Roger Olson - A History of Evangelicalism, Part 1 of 2

Evangelicalism Is Dead!

Long Live Evangelicalism!

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/03/evangelicalism-is-dead-long-live-evangelicalism/

by Roger Olson

March 19, 2013


Link to - The Future of Evangelicalism, Part 1

Link to - The Future of Evangelicalism, Part 2

Here is the first part of my talk at George Fox Evangelical Seminary (March 11, 2013). The second part will come next (in a day or two). (I posted both talks a week ago, but the formatting made it virtually unreadable for most people.)

The Future of Evangelicalism, Part I

A Lecture by Roger E. Olson

given at

George Fox Seminary

March 11, 2013


Part 1: The Demise of the Evangelical Movement
and the Survival of the Evangelical Ethos

I’ve been asked to talk about the future of evangelicalism. I’m always hesitant to predict the future. Predictions are often taken as prophecies and we all know what the prescription is for false prophets. Please don’t take anything I say here today as prophecy. I have some thoughts about where evangelicalism is going, but they are only educated guesses and don’t even rise to the level of predictions. Much of what I will say, however, has to do with evangelicalism’s present and past. Some of it will be descriptive and some of it will be prescriptive—the difference between “is” and “ought.”

Allow me to begin with some personal reflections. Who am I to talk about evangelicalism? I grew up in the thick of it—whatever “it” is, exactly. I knew we were evangelicals by the time I was in high school if not before. We were also Pentecostals, but we were Pentecostals who played well with non-Pentecostals evangelicals. My uncle was president of our tiny Pentecostal denomination. My father and several aunts and uncles were ministers and missionaries. My maternal grandparents were Evangelical Free, so my mother was raised in that denomination. Much to their chagrin, she become Pentecostal and then married my dad who was pastoring a small Pentecostal mission in the slums of Des Moines. Some of my mother’s siblings were Evangelical Covenant. My paternal grandparents were Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), but late in life my grandmother became Pentecostal. My father followed her into that. So I have deep family roots in evangelicalism. When I was growing up we, my family, commonly divided the whole Christian world into two groups—evangelicals and “nominal Christians.” My father participated in the local evangelical ministers groups in cities where he pastored. My uncle served on the national board of the National Association of Evangelicals. Billy Graham was one of our heroes—along with Oral Roberts.

During high school I became deeply involved in Youth for Christ. My future wife’s father was the city director of YFC and she sang in its “Youth Chorale.” I led our high school’s “Campus Life” club, a ministry of YFC, and helped organize city wide YFC rallies. It was through YFC that I really first became aware of something called “evangelicalism” - a transdenominational movement and alliance of believers in Jesus Christ who shared a relatively conservative theology and believed in conversion and evangelism. We actively proselytized our nominally Christian schoolmates. In YFC I came into direct contact with Baptists, Evangelical Free, Nazarenes, Wesleyans, Free Methodists, Christian Reformed and many other Christians who shared a common spiritual and theological ethos and gradually became aware of a movement called evangelicalism that transcended my own denomination and even Pentecostalism.

Donald Grey Barnhouse

While I was attending our Pentecostal Bible college I began to read Eternity magazine—an evangelical publication of the non-profit Evangelical Foundation founded by Donald Grey Barnhouse, pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia and radio preacher and author of numerous Bible commentaries. Through Eternity I became further aware of evangelicalism through articles written by people like Donald Bloesch, Bernard Ramm, James Montgomery Boice and many other evangelical authors. I began to read especially Bloesch’s books, many of which had to do with evangelicalism as a movement. One was The Evangelical Renaissance which served as my first scholarly introduction to evangelical faith and spirituality. Then I began to read Christianity Today and then InterVarsity’s magazine His. I began to read Francis Schaeffer’s books which greatly influenced me early in my evangelical student career.

James Montgomery Boice

After Bible college I attended North American Baptist Seminary in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It’s now Sioux Falls Seminary and was then and still is a mainline evangelical seminary not limited to Baptists. One of my professors was James Montgomery Boice, publisher of Eternity and pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia after Barnhouse. I was absolutely in awe of him. (He taught one course at the seminary while on a sabbatical from his pulpit.) While in seminary I continued to read Eternity and Christianity Today and my first published piece was a book review in Eternity. All my professors were evangelicals. I took three graduate theology courses at a local Lutheran college that hosted an extension of Luther Seminary. I couldn’t help but notice the difference between the evangelicalism of NABS and those professors.

While in seminary I served as assistant pastor at a local Pentecostal-charismatic-evangelical church and attended the city’s evangelical ministers’ alliance meetings. I served on the organizing committee for two Billy Graham associate evangelists’ crusades—John Wesley White’s and Leighton Ford’s. Eventually I came to view evangelicalism as my larger Christian “home” beyond my own denomination and church. By the end of seminary I no longer considered myself Pentecostal; I was evangelical first and Baptist second. In order to understand evangelicalism I read voraciously books about the evangelical movement including ones by George Marsden, the dean of evangelical historians before Mark Noll.

