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“Concerns of a Pietist
with a Ph.D.”
an address presented at an additional session of the American Academy
of Religion
Toronto ON, 23 November 2002
Stanley J. Grenz
Baylor University and Truett Seminary
“I urge you, as I did when I was on my way to Macedonia,
to remain in Ephesus so that you may instruct certain people not
to teach any different doctrine, and not to occupy themselves
with myths and endless genealogies that promote speculations rather
than the divine training that is known by faith. But the aim of
such instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good
conscience, and sincere faith.”
1 Timothy 1:3-5 (NRSV)
“It is a sober realism, rather than undue alarm, that prompts
the fear that, unless we experience a rebirth of apostolic passion,
Fundamentalism in two generations will be reduced either to a
tolerated cult status or...become once again a despised and oppressed
sect. The only live alternative, it appears to me, is a rediscovery
of the revelational classics and the redemptive power of God...”
Carl F. H. Henry
When a Baptist congregation in Vancouver, BC, invited
me to fill its pulpit on Pentecost Sunday a couple of years ago,
I immediately knew that I would preach on renewal. This once vibrant
fellowship had been wracked by several years of internal squabbling,
and as a result had dwindled in both membership and worship attendance.
In seeking to minister to the need of the church at this point in
its history, I delivered a sermon that drew from the experience
of the disciples in the upper room in the days prior to the Pentecostal
outpouring of the Spirit, recorded in Acts 1. On the basis of this
text, I sought to outline what must characterize Christians today,
if God were to visit us with an awakening. As I concluded the message,
I sensed a compulsion to offer an opportunity for anyone who had
been challenged by the Word to respond in a concrete manner. To
facilitate this, I invited all who would commit themselves to being
catalysts for renewal in the congregation to stand and thereby give
public expression to their resolve. I expected that one or perhaps
two of those in attendance would heed my call. When the number of
people standing swelled to eighteen, I was moved nearly to tears.
So overwhelmed was I by this evidence of the Spirit’s presence
that I could not offer the promised dedicatory prayer, but had to
call on the interim pastor to replace me on the platform and pray
in my stead.
This incident was a vivid reminder to me of how deeply steeped
I am in the warm-hearted, relational, pietistic conception of the
Christian faith that I saw as a child in my father’s ministry
and imbued in the churches he served. The concern for heartfelt
piety does not only tie me to my own immediate genealogical history;
it also links me to a long trajectory of proponents of an approach
to the faith that dates at least to the eighteenth-century Great
Awakening. Yet I am also a vocational theologian schooled in the
great tradition of systematic theology with its focus on the intellectual
aspect of the Christian faith, including the concern for right doctrine.
Over two decades as a theological educator, I have remained committed
to pursuing the “understanding” dimension of the “faith
seeking understanding” dictum, with Scripture functioning
as the ultimate touchstone for Christian belief. In short, two strands
run through my spiritual psyche: a non-negotiable concern for the
work of the Spirit in transforming human hearts and an unabashed
commitment to a Bible-focused intellectual rigor. You might say
that I’m a “pietist with a Ph.D.”
I do not think I am unique in this respect. Many other evangelicals
sense this double blood-line running through their spiritual veins.
And perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that it even
mirrors contemporary American evangelicalism itself. My goal in
this address is to engage with the two-sided character of the evangelical
movement. I begin by sketching the rise of the two aspects of the
evangelical ethos. I then summarize what I see as the current tension
within evangelicalism that the presence of the two concerns occasions.
Finally, I turn my attention to a possible way forward for evangelicals,
who sense–as I do–that they are pietists with Ph.D.’s.
The
Genesis of Evangelicalism’s Two-Sided Character
The central concern that has propelled the movement from
its inception is evident in the designation “evangelical,”
for evangelicals are a people intent on upholding what they see
as the one true gospel. For the genesis of their namesake, evangelicals
look above all to the Protestant Reformers. One patron saint of
evangelicalism, Martin Luther, referred to his coworkers as “those
who boldly call themselves Evangelicals,” because of their
attempt to return the church to the biblical gospel that they believed
had been lost in the Middle Ages. As the continued use of their
chosen name suggests, evangelicals view themselves as the true heirs
of the Reformers’ gospel, especially the focus on justification
by grace through faith alone (sola fide).
