Matt Pinson
This year I’ve particularly enjoyed a handful of books that I think address imbalances or “pendulum-swings” in thought and practice. It should go without saying that there are things that all these authors assert in these books that I am completely opposed to (not to mention things they say in other places). But the drift of these books is good, and we need to listen to them.
Gavin Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant
Gavin Ortlund’s book What It Means to Be Protestant, which Christianity Today recently named its “Book of the Year,” is valuable because it addresses a pendulum-swing among Gen Z, especially young men, away from Protestantism toward Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Weekly, I read another story about the number of intelligent young people who are fleeing (or thinking about fleeing) from what they see as typical shallow evangelicalism to what are often popularly called “high church” traditions—whether Protestant ones such as Anglicanism and Lutheranism or non-Protestant ones such as Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. And this is not just something off in the distance I read about. I hear about it from young people I know.
This phenomenon is particularly concerning because studies show that most of the young people who are considering becoming “nones” (no religious affiliation) are those who are critical of the shallowness of average evangelical spirituality, worship, etc. Ortlund fills a massive need here.
Ortlund offers sound, time-honored arguments about why we need to have “the courage to be Protestant” (to use a title from another one of my favorite books by David F. Wells). Thus he gives people considering moving away from historic, gospel-centered Protestantism serious reasons for reconsidering this shift.
The book also shows that there are sufficient resources right under our noses, in our own evangelical tradition, to provide the depth, substance, reverence, awe, and beauty that are so attractive to young people who are looking for a way out of some of the shallowness they have encountered in recent evangelicalism. Ortlund’s message is, “Reform your traditions; don’t abandon them.”
Matt Markins, Mike Handler, and Sam Luce, Forming Faith
Along these same lines—of forming young people in our churches to grow deep in their faith rather than simply fostering a shallow cultural Christianity that is unsustainable and will result in more “nones”—is the book by Matt Markins, Mike Handler, and Sam Luce, Forming Faith: Discipling the Next Generation in a Post-Christian Culture.
This book addresses the pendulum-swing toward culture-centered models of spiritual and ecclesial formation of youth that have not panned out for the evangelical community. You won’t agree with every prescription of this book. But it joins a chorus of other recent books that are concerned about the culture-bound ways in which evangelicals have often formed their young people spiritually over the past generation. If you enjoyed Markins’s recent book The Faith of Our Children, you will enjoy following up with Forming Faith.
Mark Tatlock and Chris Burnett, eds., Biblical Missions
This year I also enjoyed reading a pre-publication copy of a new book on missions that Thomas Nelson is set to publish in a few months, Mark Tatlock and Chris Burnett, eds., Biblical Missions: Principles, Priorities, and Practices. This book addresses the pendulum-swing in missions away from biblically and theologically grounded missionary methods toward an overemphasis on cultural anthropology, numbers, etc.
This massive textbook features contributions from scores of missionaries, pastors, biblical scholars, and theologians from across continents and ethnicities. It is refreshing in its combination of a biblical-theological (rather than cultural-anthropological or sociological) focus on cross-cultural missions. It emphasizes planting churches that are fully functioning New Testament congregations, and teaching and training the members of those congregations to observe all Christ’s commands (Matthew 28:20).
This book is not without its flaws. Not all readers will agree with every doctrine or strategy it affirms. For one example, denominational congregations and associations will need to adapt the book’s more non-denominational focus to their own contexts.
Yet I’m excited about this in-depth resource for understanding and implementing cross-cultural missions. Its emphasis on the biblical and theological rootedness of missions practice is refreshing. Every reader will benefit from its big picture: zeal for world evangelization and discipleship centered on a biblical-theological vision for cross-cultural missions.
Leonardo De Chirico, Engaging with Thomas Aquinas
Recently we have seen a pendulum-swing in some areas of the evangelical intellectual world away from the mainstream Reformed understanding of Thomas Aquinas toward what has come to be known as “Reformed Thomism.” Yet others, in an attempt to re-articulate what Reformed Protestants have traditionally disliked about Thomas, don’t want to acknowledge that there’s anything good we can learn from Aquinas! (Please note that the way I am using “Reformed” in this essay has nothing to do with the five points of Calvinism but applies to things that both Calvinists and Arminians often have in common.)