All that is to say, in brief, that “evangelicalism” has always been part of my identity and became more important to me than ever once I shed my Pentecostal identity. Yes, I became Baptist, but being evangelical was more important to me than that. I could move easily among non-Baptist evangelicals and often did. Organizations like InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Christian Scholar’s Review (which I edited for five years), the Christian College Coalition (now renamed the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities), the Evangelical Theological Group of the American Academy of Religion, the National Association of Evangelicals, Christianity Today, Inc., the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, all became spaces in which I felt at home and moved around easily. Eventually I began to write about evangelicalism. Probably the high point of my scholarly contribution to the subject came in 2004 when Westminster John Knox Press published my book The Westminster Handbook to Evangelical Theology that included a very lengthy essay on “The Story of Evangelical Theology.” Around the same time I found myself included, with a brief biography, in the Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism written by Randall Balmer and published first by Westminster and then by Baylor University Press.

All that is to say that I have some credentials, some “street-cred,” to talk about evangelicalism even if I am no George Marsden or Mark Noll.

Let me begin, then, with a statement about the present status of evangelicalism and then go backwards and then forwards. It is my considered opinion that the evangelical movement no longer exists. As a cohesive movement, it has dissolved. Of course, it never was perfectly cohesive, but throughout much of the 1950s and into the 1970s it was relatively unified—not as a bounded set category, which no movement really is, but as a centered set category. The movement had a gravitationally strong center that held it together. In my opinion, that gravitational center has lost its strength and the movement has dissolved. What was once a relatively united movement has become little more than a memory. Some of us miss it. What’s left is what was there before the movement—an “evangelical ethos.” And also left is a memory of affinity, fellowship, common cause, cooperation and united action across denominational lines.

The Frist Great Awakening

So what happened and what does the future hold?

As a distinct movement, evangelicalism was born in 1942 in St. Louis. That was when and where the National Association of Evangelicals was founded. Of course, it had a pre-history going back to the Great Awakenings of the 1740s and early 1800s. In a very real sense Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley, both born in 1703, were the two founders of modern evangelical Christianity. I’m not talking now about the movement but the ethos. One thing I insist on is this distinction between evangelicalism as an ethos and evangelicalism as a movement. Of course they’re related; the movement is a visible, somewhat organized expression of the ethos. But the ethos pre-dates the movement and outlasts it. The ethos was born out of the pietism and revivalism of the Great Awakenings. Yes, of course, even that had a pre-history, but we won’t keep backing up.

So what is the evangelical ethos that emerged out of the Great Awakenings—first and second? Noll and David Bebbington have identified it with four hallmarks: biblicism, conversionism, crucicentrism, and activism. I have suggested a fifth—respect for the Great Tradition of Protestant orthodoxy, broadly defined in terms of Christology and soteriology—Jesus as God, the cross as vicarious atonement, and salvation by grace alone through faith. The Great Awakenings added to Protestant orthodoxy an experiential dimension called “conversional piety”—the born again experience, an emphasis on regeneration, and focus on a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Crucicentrism is the centrality of the cross in evangelical preaching and worship. Biblicism is a special regard for the Bible as God’s inspired, infallible word but also love for the Bible as the story of God’s saving history for us and with us—a message meant directly for the individual’s heart and life and not only for the church. Activism is the evangelism impulse and the desire to change the world that inspired the great world evangelism crusades that grew out of especially the Second Great Awakening.

The Second Great Awakening

The evangelical ethos, then, was Protestant Christianity on fire, energized with passion and zeal, Jesus Christ experienced as living Lord and Savior, the gospel as transforming power. But it lacked a coherent theological framework until that was provided by the Princeton School of Theology formulated by Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and Benjamin Warfield. Not all evangelicals were thrilled with their Reformed spin on Protestant theology and evangelicalism, however, so alongside them arose lesser known theologies by Methodists such as John Miley and Baptists such as Augustus Hopkins Strong. Add into that mix the revivals of D. L. Moody and the strong premillennialism of the Plymouth Brethren and the Holiness-healing movements and the Keswick spirituality and by 1901 the evangelical ethos was spreading quickly through a large number of somewhat diverse theological expressions.

Then came the fundamentalist movement, a militant evangelical opposition to the growing liberal movement in mainline Protestant denominations. Evangelical leaders such as Baptists William Bell Riley and J. Frank Norris hardened evangelicalism into an exclusive club and angry mob that divided denominations with northern Baptists and Presbyterians especially fracturing into numerous small denominations. After 1925 and the infamous Scopes “Monkey Trial” fundamentalism went underground, so to speak, quietly building its own separate culture of Bible colleges, publishing houses, evangelistic organizations and missions agencies. During the 1920s and 1930s American fundamentalism was the chief organized embodiment of the evangelical ethos, even though that ethos continued to have other expressions in, for example, Pentecostalism and the Holiness churches. But, by-and-large, it found expression mainly in anti-intellectual, Christ-against-culture organizations that wiped their hands of responsibility for society at large and waited for Christ to return to rescue them from the world going to hell in a hand basket.

