The essential precondition for a renewed evangelical engagement with intellectual life is confidence in its own coherence and credibility. This study therefore aims to explore the coherence of evangelicalism by bringing out the inner consistency of the evangelical approach and demonstrating the internal contradictions and vulnerabilities of its contemporary rivals.(2)

As we shall see, evangelicalism is emphatic in affirming not merely the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, but his definitiveness; however, the affirmation of the former is an important first step in the defence of the latter.(3)

The particularity of the Christian gospel and supremely the person of Jesus Christ as saviour and Lord, does not conflict in any manner with its universal scope. Indeed, the evangelical passion for truth is expressed partly in its focus on the person of Christ, in that Jesus Christ is the truth.(4)

The fundamental revelational axiom of the Christian faith is that only God can reveal God, just as its fundamental soteriological axiom is that only God can save.(5)

To allow our ideas and values to become controlled by anything or anyone other than the self-revelation of God in Scripture is to adopt an ideology, rather than a theology; it is to become controlled by ideas and values whose origins lie outside the Christian tradition--and potentially to become enslaved to them.(6)

As the rise of Nazism and Stalinism have made abundantly clear, cultural trends need to be criticized. They cannot be allowed to be normative. And that demands that Christianity ground itself on something which transcends cultural particularities--namely, the self-revelation of God.(7)

There will be those outside evangelicalism and outside Christianity who will want to make other figures, powers, principles and values of foundational importance. Evangelical Christianity, however, is unashamedly Christ-centered. Jesus Christ is the gospel. However complex subsequent theological reflection of this may become, evangelicalism affirms that all must be based upon Christ, and all must be judged by Christ--not seeing him simply as a source of ideas, but as the foundation of every aspect of the Christian life.(8)

The critical question which arises from this approach, [that of Lindbeck] to which we shall return later in this chapter, is whether theology is simply about the grammar of faith--that is to say, regulation of Christian discourse. To what does this discourse relate? Is there some reality or set of realities outside the biblical text to which the biblical narrative relates? Do theological assertions simply articulate biblical grammar, or do they relate to some objective order, irrespective of whether we recognize this relation or not? As we shall see, one central evangelical anxiety concerning the postliberal approach is that it appears to represent a purely intratextual affair, with little concern for its possible relation to an external objective reality.(9)

This is in no sense to deny or to de-emphasize the cognitive aspects of Christian theology. It is merely to observe that there is more to theology than cerebralized information. A theology which touches the mind, leaving the heart unaffected, is no true Christian theology--a point stressed by both Luther and Calvin.(10)

While I have argued that this approach [revelation as purely propositional] to Christian doctrine is inadequate, in that it fails to do justice to the full complexity of the biblical notions of revelation, it remains axiomatic for evangelicals that both revelation and doctrine have cognitive or informational aspects.(11)

For understandable reasons, evangelicalism has in the past chosen to focus on the propositional or cognitive element of the complex network of divine revelation--an element which allowed evangelicalism to maintain its credibility and integrity during a period of rationalist assault. But the ensuring understanding of `revelation' was itself dangerous deficient, verging on the aridity and sterility which were the hallmarks of the same rationalism which evangelicalism was seeking to oppose. ... Recognizing the narrative quality of Scripture allows the fullness of biblical revelation to be recovered. In no way does this strategy involve the abandoning or weakening of an evangelical commitment to the objective cognitive truth of divine revelation. It is simply to recognize that revelation involves more than this, and to commend the wisdom of avoiding reductionist approaches to the issue.(12)

The method [historical critical method] is to be welcomed, because it takes seriously the incarnational principle, noted earlier, that God has chosen to reveal himself not in some timeless ahistorical form, or in abstract propositions, but in particular historical contexts and through real historical people.(13)