The Italian theologian and minister Leonardo De Chirico, who shifted earlier in adulthood from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism, has provided a balanced approach in his new book Engaging with Thomas Aquinas: An Evangelical Approach. Rather than an all-or-nothing approach, which either totally rejects Thomas or is giddy about him, Chirico judiciously argues for a “cautious” and “eclectic” approach to Thomas.
Of course, De Chirico agrees with the broad concerns Reformed Protestants have tended to have about Thomas Aquinas, ranging from conservatives as diverse as C. S. Lewis, Carl F. H. Henry, E. J. Carnell, Herman Dooyeweerd, Cornelius Van Til, Francis Schaeffer, and Leroy Forlines to mainline Protestants as diverse as Lesslie Newbigin, Karl Barth, Adolf von Harnack, and Paul Tillich. In addition to the general differences between Catholics and Protestants, these authors have demurred from Thomas’s views on faith and reason as well as nature and grace, worried that he fosters a too-stark division between faith and reason and between nature and grace.
De Chirico agrees with this view. He has one of the best discussions in print of Thomas’s nature-grace distinction. De Chirico explains that Thomas’s view of the creation of humanity in God’s image (imago Dei) differs sharply from Protestant thought. He argues that Aquinas taught that there is something about created human nature—even before the Fall—that makes people incapable of having religious fellowship with God. So God has to come in with a donum superadditum—a superadded gift of grace, even before the Fall—that reproportions human beings to make them capable of communion with God. De Chirico’s discussion of the reason Reformed Protestants (whether Calvinist or Arminian) have rejected Aquinas’s views on faith and reason, as well as nature and grace and the imago Dei, is worth the price of the book.
However, De Chirico rightly chides people who want to dismiss Thomas’s thought wholesale. Despite De Chirico’s concerns about Thomas’s epistemology (theory of knowledge) and non-Protestant views on nature and grace, he doesn’t have an all-or-nothing approach. Where Thomas’s teaching is biblical, De Chirico insists, evangelicals can learn from him. But he urges caution and is rightly concerned about the current trend in some circles toward “Reformed Thomism.”
Paul Helm, Faith, Form, and Fashion
In his recent book Faith, Form, and Fashion: Classical Reformed Theology and Its Postmodern Critics, Paul Helm discusses an area of theology on which most conservative critics of Thomas Aquinas in the list above would agree with Thomists: the crucial importance of propositional revelation in articulating a Christian theology of revelation and biblical interpretation (hermeneutics). (This book will be a heavy lift for beginning students of theology, who may benefit more from Ronald Nash’s slimmer volume The Word of God and the Mind of Man.)
Helm believes (and my mentor Leroy Forlines wholeheartedly agreed) that many evangelical theologians have become too enamored with postmodernism. Thus they are pendulum-swinging away from what they see as the “Enlightenment” mood of evangelical propositional theology as articulated by—and these are usually the two big “culprits”—Charles Hodge and Carl Henry.
Helm commends the classical Reformed approach to understanding the nature of biblical revelation as essentially propositional—that Scripture communicates to humanity in propositional truth—“proposition” meaning a logically coherent statement with a subject and a verb. He does a superb job of explaining that this classic view does not mitigate the diverse genres of Scripture or reduce the Bible to a “doctrinal encyclopedia.” These are caricatures of classical Reformed theology. Those who want to delve into a deep investigation of the nature of revelation, theology, and hermeneutics that agrees with the inheritance of traditional Protestant thought will find this book a rewarding read.
Mark David Hall, Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic
Readers interested in American history or political philosophy should check out a book I enjoyed by the illustrious scholar Mark David Hall entitled Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic. The pendulum-swing this book addresses (though only indirectly and implicitly) is away from the obvious problems of classical liberalism and its child neo-conservatism toward a more extreme conservatism that questions whether an American War for Independence should ever even have occurred.