During the early 1940s fundamentalist organizer Harold John Ockenga and some New England friends began to dream of a new organized expression of the evangelical ethos—one that would shed fundamentalism and emerge into the light of day with a renewed cultural presence that would be just as biblical and conversionist but less anti-intellectual and separatistic. That dream came true in 1942 with the founding the NAE. Fundamentalists declined to join it, probably to the secret delight of Ockenga and his friends. Of course, they were fundamentalists to liberal Protestants like Harry Emerson Fosdick and the Federal Council of Churches (which later changed its name to the National Council of Churches). But fundamentalists labeled them “neo-evangelicals” and liberals labeled them “neo-fundamentalists.” Eventually, they won the right to be known simply as “evangelicals.” Their champion became Billy Graham who virtually defined the post-fundamentalist evangelical movement—an alliance of denominationally diverse, relatively conservative, revivalistic Protestants who wanted to be culturally engaged, socially progressive (at least up to a point), and intellectually respectable.

Evangelist Billy Graham addressing the congregation in Trafalgar Square in London.
Fred Ramage / Getty Images

Billy Graham 1957

The rest of the story is well known, often told by scholars such as Marsden, Noll, Joel Carpenter, Randall Balmer and, more recently, Kenneth Collins and yours truly. The heyday of the new evangelical movement symbolized by Billy Graham and his widespread ministries, Christianity Today, the NAE, Eternity, World Vision, the Christian College Coalition, Youth for Christ, InterVarsity, etc., was the 1950s. In spite of very real and significant theological differences, the evangelical coalition and movement forged ahead, steadily gaining ground against its main competitors, separatistic fundamentalism and modernistic liberalism. The secular news media began to pay special attention to it, as a movement with a distinct ethos, when Jimmy Carter ran for president in the late 1970s. Carter, of course, identified with the movement and proudly labeled himself an evangelical. If there had ever been an evangelical president before Carter, it was difficult to tell. None had so openly identified with that ethos of “born again Christianity.” Time magazine labeled 1976 the “Year of the Evangelicals,” announcing that 34% of all Americans claimed to have had a “born again experience.”

Right about then, however, the movement, at its peak of popularity, was beginning to dissolve. Remember, I’m not talking about the evangelical ethos but the movement. Fortunately, I’m glad to say, the ethos is alive and well, but the movement began to die in the late 1970s—just when the media was taking notice and touting it as a powerful socially transformative force.

Marsden, the dean of evangelical historians, wrote in his book 1990 book Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism that as of 1967 evangelicalism was no longer a cohesive movement. According to Marsden, “By 1967…it was becoming impossible to regard American evangelicalism as a single coalition with a more or less unified and recognized leadership.” (p. 74) Marsden attributes this dissolving of the movement to an internal crisis. He cites as a critical turning point Christianity Today’s 1968 replacing of Carl Henry as chief editor (Henry was its founding editor) with Harold Lindsell. This signaled a shift toward neo-fundamentalism at the core of evangelicalism. Many evangelicals reacted against Lindsell’s hard core conservatism—both political and theological. Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield and the “Sojourners” group hoisted a left-leaning evangelical banner and Fuller Seminary drifted in that direction theologically.

I tend to date the demise of evangelicalism later than Marsden. I was high school when those things happened. While in college and seminary in the 1970s I witnessed them. I read The Post-American, the original title of the magazine that later became Sojourners, avidly. I paid attention when Lindsell published The Battle for the Bible in 1976 and Carl Henry left the magazine as a regular columnist. The moderate-to-left-leaning evangelical seminary I attended suddenly jerked to the right as constituents, alarmed by The Battle for the Bible, imposed an inerrancy statement on it. The faculty had to sign it to keep their jobs. One, New Testament professor Lee MacDonald, refused and resigned. Then came the founding of the “Moral Majority” and Jerry Falwell’s emergence as an evangelical leader and spokesman. Falwell had previously been a separatistic fundamentalist who, during the 1960s, heaped scorn on the “neo-evangelicals” as compromisers of the pure faith.

As I said, in my opinion, it was really during the few years immediately following publication of The Battle for the Bible that the evangelical movement dissolved. Those years also corresponded with the gradual retirement of the movement’s main prototype and champion, its figurehead leader, Billy Graham. As long as Graham was active, the movement stayed together, relatively united, largely by his personality and huge empire of ministries. The breaking up of the movement should have come as no surprise. Marsden and other evangelical historians had been warning of it for some time. The reason it was predictable is that post-World War 2, post-fundamentalist evangelicalism always was an unstable compound.

When the National Association of Evangelicals formed in 1942, and as relatively conservative Protestants rallied together around the banner of Billy Graham throughout the 1950s, there was a tendency to paper over one very significant rift between two groups of evangelicals. One group found its theological and spiritual roots in the Reformed tradition especially as that was handed down to them via the Old Princeton School of theologians of the 19^th century—Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, and Benjamin Warfield. Their twentieth century successor and representative J. Gresham Machen left Princeton Seminary and the Northern Presbyterian denomination to found the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Westminster Theological Seminary. This branch of evangelicalism tended to be Calvinistic and to regard correct doctrine as the enduring essence of evangelical faith. It held high the doctrines of biblical inerrancy, the absolute sovereignty of God and justification by faith alone.

The other branch of neo-evangelicalism was rooted in revivalism including the Holiness-Pentecostal movements, the Keswick movement and pietism generally. The emphasis of this branch was not as much doctrine as spirituality—a spirituality Stan Grenz and I have labeled “convertive piety” or “conversional piety.” This branch held high regeneration and sanctificiation, often free will, and a view of Scripture’s inspiration not tied to inerrancy.