The Christological content of the Christian proclamation is minimized in the writings of Rudolf Bultmann, Gerhard Ebeling, and especially Paul Tillich. Tillich's theology sits so loose to the figure of Jesus that he can dispense with his historical existence and personality without making any noticeable difference to his theology. Jesus illustrates a principle, which can be and is illustrated by others. ... Bultmann understood the proclamation or kerygma primarily in terms of an active and effective word, summoning its hearers to an existential decision. There was thus no informational `content' (concerning, for example, the historical figure of Jesus) to the kerygma. ... However, recent scholarship has decisively undermined the New Testament basis of this trend toward detaching Christian faith from the historical Jesus.(14)

To use Augustine's vocabulary, the point of contact is a latent memory of God, reinforced by an encounter with his creation, which possesses the potential to point us to the source through which its sense of bitter-sweet longing may be satisfied.(18)

A fundamental impulse which seems to lie behind religious experience--the quest for the transcendent--can be accounted for within the framework of Christian theology. ... But my basic contention is that the gospel itself enables us to understand why the various religious traditions of humanity exist, and why there might well be at least some degree of convergence among them in relation to a search for fulfillment.(19)

According to this approach, experience is an explicandum, something which itself requires to be interpreted. Christian theology provides a framework by which the ambiguities of experience may be interpreted. Theology aims to interpret experience. It is like a net which we can cast over experience, in order to capture its meaning. Experience is seen as something which is to be interpreted, rather than something which is itself capable of interpreting. Christian theology thus aims to address, interpret, and transform human experience.(24)

As Calvin pointed out, to know God is to be changed by God; true knowledge of God leads to worship, as the believer is caught up in a transforming and renewing encounter with the living God. To know God is to be changed by God.(25)

To be a real theologian is to wrestle with none other than the living God--not with ideas about God, but with God himself. And how can a sinner ever hope to deal adequately with this God?(26)

But, Luther insists, the real theologian is someone who has experienced a sense of condemnation on account of sin--who reads the New Testament and realizes that its message of forgiveness is for him or her. The gospel is thus experienced as something liberating, something which transforms our situation, something which is relevant to us.(27)

At its best, Christian theology shares this characteristic of poetic language ... it tries to convey to us the quality of the Christian experience of God. It attempts to point beyond itself, to rise above itself, straining at its lead as it rushes ahead, to point us to a town beyond its map--town which it knows is there, but to which it cannot lead us. ... It uses a cluster of key words to try and explain what it is like to know God, by analogy with words associated with human experience.(28)

The origins of this tradition [experiential-expressive] in one sense go back to Kant, for he helped clear the ground for its emergence by demolishing the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of the earlier regnant cognitive-propositional views. That ground-clearing was later completed for most educated people by scientific developments that increased the difficulties of accepting literalistic propositional interpretations of such biblical doctrines as creation, and by historical studies that implied the time-conditioned relativity of all doctrines. Kant, however, did not replace the view of religion he had undermined with a more adequate one. ... That breach was filled, beginning with Schleiermacher, with what I have called "experiential- expressivism", but this comes in many varieties and can be given many names.(30)

Lindbeck argues that this approach [cognitive-propositionalist] is to be rejected as voluntarist, intellectualist and literalist, even making the suggestion that those who `perceive or experience religion in cognitivist fashion' are those who `combine unusual insecurity with naïveté'.(31)

Words can be known directly and immediately by the human mind, without the need for any intermediaries. To know the words of Scripture is thus to know immediately the realities to which they relate. This theory of language is of foundational importance, as it undergirds Hodge's belief that today's reader of Scripture can be `assured of encountering the very words, thoughts, and intentions of God Himself.' Yet this metaphysical idea has been borrowed along with others of equally questionable theological parentage from the Enlightenment.(32)

If an experience is to be articulated in words, in order to communicate or to attempt a communal envision of this experience, some form of a cognitive-propositional dimension is inevitable. Yet his does not reduce the experience to words, but simply to attempt to convey it through words.(33)

Such rhetorical analyses of experience offer a means by which a cognitive account may be given of experience without in any sense reducing experience to propositional form or degenerating into `literalism' in the vague by ultimately pejorative sense of the term employed by Lindbeck.(34)

