Baptists and neo-evangelical theology.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, neo-evangelical theology was the most important conservative theological movement in North America. Led by such able thinkers as E. J. Carnell, Paul King Jewett, Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Lindsell, Millard Erickson, Bernhard Ramm, David Hubbard, Roger Nicole, and Harold Ockenga, the neo-evangelicals gathered up the shattered pieces of the old fundamentalist movement and gave conservative theology a new cultural voice. Although neo-evangelicalism was a theological movement, it was also reflective of a larger movement of renewal among American conservatives. At the same time as the neo-evangelical theologians were forging their intellectual synthesis, Billy Graham regenerated American revivalism thorough a combination of large outdoor meetings, radio and television programs, movies, and print. In the process, he became the best-known American religious leader of his generation and an advisor to a number of American Presidents. Further, like earlier revival movements, the evangelicalism of the 1950s and 1960s either created or renewed a number of religious institutions. These included the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Theological Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Divinity School, Christianity Today, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The interest that the neo-evangelicals created in theology among American conservatives also had economic import. Eerdmans, Baker, and Zondervan, the leading conservative publishers, came to rank among the largest distributors of serious religious material.

Defining the New Evangelicalism

Yet, defining the new evangelicalism is not easy. Carl Henry's The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) was the manifesto of the movement. The volume was a criticism of fundamentalism's recent history. In this study, Henry set forth a program of theological reform that would

   affirm the great fundamentals but avoid the `deficiencies' of
   fundamentalism. It would be intellectually engaged, socially aware,
   balanced and realistic about prophecy, positive about Christian unity, and
   based on a flesh and relevant rendering of biblical teaching. (1)

Each of these components is important in understanding neo-evangelical theology.

First, neo-evangelicals did not repudiate the fundamentalist past. The neo-evangelicals believed that, despite all the hoopla and confusions of the 1920s, the fundamentalists had battled for doctrines that were central to faithful life. In particular, the neo-evangelicals were not prepared to surrender a strong doctrine of Scripture to their critics on the left. The Bible did not contain revelation, as some neo-orthodox might say; it was revelation, as the neo-evangelicals did say. Carnell put this eloquently:

   We owe our great debt to the fundamentalists for preserving the faith when
   for fifty years the modernists were in the saddle without any competition
   philosophically or practically. Scores of these fundamental leaders have
   suffered desperately at the hands of the modernist hierarchy in the
   denominations. They were compelled to form independent schools and many
   times independent churches. (2)

This appreciation for the immediate past was not feigned. Even at their most restrained, many neo-evangelicals were conscious of themselves as the spiritual descendants of people who had been forcibly ejected from positions of leadership and who had become "separatists" as a result. Nor were they willing to accept the neo-orthodox tendency to replace history with symbol. Ironically, Carnell used the concept of irony to critique the master of irony, Reinhold Niebuhr:

   This ... is the grand irony of Christian realism. Reinhold Niebuhr can
   prove that man is a sinner; but man already knows that. Reinhold Niebuhr
   can develop the dialectical relationship between time and eternity, but
   this is beyond the tether of a dime store clerk or a hod carrier. When it
   comes to the acid test, therefore, Christian realism is not very
   realistic.... Niebuhr does not speak about Christ's literal cross and
   resurrection at all. He speaks, at most, of the symbols of the cross and
   resurrection. But of what value are these symbols to an anxious New York
   cab driver. (3)

Secondly, the new evangelicals were interested in finding Christian solutions to social problems. They were convinced that Christ was the answer to the problems of a hateful and war-torn world, and they wanted to say this in no uncertain way. Part of their concern was, to be sure, the communist menace of the 1950s that many, left and right, felt threatened the nation's and the world's security. But their program went beyond the immediate threat. The United States itself faced the need for moral and spiritual renewal, and this meant that Christians had to face the facts about the contemporary world. In 1957, Dirk Jellema stated in an essay "Ethics" in the programmatic Contemporary Evangelical Thought, edited by Carl F. H. Henry:

   "Fundamentalists have in the past paid no attention to philosophy ... they
   have neglected the philosophical, scientific, social and political problems
   that agitate our century, "said Gordon Clark, a decade ago. "Fundamentalism
   is prodigally dissipating the Christian culture accretion of centuries, a
   serious sin," cried Harold Ockenga, a decade ago. "Whereas once the
   redemptive Gospel was a worldchanging message, now it has narrowed to a
   worldresisting message," said Carl Henry a decade ago. (4)

Indeed, one of the reasons that Carl F. H. Henry was appointed editor of Christianity Today was Billy Graham's belief that Henry would be liberal on social issues, particularly race, while maintaining a conservative theological stance. (5)

