"Re-Imagining" the Princeton mind: Postconservative Evangelicalism, Old Princeton, and the rise of Neo-Fundamentalism

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2002 by Helseth, Paul Kjoss

I. INTRODUCTION

It has become something of an article of faith in the historiography of American Christianity that the theologians at Old Princeton Seminary were scholastic rationalists whose doctrine of Scripture was shaped by the Scottish Common Sense Realism of the "Didactic Enlightenment" in America.1 "The standard line," Roger Schultz notes, "is that in battling the skeptics of the Enlightenment, Scottish realists demanded an extreme (and unbiblical) standard of authority and certainty, and that the Princetonians incorporated this rationalistic element in their inerrantist doctrine of scripture."2 According to the accepted wisdom, then, Old Princeton's doctrine of inerrancy-the taproot of what is considered to be its rather immodest dogmatism-"is not a Biblical doctrine, but rather a bastard ideology of the Enlightenment"3 that was woven into the fabric of its highly, innovative yet thoroughly modern and epistemologically naive response to "an increasingly secular culture, on the one hand, and a rising liberal Christianity, on the other."4

1. The postconservative endorsement of the historiographical consensus. While a growing body of scholarship is establishing that Old Princeton's indebtedness to the naive realism of the Scottish philosophy is more imagined than real,5 many evangelicals nonetheless endorse the broad outline of the standard critique.6 Among those who resonate with the historiographical consensus are those ostensibly irenic individuals who presume that the essence of evangelicalism is found not in "propositional truths enshrined in doctrines," but rather in "a narrative-shaped experience"7 that "is more readily 'sensed' than described theologically."8 Believing that Christianity is primarily a life and only secondarily a doctrine, these evangelicals lament what Gary Dorrien calls "the fundamentalist evangelical establishment['s]"9 enduring preoccupation with "questions of propositional truth,"10 for such preoccupation, they contend, is evidence that much of evangelicalism has yet to move beyond the mindset engendered by wrenching struggles of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early twentieth century. Indeed, having wed themselves to Old Princeton's doctrine of inerrancy and thereby to the more divisive tendencies of a scholasticized theology,11 conservative evangelicals, these postconservatives maintain, "have exaggerated the rationalistic dimension of Christian belief"12 and thus have fallen prey to a kind of theological hubris-even bigotry-that threatens to plunge evangelicalism "back toward fundamentalism."13

Because they are convinced that all cognitive expressions of Christian experience "reflect the particular cultural grid in which they were originally articulated,"14 and because they consequently agree with Alfred Lord Tennyson that "Our little systems have their day ... and thou, O Lord, are more than they,"15 postconservative evangelicals therefore advocate a "revisioning" of the theological task along the lines of "the postliberal research program."16 Evangelicalism will become something more than "fundamentalism with good manners,"17 they contend, only when evangelicals recognize that doctrines are not "timeless and culture-free" summaries of biblical truth that form the cognitive foundation of faith.18 Rather, they are "reflection[s] on the faith of the converted people of God whose life together is created and shaped by the paradigmatic narrative embodied in scripture."19 Doctrines, as such, are not to be afforded the same exalted status as the experiential "ethos" that unites the disparate elements of the evangelical community into a single body of faith.20 Rather, they must be treated as those secondary reflections on Christian experience "that reflect and guide the converted community of God's people."21

2. The unsustainability of the historiographical consensus and the crumbling foundation of non-foundational theology. Whatever the merits of postconservatism's move away from a "propositionalist understanding of the theological enterprise"22 toward a "narrativist-communitarian model" of theology might be,23 there is no disputing that postconservatives justify this transition in part by rejecting what they regard as the "Enlightenment foundationalist rationalism" of the Princeton Theology.24 "Beneath and behind the postconservatives' approach to theology," Roger Olson argues, "lies a growing discontent with evangelical theology's traditional ties to what Wheaton historian Mark Noll describes as the `evangelical Enlightenment,' especially common-sense realism."25 While most postconservatives acknowledge that the Princeton theologians were not fundamentalists themselves,26 they nonetheless argue that Old Princeton's scholastic rationalism-itself the necessary byproduct of the Princetonians' somewhat credulous endorsement of Scottish Realism27-was "mediated" to contemporary evangelicalism through the fundamentalism of the early twentieth century.28 Turn-of-the-- century fundamentalists endorsed Old Princeton's doctrine of inerrancy and thereby accommodated the legacy of Protestant scholastic rationalism, postconservatives contend, and this legacy, in turn, has been passed on to all those whose decidedly cognitive concerns lead them to seek "an invulnerable foundation for theology in an error-free Bible, viewed as the storehouse for divine revelation."29 "Nowhere is neo-evangelicalism's genesis in fundamentalism more evident," Grenz concludes, "than in its theology. The fundamentalist acceptance of the Princeton understanding of inspiration ... gave a particular nineteenth-century cast to neo-evangelicalism's emphasis on biblical authority."30