The fundamental insight here is that human words cannot adequately define experience, but may nevertheless point towards it, as signposts.(35)

Underlying the profundity of human experience and encounter lies an unresolved tension--the tension between the wish to express an experience in words, and the inability of words to capture that experience in its fullness.(36)

Words can point to an experience, they can begin to sketch its outlines--but the total descriptions of that experience remains beyond words. Words point beyond themselves, to something greater which eludes their grasp. Human words, and the categories which they express, are stretched to their limits as they attempt to encapsulate, to communicate, something which tantalizingly refuses to be reduced to words. It is the sheer elusiveness of human experience, its obstinate refusal to be imprisoned within a verbal matrix, which points to the need for poetry, symbolism, and doctrine alike. An impatience with precisely this elusiveness appears to underline the rejection of any cognitive component to doctrinal statements.(37)

The intimation of something further, beyond and signposted by experience, is characteristic of human experience. We live on the borderlands of something more--something intimated, something ultimately lying beyond the horizons of our comprehension, yet on occasion intruding into our consciousness. Experience and language point beyond themselves, testifying that something lies beyond their borderlands, yet into which we tantalizingly cannot enter.(38)

Recognizing the narrative quality of Scripture allows the fullness of biblical revelation to be recovered. In no way does this strategy involve the abandoning or weakening of an evangelical commitment to the objective cognitive truth of divine revelation.(39)

Scripture, as we have seen, possesses a strongly objective dimension, in that it tells us about the way things are; it also possesses a subjective component, through which it offers to transform our inner lives ... As Luther put it, we read Scripture not simply to learn of the `commands of God' (mandata Dei) but to encounter the `God who commands' (Deus mandantus), and to be transformed as a result.(40)

Underlying such attempts to achieve clarity of concepts and modes of discourse is the recognition that doctrinal affirmations are to be recognized as perceptions, not total descriptions, pointing beyond themselves toward the greater mystery of God himself.(42)

For such theologians, doctrines are reliable, yet incomplete descriptions of reality. Their power lies in what they represent rather than in what they are in themselves.(43)

Christian doctrine attempts to give shape to the Christian life by laying the foundations for the generation and subsequent interpretation of Christian experience.(44) The language of Christian theology functions under constraints similar to those affecting poetry: it is obliged to express in words things which by their very nature defy reduction to these words; nevertheless, there is a fundamental resonance between words and experience.(45) Cognitive theories of doctrine recognize that words are on the borderlands of experience, intimating and signposting the reality which they cannot capture. To apply pejorative epithets such as `intellectualist' or `literalist' to the cognitive- propositionalist approach to doctrine is to fail to appreciate the power of words to evoke experience, to point beyond themselves to something inexpressible, to an experience which their author wishes to share with his or her readers. It is also, of course, to fail to do justice to the many levels at which cognitive or propositional statements operate.(46)

Theological statements simply do not operate at the same level as mathematical equations. The charge of `literalism' is vulnerable to the extent that it risks overlooking the richness of non-literal language, such as metaphor, as a means of articulation, and the importance of analogy or models as a heuristic stimulus to theological reflection. It is simply a theological truism that no human language can be applied to God univocally; indeed, it is from the recognition, rather than the denial, of this point that cognitive approaches to doctrine begin.(47)

The cognitive dimension of Christian doctrine is the framework upon which Christian experience is supported, the channel through which it is conveyed. It is a skeleton which gives strength and shape to the flesh of experience.(48)

To caricature Christian doctrine, then, as mere word-play or as an attempt to reduce the mystery of God to propositions is to fail to appreciate the manner in which words serve us. In order for my experience to be expressed, communicated to or aroused in another, it demands statements in cognitive forms. That these cognitive forms fail to capture such an experience in its totality is self-evident, and hardly a matter for rhetorical exaggeration: it is one of the inevitable consequences of living in history and being obliged to communicate in historical forms. Schleiermacher recognized that doctrine expressed an experience constituted by the language of the Christian community, thus pointing to the delicate interplay of cognitive and experiential elements in doctrinal formulations.(49)