Third, the search for a balanced view of prophecy was particularly crucial. Joel Carpenter observed that much of the fundamentalism of the 1920s and 1930s was dominated by "the Book, the Blood, and the Blessed Hope." (6) In many ways, premillennial dispensationalism lay behind all three of these emphases. For the dispensationalists, the key to the interpretation of Scripture--"rightly dividing the word of truth"--was the interpretation of prophecy. According to this school of thought, the most important question about a particular biblical prophecy was whether it referred to Israel, to Christ, or the Israel that would be restored after the rapture. When this hermeneutic was applied consistently, the whole of Scripture became a vast panorama of interrelated events that pointed towards the final consummation of all things. The dispensationalists, who were perhaps the premier popular educators of American Protestantism, often pictured Scripture on large, well-illustrated prophecy charts that united the ages. Dispensationalism also highlighted the emphasis on the Book and the Blood. On the Book because the interpretation rested on a belief that the prophecies of the Bible had to be taken as literal or actual descriptions of future events, a position that was easily expanded to include all of the biblical text. Even more than the larger scheme of history, this tied fundamentalism to a particular hermeneutic. Dispensationalism also intensified the conservative American emphasis on the atonement. Since most dispensationalists believed that the fulfillment of prophecy had been suspended shortly after the death of Jesus and would not resume until the rapture, history after the cross and resurrection had no redemptive significance. At best, the history of the on church repeated the old story of humankind's rejection of God's gracious offer.

Evangelical Mark Noll correctly saw dispensationalism as one of the impediments to the development of an intellectually rigorous conservative theology:

   For the purposes of Christian thinking, the major indictment of the
   fundamentalist movement, and especially of the dispensationalism that
   provided the most systematic interpretation of the Bible for
   fundamentalists and many later evangelicals, was its intellectual
   sterility. Under its midwifery, the evangelical community gave birth to
   virtually no insights into how, under God, the natural world proceeded, how
   human societies worked, why human nature acted the way it did, or what
   constituted the blessings and perils of culture. (7)

The way the neo-evangelicals handled this issue perhaps illustrates the nature of the movement as well as any other aspect of their theology. In general, neo-evangelicals were committed to a more inclusive and ecumenical stance that would allow conservatives of all stripes to work together. First, while some neo-evangelicals retained belief in dispensationalism and others continued as historic premillennists, most were committed to a pluralism in the interpretation of prophecy. Whatever a neo-evangelical's personal position, differences in eschatology were not to break fellowship between dispensationalists and such non-dispensational conservatives as Westminster Presbyterians or traditional Baptists. Secondly, they were determined to allow the Scriptures to speak for themselves. In the late 1950s, when many of the harshest of old fundamentalists, including John R. Rice and Carl McIntyre, were attacking Graham's ecumenism, George Alan Ladd published The Blessed Hope, (8) one of a series of careful biblical studies of the passages about Christ's return. Although some expected that the battle over dispensationalism would be as bitter as the battle over Graham's New York revival, it was not. While the issue was joined at that time and serious debate continued into the 1960s, it did not prove as disruptive as some had feared. While the neo-evangelicals never completely displaced dispensationalism--nor apparently did they want to do so--they did open up American conservatives to a variety of eschatological interpretations. If they had accomplished nothing else, this would have been a sea change for conservative Protestants.

Fourth, neo-evangelicals were committed to unity as an essential element in conservative renewal. In the 1920s, many American conservatives had agreed to more or less ignore their differences to wage a major doctrinal war on what they considered unbelief in the churches. When the moderates allied with the liberals in these battles, the fundamentalists were defeated in denominational politics, particularly in the Presbyterian and Baptist denominations, and made the subject of considerable ridicule. Conservatives had responded with what looks, in retrospect, as self-loathing. They turned the fire on each other with much of the passion that they had early assaulted the liberals and moderates. Perhaps the most serious sign of conservative disarray was the deep division between those fundamentalists who decided to stay in their denominations and those who came to believe in first or second degree separation. Basically, "evangelical separation" was the belief that the Bible demanded that those who could not doctrinally agree, form separate churches, free of the tinge of liberal unbelief. "Second degree" separation argued that people should separate from those churches which, although doctrinally pure, refused to separate from other, less pure, believers. "Second degree" separation was a recipe for sectarianism, and those who followed it ended up in a progressively more sectarian position. (9)

Neo-evangelicals were acutely aware that the fundamentalist reputation for pugnacious behavior also kept them from positions of power. The young Carl F. H. Henry was a conservative representative at the Grand Rapids Convention that marked the breech between the Northern Baptists and those who formed the Conservative Baptist Convention. More than a decade later, he remembered:

   The test of strength did not show that there were 2,483 liberal delegates.
   Membership in Northern Baptist Churches at that time was about 85%
   evangelical; so it is likely that most delegates who voted
   antifundamentalist were actually disposed to various shades of conservative
   theology. Many resented the pugnacious features of fundamentalism, and
   feared the consequences of Convention control by a power bloc. Even if
   lacking in courage to register their theological convictions, many
   evangelicals who voted against the fundamentalists were motivated by a
   sense of Baptist concern. But while denominational executives were often
   capable of a questionable political shrewdness, the fundamentalist revolt
   was infected with an equally serious characteristic, that of a vitriolic
   spirit. (10)

Aside from serious questions about whether such vitriolic behavior was Christian, neo-evangelicals did not intend to be limited in their effectiveness by an offensive or combatant manner. The gospel was its own best defender.