I’m thinking, for example, of Patrick Deneen’s Roman Catholic Integralism. Or, probably more attractive to younger Protestant conservatives, Yoram Hazony. His book Conservatism, for example, celebrates the Restoration of the Monarchy of English king Charles II and extols that kind of conservatism, chiding the seventeenth-century Puritans and Baptists, who opposed the Stuart dynasty and advocated for more “republican” or even “democratic” ideals.
Hall’s book discusses Roger Sherman as an example among the American founding fathers of an American adaptation of Reformed political theory. That approach moved away from typical medieval political theory in important ways, bearing similarities to some of the thought of medieval thinkers such as Marsiglio of Padua but drawing heavily on Scripture, the church fathers, and classical Greco-Roman political thought. So while it seemed “new” or “revolutionary,” it was in reality old.
In Sherman one sees a Reformed political theory similar to that in Reformed sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These include the French Huguenot author of Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos, the Swiss Reformed leader Theodore Beza, and proto-Puritans and Puritans like the English writers John Ponet and Christopher Goodman and the Scottish writers George Buchanan and Samuel Rutherford.
Hall joins scholars such as Daniel Dreisbach, Gary Steward, Jeffry Morrison, and Glenn Moots in arguing that the unique—in some ways seemingly “new”—American experiment in ordered liberty was birthed out of the Reformed wing of the Reformation—particularly the Puritan movement. Thus they are probing what the British historian Quentin Skinner referred to as “Liberty before Liberalism” and what the American religious historian Winthrop Hudson meant when he called Locke an “heir to Puritan political thought.” Their writings do not defend Lockean liberalism, but they do keep the pendulum from swinging too far in the opposite direction.
Hall makes a compelling argument that Roger Sherman exemplifies the influence of Reformed political theory on early American political thought. He says that the many writings of the Reformed political theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been woefully underemphasized by historians: “these works are lost in a sea of books and articles contending that the founders were primarily influenced by some variation of secular Lockean liberalism, classical republicanism, the Scottish Enlightenment, or other intellectual traditions” (ix–x).
Instead, Hall argues that Reformed political theory is an important influence on the political thought of the American founders. His basic thesis echoes, yet goes deeper than, earlier writers who said essentially the same thing, such as Hudson and Herbert D. Foster. The latter, for example, went as far as to say in a 1927 American Historical Review article that the “five points of political Calvinism” were “filtered” through Locke: “fundamental law, natural rights, contract and consent of the people, popular sovereignty, resistance to tyranny through responsible representatives.”
Hall shows that Sherman, like the Puritans before him, advocated for all these principles. Further, Sherman argued strenuously for a “limited national government that would not interfere with states’ rights.” Hall insightfully says that “the national government today acts as if it has a general grant of powers and the notion of states’ rights has been consigned to the dustbin of history.” Yet he says that people who think the founders intended this state of affairs “are wrong in the case of Roger Sherman and his allies” (100).
Conclusion
One of the reasons I like these books so much is that they help us think about ways to keep the pendulum from swinging too far, or “over-correcting” in our thinking and practice. Ortlund effectively addresses the pendulum-swing in young evangelicals away from the shallowness of their evangelical upbringing toward non-Protestant traditions. Markins, Handler and Luce effectively address the pendulum-swing in much evangelical church life away from time-honored practices of spiritual formation toward an extreme emphasis on cultural relevance. Tatlock and Burnett’s edited volume effectively addresses the pendulum-swing in some missions thought toward too much emphasis on cultural considerations to the neglect of biblical-theological ones.
De Chirico effectively addresses the pendulum-swing away from typical Reformed understandings of Thomas Aquinas, calling us back to that cautious approach toward him while not wanting the pendulum to swing to the other extreme of ignoring the good things he does teach. Helm effectively addresses the pendulum-swing away from Enlightenment thought toward too much postmodern influence on theology, calling us back to classic Reformed theology. Hall effectively addresses the pendulum-swing away from neo-conservatism toward a “post-liberal” conservative political theory that leads us to doubt whether there should ever even have been an America (!), using Roger Sherman as an excellent exponent of the Reformed political theory that made America possible.