How could two such profoundly different Christian traditions combine to form one movement called “evangelicalism?” I believe one answer to that lies in the Baptist ingredient. By 1942 Baptists formed a large portion of American fundamentalists and many of them were dissatisfied with the separatistic and anti-intellectual drift of fundamentalism. That dissatisfaction was illustrated by the separation between the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches and the Conservative Baptist Association with the former finding Billy Graham dangerously liberal and the latter embracing Graham. The Conservative Baptists, together with other moderate Baptist groups, often held together the two traditions—what evangelical historian Donald Dayton has called the Pietist-Pentecostal paradigm of evangelicalism and the Puritan-Presbyterian paradigm of evangelicalism. The former emphasized experience as the sine qua non of authentic evangelical faith while the latter emphasized correct doctrine as that.

This tendency of moderate Baptists, neither fundamentalist nor liberal, to include both paradigms itself became the paradigm for neo-evangelicalism. In essence, Ockanga and Henry and other founders of the movement were saying “Let’s paper over this gulf and form a coalition of moderately conservative Protestants who are neither fundamentalist nor liberal.” To the right of the NAE was fundamentalist Carl McIntire’s American Council of Christian Churches that would not have fellowship with Pentecostals or “mainliners.” To the left was the Federal Council of Churches, later re-named the National Council of Churches. Within the NAE and the neo-evangelical movement was everything from the Church of the Nazarene to the Christian Reformed Church—a motley crew of Protestants who had little in common other than being neither fundamentalist nor liberal.

Gradually, throughout the late 1970s, these two branches of evangelicalism pulled further apart over issues such as inerrancy, political involvement, predestination, the attributes of God, gender roles in family and church, and the possible salvation of the unevangelized. By the first decade of the 21^st century the two sides were barely speaking to each other. Each side had its champions—D. A. Carson and John Piper on one side and Stan Grenz and Clark Pinnock on the other. Many evangelicals tried to mediate the divorce and bring evangelicals back together with limited, and I would say ultimately no, success. Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, himself a moderate-to-progressive evangelicals, has worked tirelessly to hold together a broad evangelical consensus and coalition. With him are Timothy George and Christianity Today. In 2008 Mouw, George, David Neff of CT and a number of like-minded moderate evangelicals published “An Evangelical Manifesto” that called for evangelical unity and renewal. It did not mention biblical inerrancy, women’s ordination, or most controversial issues that have divided evangelicals.

At the same time, however, Carson and his conservative evangelical colleagues, all Reformed theologically, created “The Gospel Coalition” and held meetings and published books calling for renewed evangelical commitment to doctrines such as inerrancy, monergistic salvation, penal substitutionary atonement, and male headship.

Now, a new group of left-leaning evangelicals calling itself “Missio Alliance” will hold its first annual gathering in suburban Washington, D.C. in April, 2013. Present and speaking will be many self-identified evangelicals associated with the emerging church movement, anathema to Carson and the Gospel Coalition and a cause of concern to Mouw and George and their group. Emerging as a spokesman for this group is Scott McKnight, but in the background are recently deceased postconservative evangelical Stanley Grenz and (still living) British scholar N. T. Wright.

It is my considered opinion that “the” evangelical movement, “the” post-fundamentalist, neo-evangelical movement that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s and was, in my opinion, still alive if not well in the 1970s has died. It has fractured into at least three separate groups that have little contact with each other and often stand toward each other with postures of opposition and even competition. First, there are what I call the conservative, neo-fundamentalist evangelicals. They are represented by the Gospel Coalition and similar organizations such as the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals that publishes Modern Reformation. Second, there are what I call the conservative, mediating evangelicals. They are represented by Mouw, George, Neff and Christianity Today. Finally, there are what I call the postconservative evangelicals. They are represented by McKnight and the Missio Alliance and magazines such as Sojourners and Relevant. These are not monolithic groups; each has much diversity within it. But they are, as evangelicalism once was, relatively cohesive affinity groups, alliances, coalitions.

So why do I call them all, and many more, “evangelicals?” It’s because I do not consider “evangelical” a concept tied to the post-WW2, post-fundamentalist, neo-evangelical movement. “Evangelical” is an ethos, not just a movement. Movements come and go, ethoses that gave them their identities and outlived them live on. Let’s look at some examples of this outside of our present subject.

“New Thought” was a spiritual-philosophical-quasi-religious movement that flourished in America in the 19^th century. It emphasized mind-over-matter with physical healing and financial prosperity possible through positive thinking and speaking. Its practitioners shared an ethos and on that basis they formed a movement that transcended their own individual practices and organizations. The International New Thought Alliance was founded in 1915 to coordinate practitioners’ efforts and creating a better world and to provide fellowship among them in spite of certain sometimes profound differences. The fundamentalists of New Thought, Mary Baker Eddy’s Church of Christ, Scientist (“Christian Science”) refused to join even though everyone knows it was inspired by New Thought philosophy. For much of the later 19^th and early 20^th centuries the Unity School of Christianity founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore was the best known of the New Thought organizations. It still has churches all over North America. Even though the International New Thought Alliance still exists, the once flourishing and influential New Thought movement exists no more. At best it’s an affinity group with many New Thought practitioners and teachers existing and operating quite apart from any explicitly New Thought organization. New Thought gradually filtered out of its movement into the fabric of American culture. Protestant ministers such as Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller and now Joel Osteen have re-packaged and popularized it for non-New Thought Christians. Some would say they have vulgarized it.

What New Thought really was and is is an ethos. The ethos pre-dates Mary Baker Eddy and the Fillmores and the New Thought Alliance. And it is still very much alive and well, taking on new forms and finding new expressions all the time. The Pentecostal-charismatic “prosperity gospel” is one of them. The New Thought ethos was probably born out of American pragmatism, the popularity of esoteric ideas and practices such as Mesmerism, and mind healer Phineas Quimby’s peripatetic therapeutic ministry. Lurking somewhere in the background of New Thought is almost certainly German philosophical idealism, transported onto American soil and translated for always optimistic American individualists. Today it is ubiquitous and nearly identical with “the American ‘can-do’ spirit.”

I could give many examples of the distinction between “ethos” and “movement.” The charismatic movement arose in the 1960s and died sometime later. But its pre-existence was in Pentecostalism and its post-existence is in “renewalism,” Third Wave Christianity and television evangelism.

The evangelical movement of my youth is dead. It broke apart. Relics such as Christianity Today and the rather ineffectual NAE remain. What’s left? The evangelical ethos—that pre-dated the movement, was given new expression by the movement, and is still shared in distinct expressions by the three evangelical groups I mentioned above.

So what is this evangelical ethos? Each group of evangelicals will give it a somewhat different description. One evangelical party will emphasize its experiential dimension—“conversional piety.” Another one will emphasize its doctrinal dimension—usually then with emphasis on a distinctive view of Scripture that includes inerrancy. Yet another one will emphasize its culture-transforming dimension with stress on changed people changing culture toward the Kingdom of God.

Rachael Held Evans

I find Mark Noll’s and David Bebbington’s approach to evangelical description most helpful, but I want to amend it in some ways. In my next talk I will focus on the evangelical ethos as the present and future of evangelicalism and on what I mean by “postconservative evangelicalism.”

- Roger Olson

Link to - The Future of Evangelicalism, Part 1

Link to - The Future of Evangelicalism, Part 2

*David Bebbington: Bebbington’s Quadralateral

Bebbington is widely known for his definition of evangelicalism, referred to as the "Bebbington quadrilateral”, which was first provided in his 1989 classic study Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s.

Bebbington identifies four main qualities which are to be used in defining evangelical convictions and attitudes:

• biblicism - a particular regard for the Bible (all essential spiritual truth is to be found in its pages)

• crucicentrism - a focus on the atoning work of Christ on the cross (Jesus died for sinners)

• conversionism - the belief that human beings need to be converted (born-again)

• activism - that the gospel needs to be expressed in words and actions

An Excerpt from "What We Talk About When We Talk About God," by Rob Bell

What We Talk About When We Talk About God (EXCERPT)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-bell/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-god-excerpt_b_2839028.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

 

by Rob Bell, Author of Love Wins

March 12, 2013

 

I realize that when I use the word God, there's a good chance I'm stepping on all kinds of land mines. Is there a more volatile word loaded down with more history, assumptions and expectations than that tired, old, relevant, electrically charged, provocative, fresh, antiquated yet ubiquitous as ever, familiar/unfamiliar word God?

 

And that's why I use it.

 

From people risking their lives to serve the poor because they believe God called them to do it, to pastors claiming that the latest tornado or hurricane or earthquake is God's judgment, to professors proclaiming that God has only ever been a figment of our imagination, to people in a recovery meeting sitting in a circle drinking bad coffee and talking about surrendering to a higher power, to musicians in their acceptance speech at an awards show thanking God for their hit song about a late-night booty call, when it comes to God, we are all over the place.

 

Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.

 

And then there are the latest surveys and polls, the ones telling us how many of us believe and don't believe in God and how many fewer of us are going to church, inevitably prompting experts to speculate about demographics and technology and worship style and this generation vs. that generation, all of it avoiding the glaring truth that sits right there elephant-like in the middle of the room.

 

The truth is, we have a problem with God.

 

It's not just a problem of definition -- what is it we're talking about when we talk about God? -- and it's not just the increasing likelihood that two people discussing God are in fact talking about two extraordinarily different realities while using the exact same word.

 

This problem with God goes much, much deeper.

 

As a pastor over the past 20 years, what I've seen again and again is people who want to live lives of meaning and peace and significance and joy -- people who have a compelling sense that their spirituality is in some vital and yet mysterious way central to who they are -- but who can't find meaning in the dominant conceptions, perceptions and understandings of God they've encountered. In fact, those conceptions aren't just failing them but are actually causing harm.

 

We're engaged more than ever by the possibilities of soul and spirit, and by the nagging suspicion that all of this may not be a grand accident after all; but God, an increasing number of people are asking -- what does God have to do with that?

 

I've written this book about that word, then, because there's something in the air, we're in the midst of a massive rethink, a movement is gaining momentum, a moment in history is in the making: There is a growing sense among a growing number of people that when it comes to God, we're at the end of one era and the start of another, an entire mode of understanding and talking about God dying as something new is being birthed.

 

There's an ancient story about a man named Jacob who had a magnificent dream, and when he wakes up he says, "Surely God was in this place, and I, I wasn't aware of it."

 

Until now.

 

The power of the story is its timeless reminder that God hasn't changed; it's Jacob who wakes up to a whole new awareness of who -- and where -- God is.

 

Which brings me back to this moment, to the realization among an increasing number of people that we are waking up in new ways to the God who's been here the whole time.

 

I'm aware, to say the least, that talking about this and writing a book about it, naming it and trying to explain it and taking a shot at describing where it's all headed, runs all sorts of risks.

 

I get that.

 

We're surrounded by friends and neighbors and family and intellectual and religious systems with deeply held, vested interests in the conventional categories and conceptions of belief and denial continuing to remain as entrenched as those traditional conceptions are. There are, as they say, snipers on every roof. And being controversial isn't remotely interesting.

 

But love and meaning and joy and hope?

 

That's compelling.

 

That's what I'm after.

 

That's worth the risk.

 

The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour's need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.

 

And the truth is, we have a problem -- we have a need -- and there's always the chance that this may in fact be the hour.

 

First, then, a bit more about this God problem...

 

When I was 20, I drove an Oldsmobile.

 

Remember those?

 

It was a four-door Delta 88 and it was silver and it had a bench seat across the front with an armrest that folded down and it fit seven or eight people easily and in a feat of engineering genius the rear license plate was on a hinge that you pulled down in order to fill up the gas tank and the trunk was so huge you could put five snowboards in at the same time or a drum set, several guitar amps, and a body if you needed to. (I'm just messing with you there, about the body.) My friends called it "the Sled."

 

It was a magnificent automobile, the Sled, and it served me well for those years.

 

But they don't make Oldsmobiles anymore.

 

They used to be popular, and your grandparents or roommate may still drive one, but the factories have shut down. Eventually the only ones left will be collector's items, relics of an era that has passed.

 

Oldsmobile couldn't keep up with the times, and so it gradually became part of the past, not the future.

 

For them, not us.

 

For then, not now.

 

I tell you about the Sled I used to drive because for many in our world today, God is like Oldsmobiles. To explain what I mean when I talk about God-like Oldsmobiles, a few stories: My friend Cathi recently told me about an event she attended where an influential Christian leader talked openly about how he didn't think women should be allowed to teach and lead in the church. Cathi, who has two master's degrees, sat there stunned.

 

I got an email from my friend Gary last year, saying that he'd decided to visit a church with his family on Easter Sunday. They'd heard a sermon about how resurrection means everybody who is gay is going to hell.

 

And then my friend Michael recently told me about hearing the leader of a large Christian denomination say that if you deny that God made the world in a literal six days, you are denying the rest of the Bible as well, because it doesn't matter what science says.

 

And then there are the two pastors I know who each told me, within days of the other, how their wives don't want anything to do with God. Both wives were raised and educated in very religious environments that placed a great deal of importance on the belief that God is good and the point of life is to have a personal relationship with this good God. But both wives have suffered great pain in their young lives, and the clean and neat categories of faith they were handed in their youth haven't been capable of helping them navigate the complexity of their experiences. And so, like jilted lovers, they have turned away. God, for them, is an awkward, alien, strange notion. Like someone they used to know.

 

And then there's the party I attended in New York where I met a well-known journalist who, when he was told that I'm a pastor, wanted to know if all of you pastors use big charts with timelines and graphics to show people when the world is going to end and how Christians are going to escape while those who are left behind endure untold suffering.

 

I tell you about Cathi sitting there stunned and Gary hearing that sermon and me at that party because
whether it's science or art or education or medicine or personal rights or basic intellectual integrity or simply dealing with suffering in all of its complexity, for many in our world -- and this includes Christians and a growing number of pastors -- believing or trusting in that God, the one they've heard other Christians talk about, feels like a step backward, to an earlier, less informed and enlightened time, one that we've thankfully left behind.

 

There's a question that lurks in these stories, a question that an ever-increasing number of people across a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives are asking about God:

 

Can God keep up with the modern world?

 

Things have changed. We have more information and technology than ever. We're interacting with a far more diverse range of people than we used to. And the tribal God, the one that is the only one many have been exposed to -- the one who's always right (which means everybody else is wrong) -- is increasingly perceived to be small, narrow, irrelevant, mean, and sometimes just not that intelligent.

 

Is God going to be left behind?

 

Like Oldsmobiles?

 

* * *

 

For others, it isn't that God is behind or unable to deal with the complexity of life; for them God never existed in the first place. In recent years we've heard a number of very intelligent and articulate scientists, professors and writers argue passionately and confidently that there is no God. This particular faith insists that human beings are nothing more than highly complex interactions of atoms and molecules and neurons, hardwired over time to respond to stimuli in particular ways, feverishly constructing meaning to protect us from the unwelcome truth that there is no ultimate meaning because in the end we are simply the sum of our parts -- no more, no less.

 

That all there is is, in the end, all there is.

 

This denial isn't anything new, but it's gained a head of steam in recent years, this resurgence seemingly in reaction to the God-like Oldsmobile, the one more and more people are becoming convinced is not only behind, but downright destructive.

 

I was recently invited to participate in a debate at which the topic was "Is religion good or bad?"

 

Here's the kicker: the organizers wanted me to know I was free to choose which side I'd take!

 

How revealing is that?

 

All of which brings me to Jane Fonda. (You didn't see that coming, did you?) Several years ago in an interview she gave to Rolling Stone magazine the interviewer said this:

 

Your most recent -- and perhaps most dramatic -- transformation is your becoming a Christian. Even with your flair for controversy, that's pretty explosive.

 

It's a telling statement, isn't it? You can sense so much there, as if there's a question behind the question that isn't really a question -- that hidden question being what the interviewer really wants to ask her: "Why would anybody become a Christian?"

 

That's a question lots of people have -- educated, reasonable, modern people who find becoming a Christian an "explosive," not to mention an inconceivable, thing to do.

 

In her response, Jane Fonda spoke of being drawn to faith because "I could feel reverence humming in me."

 

Reverence humming in me. I love that phrase. It speaks to the experiences we've all had -- moments and tastes and glimpses when we've found ourselves deeply aware of the something more of life, the something else, the sense that all of this might just mean something, that it may not be an accident, that it has profound resonance and that it matters in ways that are very real and very hard to explain.

 

For a massive number of people, to deny this reverence humming in us, to insist that we're simply random collections of atoms and that all there is is all there is, leaves them cold, bored and uninspired.

 

It doesn't ring true to our very real experiences of life.

 

But when people turn to many of the conventional, traditional religious explanations for this reverence, they're often led to the God who is like Oldsmobiles, the one who's back there, behind, unable to keep up.

 

All of this raising the questions:

 

Are there other ways to talk about the reverence humming in us?

 

Are there other ways to talk about the sense we have that there's way more going on here?

 

Are there other ways to talk about God?

 

My answer is yes. I believe there are. But before we get to those others ways, I need to first tell you why this book comes bursting out of my heart like it does.

 

One Sunday morning a number of years ago I found myself face-to-face with the possibility that there is no God and we really are on our own and this may be all there is.

 

Now I realize lots of people have questions and convictions and doubts along those lines -- that's nothing new. But in my case, it was an Easter Sunday morning, and I was a pastor. I was driving to the church services where I'd be giving a sermon about how there is a God and that God came here to Earth to do something miraculous and rise from the dead so that all of us could live forever.

 

And it was expected that I would do this passionately and confidently and persuasively with great hope and joy and lots of exclamation points. !!!!!!!

 

That's how the Easter sermon goes, right? Imagine if I'd stood up there and said, "Well, I've been thinking about this for a while, and I gotta be honest with you: I think we're kinda screwed."

 

Doesn't work, does it?

 

I should pause here and say that when you're a pastor, your heart and soul and paycheck and doubts and faith and hopes and struggles and intellect and responsibility are all wrapped up together in a life/job that is very public. And Sunday comes once a week, when you're expected to have something inspiring to say, regardless of how you happen to feel or think about God at the moment. This can create a suffocating tension at times, because you want to serve people well and give them your very best, and yet you're also human. And in my case, full of really, really serious doubts about the entire ball of God wax.

 

That Easter Sunday was fairly traumatic, to say the least, because I realized that without some serious reflection and study and wise counsel I couldn't keep going without losing something vital to my sanity. The only way forward was to plunge headfirst into my doubts and swim all the way to the bottom and find out just how deep that pool went. And if I had to, in the end, walk away in good conscience, then so be it. At least I'd have my integrity.

 

This book, then, is deeply, deeply personal for me. Much of what I've written here comes directly out of my own doubt, skepticism and dark nights of the soul when I found myself questioning -- to be honest -- everything. There is a cold shudder that runs down the spine when you find yourself face-to-face with the unvarnished possibility that we may in the end be alone. To trust that there is a divine being who cares and loves and guides can feel like taking a leap -- across the ocean. So when I talk about God and faith and belief and all that, it's not from a triumphant, impatient posture of "Come on, people -- get with the program!" I come to this topic limping, with some bruises, acutely aware of how maddening, confusing, frustrating, infuriating and even traumatic it can be to talk about God.

 

What I experienced, over a long period of time, was a gradual awakening to new perspectives on God - specifically, the God Jesus talked about. I came to see that there were depths and dimensions to the ancient Hebrew tradition, and to the Christian tradition which grew out of that, that spoke directly to my questions and struggles in coming to terms with how to conceive of who God is and what God is and why that even matters and what that has to do with life in this world, here and now.

 

Through that process, which is of course still going on, the doubts didn't suddenly go away and the beliefs didn't suddenly form nice, neat categories. Something much more profound happened. Something extraordinarily freeing and inspiring and invigorating and really, really helpful, something thrilling which compels me to sit here day after day, month after month, and write this book.

 

Which leads me to two brief truths about this book before we go further.

 

First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God. I realize that for some people, hearing talk about Jesus shrinks and narrows the discussion about God, but my experience has been the exact opposite. My experiences of Jesus have opened my mind and my heart to a bigger, wider, more expansive and mysterious and loving God who I believe is actually up to something in the world.

 

Second, what I've experienced time and time again is that people want to talk about God. Whether it's what they were taught growing up or not taught, or what inspires them or what repulses them, or what gives them hope or what fills them with despair, I've found people to be extremely keen to talk about their beliefs and lack of beliefs in God. What I've observed is that while we want more of a connection with the reverence humming within us, we often don't know where to begin or what steps to take or what that process even looks like.

 

So if, in some small way, this book could provide some guidance along these lines, I'd be ecstatic. In saying that, I should be clear here about one point: This is not a book in which I'll try to prove that God exists. If you even could prove the existence of the divine, I suspect that at that moment you would in fact be talking about something, or somebody, else.

 

This is a book about seeing, about becoming more and more alive and aware, orienting ourselves around the God who I believe is the ground of our being, the electricity that lights up the whole house, the transcendent presence in our tastes, sights and sensations of the depth and dimension and fullness of life, from joy to agony to everything else.

 

* * *

 

Now, about where we're headed in the following pages.

 

This book centers around three words. They aren't long or technical or complicated or scholarly; they're short, simple, everyday words, and they're the foundation on which everything we're going to cover rests.

 

These three words are central to how I understand God, and if I could CAPS LOCK THEM THE WHOLE WAY THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, I would; or write them in the sky or etch them in blood (on second thought, maybe not) or graffiti them on the side of your house (let's not do this either, though I'd love to see what Banksy would do with them), because they're the giant, big, loud, this one-goes-to-11 idea that animates everything we're going to explore in the following pages.

 

They've unleashed in me new ways of thinking about and understanding and most importantly experiencing God. They've made my life better, and my hope is that they will do the same for you.

 

But before we get to those three words, we first have two others words we're going to cover. (Nice buildup, huh?)

 

It's these two words that will set us up for the three words that form the backbone of the book.

 

First, we'll talk about being open, because when we talk about God we drag a massive amount of expectations and assumptions into the discussion with us about how the world works and what kind of universe we're living in. Often God's existence is challenged in the conversation about what matters most in the modern world because haven't we moved past all of that ancient, primitive, superstitious thinking? We have science after all, and reason and logic and evidence. What does God have to do with the new challenges we're facing and knowledge we're acquiring? Quite a lot, actually, because the universe, it turns out, is way, way weirder than any of us first thought. And that weirdness will demand that we be open.

 

So first, Open.

 

Then we'll talk about talking, because when we talk about God, we're using language, and language both helps us and fails us in our attempts to understand and describe the paradoxical nature of the God who is beyond words.

 

First Open,

then Both.

 

And then, after those two words, we get to the three words, the words that will shape how we talk about God in this book. The words are (I feel like there should be a drumroll or something...):

 

With,

 

For,

 

Ahead.

 

With, because I understand God to be the energy, the glue, the force, the life, the power and the source of all we know to be the depth, fullness and vitality of life from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and everything in between. I believe God is with us because I believe that all of us are already experiencing the presence of God in countless ways every single day. In talking about the God who is with us, I want you to see how this withness directly confronts popular notions of God that put God somewhere else, doing something else, coming here now and again to do God-type things. I want you to see both the irrelevance and the danger of that particular perspective of God as you more and more see God all around you all the time.

 

Then for, because I believe God is for every single one of us, regardless of our beliefs or perspectives or actions or failures or mistakes or sins or opinions about whether God exists or not. I believe that God wants us each to flourish and thrive in this world here and now as we become more and more everything we can possibly be. In talking about the forness of God, I want you to see how many of the dominant theological systems of thought that insist God is angry and hateful and just waiting to judge us unless we do or say or perform or believe the right things actually make people miserable and plague them with all kinds of new stresses and anxieties, never more so than when they actually start believing that God is really like that. I want you to see the radical, refreshing, revolutionary forness that is at the heart of Jesus' message about God as it informs and transforms your entire life.

 

Then ahead, because when I talk about God, I'm not talking about a divine being who is behind, trying to drag us back to a primitive, barbaric, regressive, prescientific age when we believed Earth was flat and the center of the universe. I believe that God isn't backward-focused -- opposed to reason, liberation and progress -- but instead is pulling us and calling us and drawing all of humanity forward -- as God always has -- into greater and greater peace, love, justice, connection, honesty, compassion and joy. I want you to see how the God we see at work in the Bible is actually ahead of people, tribes and cultures as God always has been. Far too many people in our world have come to see God as back there, primitive, not-that-intelligent, dragging everything backward to where it used to be. I don't understand God to be stuck back there, and I want you to experience this pull forward as a vital, active reality in your day-to-day life as you see just what God has been up to all along with every single one us.

 

All of which leads us to one more word to wrap it up: so. So what? So how do we live this? So is the question about what all this talking has to do with our everyday thinking and feeling and living.

 

To review, then:

 

Open,

 

Both,

 

With,

 

For,

 

Ahead,

 

and So.

 

It's a fair bit of ground to cover, and my hope is that by the end you will say, "Now that's what I'm talking about."

 

- Rob Bell