What about the future of Evangelicalism? Recently Trevin Wax suggested in the early days of the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention high profile Evangelicals lent their weight in the effort to stave off liberal drift. Wax thinks it is now time to return the favor. Trevin sees the current situation among Evangelicals to need the now re-invigorated SBC to lend their support and involvement in shoring up what to him is an Evangelical stream that has become too wide.
I have been chewing on Wax’s piece since it came out. The one thing that I believe he misses is explicated in David Fitch‘s, The End of Evangelicalism. Sadly the book may never make it into those circles. We tend to see books by the droves on the same old theme – “if we would do better and try harder, then we could remake, reshape, improve on what we have.”
Dallas Willard suggests the notion that, “if at first you don’t succeed try, try again,” has made its way into the church. The error prompts us to do the same things harder rather than step back and see just what it is that keeps us failing. If this practice is prevalent in churches, it is perfected in denominational structures. Maybe the folks over at Lifeway would do well to consider a book study with their research team using Fitch as their subject.
This is a long introduction to another review I am happy to post here at The Edge of the Inside. In fact, my interest in Fitch’s book and his ongoing project seems to fit well with my major interest here on the website – except maybe Cohen Alan.
Stina Busman teaches at Bethel University. A graduate of Bethel, Busman earned her M.Div. from Princeton and is a PhD candidate there. Stina’s expertise is “theology, culture, and ethics.” One of the oft overlooked voices when considering Evangelicalism are those faithful female witnesses to the ongoing activity of God in the world who make great contributions to biblical and theological studies. Stina is among those “young” voices.
As part of the Viral Blogger project for Fitch’s book, we sent a copy to Stina for review. Here is part 1 of Stina Busman’s review of Fitch’s, The End of Evangelicalism.
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I finished reading David Fitch’s new book in the context of a similar scenario to the one with which Fitch opens his text – namely, one of those awkward conversations in which one encounters the negative stereotype of evangelicals in this country. Sitting one evening on the sidelines of an Ultimate Frisbee game with a gorgeous mountain backdrop, someone asked me what book I was reading. My response: The End of Evangelicalism? Without hesitation, her reply was an answer to the title’s question: Oh, I hope so.
This young, highly-educated inquirer and I chatted briefly about the premise of the book for a couple minutes, and I found myself explaining that gracious, authentic evangelicals do exist. Really, they do. Yet this moment again stirred in me ambivalence about the usage and retention of the term. Yes, I am a faculty member at an evangelical institution of higher education, have been involved in evangelical communities since I entered this world, and self-identify with evangelicalism. Nevertheless, the term’s co-optation in so many different theological contexts by so many different people leaves me frustrated.
In the first chapter of his book, David Fitch attends to this sentiment of disenchantment but forcefully argues throughout the work for the term’s retention – and more specifically, a recovery of the core of evangelicalism. Although I was hoping for a deeper interaction with those suggesting and predicting the end of evangelicalism, Fitch’s purpose in these initial pages is to survey what has been said and written about the current and future states of the evangelical movement. The foundation he lays here proves to be a solid one for his overall argument for an evangelical recovery. In fact, the first descriptor that comes to mind in response to David Fitch’s new book is this: impressive. While I do have some enduring questions about the text, what Fitch is able to accomplish in the pages of this work is insightful and helpful.
Fitch’s goal, which culminates in the final chapter of the book, is to propose a new faithfulness from within the evangelical tradition that takes seriously the nature of the church’s corporate witness, is understood through a missional lens, and is foremost grounded in the incarnate Christ. The route he takes to accomplish this task is undeniably a curious one. He employs the ideas of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to reveal how three of the dominant articulated commitments within evangelicalism (i.e., “the Inerrant Bible,” “the Decision for Christ,” and “the Christian Nation”) have become ideological objects. Specifically, Fitch diagnoses them as Žižekian “Master-Signifiers” – that is, conceptual identifiers to which persons in a group are deeply devoted.