In this commitment, evangelicals are not simply Lutherans,
however. Rather, their understanding of justification by grace through
faith has been mediated to them by developments that followed on
the heels of the Reformation. Evangelicals have generally diverged
from the Lutheran script by following the Reformed tendency to view
justification as a completed spiritual transaction that inaugurates
the process of sanctification. The roots of this hallmark of the
evangelical understanding of the gospel lie in the Puritan and Pietist
movements, that are often cited as forming the immediate seed-bed
for the rise of the evangelical awakening in the eighteenth century.
As the Puritan movement unfolded, many of the more radical
among them came to conclude that the goal of the gospel is to gather
out of the world “pure” churches, consisting solely
of the elect of God. The truly reformed church, these Puritans concluded,
must rid itself not only of popish errors but of the unregenerate
within it. The quest for a pure church ignited within the Puritans
a apprehension regarding the possibility of gaining assurance of
elect status. The result was the development of a descriptive psychology
of sin and regeneration. This gave rise, in turn, to the practice
of reciting personal testimonies of God’s work of grace in
the heart, which, when coupled with evidence of a subsequent Christian
walk, could mediate to concerned believers “full assurance”
of salvation and of eternal election.
Like the Puritans, the Pietists were reformers. Their goal
was to complete the reformation of the Lutheran church, which in
their estimation had degenerated to adherence to outward forms rather
than fostering inward transformation. According to the Pietists,
the true gospel entails the call to personal conversion, that is,
to a transformed heart leading to right living. In the Pietists’
estimation, the experience of the new birth forms the basis for
the sanctification process.
The confluence of Puritanism and Pietism in the lives of
a theologically diverse group of Christians in England in the 1730s
gave birth to the evangelical movement. Like the Pietists, evangelical
leaders such as John Wesley preached a gospel of conversion or regeneration
(i.e. the new birth), an event that they believed includes justification.
The preaching of the new birth sparked a parade of vivid accounts
of conversion, all of which followed a typical form. The paradigm
evangelical conversion narrative found its musical expression in
the penultimate stanza of Charles Wesley’s hymn, “And
Can It Be,” which also encapsulated the evangelical theological
assumption, inherited from Pietism, of the primacy of conversion
and regeneration to justification. Hence, only after narrating the
conversion experience–“My chains fell off, my heart
was free”–do the lyrics announce that the regenerated
believer is now “clothed in righteousness divine.”
Like their Puritan forebears, evangelicals such as Wesley
were also keenly interested in assurance, which was closely connected
with their concern for sanctification. Wesley viewed justification
(understood as imputed righteousness) as the basis for the believer’s
acceptance with God. Sanctification (which emerges from regeneration),
in turn, is the fruit of such acceptance.
The focus on the new birth and the assurance of salvation
that launched the evangelical awakening was abetted by an approach
to the Christian faith that arose from the influence of the new
empiricist, inductive, experiment-focused scientific method characteristic
of Enlightenment thinkers, especially John Locke.
Hence, eighteenth century evangelicals repeatedly referred
to their goal as fostering “experimental religion,”
that is, a faith that had been tried and proved by experience.
In short, its roots in Puritanism and Pietism mediated to
eighteenth century evangelicalism a concern for, and emphasis on,
a conscious experience of the grace of God in personal conversion.
Thus, at the heart of the evangelical movement has always been what
Donald Dayton calls “convertive piety” or what Roger
Olson terms “conversional piety,” the message that “true
Christian piety–devotion, discipleship, sanctification–begins
with a distinct conversion experience.” Convertive piety,
in turn, has given shape to evangelical theology, as issues surrounding
the shared conversion experience have provided grist for the evangelical
theological mill for two and a half centuries.
By the mid-twentieth century, descriptions of evangelicalism
tended to augment the focus on convertive piety with another, decidedly
cognitive aspect, the commitment to biblical doctrine. The introduction
of this additional dimension suggests to some partisans that the
evangelical ethos consists of a material and a formal principle:
the gospel of Christ and the authority of the Bible understood as
the source of sound beliefs.
