Jay Tolson has done a truly excellent job in surveying the modern evangelical scene. He has also asked an excellent question, what would have Jonathan Edwards thought?
What would Jonathan Edwards think of suburban Chicago's Willow Creek Community Church, where every weekend some 17,000 congregants arrive in their Chevy Tahoes and Toyota minivans to worship in the enormous brick-and-glass auditorium? More specifically, what would the 18th-century Puritan preacher who penned the fire-and-brimstone sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" make of "seeker-friendly" services that use "drama, multimedia, and contemporary music" to serve "individuals checking out what it really means to have a personal relationship with Jesus"? Gazing across the packed rows, would Edwards recognize the modern face of the religious movement that he played such a key role in launching?
On the 300th anniversary of the great theologian's birth, the questions are hardly academic. From Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., to Bellevue Baptist Church outside Memphis, evangelical megachurches dot the American landscape like the Wal-Marts, Home Depots, and other big-box stores that so many of them resemble. But this is only the most visible sign of the growing sway of evangelical Christianity, a tradition that includes both the Pentecostal and Southern Baptist churches, as well as an ever growing array of nondenominational and even some mainline Protestant congregations.
Edwards for the most part would be generally pleased. He would be pleased with evangelicalism's emphasis on authentic experience (cf. Treatise on Religious Affections) and also its theory of engaging contemporary society (cf. On Being where Edwards took on Locke and Berkeley). Edwards would not be as pleased with Fundamentalism.
Starting in the late 19th century, however, waves of new immigrants and an assortment of intellectual challenges from Darwinism to "modernist" theology began edging evangelicals from their place at the center of American life. In reaction, a core of the faithful adopted a hypermoralistic, biblically literalist, and anti-intellectual stance that came to be known as fundamentalism. In the 1940s, more open-minded carriers of the torch, including Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry (founding editor of Christianity Today), broke with the bunker mentality and attempted to reconnect with the larger culture. Abandoning the apocalyptic scenarios of the fundamentalists and much of their anti-intellectual baggage, they broadened their appeal, often reaching out to Christians in mainline Protestant churches and even to Catholics. Fundamentalism didn't just disappear; many highly visible leaders and televangelists remain of that tendency. But it is now only one current within a larger movement. "We are back to a situation in which evangelicalism dominates our culture," says Wolfe. "But that doesn't mean `fundamentalist.' It means revivalist, personalist, therapeutic, entrepreneurial--the megachurch."
The anti-intellectualism of Fundamentalism would have driven Edwards batty. There are those who are historians of evangelicalism that charge that it also eschews the intellectual. For example:
Evangelical scholars and intellectuals especially lament the decline of the evangelical mind since the generation of Edwards. During the last century in particular, says Wheaton College's Noll, "Christian reasoning as a whole, through use of the Bible, theology, and doctrine, simply hasn't measured up. The scandal of the evangelical thinking is that there is not enough of it, and that which exists is not up to the standards that Edwards established."
I think that assessment is a little harsh. Noll is thinking of such popularizers as Rick Warren (The Purpose-Driven Church). But, Edwards was also a popularizer. Edwards believed that the faith should be understandable. This resulted in the vivid metaphors in Edwards' most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Noll and Marsden want an academia-friendly evangelicalism. Edwards wants something that the people could get (contrast his sermons to the Native Americans in Western Massachussetts with those in Northampton).
Tolson concludes that evangelicalism is quite healthy and that health is at least partially attributed to a man born three hundred years ago. Rick Warren notes that his life verse is Acts 13:36 where David served God's purposes for his generation, combining the eternal with the contemporary. That is the challenge of modern evangelicalism.
For all the faults that Edwards might have found in them, however, contemporary evangelical Christians continue to exhibit a quality that he would have considered paramount: They are serious about their religion and seriously concerned about the authenticity of their faith. Listen to Nick Giordano, 46, a pork-industry lobbyist who lives in Northern Virginia and is a member of an evangelically oriented Episcopal congregation. This father of three prefers not to quibble about the label "evangelical" but says there is something about his practice of Christianity that demands taking the example of Christ seriously. "It's impossible to do that if you don't hang out with him, and you can't do that unless you read the Bible. And you don't hear from him through the Holy Spirit if you are selectively cutting things out of your Bible."
Such seriousness about the business of faith may be one reason why evangelical churches are expanding while many mainline Protestant churches shrink. "I think what is happening within the Christian world," says Solomon of McLean Bible Church, "is that going through the motions of being a Christian is something that is passe, outmoded, and no longer necessary. Increasingly, there is evangelicalism and secularism, and if you're not going to be evangelical, why play the game at all?"