Yet these corporately affirmed abstractions are just that: abstract. They lack definition and carry little specific meaning, thereby allowing individuals who rally around these conceptual objects to apply their own understandings of the terms’ significance to the terms themselves. To be clear, such a critique for Fitch is not a denial of a high view of Scripture, a soteriology grounded in conversion, or the need for the church to be an active presence in the world. Rather Fitch suggests that, in its threefold core, evangelicalism has embraced an “empty politic” marked by arrogance and pretense instead of a “politic of fullness” characterized by humility and hospitality.
In Fitch’s last chapter, he turns away from a Žižekian assessment and attempts to sketch an evangelical missional political theology. The roll of scholars he pulls in to accomplish this task is impressive: Karl Barth, N.T. Wright, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kevin Vanhoozer, Michael Gorman, John Milbank, John Howard Yoder, and Henri de Lubac – among others. The Epilogue to the book (“The Emerging and Missional Church Movements: Possibilities for a New Faithfulness”) is an important continuation of Fitch’s ideas, yet the work here seemed less nuanced than the rest of the text, thus leaving me with a desire for more clarification in Fitch’s descriptions.
Next, Questions and Suggestions
While I’m slowly engaged in my own dialogue on Fitch’s book, over at rashomania.wordpress.com, I thought I’d chime in here briefly to make an observation that’s become clearer to me over the past several weeks, finally crystalizing, somewhat, during a flight delay at LaGuardia this morning.
It seems to me that Fitch’s reliance on Zizek’s Lacanian / Marxist theoretical framework obscures the rather simple fact that the three “master signifers” he identifies as the cores of an Evangelical “ideology” – or what is in danger of becoming an “empty ideology” – are substantive theological positions that were widely – and often passionately – disputed during the historical time frame within which they emerged as ecclesiastical issues.
That is to say, they were certainly not empty signifiers when initially articulated and remain tied to legitimate concerns that Christians continue to debate. What has indeed occurred is that for the larger mass of rank-and-file Evangelicals, these complex concepts always functioned as slogans or badges of affiliation – that is, as short-hand for identifying oneself as belong to a particular faction in the dispute, like the brightly coloured tunics worn by the riders of the annual Palio di Siena horse race.
However, I’d argue that such has always been the case, not just with Evangelicalism’s three “master signifiers” but with most core Christian doctrine through the ages. And this, in itself, points to what I think is indeed the fundamental problem that Fitch ultimately gets around to addressing: What makes someone a Christian and how does one know if one is a Christian or not? Concomitantly, and of equal significance, how is the “Church” then to be defined, given such a fundamental epistemological and existential conceptual lacuna at its very heart?
Numerous solutions to this issue have been posited over the centuries, starting with the early disciples’ assumption that “believers” were first and foremost Jews who accepted Jesus as the promised and anticipated Messiah. This definition of the church quickly ran aground on the much more rapid adoption of the new religious faith among non-Jews and one can note the way this transitional tension plays out in Paul’s epistles.
I won’t go into the full history of the evolution of ecclesiastical models, but we should not be surprised that Evangelicalism’s own response to this bundle of issues, emerging from within its own historical context, would eventually play itself out and lead to new attempts to answer the same questions, such as those which Fitch touches on in the last chapter of his book.
Where I think Fitch goes astray is in not fully embracing what I’d call an anti-foundationalist approach to the problem – that is, letting go of his effort to somehow breathe new life into Evangelicalism’s three “master signifiers” and adopting a more Kierkegaardian approach, where the questions of faith and salvation are always in play, always subject to questioning, even at the level of first principles – what Zizek, following Hegel, would call the re-positing of presuppositions based on ever new encounters with Badiou-ian “events”, which can never be anticipate in advance.
Somehow I’ll wrap my head around this and flesh it out on my blog. Thanks for indulging me. Must be something in the air here in Pittsburgh.
Thanks for your thoughts, Guy. You raise an interesting point regarding Fitch’s hesitancy to fully embrace an anti-foundationalist approach. I look forward to your review of Fitch’s work!