As with the commitment to the gospel of justification by
faith alone, evangelicals look to Martin Luther for the genesis
of their elevation of the Bible to center stage, and they see themselves
as maintaining Luther’s principle of sola scriptura.
Yet, here too evangelicals are not simply Lutherans. Luther elevated
the Bible because he saw it as the cradle that holds Christ and
as God’s chosen instrument for bringing the gospel to sinful
humans, whereas contemporary evangelical theologians tend to honor
the Bible as the source book for what may be called its “stateable
content,” that is, the doctrines (and moral precepts) it teaches.
This altered understanding of Luther’s great principle
was mediated to evangelicalism by several post-Reformation developments,
the first of which was “Protestant scholasticism.” As
the conflict with the Roman Catholic Church continued into the seventeenth
century, both Lutheran and Reformed theologians sought to undergird
the commitment to sola scriptura by setting forth a clearer understanding of biblical
authority. In the process, many Protestant theorists elevated the
divine origin of Scripture above its human authorship, and they
came to treat Scripture as accurate in every detail and as a storehouse
of revealed propositions. Theology, in turn, was viewed as the attempt
to forge a system of right doctrine through the systematizing of
the teachings of Scripture.
Although contemporary evangelical theologians routinely follow
the pattern honed by the Protestant scholastics, the characteristically
evangelical focus on biblical doctrine is more immediately indebted
to the nineteenth century Princeton theologians, who sought to respond
to a quite different phenomenon than that of their seventeenth century
forebears. Rather than attempting to establish the Protestant cause
over against the claims of the Roman Catholic Church, the Princetonians
were exercised by the challenge posed initially by the rising influence
of the scientific method, subsequently by German higher criticism,
and eventually by theological liberalism. In response to these challenges,
they set forth an understanding of theology and a theological method
that paralleled in several important ways the empirical scientific
method, with its elevation of induction, that had arisen in conjunction
with the Enlightenment. Believing that theology and science share
a common method of inquiry, Charles Hodge, the great systematician
and progenitor of the Princeton theology, patterned his work in
uncovering the theological facts found within the Bible after the
scientist, and he assumed that the theological propositions he drew
from the Bible–i.e., the doctrines revealed in Scripture–stated
universal facts.
The line connecting mid-twentieth century evangelical theologians
to their nineteenth century forebears and hence to the Protestant
scholastics runs through yet another intermediary, however, the
fundamentalist movement. In their fight against theological liberalism,
the fundamentalists elevated adherence to correct doctrine as a
mark–if not the
mark–of authentic Christianity. Moreover, to counter what
they perceived as the liberal attack on the Bible, they called for
an uncompromising loyalty to Scripture arising out of a high view
of biblical authority, that they contended was guaranteed by divine
inspiration. In this process, the fundamentalists looked to the
Princeton theologians for the intellectual framework for their own
elevation of the Bible and their commitment to its complete trustworthiness.
The legacy of fundamentalism introduced into the heart of
the evangelical ethos a concern for right doctrine, understood as
adherence to a set of basic dogmas that are viewed as encapsulating
the essence of the faith. Moreover, the dogmas that the movement
bequeathed to evangelicalism as comprising essential Christianity
did not focus so much on the nature of salvation itself, which
topic had stood at the theological center of the Reformers’
controversy with Rome. Rather, what came to be known as the
five fundamentals were more closely related to the supernatural
character of the faith, which the fundamentalists saw as under attack
by modern naturalism in its various forms. Finally, the legacy
of the fundamentalist struggle against liberalism, waged on the
terms set out by the Princeton theology, oriented evangelical theology
toward the quest for propositional truth, in contrast to the
interest in the person’s relationship to God that had
shaped and propelled the theological pursuits of the earlier
awakening evangelicalism. By adding the grave burden of maintaining
biblical orthodoxy, in a context understood as an ever-present battle
against both theological heterodoxy and scientific naturalism, to
the older commitment to the advancement of the gospel of transformation,
the trajectory through fundamentalism altered the ethos and self-understanding
of American evangelicalism. To be an evangelical now came to be
seen as being concerned for warm-hearted piety and
right-headed orthodoxy. In a sense, evangelicalism had taken on
the face of a “pietist with a Ph.D.”