For Christians, Jesus is the embodiment and self-revelation of God. At the heart of the Christian faith stands a living person, not a book.(50)

Despite its high view of Scripture, evangelicalism has resisted the temptation to identify the text of Scripture with revelation. Scripture is regarded as a channel through which God's self- revelation in Jesus Christ is encountered. Although it is a bearer of that self-revelation in Christ, it is not to be identified directly with that self-revelation. Scripture is not Jesus Christ. Yet as Kuyper so aptly put it, we cannot encounter Christ in any form other than that which we find in Scripture. . . . There is a strongly Trinitarian dimension to the evangelical understanding of revelation, which is particularly evident in its affirmation of the distinctive role of the Holy Spirit.(51)

For evangelicals, there is something real which lies beyond the text of Scripture, which is nonetheless rendered and mediated by that text--that is, the Christian experience of being redeemed in Christ. The emphasis on intratextuality tends to obscure the fact that the person of Jesus Christ stands at the centre of the Christian faith--and did so before the texts of the New Testament were written down.(52)

Negatively, some evangelicals have argued that all critics are influenced by their own cultural, philosophical, and theological presuppositions, and that much of the criticism that has seemed to undermine the authority of Scripture has reflected a deep- rooted prejudice against the miraculous, which rests upon rationalist rather than Christian presuppositions. Even scholars whose work has been on other ways especially illuminating have sometimes found it hard to come to terms with biblical miracles and prophecy. Evangelicals rightly reject criticism based on such prejudice as, in the first place un-Christian, and in the second as based upon a flawed methodology, in which a secular worldview is imposed upon the biblical material.(54)

[Evangelicalism proclaims] An emphasis upon conversion or a `new birth' as a life-changing religious experience.(55)

Christian theology cannot remain faithful to its subject matter if it regards itself as purely propositional or cognitive in nature. The Christ encounter with God is transformative. As Calvin pointed out, to know God is to be changed by God; true knowledge of God leads to worship, as the believer is caught up in a transforming and renewing encounter with the living God.(56)

A theology which touches the mind, leaving the heart unaffected, is no true Christian theology--a point stressed by both Luther and Calvin.(57)

The gospel is thus experienced as something liberating, something which transforms our situation, something which is relevant to us.(58)

Through faith, the believer is caught up in a new outlook on life, a new structure of existence, embodied paradigmatically in Jesus Christ,--and both in their proclamation and person, believers reveal this story of Jesus Christ.(59)

Scripture, we have seen, possesses a strongly objective dimension, in that it tells us about the way things are; it also possesses a subjective component, through which it offers to transform our inner lives--an offer which, in the evangelical experience, is more than justified, and leads to an emphasis upon evangelism as the means by which others might share in the same `transforming friendship' (James Houston).(60)

We need to purge rationalism from within evangelicalism. And that means recovering the relational, emotional, and imaginative aspects of biblical spirituality, which the Enlightenment declared to be improper. As Martin Luther constantly insisted, Christianity is concerned with totus homo, the `entire human person', and not just the human mind.()

... evangelism is about the proclamation of an objective truth with the expectation that this will give rise to a subjective response--that is to say, a response which involves the heart, mind and total being of those who hear it. The Enlightenment notions of `truth' and `knowledge', as critics such as Kierkegaard pointed out with such vigour, fail to engage with human nature in all its fullness, and focus instead on a purely cerebral `faith', devoid of emotion and transformation.(62)

Evangelicalism has long since got past the stage where it needs to feel defensive about anything, and is perfectly capable of mounting a sustained bid both for a justified presence within the academic community, and for intellectual respectability as a serious option of thinking people in today's world.(63)

Evangelicalism is determined to `let God be God', and to receive, honour and conceive him as he chooses to be known, rather than as we would have him be. At its heart, evangelicalism represents a relentless and serious attempt to bring all our conceptions of God and ourselves to criticism in the light of how and what God wishes to be known.(65)