The word evangelical itself was a sign that some fundamentalists wanted to move beyond the carnage. In the nineteenth century, many American Protestants of British descent had used the term evangelical to describe a type of Christianity that stressed personal religious commitment as the primary gateway into faith. In those circles, evangelical was often a convenient substitute for the more politically loaded term "low church" and had the advantage of describing both some members of the established church and the principal non-conformist denominations. In general, evangelical Christians tended toward a less or even a non-sacramental understanding of Christianity, (11) were suspicious of such "high church" movements as Anglo-Catholicism, and supported revivalism and other forms of pietism. In resurrecting this older term, the neo-evangelicals were appealing to what they believed was a broad comprehensive theological tradition that included people of diverse ecclesiastical backgrounds.

Fifth, neo-evangelicals, as one might expect, were deeply concerned with finding "new and fresh ways" to read Scripture. To be sure, the authority of Scripture remained the central issue for them. Carl F. H. Henry's magnum opus, God, Revelation, and Authority, is a sustained recapitulation of the arguments for an inerrant text. (12) But, even in this extended treatment of a contentious issue, more was involved than the recitation of mantras. Henry was concerned to free the Bible to be heard for what it actually had to say. (13) This same motive is even clearer in such neo-evangelicals as Bernard Ramm. In Protestant Biblical Interpretation, Ramm is careful to stress the ways in which good interpretative techniques and methods, including the application of historical and literary categories, provide ways to hear Scripture speak in the Bible's own language. Ramm's goal was to find a "straight course through the Holy Bible," that will "exercise all the human pains possible to keep from overlaying it with a gossamer pattern of our spinning." (14)

Perhaps above all, the neo-evangelicals wanted their work to be "intellectually engaging." Except in its most populist forms, (15) conservative Christianity had rarely been as anti-intellectual as its liberal and moderate critics had claimed. Conservative Christians desperately wanted to be accepted in the academy and to have their substantial intellectual achievements credited by others. Roger Nicole remarked:

   In the view of the achievements ... one may express some surprise and
   chagrin at the cavalier manner in which too often the evangelical
   contributions are dismissed or disregarded by those who do not share the
   position. Those who feel, by the use of such weighted words as
   "obscurantists," repristination, snake handlers, bibliolatry, mechanical
   inspiration, and so forth, that they have adequately and finally disposed
   of the whole movement, are themselves hardly giving thereby evidence of
   real learning or competent scholarship. (16)

The determination to take culture seriously was an attempt to escape what was becoming a conservative ghetto. But this not necessarily a movement toward rationalism. If anything, the long conservative debate with liberals and secularists from Hume to Huxley gave the movement more than a tinge of rationalism and empiricism. What the neo-evangelicals wanted was not to introduce more reason into what was already a heavily rationalist system, but to find ways to engage the more important cultural questions of their own time. In particular, they did not want to leave such areas of inquiry as science and history to the snake; these also had to be redeemed. The neo-evangelicals wanted to engage cultural issues with the same passion that their nineteenth-century counterparts had directed against rationalism and free-thought. A major mark of neo-evangelical theology was its passion for cultural apologetics, for speaking a biblical word in the midst of contemporary culture and using, insofar as possible, culture's own categories. Like American neo-orthodoxy, the movement was concerned with the problem of theology and cultured. (17)

Baptist Influences

Neo-evangelicalism as a whole had its origins in the older fundamentalist movement. Like other forms of fundamentalism, the movement had clear affinities with the Old Princeton Theology. In a recent dissertation, John Adams has demonstrated the importance of Harold Ockenga's training at Westminster, (18) for instance, and George Marsden noted:

   Princeton was of immense symbolic significance in the fundamentalist
   community. When all the other major Northern educational institutions had
   turned away from evangelicalism, Princeton Seminary was left the last
   bastion of orthodoxy with any prestige. Finally in 1929 conservative or
   "fundamentalist" Presbyterians led by the famed New Testament scholar split
   with Princeton to found their own school. (19)

When Princeton itself began to show neo-orthodox tendencies during the presidency of John McKay, the more extreme fundamentalist position seemed verified. Once a school started down the slippery slope toward liberalism, nothing could stop its full slide to perdition. Yet, as Donald Dayton has argued, there was another game afoot as well. Ockenga had begun his career as a Methodist, had attended Taylor University, and the National Association of Evangelicals has always had a substantial Holiness and Pentecostal membership. (20) Even in the 1920s, many fundamentalists had embraced the semi-Wesleyan Keswickian movement, and essays and devotional works on holy living dot their publications. For these and other reasons, Dayton suggests that the origin of both neo-evangelical theology and the broader evangelical movement may be more extensive than Princetonian Calvinism and dispensationalism. Dayton's suggestion is a valuable one. American religious conservatism, whether in its fundamentalist or evangelical modes, has always been a Joseph's coat of many colors. (21)

One of the many hues that made up that coat, I would suggest, was the nineteenth-century Baptist theological heritage. The most important piece of evidence is the number of neo-evangelicals who had Baptist roots or who affiliated with Baptists as adults. These include Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Lindsell, Bernard Ramm, Paul Jewett, E. J. Carnell, and Roger Nicole. Further, all of these theologians had important contacts with Baptist seminaries. Henry and Lindsell, for instance, taught at Northern Baptist Seminary; Bernard Ramm, a graduate of Eastern, taught at the American Baptist Seminary of the West; and Carnell and Jewett taught at Gordon before moving to Fuller. Roger Nicole spent his entire career at that institution. Although he was not raised a Baptist, Billy Graham has been Baptist throughout his active ministry.