Contemporary
Evangelicalism: Caught in the Middle
The historical journey of American evangelicalism from its
beginnings in the eighteenth century awakenings through its reorientation
in the wake of early twentieth-century fundamentalism has pressed
into the psyche of the movement two concerns–the pietistic
and the scholastic, the warm-hearted and the right-headed, the convertive
and the doctrinaire. This double-sided ethos is embodied in the
psyche not only of our immediate neo-evangelical parents, but also
of many of evangelicalism’s children. As a result, many evangelicals
today may–like I–sense that they are caught in the middle,
that they are being pulled in two directions simultaneously.
Although this conflict has always been present to some extent,
at the inception of the movement, the warm-hearted, “experimental”
dimension was clearly in the ascendency. Already in the sixteenth
century, the Puritans criticized the English church for having become
a mixed company that included persons, and even clergy, who showed
no evidence of true devotion to Christ. Likewise, the continental
Pietists bemoaned the state of the Lutheran church, which in their
estimation had grown content with mere outward forms and adherence
to creeds. The eighteenth-century evangelicals, in turn, extended
this critique to the church of their day. They decried a nominal
Christianity in which, to cite George Whitefield’s words,
“many are baptized with water which were never, effectually
at least, baptized with the Holy Ghost.” Hence, evangelicalism
began as a revival of warm-heartedness within a church whose focus
on right-headedness had left its adherents spiritually cold and
unconverted.
Since then, many evangelicals have continued to take an uncompromising
stance against the presence of what they have feared is a life-sapping
creedalism in the church. Pietistic evangelicals have been zealous
in warning of the dangers they find inherent in a confessionism
in which the focus on orthodox doctrine is purchased at the cost
of warm-hearted piety, fervor and devotion to Christ. Even Carl
Henry cautioned against this danger. In 1947, he cited approvingly
the words of fellow fundamentalist William Ward Ayer who decried
what he saw as the “pharisaical spirit of fundamentalism.”
Henry then prophesied, “unless there is a resurgence of love,
power and breadth of mind and spirit in our midst we shall more
effectively deny the faith than the religiously-shallow modernists
can ever do.”
The “experimental” approach is not without its
own dangers, of course. As the history of American Christianity
amply illustrates, when allowed to become the sole defining characteristic
of the Christian faith, warm-heartedness can lead to wrong-headedness,
that is, to doctrinal slippage or to a virulent anti-intellectualism.
Nevertheless, the commitment to the gospel of heartfelt transformation
and the accompanying suspicion of any reduction of saving faith
to simple assensus has been the lifeblood of evangelicalism throughout
its history and has formed its central contribution to the cause
of renewal in the church of Jesus Christ.
Despite the central role that the commitment to experimental
faith has played in defining the evangelical ethos throughout much
of its history, in recent years the pietist dimension has increasingly
found itself overshadowed in many circles by the other side of the
contemporary evangelical psyche, the concern for maintaining orthodox
doctrine. A growing number of evangelical theologians now set themselves
to the task of shoring up doctrinal standards for the movement,
even to the point of claiming that the essence of evangelicalism
consists in adherence to right doctrine. Some protagonists go so
far as to elevate the doctrinal heritage of a particular ecclesial
tradition or a particular theological interpretation of such points
of doctrine as the nature of salvation as the norm for all who would
claim the designation “evangelical.” This trend has
led several commentators to fear that a battle for the “soul”
of evangelicalism is brewing, one that could pit the champions of
doctrinal fidelity against the defenders of warm-hearted piety.
Like many others, I find myself caught in the middle of this
theological tug-of-war. Because I share both of the concerns that
have come to form the evangelical psyche, I not only affirm the
perspective that each side is seeking to uphold, I also rue the
debilitating problem that each is wanting to rectify.
