Just a thought. Why are so many evangelicals prone to pre-critical/modern theological modes? Why is the recovery that is being done propelling evangelical theologians back pre 18th century theology, and later. John Webster writes:
‘Retrieval’, then, is a mode of theology, an attitude of mind and a way of approaching theological tasks which is present with greater or lesser prominence in a range of different thinkers, not all of them self-consciously ‘conservative’ or ‘orthodox’. Although here we concentrate upon strong versions of this approach, it can be found in less stringent forms and in combination with other styles of theological work. A rough set of resemblances between different examples of this kind of theology would include the following: these theologies are ‘objectivist’ or ‘realist’ insofar as they consider Christian faith and theology to be a response to a self-bestowing divine reality which precedes and overcomes the limited reach of rational intention; their material accounts of this divine reality are heavily indebted to the trinitarian, incarnational, and soteriological teaching of the classical Christianity of the ecumenical councils; they consider that the governing norms of theological inquiry are established by the object by which theology is brought into being (the source of theology is thus its norm); accordingly, they do not accord final weight to external criteria or to the methods and procedures which enjoy prestige outside theology; their accounts of the location, audience, and ends of Christian doctrine are generally governed by the relation of theology to the community of faith as its primary sphere; and in their judgements about the historical setting of systematic theology they tend to deploy a theological (rather than socio-cultural) understanding of tradition which outbids the view that modernity has imposed a new and inescapable set of conditions on theological work. For such theologies, immersion in the texts and habits of thought of earlier (especially pre-modern) theology opens up a wide view of the object of Christian theological reflection, setting before its contemporary practitioners descriptions of the faith unharnessed by current anxieties, and enabling a certain liberty in relation to the present. With this in mind, we begin by considering the study of history as a diagnostic to identify what are taken to be misdirections in modern theology, and then the deployment of history as a resource to overcome them.[1]
I can see the appeal to go back to a time where the Christian God, at least in the Western European world, simply just was. I can see why evangelicals desire to think theological theology from and through the ‘theologians’ (as Gunton calls it), rather than deal with the constant assaults of the higher critics and history of religionists at every turn. Retrieving theology from a time and period that was enveloped by the reality of the triune God is very appealing. Recovering theology from a time where the Bible was understood as God’s Word, particularly for the post reformers in the 16th and 17th centuries, based upon the movements of the magisterial reformers, is very inviting. And so this sort of move by evangelicals makes sense to me.
I am an evangelical. And I don’t think some people get this, but this is why Karl Barth, among the various premoderns I am attracted to, is so appealing to me. If you shorn Barth of his period, and his self-conscious and intentional engagement with the sources from his time, what you get is someone who is attempting to simply follow the contours of Holy Scripture. If it was possible to think Barth as a theologian of the post reformed orthodox period, and there are some antecedents in that period (just read Muller’s PRRD), he isn’t as far removed as some of those who see him as an antagonist might think.
Anyway, it all makes sense to me. We are evangelicals. We have veneration for Holy Scripture and its reality in Christ; as such, finding theologians who had an equal heart-beat for such things, and without the anxieties created by modernity, is a boon to the evangelical’s mode and mood as theologians and disciples of Jesus Christ. I get it.
[1] John Webster, “Theologies of Retrieval,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, edited by John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford/NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 584-85.