Occasionally I will review or just recommend (or not)\u00a0books here.\u00a0 Yesterday I received a\u00a0new\u00a0book Baker kindly sent me.\u00a0 It is by two old friends\u2013Steve Wilkens and Don Thorsen.\u00a0 The title is Everything You Know about Evangelicals Is Wrong (Well, Almost Everything).\u00a0 The sub-subtitle is\u00a0An Insider\u2019s Look at Myths and Realities.\u00a0<\/p>\n
From the table of contents: Evangelicals\u00a0Are Not All Mean, Stupid, and Dogmatic. Evangelicals Are Not All Waiting for the Rapture, Evangelicals Are Not All Anti-evolutionists, Evangelicals Are Not All Inerrantists, Evangelicals Are Not All Rich Americans, Evangelicals Are\u00a0Not All Calvinists, Evangelicals Are Not All Republicans, Evangelicals Are Not All Racist, Sexist, and Homophobic.\u00a0 I\u2019ve only read parts of it so far, but it seems like an entertaining and enlightening read.\u00a0 I highly recommend it.\u00a0 We need more people like Wilkens and Thorsen promoting the \u201cbig tent\u201d vision of evangelicalism in this time of conservative evangelicals talking endlessly about \u201cevangelical boundaries\u201d and trying to excommunicate evangelical scholars from movement.<\/p>\n
I am reviewing a new book by British evangelical Steven Knowles entitled Beyond Evangelicalism: The Theological Methodology of Stanley J. Grenz (Ashgate).\u00a0 It is neither entertaining nor enlightening.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t intend to be the former and if it is meant to be the latter if falls miserably short.\u00a0 Knowles is one of those \u201cevangelical boundaries\u201d guys and he thinks my late friend Stan Grenz went outside of them.\u00a0 His implicit magisterium for deciding who is authentically evangelical seems to be (because he refers to them favorably so often) D. A. Carson, Millard Erickson, David Wells, Wayne Grudem, Alister McGrath and Kevin Vanhoozer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In my opinion Knowles has Stan Grenz mostly wrong.\u00a0 I have the advantage of having known Stan very well; we were like brothers.\u00a0 We spent many hours discussing his theology and criticisms of it by fellow evangelicals.\u00a0 Like Carson and Erickson and other conservative evangelicals, Knowles seems to think Stan was a cultural relativist because he attempted to do evangelical theology without a foundationalist epistemology.\u00a0 To Knowles, apparently, a foundationalist epistemology is necessary for authentic evangelical theology.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I wonder who decided that and when?\u00a0 Now, if all Knowles means is that Stan broke out of the constrictions of TRADITIONAL evangelical theological methodology\u2013fine.\u00a0 But he says more than that even with his title.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I know beyond doubt\u00a0that Stan was not a cultural relativist and his theology was not uncritically influenced by, for example, George Lindbeck.\u00a0 He was trying to take the postmodern cultural landscape seriously, but he did not embrace postmodern philosophy or thought patterns uncritically and he did hold Scripture as the highest and final authority in theology.<\/p>\n
Knowles scores Stan for wedding Word and Spirit inseparably together and making the authority behind the written Word the Holy Spirit.\u00a0 He fails to mention that Calvin, among others, did the same!\u00a0 Apparently Knowles views the Bible without the Spirit as authoritative.<\/p>\n
There are many, many problems with Knowles\u2019 account of Stan\u2019s theology.\u00a0 He puts the worst spin possible on some of Stan\u2019s statements, ignoring cautions Stan built into the surrounding contexts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is sad to me that this is the first book length treatment of Stan\u2019s theology after his passing.\u00a0 It is such a bad book that I hesitate even to review it for a scholarly journal, but I feel compelled to defend Stan\u2019s evangelical credentials and ask who gives Knowles or anybody the authority to declare who is and who isn\u2019t evangelical?\u00a0 Just because someone breaks out of traditional evangelical patterns of thought doesn\u2019t make him or her not evangelical.<\/p>\n
I also find it interesting that ALL of the people Knowles uses as examples of traditional evangelical theology are Reformed.\u00a0 Stan wasn\u2019t.\u00a0 In fact, I happen to know he was an Arminian even though he didn\u2019t like labels (other than Christian, evangelical and Baptist).\u00a0 I have to wonder if Knowles is one of those people who thinks Reformed theology stemming from the Princeton theologians of the 19th century is normative for all evangelical thought.<\/p>\n
I recommend that people interested in understanding Stan Grenz\u2019s theology read Grenz himself and not a secondary source and especially not this one.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Occasionally I will review or just recommend (or not)\u00a0books here.\u00a0 Yesterday I received a\u00a0new\u00a0book Baker kindly sent me.\u00a0 It is by two old friends\u2013Steve Wilkens and Don Thorsen.\u00a0 The title is Everything You Know about Evangelicals Is Wrong (Well, Almost Everything).\u00a0 The sub-subtitle is\u00a0An Insider\u2019s Look at Myths and Realities.\u00a0 From the table of contents: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n