My commitment to warm-heartedness is evident in my repeated
declarations that the sine qua non
of evangelicalism is not primarily doctrinal uniformity, but a particular
spirituality. At the same time, I bristle when some pietistic evangelicals
use the call to warm-heartedness as a pretense for an anti-intellectual,
anti-theological bias that glorifies “simple believing”
and vilifies any attempt to grapple with the intellectual dimension
of the faith. In such a climate, I link arms with those who call
themselves “confessing evangelicals,” for I am deeply
concerned that the Christian church maintain its doctrinal integrity
in the face of sloppy theology and the inroads of heterodoxy. Like
the “confessing evangelicals,” I am aware that a theologically
naive “experientalism” can produce a theologically-vacuous
“spirituality,” and so I share their fervor in combating
this debilitating tendency. Moreover, being convinced that theological
conviction is a crucial well-spring of Christian living, I affirm
the importance of sound theology for the on-going health and vitality
of the church, and I seek to model in my own life and foster in
the lives of others a theologically-tuned and theologically in-tune
discipleship. For this reason, therefore, I resonate with those
who lament the decreasing interest in theology so often evident
in the church and the paltry place given to solid theological engagement
on the shelves of Christian bookstores and in the day-to-day living
of vast numbers of persons who claim to be evangelicals. Hence,
when David Wells reports that an “antitheological mood...now
grips the evangelical world,” I respond immediately and passionately,
eager to join forces with colleagues in the task of promoting sound
theology.
Yet when I set myself to enter the battle, I discover that
I am at odds with the direction that some of the evangelical generals
would take this “good fight of the faith.” My hesitancy
is generally not motivated by irreconcilable differences over fine
points of doctrine. In most of the more volatile debates that divide
evangelicals today, I usually am in basic agreement with those who
are defending what have become the traditional positions. Rather
than differences over the doctrines themselves, what triggers my
consternation is a gnawing fear that the tendency of some theologians
to elevate adherence to a particular set of doctrinal formulations
as a necessary condition for claiming the designation “evangelical”
too easily overshadows the transformational focus so crucial to
true evangelical piety. Moreover, my heart grieves when I observe
the unchristlike manner in which many doctrinaire evangelicals vivify
those whom they deem to be in error. Whenever such abuses surface
in the cause of “saving”
a supposedly decadent and floundering evangelicalism, I worry that
the would-be saviors of the movement may in fact be the unwitting
agents of its actual demise. In such moments, I discover again the
degree to which awakening evangelicalism has been ingrained in my
soul. I sport a doctorate in theology, but I remain a pietist, a
pietist with a Ph.D.
The Evangelical
Ideal: The Integrating Middle
So what, then, is the way forward? Can evangelicals retain
allegiance to both heartfelt piety and orthodox doctrine without
succumbing to the debilitating situation of being caught between
competing concerns? Or stating the question in personal terms, how
can I remain a pietist with a Ph.D.? Perhaps the obvious answer
to the dilemma is “integration.” The evangelical ideal
would be to integrate warm-heartedness and right-headedness. The
pietist with a Ph.D. would be the one who not only remains committed
to both the gospel of transformation and the advancement of biblical
doctrine, but brings the two concerns into creative engagement.
Calling for integration is neither a new nor a unique idea,
of course. Nearly all contemporary evangelicals would likely claim
that the integration of head and heart (as well as “hand”)
is exactly what they are seeking. Moreover, even theologians known
for their focus on doctrine would want to characterize their program
as that of bringing together orthodoxy and “orthopraxy.”
My theological teacher at Denver Seminary, Gordon Lewis, to cite
one example, recently remarked to me that the goal of his theology
has always been to relate revealed theological truths to one another,
not as an end in itself, but for the sake of living by them. Similarly,
Wayne Grudem declares “application
to life is a necessary part of the proper pursuit of systematic
theology.”
The importance of personal piety was likewise acknowledged
by the nineteenth and early twentieth century luminaries who mediated
the attention to right doctrine to contemporary evangelicalism.
