The Gospel in a Pluralistic Age

The Gospel in a Pluralistic Age: An Application to Our Current Theological Condition

When I had initially read through The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society in the late 1990s, I was not then in a position to give Newbigin’s argument the sustained attention that it merits. I view it now for the pivotal role it can potentially play, along with Barth’s “strange new world within the Bible” toward a revitalization of mainline Protestantism in discerningly placing the Word at the apex of the relationship with the World. What has moved me in this direction is the fuller realization that regardless as to what stance one takes on any number of positions, the faith dimension that gives shape to what becomes viewed as relevant knowledge (metanarrative construal) is inescapable, and is based on values. That is a partial explanation.

The other facet is a deeper experience with contemporary secular thought and value orientation and finding them wanting in substantial ways. This is not to deny the possibility of some dissimulation on my part in taking a leap based on an earlier conversion experience to Christianity that I may have at some level tendentiously sought to appropriate as a way of smoothing over tension points that may well have required closer examination. I cannot categorically deny that. Neither would I want to overly stress its possibility in that the various and countervailing streams of motivation are often more complex than we can readily fathom. Despite the lack of certainty amidst the seemingly never ending stream of questions that if pursued to their “logical” conclusions seldom come to exhausting resolution, one does have to choose on where one places one’s ultimate concern. Such decisions, however unconsciously processed are based on reasons which involve an intuitive element, a leap of faith, an inescapable reality in any event. I would like to think too, that the small still voice of God’s Holy Spirit was in the midst of this probing, however invariably mixed with the peculiarities of my own idiosyncratic searching.

To state it more affirmatively, a persisting faith in the durability and ultimate truth of the biblical revelation, its transcendent depth, and the prospect of personal intimacy with God through Christ, however partially experienced, seemed in the most fundamental sense a resource upon which I could rely unconditionally. That is, if I gave this incarnational vision something of the fullness of attention that any reorganization of one’s life on these grounds would, by definition warrant. That is so, on faith, given a belief in “a God who is there” upon which one can, in concert with a mighty cloud of witnesses claim as an ultimate reality, however infinite the gap remains between ontological assertion and any epistemological warrant this side of the eschaton. With this clearer mindset in place, a re-echoing of an earlier evangelical worldview, I have become better able to appropriate Newbigin’s challenging reconstruction of reality and more appreciative of the important role that, if I may put it this way, his Barthian turn could play in revitalizing mainline Protestantism on its own foundational faith claims.

Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998) was no fundamentalist. As a 20th century British missionary, Newbigin was keenly appreciative of the intellectual diversity of European culture and the importance of interfaith dialogue. He was well attuned to the dominant “plausibility structures” of the pluralistic society he inhabited at home and abroad and the prevailing incongruity of any claims to a faith based on the “radical particularity” of Christ revealed as the incarnate Son of the Lord, God, as professed in orthodox Christian doctrine. Sorely tempted by what he referred to as “reasonable Christianity,” “one that could be defended on the terms of my whole intellectual foundation as an Englishman,” Newbigin ultimately became convinced that in his accommodation to the prevailing precepts of the culture he was “guilty” of nothing less than “domesticating the gospel.” This realization was no mere fob, but the result of a profound probing into the logic of contemporary thought and culture, and drawing the conclusion that metanarrative, or storied construction of reality (including the postmodern one) was inescapable regardless of position held. For Newbigin, radical adherence to the Christian faith necessitated rejection of the dominant plausibility structures of our secular age in which the triple values of relativism, rationalism, and pluralism were held with absolute-like tenacity in which any religion claimed as truth could not stand.

Turning the postmodern argument on its head, Newbigin argued that there is no Archimedean point or foundational knowledge to ground absolute claims. In this respect there is a substantial difference between his view and Schaeffer’s even as both share a broad resonance in evangelical orthodoxy. Consequently, all knowledge claims, even those grounded on science, reason, common, or critical sense, have an irreducibly faith-based component, which requires acceptance in order to enter into the pathway of what they reveal about human experience. This fallibilistic stance is an irreducible component of all knowledge. What moves claims beyond the “merely” subjective is the commitment to and the evidence provided that any truth assertion makes as possessing universal validity even if the faith chosen (e.g. science) overshoots, as it must, any actual proof. In this respect, the dictum of pragmatic philosopher, Charles Peirce that in the long run, honest and rigorous inquiry among committed investigators will lead to a closer approximation of the truth, is the best for which we can hope. This, for Christianity in the most radical sense is the apocalyptic consummation in the eschatological coming of Christ and the ushering in of the New Jerusalem.

Whether on the side of science or religion, absolute certainty is beyond the purview of the human grasp, although one can, and actually must make absolute truth claims from an inescapable epistemological finitude and test them within the crucible of reality. Signs and “evidence of things unseen” is what is available for science and religion alike. For orthodox Christianity, the lack of absolute certainty on the grounds of knowledge is the result of our residence between the “not yet” symbolized in the Second Coming in which faith will be turned into sight and “the already” of the First Coming, as a foretaste of greater things to come. The tension between these dispensations of revelation are enduring even as the Holy Spirit mediates God’s grace in the here and now, however finitely realized any such appropriation may be. Drawing on Schaeffer, the Holy Spirit is a manifestation of the God who is there in the immediacy of our world, however evident or not his presence may seem to others as well as to self, as a small still voice.

On Newbigin’s reading, this initial entrée into human history for the purpose of “mak[ing] propitation for the sins of the people” (Heb 2:17b) provides a sufficient basis for believing in Christ as the centerpiece of human history. Reasoning is included even as questions and gaps persist, only after the step of faith as the basis for the search of surer knowledge of God is taken. In this respect, commitment to the Christian revelation is no different than adherence to the scientific method or the belief in the equal validity of all religions. What drives the specific commitment and the logic therein in the quest of knowledge is the starting place of any narrative construal.

The challenge that Newbigin sought to address was how one could come to “preach the gospel as truth, truth which is not to be domesticated within the assumptions of modern thought but which challenges these assumptions and calls for their revision.” Above all, this requires an internal source of authentication rather than any appendage to the reigning plausibility structures of our secular age that could be reduced to a mere belief or that could be explained through the “bar of reason and conscience” as determined by the premises of the prevailing cultural or scientific thinking. Such explanations in the mode of inquiry as laid out by Popper and Peirce could serve an apologetic function in conveying something of the premises of faith in idioms those outside of its boundaries might understand. Internal justification, however, can only stem from grounds intrinsic to its own innate meaning, including, “modifications which must be submitted to the judgment, in our case, of the Christian community as a whole [the community of knowledgeable inquirers in a manner analogous to the scientific community], and which may be subject to debate and dispute for many years.”

However valid a claim may be within a given tradition, regardless as to the permeability of its boundaries, the “logic” therein would not necessarily prove convincing or relevant to those outside its given framework. Such “evidence” offered, therefore, within a given “paradigm,” may not necessarily “demand a verdict” among those who remain outside its operative assumptions, however valid it may or may not be (e.g. proof offered for the physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth) for a given community of inquiring believers. Thus, beyond the apologetic function, there is an irreducible dogmatic core to the Christian faith, as there is, for example, with science, conveyed through its own inherent presuppositions that remain reasonably durable over time. Concepts evolve within a tradition that may push the boundaries of the given framework, which need to be (re)incorporated within, which for our case, I am describing as a generous orthodoxy. This is necessary to provide a definitional sharp edge against, for example, some form of gnosticism in the early centuries, or in our era, naturalistic philosophy, which cannot be accepted as normative for Christian belief even as it may be valuable in stimulating apologetic examination and theological reflection.

Thus, for Protestant Christianity, in particular, the primary claims of the New Testament canonically interpreted through the prism of the entire Bible remain the magisterial source of belief. Theology (whether academic, ecclesiastic, or lay) emerges as a secondary and necessary source of illumination, which fleshes out aspects and conclusions of the primary text within the context of historical and cultural unfolding over time. Disputes about many specifics aspects of contemporary or ancient Christian theology may or may not fall within the purview of what might be considered a generous Christian orthodoxy. That is a matter of public discernment within the household of faith in which disagreements over matters of much signification are likely to persist. However, to posit any other metanarative than the revelation of the incarnate Son of the living God as revealed first and foremost through the New Testament is to put faith in nothing less than another gospel.

In the current era, such a faith stance might be absorbed in what could be viewed as the ideology of pluralism, premised on the assumption that the various world religions provide equally valid pathways to right relationship with the living God. On this interpretation, Christianity is viewed as one pathway to the holy. This is a position I had once argued for with considerable tenacity as a self-acknowledged de-centered Christian whose primary plausibility structure resided within the realm of the secular. The stance maintained throughout this book is the Archimedean point upon which orthodox Christianity may well stand or fall; namely, the radical particularity of Christ revealed as the very Son of the living God, the “High Priest,” in whom “all the fullness [of God, the father] should dwell” (Col 1:19). This very “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15) embodied conceptually in the Incarnation as the second person of the Trinity has historically held as an essential theological reflection of the core New Testament doctrine (Jn 14:9-13). Arising out of necessity to protect the early church from various distortions of a predominantly gnostic nature, this primary belief in Jesus the Christ as the Son and the very embodiment of God in human flesh has been the prevailing source of doctrinal stabilization for almost 1900 years.

It is this “scandalous” vision in its radical particularity of God incarnate that modern liberal Protestantism has considerably muted that provoked Newbigin’s counter-response. From his point of view, as well as the one agued in this book, to accept the predominant premises of modern liberal Protestantism is to effectively uproot the very basis of the Christian revelation that God in his fullness in human flesh is embodied in no other name than the person of Jesus the Christ. Christianity, in the pluralist vision which has so attracted modern liberal Protestantism would survive as one of the great world religions. However, it would be shorn of its radical specificity, even as the Christ narrative as mythos “beyond incarnation” would be given credibility as, perhaps, a beautiful story possessing a certain appeal and revealing a certain metaphorical truth to a given community of believers.

Spong’s vision rejects any call of a Great Commission of “mak[ing] disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt. 28:19). The conversion impulse, from his perspective, is viewed as an undesirable residue of an earlier era. Moreover, in Bishop Spong’s rendition, such core theological concepts as theism, the Incarnation, and original sin would be eliminated or radically re-fashioned in the “new Christianity.”

This depiction of Spong may be seen as a caricature of liberal Protestantism, the complexity of which is far from cut from the same prefabricated cloth. My objective at this point is not to enter into the subtleties of liberal theology, with roots extending back at least to Schleiermacher. I focus on Spong because in his “new Christianity for a new world” he logically carries out some of the most radical impulses of modern Protestant liberalism. In doing so, he places into sharp relief the core orthodox claim that Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) without equivocation and remainder, however much subtlety, explication, and humility is needed to effectively argue such, and however limited and incomplete the understanding of particular expositors may be. The fundamental question that both Spong and Newbigin pose in their different ways to the liberal Protestant sector is the primary one that Christ poses to Peter; namely, “who do you say I am?” (Mt 16:13-17). Upon the cornerstone of Peter’s response, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God” (v 16), much rides, namely, the legitimacy of Christianity as a distinct religion with its own peculiar claims, the definition of salvation, and the nature and character of God.

The question, in more contemporary terms is where one places one’s “ultimate concern” (Tillich) or primary “center of value” (H.R. Niebuhr), and the role of the reigning plausibility structures of the modern secular era in giving shape to them. Newbigin takes contemporary thought with penultimate signification. Nonetheless, he posits the “more difficult [and as argued throughout this book an ultimately more satisfying] enterprise of trying to understand modern thought in light of the biblical story.” This requires much subtle theological probing and apologetic explication in which any semblance of caricature is rejected as un-Christian on its face. Any such efforts in this direction are likely to be, if not piecemeal, highly partial, although I am pushing throughout this book on the importance of grappling diligently with the issue of truth claims even those beyond epistemological certainty. What is important, at the least, is the trajectory, namely a reversal of a century’s tendency by placing the biblical revelation front and center of the mainline church’s concerns in a manner which thoroughly comes to terms with modern critical scholarship. The critical discussion between postliberal and evangelical theology is one pivotal center where such key probing is currently operative, one that serves as a touchstone for this book.

For all intents and purposes there are two alternatives. There is the direction posited by Spong in which the core tenets of orthodoxy are gutted in order to preserve something of the essence of the Christian mythos. Or there is the direction of canonically grounded, scholarly informed generous orthodoxy in which the fundamental precepts of the Bible grounded in the New Testament revelation becomes the basis for interpreting and interrogating the world. With Newbigin and Barth I posit the latter, clearly through a position of faith in search of greater knowledge and with the acknowledgment that the questions stemming from the culture have much penultimate signification. The core assumption requiring much articulation is that in Christ the pathway to universal history shaped by God’s consuming vision of New Israel is revealed even as we live “between the times” of the First and Second Coming and see in a “mirror, dimly” (1Cor 13:12). This presupposition cannot be proven by human reason, evidence, or logic, even as reason, logic and “evidence of things unseen” can and will be given. “The substance of [these] things hoped for” (Heb 11:1) is the focal point of this book.

In Quest of a Sharply Articulated Christian Identity in Light of the Challenges of a Profoundly Secular Era

There seems to be something fundamentally at odds between a sharply defined Christian identity and the basic assumptions of the contemporary era variously described as postmodern, post-industrial and post-Christian. The short of it is that the precepts of faith and those of the times in our secular age do not easily fit in with each other nor can be strictly correlated even by the most rigorous interpretative sensibility. One cannot get to faith through the pathway of human reasoning even as we are called to seek God with all our mind, as well as heart, strength, and soul, and not to quit knocking on the door of salvation until a pathway of understanding and new life in Christ is opened up. On the other side of the ledger, even a strong faith stance can seem woefully inadequate in dealing with the challenges of contemporary existence, particularly in the last century, to say nothing of its enormous evils where any notion of “God” has been evacuated from the intellectual history of the west and vast portions of its culture. From this vantage point, the Bible, theological reflection, song, Holy Communion, the preached word, and prayer can be perceived, even among those professing the Christian faith, as anachronistic or simply irrelevant to the main currents of contemporary life, however personally significant to our respective faith journeys.

This schism is a prime characteristic of 20th century Protestant thought and culture. It is expressed in its sharpest tones in the modernist-fundamentalist great divide, which continues to have an indelible influence on the relationship between faith and culture in our time. Calls for a return to the great tradition stemming out of the Protestant Reformation as a way of revitalizing a 21st century faith in such mainline denominations like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the United Methodist (UMC) Church, the Reformed Church in America (RCA), and the United Church of Christ (UCC) as advocated by Donald Bloesch and Gabriel Fackre within the UCC, can only come by way of a substantial resolution of this 20th century problem. The only way through, I argue, is by a direct grappling with the crisis in faith that was evoked in the late19th and early 20th centuries, the challenge of modernity itself, which continues to have a profound impact on contemporary Protestant culture in its varying liberal, Reformed and evangelical expressions.

The core tension throughout the Protestant culture in our contemporary setting is that between the need to push out large segments of secular identity in exchange for a firmly based biblically-grounded belief, and that of marginalizing a strong orthodox faith stance in order to achieve deep congruence with prevailing precepts of secular assumptions as the sphere which shapes so much of the identity of our personal and public lives. Various “two-world” positions as advocated by sociologist Peter Berger are also plausible which require substantial “bracketing” between the secular and religious spheres of life in which the twain only seldom meet. Even here, matters of ultimate identification are operative, even if only latently so. Regardless of one’s position in coming to terms with the realm of faith within the contemporary secular setting, there is no alternative except to stand somewhere, ultimately as an article of faith, no matter how exacting, precise, or logical one’s thinking assumes to be. In short, as H.R. Niebuhr puts it, “centers of value” cannot be avoided even in the knowledge that such centers can only fall short of their desired objective. This is the case even if one adheres to the postmodern credo that “metanarratives” are historical constructs “all the way down, which privileges history as the ultimate arbiter of human understanding. Such historicism as the final vocabulary of 20th century modernity has had a profound influence on Protestant culture throughout the last century and into the current one, particularly liberalism, but fundamentalism as well, a product itself of modernity.

In grappling with the thorny issue of one’s ultimate identity, the underlying concern remains not only the stance, but also the grounds upon which one’s choices are based. The issue of where and upon what basis one locates this identification is of no minor significance, which cannot be slid under the gaze of postmodern relativism. Wherever one places what Tillich refers to as one’s “ultimate concern,” it is one of costly faith. In terms of contemporary Protestant theology, whether lay or academic, one of the most fundamental issue upon which a great deal derives is that of Christology. To put it in the most radical of terms, and, however analogical one’s reasoning may be: the key question remains whether one’s faith is based on the unswerving belief that Jesus the Christ is the way, the truth, and the life as God incarnate in human flesh, ultimately without equivocation, which begets a corresponding need to grapple theologically with the fullest possible dimension of what this may mean. If not this incarnational Christology, the issue, however nuanced, becomes whether one places the Christian claims within the context of some other narrative constructs, particularly in the assumption that all truths are at bottom worldviews historically construed all the way down in which there can be no theological remainder.

Closely related is the deconstruction of the radical particularity of the Christian credo in the interfaith vision in which all the great faiths of the world are viewed as various pathways leading to God (or the ineffable) as reflected in different times and cultures. On this interpretation the Christian “story” has had obvious appeal in different historical contexts, including our own. However, given the triple impact of the postmodern credo, the ineradicable pluralism of contemporary culture and society, and the democratizing ethos of radical egalitarianism, any claims of ultimate religious truth, however dimly perceived based on the radical particularity of the Christian revelation are not merely considered archaic, and therefore naïve. They are also suffused with consequences, intended or otherwise, of cultural and political imperialism as reflected throughout the last two centuries in the operative assumptions of at least certain depictions of Protestant missions.

The issue, in brief, is whether the Barthian “strange new world within the Bible” absorbs the world, however subtly, or whether the “world,” that is, culture, absorbs the Bible within the precepts of its various metanarratives. If there is a dialectical tension between the two in that neither stance is absolutely clear cut, the lurking issue of ultimate identification, including the basis for whatever stance is argued remains operative. On this latter challenge there is no escape. For to evade the issue is to choose sides even in the acknowledgment that much nuance is required in the hard work of coming to terms with the ways in which the revelation of God as embodied within the Bible are refracted within and through historical experience.

On the matter of Jesus Christ, the fundamental question remains, “Who do you say I am?” In theological terms, Jesus the Christ either is or is not, to put it baldly, the Incarnation of God in human flesh as discerned first and foremost through the entire Bible refracted through the prism of the New Testament and secondarily through the theological and spiritual Christian literature throughout the ages. Equivocation on this central question of “who do you say that I am” has led to much confusion even as the result, in part, has been some very creative, and for me, at varying periods throughout my Christian odyssey, highly stimulating theological work, particularly through the insights of Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Langdon Gilkey.

The theologies that these three, particularly in the areas of myth, symbolization, and apologetics speak deeply to the challenges to which contemporary U.S. theology needs to grapple to be meaningfully appropriated by modern and postmodern adults. The rich and provocative work of these three can be dismissed by serious evangelical theology only at the latter’s peril. No doubt, as critics have well argued, an uncritical embrace of these liberal theological giants may well result in a deracination of a full bodied trinitarian orthodox Christian faith stance. This is a clear possibility, although it need not be so. The consequent tendency of evangelical theology to dismiss or at least marginalize this creative work is to disregard much that is potentially viable, which could contribute a great deal toward a faithful revitalization of Christian orthodoxy in our time, in a manner that can also speak meaningfully to the culture.

The challenge in my view is that of adhering rigorously to the “strange new world within the Bible” as the operative standard of Christian faith. This includes drawing in as much as possible from the best insights of theological liberalism in a manner that enhances what Brian McLaren refers to as a “generous orthodoxy.” This would be based on a canonical framework that views “all scripture” as “given by inspiration of God, and” therefore, “profitable for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness that the man [and woman] of God may be complete for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16). This would require, on my assessment, the mutual objective of taking the Bible with extreme seriousness as a primary canonical resource in all matters related to faith without the necessity of embracing a rigid doctrine of a scriptural inerrancy. The search for greater interpretive scriptural clarity and discernment of the Word would, in turn, be an essential component of an ongoing dialogue between postliberal and contemporary evangelical perspectives in which I seek to situate this text.

Any imaginative exorcism of the modernist-fundamentalist divide as a proximate goal entails separating out as much as possible what is essential from what is beside the point or even outright dubious within 20th century US fundamentalist, evangelical, and liberal theology. This would include a more discerning depiction of theological liberalism within evangelical theology and a deeper appreciation for the centrality of the Bible as a primary source of revelation within the mainline sector as reflected in miniature in the current discourse between postliberal and evangelical theology. The judgment of what the tipping points in 20th century theology are is obviously mine, as discussed throughout the book, although more than simply “my opinion” in a narrowly subjective sense. In the effort to move beyond mere subjectivism, through close historical, biblical, and theological analysis, I seek to establish a solid grounding within the key discourses of contemporary religious culture in a manner that moves toward what the philosopher Karl Popper refers to as “objective knowledge.” As put by Popper:

"We can never rationally justify a theory—that is, a claim to know its truth—but we can, if we are lucky, rationally justify a preference for one theory out of a set of competing theories, for the time being; that is, with respect to the present state of the discussion. And our justification, though not a[n absolute] claim that the theory is true, can be the claim that there is every indication at this stage of the discussion that the theory is a better approximation to the truth [italics in original] than any competing theory so far proposed.”

It is with such a degree of what Popper refers to as “versimilitude” that I seek to defend the view that a canonically comprehensive understanding of the biblical story in its various narrative and dogmatic articulations through the New Testament lens can serve as a cogent and highly imaginative baseline for the potential revitalization of contemporary Protestant theology. The existential matter of meaning is also crucially important, which can be shortchanged only at much loss. In the most fundamental and Barthian sense, the existential matter of faith would serve in a ministerial role, and therefore, however much in dialogue, in service to the biblical revelation itself, of, in the language of Francis Schaeffer, “the God who is there,” as proclaimed in Scripture. The theological task requires much discernment in the working out of the tensions among these competing sources of revelation that have given shape to so much of 20th century Protestant thought and popular religious culture, complicated further in the realization that any cognitive claim invariably overshoots its appropriation in which world-word interaction can only be more complex than what can be possibly described in words.

The crucial matter of “centers of values,” pointing to the indubitableness of ultimate vocabulary and identity is inescapable. Unless mainline theology is able to come to terms, however subtly with its most formative religious identification, the specter of relativism and syncretism; more fundamentally, the ubiquity of history as ultimate discourse through which revelation is sifted, can only continue to plague such denominations as the United Church of Christ (UCC) and the United Methodist Church (UMC), the two that I know best. In such a mindset, faith claims can only be contextualized within the frame of their varying historical perspectives rendering any notion of truth as utterly devoid of meaning on its face. I do not argue that one can escape historical finitude. I do maintain that any privileging of historical interpretation over that of the universal message embedded throughout the New Testament on the central redemptive role of Christ as God incarnate in human flesh gives to the former a sense of absolutism which itself requires attenuation in the light of the latter, for the very survival of Christianity as a distinct religion based on its own metanarrative claims.

Given the finitude and fallibility of human nature, this call for a certain level of theological exactitude does not mean that equivocation will not take place, for we do see in a “mirror, dimly.” However subtle the work required to flesh out the core claim that Jesus is Lord, if accepted as foundational revelatory truth, then the consequences of Christ in whom “dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col 2:9) needs to be addressed and implications for missions, evangelism, apologetics, interfaith dialogue, and discourse with the “world” drawn. This primary issue of “who do you say I am” requires square facing by the Protestant mainline. This is my core thesis, for if any other name or title than Lord Jesus Christ, Israel’s Messiah is given, then what is in jeopardy is Christianity itself as a sharply distinctive faith. There are clearly schools of contemporary theology that move in this direction of other naming and I encourage those who seek to travel this pathway to continue to flesh out the logic of such assumptions, including the fruit thereof derived. My objective is to lay out to the best of my ability the implications of a vision based on the most generous orthodoxy that I can possibly discern consistent with a fully-embodied theology of Scripture, clearly an ideal, in which the latter serves as the interpretive lens to define the parameters of the former.

In the process, triumphalism, the temptation of fundamentalism, will need to be avoided. So, too will a too easy accommodation with what Hinkle refers to as “privatization, pluralization, and rationalization,” the ethos of modernity/postmodernity, the primary temptation of Protestant liberalism. Such work will need to proceed with consummate sensibility to other perspectives, even those within Christianity which posit a more “metaphorical” interpretation of the fundamental tenets “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). However incomplete human understanding remains, ultimate identifications are still required; for any effort to escape the issue of the radical particularity of the Christian revelation is to posit an absolutism of some sort even if it is that of “self-evident” acceptance of pluralization, hence the relativism, and radical historicism of human knowledge.

The argument that I seek to lay out is grounded on the assumption that the most radical faithfulness to the religious tradition founded on the revelation of Jesus the Christ requires a thorough embrace of the Bible as a holistic canonical text. This necessitates a reading that is both generous and textually faithful to the core precepts of the biblical claims about God, Christ, and humankind as the principal basis for serious mainline-evangelical encounter as a potential baseline for Protestant revitalization in the very midst of the challenges posed by modernity, postmodernity, globalization, and the marginality of Christian identity in the contemporary setting.

Any intentional shift in this direction will require some fundamental recasting of at least a few key assumptions of mainline and evangelical sectors, particularly those that fuel the persisting culture war in both its hot and cold formats which stem from the modernist/fundamental splits of the early 20th century. Many of the specific issues that shook Protestantism to its core in the earlier decades of the last century have seeped into the background. I contend that there remains an enduring culture lag in their continuing influence on the collective consciousness of both sectors in contemporary Protestant theology and culture that will need to be substantially resolved before denominations such as the UCC and the UMC will be able to embrace a 21st century based Reformation-derived revitalization of its theology, ecclesiology, and sense of core identity. Any such an effort may be improbable if not downright quixotic, yet, arguably, one worthy of the most rigorous and faithful pursuit, at the very least as a rigorous theological ideal.

There will be many within and without the mainline denominations who will argue that this is not a viable direction. I will take the position that it is the only plausible pathway for Protestant renewal in a manner that is most faithful to the original revelation of Jesus the Christ as Israel’s Messiah and the early church’s Trinitarian theology, in which equivocation places the radical uniqueness of Christianity itself in much doubt. However, much clearing of the ground is needed if mainline denominations or even substantial subsets within them are able to move in this avowedly orthodox direction at the dawn of the 21st century, as there remain many forces militating against such an effort. There are various ways of proceeding. The heart of the book is a detailed examination of the theology of Scripture and corresponding theology of God of five key contemporary expositors, which provides one critical way in of examining the various tensions within 20th century U.S. Protestantism. As prelude I lay out a highly selective survey of key issues in 20th century Protestant theology, which have given shape to the issues discussed throughout the book. I conclude this initial chapter with a discussion of Lesslie Newbigin’s, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society through which I lay out in more detail my core argument.