Further, Northern Baptist schools were crucial parts of the conservative world in the 1930s. The fundamentalist-modernist battles of the 1920s had been particularly hard on the denomination. Controversy over the writings of George Burham Foster began in the late 1890s; and although President William Rainey Harper had transferred Foster to the department of philosophy in 1906, the dispute permanently divided Illinois Baptists. Many in the southern part of the state withdrew and joined the Southern Baptist Convention; others rallied around a new Chicago-area seminary, Northern, established in 1913, as a counterweight to the Divinity School; and others continued to support the Divinity School. Northern was, in a sense, the mother of Eastern Baptist Seminary and California Baptist Seminary. Both of these schools were founded in response to the advance of liberalism ill other institutions. Eastern, for example, was founded by moderate fundamentalists to counter the influence of Crozer, (22) and California, founded in the 1940s, was a counterbalance to Berkeley. President du Blois of Eastern, the best financed of these schools, put its purpose clearly:

   The purpose of our seminary is to compete triumphantly with the modernist
   theological seminaries. To do so we must meet them on their own level in
   the educational field. We must give just as virile an intellectual
   discipline. We must prepare just as accurate a scholarship, and a
   scholarship much more sound. We must secure for our Baptist pastorates an
   ever enlarging group of thoroughly trained men. (23)

Two other Baptist schools developed in the same direction. Central Baptist in Kansas City, which was established in 1902, found itself on the conservative side when the controversy erupted. Its presidents made its commitments clear in their addresses, and the catalogue gave the school's confession of faith as a mark of its identity. Gordon in Massachusetts had a slightly different history. A. J. Gordon, its missionary founder, established the school in the basement of his church as part of his recruitment of volunteers for the Congo mission. After the school relocated in Fenway, an immigrant section of Boston, it developed substantial interests in training women and men for Christian social work. At the same time, Newton Seminary, under the presidency of George Horr, had moved toward a more liberal stance. As it did, Nathan Wood, a former president of Newton and Gordon's president, developed Gordon more as a counter to the older school. (24) The school added courses for pastors and finally its own seminary. At one point, Gordon had trained all the Baptist pastors in Boston and more than half of the pastors in New Hampshire. While the school never repudiated its founder's dispensational beliefs, it quietly moved away from them. For many Northern Baptists, especially in Southern Illinois and Indiana, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary also served as a counter-seminary to the more liberal schools.

The conservative Baptist seminaries of the 1930s developed a position that was almost indistinguishable from later neo-evangelicalism. They were deeply loyal to the biblical text, not dispensational, (25) devoted to a style of conservative theology that could hold its own in the world of ideas, and they believed in the central importance of evangelism. When Billy Graham began his work, the graduates of these schools were among his most enthusiastic supporters. And Graham also supported them. He was the featured speaker when Northern Baptist Seminary dedicated its new buildings in 1963, and he later served as chair of Gordon-Conwell's board of trustees.

Although the fundamentalist movement helped to make Princeton Theology more popular among Baptists, the Baptist counter-seminaries of the 1920s and 1930s were not pale reflections of Westminster. The most popular theologians at those institutions were two former Baptist seminary presidents, E. Y. Mullins of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Augustus Strong of Rochester. (26) John Benjamin Champion (1868-1948) professor of theology at Eastern and perhaps the most widely published conservative theologian after Machen, used both men throughout his career at Eastern; and T. Leonard Lewis of Northern and the young Carl Henry projected a new edition of Strong's works while colleagues at Northern in the 1940s. (27) Of the two theologians, Strong appears to have been the most influential on later neo-evangelicalism.

With some warrant, liberals and conservatives have wanted to claim Augustus Strong for their own camp. Grant Wacker said of Strong that "liberals used him to establish their legitimacy, while conservatives used him to certify their credibility." (28) As the president of Rochester Seminary in troubled times, Strong made statements that were, perhaps, studied in their ambiguity, but the main direction of his thought was clear. In his Autobiography, Strong wrote: "Neither evolution nor the higher criticism has any terrors to one who regards them as parts of Christ's creating and educating process." Yet, on the next page of the printed text, there is this solemn warning:

   Under the influence of Ritschl and his Kantian relativism, many of our
   teachers and preachers have swung off into a practical denial of Christ's
   deity and his atonement. We seem on the verge of a second Unitarian
   defection that will break up churches and compel secessions in a worse
   manner than did that of Channing and Ware a century ago. American
   Christianity recovered from that disaster only by vigorously asserting the
   authority of Christ and the inspiration of the Scriptures.... We need a new
   vision of the Savior like that which Paul saw on the way to Damascus and
   John saw on the isle of Patmos to convince us that Jesus is lifted upon
   space and time, that his existence antedated creation, that he conducted
   the march of Hebrew history, that he was born of a Virgin, suffered on the
   cross, rose from the dead, and now lives for evermore. (29)

In other words, Strong wanted to maintain a stance of openness to the modern world, while affirming the importance of scriptural authority and even of a limited doctrine of inerrancy.