Charles Hodge, for example, displayed a strong pietistic side, for
he supposedly warned his students to “beware of a strong head
and a cold heart.” Moreover, in the opening section of his
Systematic Theology,
he declared, “It would be safe for a man to resolve to admit
into his theology nothing which is not sustained by the devotional
writings of true Christians of every denomination.” In keeping
with his sense of the importance of the devotional life, Hodge even
tried his hand at this literary genre, composing a book entitled,
The Way of Life (1842).
A similar appraisal ought to be voiced regarding the early
fundamentalists. Their goal was never that of elevating doctrine
at the expense of piety. Rather, the turn to doctrine occurred because
they perceived that orthodoxy, and not piety, was the dimension
of the faith that was being put at risk by the rise of liberalism.
Roger Olson explains: “Early fundamentalists did not deny
that personal experience of repentance and conversion is important.
But because of the threat they saw in liberal theology, they tended
to emphasize assent to unrevisable doctrinal propositions as the
essential and timeless core of Christianity....They distrusted religious
experience and affections because liberals could claim to have them.”
The issue, therefore, is not whether or not commitment to,
and integration of, the two central concerns is a worthy goal. Rather,
the question that may well divide evangelicals today is: Which concern
ought to be given preeminence in the process of determining the
character of evangelicalism? Here, I would advise that we move cautiously.
Several considerations lead me to suspect that elevating
the concern for biblical doctrine as the determinative or integrating
characteristic of evangelicalism may well undermine the movement
itself. First, a doctrine-centered approach all-too-readily loses
the distinctive character of evangelicalism as a renewal movement
within the church. It can too easily transform what was meant to
be a transconfessional coalition into a particular confessional
tradition and thereby make the parachurch into the church. Second,
viewing right-headedness as evangelicalism’s integrating concern
risks the demise of the generous spirit that has characterized evangelicals
from the beginning, but is all-too-often the first casualty in the
battle for doctrinal uniformity. Above all, however, giving central
place to the doctrinal concern can blunt the central insight evangelicalism
offers to the church, namely, that genuine Christian faith dare
never be equated with externalism in any form, including the externalism
entailed in mere adherence to orthodox doctrine. The early evangelicals
knew from their own experience that fidelity to doctrinal standards
cannot guarantee the presence of true Christianity, which they rightly
understood as personal trust in Christ and hence a heart converted
to God and to others. As J. I. Packer has noted, “What brings
salvation, after all, is not any theory about faith in Christ, justification,
and the church, but faith itself in Christ himself.” Looking
to the concern for doctrine as the integrative principle, therefore,
risks replacing the focus on warm-heartedness that constitutes the
central ethos and unique contribution of the evangelical community
with the very attitude–the creeping creedalism–that
evangelicalism rose up to protest.
Rather than the quest for right doctrine, the commitment
to convertive piety must remain the integrative principle of the
evangelical ethos. Whatever value evangelicals may (rightly) place
on doctrinal orthodoxy, historically they have always been adamant
that doctrine is never an end in itself, but is important insofar
as it serves and nurtures something even more significant: the transformation
of the heart and true Christian piety. Consequently, concern for
biblical doctrine must always remain the handmaiden to commitment
to the gospel of heartfelt piety.
Having said this, I must quickly add that piety dare never
ignore doctrine. Orthodoxy is crucial to orthopraxy, right-headedness
is important to warm-heartedness, and doctrinal rigor plays a crucial
role in the truly transformed life. This conclusion emerges directly
out of the nature of the convertive piety that marks the essence
of evangelicalism. As I have declared repeatedly, the encounter
with God that evangelicals proclaim does not occur in a theological
vacuum. Every experience is necessarily tied to an understanding
of reality, an interpretive framework, that both facilitates it
and emerges from it. So also, the saving encounter with God in Christ
through the Spirit, both at conversion as the beginning of the faith
journey and in the on-going life of faithful discipleship, must
be cradled by the constellation of beliefs, arising from the Bible,
that comprise the Christian interpretive framework.
My commitment to convertive piety, therefore, leads inevitably
to a concern for orthodox doctrine. Or stating the point in the
opposite way, my strong regard for doctrine arises as a crucial
and necessary by-product of my being an evangelical committed to
the gospel of heartfelt transformation. But notice the order: I
am deeply concerned for right-headedness because I am an evangelical. Furthermore, my adherence to orthodox
doctrine does not in-and-of itself constitute me as an evangelical.
