build.
Modernity isn't just the rise of science and materialism. It isn't just the relegation of religion to the realm of myth and human affect. Central to modernity are the concepts of culture and cultural change; the very basis upon which a rejection of the culture of modernity is possible. It is modernity that provides the conceptual tools that allow traditionalists to formulate both their objections to it and their response. They are modern whether they wish to be or not. CS Lewis once wrote that he was "the last old western man." He was wrong. The last old western man didn't know it. Lewis' ability to place himself in the history of Western thought placed him firmly among the new modern humans.
Moreover, the real Christian tradition is one of ongoing, often radical cultural transformation under the influence of the Spirit of the Risen Christ. One can argue from scripture that women should fully participate in all the ministries of the church, but one cannot argue it from tradition without acknowledging that it is a tradition of change that led to emerging Christian concepts of marriage and celibacy and then into the formation of convents alongside monasteries and finally into the modern era and its changing understandings of gender roles. One can argue for the validity of remarriage after divorce, but certainly not on the basis of either scripture or subsequent tradition unless one acknowledges that changing views of the human person and human relationships are a basic feature of Christian tradition. Only modern understandings of the very nature of marriage warrant a traditionalist reevaluation of the institution as it is portrayed in scripture and pre-modern tradition.
What Jesus inaugurated was a tradition of change in every aspect of our human understanding of ourselves, our world, and the Divine.
A desire to escape the bawdy house bedlam found in modernity and modern culture is understandable. But the cloister under construction by the traditionalists is less an alternative than they imagine, because it is built on and of the same sand. We're all looking for a rock. The only place we'll find it is beneath our feet on the pilgrim's road. Since we all have to walk it, the only real decision is whether to walk it together.
Robert A. Hunt
Dr. Robert A. Hunt (Perkins School of Theology Photo)
The Rev. Dr. Robert A. Hunt serves as Director of Global Theological Education and Director, Center for Evangelism at United Methodist-related Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. This post is republished from his blog, The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture.