Awakening the Evangelical Mind:
An Intellectual History of the Neo-Evangelical Movement,
by Owen Strachan, Zondervan, 2015. Kindle edition
On my study bookshelves I have at
least one commentary on each book of the Bible. More again if you count Kindle
and Logos editions. Most are scholarly works by Evangelical writers. Then there
are countless theological titles dealing with a wide variety of subjects from
the atonement to apologetics, historical works, and so on. Many have been
published in the last 30 or 40 years by notable Evangelical scholars. These writers
are in turn the product of world class Evangelical theological schools and seminaries.This abundance of literary riches would have amazed postwar Evangelicals. Today we tend to take it for granted.
I finished reading this a while back, yet never got round to writing up a review until now. Must have slipped my mind. It was a 'fits and starts' read, anyway. Not that it wasn't any good, but I bought it cheap, a Kindle special offer and tended only to look at it occasionally. Like when I found myself hanging around for some reason or other, and wanted something to read to redeem what otherwise would have been wasted time.
In the 1930s and 40s theological academia was dominated by Liberal scholarship. Evangelicals working in the field were few and far between. Fundamentalists tended to view scholarly pursuits with some suspicion. They stuck to the Bible, stuck it to the Liberals, and that was about it. The trouble with that anti-intellectual approach was that it left Evangelical students bereft of the tools they needed to give a cogent defense of their beliefs in the academic world. Thankfully, the same cannot be said now.
In this title Owen Strachan tells the story of how the founders Neo-Evangelicalism helped to reawaken the Evangelical mind. With the support of Billy Graham, Harold John Ockenga and Carl F. H. Henry led the way. Between them they founded institutions such as the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Seminary and the magazine, Christianity Today. Scholars such as Edward John Carnell, Kenneth Kantzer, John H. Gerstner, and George Eldon Ladd added their weight to the movement. They had big plans to capture the commanding heights of academia for the gospel. New books were published and older writers like Jonathan Edwards were rediscovered. The 'Neos' were self-consciously different to the 'Fundies' in their approach. Henry's The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism attacked the truncated world view of the Fundamentalists.
Not all of the Neo-Evangelicals ambitions were realised, and today's Evangelicalism is not without its challenges in the academic world. Holding to the authority Scripture, substitutionary atonement and the new birth is never going to be fashionable in any generation. But that is where we stand. Carl Henry was a revered figure at London Seminary where I trained for the ministry (1988-90). His books were warmly recommended by the faculty. The Evangelical elder statesman visited the seminary when I was there and gave a talk on the doctrine of Scripture.
In a conclusion Strachan draws some helpful lessons from his study that are worth pondering. We owe a debt of gratitude to the likes of Henry and Ockenga, without whom pastors' bookshelves would be less well stocked than they are today. May this account of their efforts serve to inspire contemporary Evangelicals to rise to the intellectual challenges of our post-modern, pluralistic and secular age, 2 Corinthians 10:5.
In a conclusion Strachan draws some helpful lessons from his study that are worth pondering. We owe a debt of gratitude to the likes of Henry and Ockenga, without whom pastors' bookshelves would be less well stocked than they are today. May this account of their efforts serve to inspire contemporary Evangelicals to rise to the intellectual challenges of our post-modern, pluralistic and secular age, 2 Corinthians 10:5.