Indeed, not everyone who is doctrinally orthodox can claim (or would
desire to claim) the descriptor “evangelical.”
This takes us back to the text of Scripture with which I
began. In these words to Timothy, Paul voices his grave concern
for the maintenance of doctrinal integrity in the church. In anticipation
of his own impending death, he charges his younger colleague to
contend for sound doctrine against the false teachers that have
infiltrated the Ephesian congregation. But notice that for Paul,
right belief is not an end in itself. Rather, as he explains, his
charge to Timothy has a deeper telos,
namely, the kind of love that emerges from a pure heart, a good
conscience and a sincere faith. Paul’s ultimate goal, therefore,
does not rest with the cognitive dimension but moves to the affective–the
transformation of the person–which purpose he intends that
the cognitive serve. Placing this text in the context of the preaching
vocation of the pastor, the early twentieth-century Princeton professor
of practical theology, Charles Erdman, declared, “the supreme
end of preaching ever will be so to present the grace of God in
Christ as to call forth a responsive love....The love of which he
speaks must have its course and its spring ‘in a pure heart’;...it
must come from ‘a good conscience’;...above all, it
must have its origin in ‘faith unfeigned,’ a faith which
is no empty profession, no simple, easy assent to formulas, but
a vital principle uniting one to a living Christ, and manifested
in a life ‘according to the gospel of the glory of the blessed
God.’” The mid-century Anglican biblical scholar, A.
E. Burn, echoed these sentiments when he declared tersely regarding
this text, “No teaching is of value that does not help to
produce love, or one of the three roots out of which grows.”
Conclusion
So where does this leave me? I am a person whom God has encountered
in Christ, whose heart the Holy Spirit has regenerated, and therefore
whose highest desire is to be a faithful disciple of Christ within
the community of his disciples and the world. Viewing myself in
this manner suggests that I am a pietist. It places me in a long
trajectory of people from the Pietists and the Puritans, from Wesley,
Edwards and Isaac Backus, to the folks who came forward at the worship
service on Pentecost Sunday, all of whom have a burning desire to
serve the cause of the gospel in the church and the world by fostering
an awakening to heartfelt piety. With these heroes of the faith,
I share the concern for a renewal of the kind of warm-hearted fervency
that is able to replace dead creedalism with a generous orthodoxy
that can facilitate us in the task of being faithful disciples of
Christ by the transforming power of the Holy Spirit to the glory
of God. Carl Henry articulated this concern well, when he declared,
“a baptism of pentecostal fire resulting in a world missionary
program and a divinely-empowered Christian community would turn
the uneasy conscience of modern evangelicalism into a new reformation–this
time with ecumenical significance.”
At the same time, I am concerned for right-headedness–doctrine.
I affirm that intellectual rigor in the exploration and articulation
of biblical doctrine is crucial to the life of true piety and to
the advancement of the gospel of genuine transformation. This concern
led me to seek a doctorate in theology. I am a Ph.D. Putting the
two together means that I am imbued with a commitment both to warm-heartedness
and right-headedness. I am, in short, a pietist with a Ph.D. And
this, I would add, marks me as an evangelical.
So how can I integrate these two dimensions? How can I bring
together heart and head, piety and orthodoxy? For insight, I turn
to a long line of faithful servants of God–my own teachers
and the nineteenth century exemplars whom they imitated, as well
as the seventeenth century Puritans and Pietists and their eighteenth
century evangelical followers. In ways uniquely their own and appropriate
to their day, these luminaries were also pietists with Ph.D.’s.
My concern to honor their legacy, to follow in their footsteps and
to advance the renewal that they pioneered is what ultimately led
me to affirm The Word Made Fresh.
Note: The above address is an edited and expanded version
of an essay published in the Wesleyan Theological Journal 37/2 (Fall 2002): 58-76. For the scholarly documentation
that corresponds to the essay, please see the published form or
contact the author.
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