Like later neo-evangelicals, Strong was determined to have it both ways on the issue of Christ and culture. Holding firm to Scripture, he was the leading advocate of a Baptist University in the 1880s, and he was deeply distressed that the previously Baptist University of Rochester moved in a less ecclesiastical direction. He believed that the university tradition of learning and thought was essential to a modern Christian witness. After all, Strong's American Poets and Their Theology was among the first writings by an American theologian to take literature seriously in terms of the artists' apprehension of God. (30) While it may be only a coincidence, neo-evangelicalism had a similar passion for the university and its standards of rigor. The leading neo-evangelicals were all university graduates, and many of them, including E. J. Carnell, Roger Nicole, Paul K. Jewett, and George Ladd, held doctorates from Harvard. (31) Others, such as Daniel Fuller, were graduates of European universities. When Henry was asked to list the three biggest disappointments of his lifetime, he listed as the first the "evangelical failure to establish a truly great international university." (32)

In a sense, the neo-evangelical attempt to speak to culture was a resumption of the drive of such earlier conservatives as Strong to construct a theology that was, at once, biblically faithfully and responsive to the deeper philosophical and cultural trends of the time. Like Strong, they did want Christianity locked in a ghetto, even if it was the ghetto of sound doctrine. If the neo-evangelical educational enterprise was, in part, the attempt to reestablish Princeton Seminary, it was also the attempt to reestablish the University of Chicago and Rochester Seminary as they might have been without modernism.

One other aspect of neo-evangelical theology may have its inspiration in Strong: the movement's interest in political and social applications of the gospel. While Strong had not been a social gospel theologian, he had been an active supporter of that movement. He was, of course, the president who appointed Walter Rauschenbusch to the faculty at Rochester, and who stood by him through much controversy. At the end of his career, Rauschenbusch acknowledged Strong's support in his dedication to a Theology of the Social Gospel: "This book is inscribed with reverence and gratitude to Augustus Hopkins Strong: For forty years President of Rochester Seminary, my teacher, colleague, friend, humanist and lover of poetry, a theologian whose best beloved doctrine has been the mystic union with Christ." (33)

In short, the Baptist contribution to neo-evangelical theology may have been through the long-term influence of Augustus Strong on conservative Baptist theology in the North, particularly in the seminaries that were established to counter modernism. The faculties of Northern, Eastern, and Central who used Strong's Systematic Theology in the 1920s and 1930s believed that sound faith was necessarily linked to cultural and political responsibility. Since many of those who became neo-evangelical leaders were the students of these faculties, who studied Strong in their systematic classes and who used his work in their early years of teaching, it is reasonable to suppose that some of Strong's characteristic emphases were transmitted to them.

Baptists and the End of Neo-evangelicalism

Dating the beginning and end of a theological movement is risky business. Theologians often do their best work after their season of greatest public acceptance has passed. Yet, it can be useful to speak of the "end" of theological movements and schools, even when some of their greatest voices are still vigorous and writing beyond that day. With this in mind, I would suggest that neo-evangelicalism began to lose its importance around 1976. (34) In part, this was because the young evangelicals, a less homogeneous group, were coming into influence around that time. The transition in evangelical biblical studies from George Ladd to Robert Gundry was more than the rise of a new generation. Gundry's insistence that evangelical theologians could accept and profit from the use of the "redaction criticism" of the gospel tradition was part of a new way of thinking about the Bible among conservative biblical scholars. As Gundry said in his Matthew: A Commentary on his Literary and Theological Art:

In sum, if we do not enlarge the room given to differences of literary genre and, consequently, of intended meaning, scriptural inspiration, authority, infallibility, or inerrancy--call it what we will--cannot survive the "close reading" of the biblical text now going on. The old method of harmonizing what we can and holding the rest in suspension has seen its day.... (35)

The work of Ramsey Michael at Gordon could also be used to mark the triumph of this new style of scholarship. (36) The substantial historical studies beginning to be published by George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Joel Carpenter were another sign that the times had changed. In many ways, the same could be said of the Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, issued in 1973. Although this was signed by many of the leaders of the older neo-evangelical movement, including Carl F. H. Henry and Mark Hatfield, it marked a major turning away from early neo-evangelical concerns. Paul K. Jewett's, Man as Male and Female, published in 1975, also marked a major change in the direction of evangelical thought. The neo-evangelicals had given birth to a renaissance of conservative learning and ethics, as they had hoped, and learning and those ethics were increasingly at home in learned circles. In that sense, they had won a significant victory on the playing field of their choice. The election of Jimmy Carter and Time Magazine's declaration of 1976 as the "Year of the Evangelical" provided a trophy of that victory.

