The following passage from Randall Balmer's Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (thank you, again, for the book) struck me as appropriate for Flame War Thursday.
Balmer wrote this in 1990, responding to his visit to Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Ore. In the years since then, however, the demeanor he describes has become much more widely familiar thanks to the wide world of the Web. The kind of urgent, earnest, somewhat belligerent "apologetics" Balmer describes has come to characterize a large chunk of the evangelical Christian blogosphere — as well as the itinerant ministry of many such apologeticians who seem to believe they possess the spiritual gift of trolling.
Anyway, I haven't much more to say about this than simply to note that Balmer here identifies a certain tone, stance and character, describing it with such precision and aptness that he and the reader cannot help but feel a kind of affectionate compassion for the people he describes. I share that affection, but I still don't want to spend my Flame War Thursdays (or any other days) indulging them in their quest for that one perfect argument that they seem certain will usher in the kingdom.
I found a strong whiff of apologetics both in the conversations and in the classrooms of Multnomah. That is to say the tenor of theological discourse alternated somewhere between defensiveness and defiance. When, for instance, students or faculty talked about biblical inerrancy (a recurrent topic on campus) they were prepared without notice to recite all the arguments in favor of the doctrine and to rehearse the dangers of holding a contrary view. There was always, moreover, a tone of urgency about the discussion, a sense that the fate of the entire world hung in the balance.
The assumption underlying these discussions seems to be that the way to prevail on this or any other theological issue is to fashion a superior argument, to marshal all the evidence for your side in the battle against the forces of darkness, be they liberalism or modernism or secular humanism. The students' task, then, is to master the arguments, to be able to defend biblical inerrancy …
The premise behind this pedagogy is that he who crafts the better argument wins. If only we can fashion an airtight case for evangelical Christianity, the people at Multnomah seem to say, then the forces of darkness will crumble at our feet. The exercise of faith, which is, after all, the essence of religion, has been eclipsed by the quest for logical certitude.
I am struck by the poignancy of this enterprise, and by its futility. The evangelicals of Multnomah are, in many ways, still fighting the battles their religious forebears fought — and lost — a century ago. Evangelicalism lost credibility when it came under attack from 19th-century intellectuals for failing to measure up to scientific and Enlightenment standards of evidence and verifiability. At the time many evangelicals dismissed those charges as irrelevant to faith; those who sallied forth to defend evangelical theology on logical or rational grounds found themselves overmatched, unconversant with the ideology and presuppositions of their adversaries.
Evangelical theologians ever since, still smarting from Enlightenment assaults, determined never to be beaten again, and so they have spent much of the past century boning up on their logic and shoring up their arguments. The only problem is the intellectual ground has shifted. Most intellectuals have put those 19th-century debates behind them. …
In many respects, then, the theological discourse taking place among fundamentalists, and at places like Multnomah School of the Bible, is an anachronism. They are busy waging battles that no one else cares to fight — and the ultimate irony is that, lacking a common enemy who will engage them, they have turned their intellectual guns on one another, engaging in bitter internecine quarrels about theological minutiae that no one outside of the subculture deems important.
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