But 1976 was not only a time for victory; the year was significant for other reasons. In that year, Harold Lindsell published his Battle for the Bible. In many ways, Lindsell's decision to renew the fundamentalist-modernist battle, this time with opponents from within evangelicalism, marked the end of the "era of good feelings" that had characterized the neo-evangelical era. Henry had noted the deepening evangelical split over "inerrancy" in the 1960s:

   Conservative theology has tensions of its own about the doctrine of
   Scripture, and not all the questions and doubts are resolved. Among
   conservatives the main point of contention is the inerrancy or
   infallibility of the Scriptures, a question that has recently vexed a
   number of institutions. Some evangelical scholars have long debated whether
   affirmations of the Bible as "the only rule of faith and practice" embrace
   historical and scientific facts also, or whether Scriptural reliability in
   the latter area is inconsequential. (37)

But, despite the arguments over Daniel Fuller's theology at Fuller, the issue had not seemed divisive. The first and second generations of evangelicals seemed able to find ways to live with their differences. But Lindsell's book broke this peace. Carl F. H. Henry called it a theological "atom bomb that destroys as many evangelical friends and foes." (38) And it marked the beginning of a series of theological battles on the right. Philip Thorne notes:

   Various attempts to analyze this battle have occurred, but the important
   point is that American Evangelicalism in the seventies reached "an impasse"
   on the interpretation of biblical authority. Some institutions and
   denominations developed new doctrinal statements or position papers
   designed to include a range of opinion on the subject (Fuller Seminary,
   Christian Reformed Church, Wesleyan Theological Society). Others revised
   doctrinal statements to exclude broader interpretations (Assemblies of
   God), sponsored conferences to clarify and defend traditional doctrine
   (International Council on Biblical Inerrancy), or mobilized constituencies
   to gain control of educational institutions (Southern Baptist Convention).
   (39)

Thorne's mention of the Southern Baptist Convention was not incidental. Unlike Carl F. H. Henry, who spent much of his life within the Northern Baptist Convention, Lindsell was ordained at Columbia, South Carolina, and considered himself a Southern Baptist throughout his career. In both the Battle for the Bible and The Bible in the Balance, Lindsell devoted a chapter to Southern Baptist developments. (40)

The inclusion of Southern Baptists in Lindsell's list, nonetheless, seems somewhat strange. Southern Baptists had rarely identified with the classical fundamentalist movement, even at the height of the evolutionary controversy in the 1920s, and they had avoided any affiliation with other Christians, whether liberal or conservative, throughout their history. In part, this was due to a profound isolationism that encouraged many Southern Baptists to believe in Landmarkism with its doctrine that Baptist churches had existed since the days of the apostles. In addition to Landmarkism, two other factors had sustained the Southern Baptist belief that they were somehow special, a people apart. The first was the relative cultural isolation of the South until well after World War II. Intellectual and cultural issues did not hit the South with quite the same force as they impacted the North. Thus, although Southern Baptist theologians read liberal theology and critiqued it from 1920 to 1950, no serious liberal movement developed in the convention during that period. The second factor was equally important. Southern Baptists were almost uniquely self-contained theologically. Their string of seminaries, which by the 1950s stretched from California to North Carolina, educated approximately half of the protestant seminary students in the nation. Only rarely did they have to step outside their own system for teachers or, since many Southern Baptists were prolific writers, for theological literature. Almost all Southern Baptist faculty had at least one degree from a Southern Baptist seminary, and most were completely educated within Southern Baptist circles. Was the Southern Baptist disruption in the 1980s part of the larger pattern of debate within conservative circles that followed the publication of the Battle of the Bible?

As with any attempt to relate Southern Baptists to larger patterns within American religion, the answer must be yes and no. The answer might be a qualified yes since it was the same issue, biblical inerrancy, and some of the leaders in the larger evangelical debate were part of the discussion. For example, The Conference on Biblical Inerrancy, held by the Convention in 1987, included Mark Noll, Clark Pinnock, Kenneth Kantzer, James Packer, and Millard Erickson, all prominent evangelical leaders with experience in the larger debate.

Yet, the answer might be a qualified no as well. Southern Baptists had been battling over the Bible periodically since the 1920s, and those debates had often revolved around the historicity of the biblical books. The 1960s were dominated, for example, by convention debates over Genesis. But, the earlier Southern Baptist battles over the Bible appear to have their own causes, largely internal to Baptists in the South, and not to be related to other debates.

In that sense, the Southern Baptist battle over inerrancy was similar to the equally disruptive battle in the Missouri Synod. Like the Southern Baptist Convention, the Missouri Lutheran conflict had important points of contact with the debate among evangelicals. Further, like the Southern Baptists, Lindsell included the Synod in the Battle of the Bible. Yet, as in the case of the Southern Baptists, Missouri had its own convoluted history that included, like the Southern Baptists, isolation from larger theological trends and a theological tradition, Lutheran Confessionalism, that fueled the controversy.

Was the Southern Baptist battle over inerrancy in the 1980s a part of the larger evangelical battle that accompanied the generational change between neo-evangelicals and young evangelicals? The vagueness of the answer to that question reflects a larger dilemma in the study of American religion. In the United States, there are often large theological trends, such as revivalism, neo-orthodoxy, and liberalism, that influence many denominations at roughly the same period. The historian is tempted to write the religious history of the nation in terms of these large-scale movements that seem to unify the American Babel of churches, denominations, sects, parachurch bodies, and theological positions. But, we must be careful to note, at the same time, that these larger movements must themselves be incarnate in communities of faith, and that sometimes that incarnation is less than perfect. At times, for various cultural and religious reasons, the same issues may arise in very different communities. While there are certainly theological and cultural links between the Baptist conflicts, particularly in the South, and the larger post-1976 battles among the successors of the neo-evangelicals, the two sets of battles were not necessarily the same.

Perhaps this is why the outcome of those battles seems so different today. Among Southern Baptists and Missouri Synod Lutherans, the most rigorous type of conservatism seems to have won. By and large, those who wanted to explore the Bible in another way have either voluntarily or not so voluntarily left. Among those who were more clearly the descendants of the neo-evangelicals, the results are not nearly as conclusive. Despite the intense debates over redaction criticism among present-day evangelical scholars, (41) a believing biblical criticism appears to be increasingly accepted among American religious conservatives. Further, most American conservatives had moved decisively toward the type of larger cooperation with other Christians originally advocated by the neo-evangelical movement. Perhaps the best evidence of this is that present-day evangelical seminaries work together with other theological schools in the Association of Theological Schools. Despite the fact that evangelical members of the association often differ from non-evangelicals on crucial issues, the rancor appears to be more a part of fundamentalism's past than evangelicalism's future. If so, then those elements of neo-evangelicalism that were drawn from the Baptist heritage may have made a major contribution to the church as a whole. (42)

Endnotes

(1.) Cited in Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: the Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 201.

(2.) Cited in David Lee Russell, "Coming to Grips with the Age of Reason: An Analysis of the New Evangelical Intellectual Agenda, 1942-1970" (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1993) 83.

(3.) Alister McGrath, Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity (InterVarsity press: Downer's Grove, Ill., 1995), 77

(4.) Dirk Jellema "Ethics" in Carl F. H. Henry, Contemporary Evangelical Thought (Great Neck, N.Y.: Channel Press, 1957), 133

(5.) The new periodical, as Graham envisioned it, would "plant the evangelical flag in the middle of the road, taking a conservative theological position but a definite liberal approach to social problems. It would combine the best in liberalism and the best in fundamentalism without compromising theologically." George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company), 158. Graham had recently ended the segregation of his crusades in the South.

(6.) See Joel Carpenter, "Contending for the Faith Once Delivered: Primitivist Impulses in American Fundamentalism," Richard Hughes, ed., The American Quest for the Primitive Church (Urbana: the University of Illinois Press, 1988), 99-119.

(7.) Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988), 137.

(8.) George Alan Ladd, The Blessed Hope (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956). See also his Crucial Questions about the Kingdom of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952). For an excellent discussion of the issues from an evangelical perspective, see Millard Erickson, Contemporary Options in Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1977; rev. ed. 1998)

(9.) Historian George Dollar, A History of Fundamentalism in America (Greenville: Bob Jones University Press, 1973), has traced the history of this type of separatist fundamentalism in the United States. Estimates of the number of separatist fundamentalists vary, but Dollar and others believe that these churches have about 1 million members. If so, they represent only a small fraction of those holding conservative or even fundamentalist views.

(10.) Carl F. H. Henry, "Twenty Years a Baptist," Foundations 1 (January 1958), 46-54. Cited in L. Russ Bush and Tom J. Nettles, Baptists and the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980), 360.

(11.) In the nineteenth century, the Evangelical Alliance had been the largest and most influential ecumenical organization among Anglo-American Protestants. Unlike the later Councils of Churches, the Alliance permitted individuals to be members.

(12.) Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 6 vols. (Waco: Word Books, 1976-1983). Henry's understanding of biblical inerrancy is not presented as either characteristic or even representative of neo-evangelical views on the Bible. Where Henry was representative was in his belief that some forms of biblical criticism had to be used in interpreting Scripture. For views of inerrancy among evangelicals, see Robert K. Johnson, Evangelicals at an Impasse (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979).

(13.) For a discussion of Henry's aims and goals in volume 4, the key volume on the interpretation of inerrancy, see Bob E. Patterson, Carl F. H. Henry (Waco: Word books, 1983), 103-26.

(14.) Bernard Ramm, Protestant Biblical Interpretation: A Textbook of Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, Third Edition, 1970), 290. It should be noted that Wilbur Smith, one of the first to leave Fuller over what some perceived as a weakening of the doctrine of biblical authority, wrote the preface to the book and that Ramm, who was loyal to the Convention throughout his ministry, dedicated the book to Dean Earl Kalland of Conservative Baptist Seminary in Denver, the school of those who left the Northern Baptist Convention in 1948.

(15.) In an e-mail conversation about conservative seminaries in the 1920s and 1930, Joel Carpenter suggested that the political distinction between progressives and populists might also be useful in discussing conservative Christianity. I have found the metaphor useful.

(16.) Roger Nicole, "Theology," in Carl F. H. Henry, Contemporary Evangelical Thought (Great Neck, N.Y.; Channel Press, 1957), 105.

(17.) The title of the festscrift for Carl Henry was God and Culture: Essays in Honor of Carl F. H. Henry, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge.

(18.) See John Adams, "The Making of a Neo-evangelical Statesman: The Case of Harold John Ockenga" (Ph.D. diss., Baylor University, 1994), 144-49.

(19.) Marsden, op. cit., 22.

(20.) Donald Dayton, "The Search for the Historical Evangelicalism: George Marsden's History of Fuller Seminary as a Case Study," Christian Scholar's Review, 23, no. 1, 1033.

(21.) Fundamentalists characteristically feared the establishment of a consolidated Protestant church and favored the competition and clash between denominations as a way of preserving and honoring doctrinal truth.

(22.) See, for instance, James D. Mosteller, "Something Old--Something New: The First Fifty Years of Northern Baptist Theological Seminary," Foundations 8 (January 1965): 2648.

(23.) Gilbert Guffin, What God Hath Wrought (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1960), 43

(24.) Nathan Wood, A School of Christ (Boston: Gordon College, 1953).

(25.) There were teachers and trustees who accepted this position, but it was never written into the confessional or other documents governing the schools.

(26.) At Northern, Strong was included on a list of the heroes of the faith whose theology formed the foundation of the seminary's own tradition. The list included John A. Broadus, Augustus Strong, A. J. Gordon, Henry G. Weston, B. H. Carroll, A. H. Newman, H. C. Mabie, and Francis Wayland. See Warren Cameron Young, Commit What You Have Heard: A History of Northern Baptist Theological Seminary (Harold Shaw Publishers: Wheaton, Ill.) 1988, 58.

(27.) Carl F. H. Henry, Confessions of a Theologian: An Autobiography (Waco: Word Books, 1986).

(28.) Grant Wacker, Augustus Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985), 125.

(29.) Augustus Strong, The Autobiography of Augustus Hopkins Strong, ed. Crerar Douglas (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1981), 349, 340. Strong's reservations about historical criticism were not new. As early as the 1880s, he was expressing his reservations about the new tendencies. Wacker comments:

   He was certain that the notion of inspiration was worthless if it did not
   mean that Scripture had been preserved from all error--which meant, of
   course, that the Bible originated wholly outside the normal modes of
   cultural change. "We do not admit the existence of scientific errors in the
   Scripture," he flatly asserted, and he devoted a sizable part of the first
   edition of his Systematic Theology to a refutation of alleged flaws and
   inconsistencies.

Wacker, Augustus Strong, 51

(30.) Augustus Strong, American Poets and Their Theology (Philadelphia: Griffith and Rowland Press, 1916).

(31.) Many attended Harvard while teaching at Gordon. Henry helped to pay for his summer work at Boston University in the same way.

(32.) Carl F. H. Henry, Conversations with Carl Henry: Christianity for Today (Lewiston/Weenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), 118

(33.) Cited in Wacker, Augustus Strong, 105.

(34.) For a similar analysis, see Richard Quebedeaux, "Conservative and Charismatic Developments of the Later Twentieth Century," Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience 2 (1988): 963-76

(35.) Donald Jacobson, "The Rise of Evangelical Hermeneutical Pluralism," Christian Scholars' Review 16, no. 4: 329.

(36.) J. Ramsey Michaels, Servant and Son: Jesus in Parable and Gospel (Atlanta: J. Knox Press, 1981).

(37.) Carl Henry, Frontiers in Modern Theology: A Critique of Contemporary Trends (Chicago: Moody Press, 1964), 127.

(38.) Henry, Conversations with Carl Henry, 24.

(39.) Phillip R. Thorne, Evangelicalism and Karl Barth: His Reception and Influence in North American Evangelical Theology (Allison Park, Penn.: Pickwick Publications, 1995), 23.

(40.) Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), chapter 5, and The Bible in the Balance. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979).

(41.) "Redaction Criticism: Is It worth the Risk?" Christianity Today, October 12, 1985.

(42.) I have often thought that one of the tragedies of the 1980s Baptist battles in the South was that the convention moved from the debates over Genesis in the 1960s and 1970s directly into the debate over biblical inerrancy. It was as though the churches jumped from the issues that were characteristic of fundamentalism directly to the issues of the 1970s without an intervening period in which some group, like the neo-evangelicals, could have developed a more meditating position that might have stood the test of controversy.

Glenn T. Miller is Waldo Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Bangor Theological Seminary, Bangor, Maine.