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What Is the Anxious Bench: A Note from Our Editor

What Is the Anxious Bench: A Note from Our Editor

Last updated on: November 9, 2024 at 4:16 pm by Joey Cochran

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What Is the Anxious Bench: A Note from Our Editor 2024-11-09T16:16:44-04:00 Joey Cochran

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Anxious Bench

People have expressed abundant feelings and analyses over the last week on the interwebs, as a result of the election. There is certainly no shortage of commentary on social, news outlets, substacks, and podcasts. Just prior to the election, I dropped my own passionate plea to get out the vote, indicating my anxieties and sense of urgency regarding the election. Ansley Quiros followed that up with a prayer for the election. Malcolm Foley offered some post-election grounding for Christians engaged in public life, and Philip Jenkins offered a prescient piece on how to be in the world post-election.

In that recent column of mine, I delineated that I came to you not as an evangelical but as a political animal. That was, for me, a signal to my two kingdoms mindset and a nod to my views of public theology. Now I come to you as an evangelical and editor of the Anxious Bench, who is processing and analyzing life after election.

My Post Election Experience

Before going to bed on Tuesday, November 5, I knew the outcome of the election. I was up until 1AM watching. My phone provided real-time election updates, so I awoke around 6:30AM to a notification of Trump’s decisive win. Around the breakfast table, my daughters were numb and my wife was sullen, feelings from them that would turn to frustration and anger by mid-week. My son was unsurprised. He has a good sense of the young-male mindset in the US. He had already forecasted the male turnout and vote days prior.

I have a 35 minute drive each morning from my near West suburb Chicago, Illinois home to Purdue University Northwest in Hammond, Indiana. On that ride, I listened to the Q101 morning show, which treated the morning in almost funerary fashion, providing space for people to lament and commiserate. The halls of Purdue Northwest contained scattered collections of befuddled intelligentsia performing an autopsy on the situation. One professor commented, “I just don’t get it. Are that many people really this stupid?”

At my first class, an enthusiastic student was astonished to learn that Trump actually won. However, he quickly asserted his own opinions on why Trump won. He said, “Men weren’t going to vote for a woman president.” He referenced similar cultural trends my son recognized, trends concerning toxic masculinity. “Hey, I don’t like patriarchy, but I also resist fourth wave feminism,” he said. In my afternoon class, a woman student lingered after and just asked: “Is it really over? Did he really win?” Her sense of concern and dread conveyed an earnest wish that the new reality would not set in.

Wednesday night at our church’s middle school ministry, some leaders were chipper than usual. Others were looking for allies for therapy. “How are you doing? Are you okay?” seemed to be a common refrain. On Thursday, we held a CFH book talk event where Daniel K. Williams interviewed Daniel Silliman on his new religious biography of Richard Nixon. In the green room before, I asked if they planned to discuss the election. Both seemed disinclined to discuss the topic and more inclined to focus on Silliman’s biography. In sympathy to their inclinations, I commented that we’ve all probably felt inundated by punditry.

On Friday, I met one of our columnists, Wyatt Reynolds, for breakfast and coffee at Fairgrounds Coffee Shop in Oak Park. He happened to be in town for the weekend, and it was a great opportunity for us to meet in real life for the first time since he joined our team. We reminisced on the Yale Div Jonathan Edwards Congress meeting, where a group of us commemorated Skip Stout’s career as a historian. We chatted about intramural matters pertaining to the latest of evangelical historiography (particularly Matt Sutton’s JAARs article) and Wyatt’s research on Early Republic transatlantic networks of Christian social activism and how nodes of Native activism were integrated into this network.

We talked little of politics and the election, which was a welcomed relief. But I did share with Wyatt a little about what I think the purpose of the Anxious Bench is. I mentioned to him that I frequently ask people what they think the Anxious Bench is and what is the meaning of our name.

Allow me to do a little bit of that introspective post-election reflection and vision casting for you. Why? Because recalibrating around our commitments helps us focus on who we fundamentally are.

What Is the Anxious Bench

When Timothy Dalrymple first approached two of his Evangelical Patheos bloggers, Tommy Kidd and John Fea, to collaborate and form a Patheos group blog, Kidd kicked off the blog with a first piece responding to Ross Douthat, who “underestimates how fractious the combination of religion and politics has always been in America.” Perhaps this was a bit of an allusion to how much content creation would derive from the intersection of politics and religion. In little time the group blog included Philip Jenkins, John Turner, Tal and Agnes Howard. The head mast would carry the name Anxious Bench and be adorned with images of George Whitefield preaching. According to the oral history, they were looking for a catchy title. While all this primitive history seems happenstance, I believe a sort of fortuitous and serendipitous providence was in play, even in the inauspicious naming of “The Anxious Bench.”

Since the election, I’ve been re-reading The Anxious Bench. No. Not “back issues” of blog articles, though I have done a bit of that over the past couple years. I’ve been re-reading John Williamson Nevin’s tract, The Anxious Bench (1843).

Nevin wrote the tract about half a year before Philip Schaff joined him at the Theological Seminary at Mercersburg. Together they formed the Mercersburg school and generated a significant amount of historical and theological reflection across the nineteenth century.

After re-reading this tract, I’ve gathered some thoughts on how “The Anxious Bench” as a type is a fitting way to describe who we are and what we do.

When Nevin wrote this work he was confronting the “New Measures” of Charles Grandison Finney, an upstate New York Revivalist, who presided over revivals in the burned-over district. However, Nevin’s concern had much to do with how the New Measures were portable and permeated into other traditions. He credits them as being fundamentally methodistic, and he felt greatly threatened by how John Winebrenner, a German Reformed pastor, had adopted them in his ministry. It wasn’t just that the New Measures existed in parallel or adjacent traditions, but they had permeated and intruded into his own (Nevin, 42).

Nevin entitled his work “The Anxious Bench” because he believed that the function of the bench in the New Measures typified the mechanistic problems of the methodistic tactics for revival (Nevin, 33). While I can’t get into all the details related to the rhetorical genius that Nevin employed, I will say that he performed a rigorous analysis of the New Measures. He set them up against the “organic” tradition of the church, which he favors. He compared the mechanism of the New Measures against the organism of catechetical instruction (Nevin, 91–96).

I read the second edition of the tract found in volume 5 of The Mercersburg Theology Study Series. The volume editor, Sam Hamstra, Jr., provided an outstanding introduction and notes that developed more of the history of the tract. As commonly occurs, Nevin’s tract received rigorous engagement from both his proponents and antagonists. He produced his second edition in order to address critiques from the Lutheran Observer and added a final chapter that compared the catechetical method to the New Measures.

Nevin was very concerned about the manipulative aspect of the Anxious Bench. The “excitement” surrounding the use of the New Measures and the Anxious Bench obscured the legitimacy of “true religious feeling,” which was an inward work that required nurture and time (Nevin, 35, 63, 82). Nevin advocated the ordinary work of the church and its minister. He concluded by commending Richard Baxter’s ministry in Kidderminster, and his classic work, The Reformed Pastor, which offered a guide to the organic work of weekly pastoral ministry (Nevin, 100–104).

As I have analyzed this work and developed my own feelings concerning it, I came across parts with which I vigorously agreed and disagreed. I appreciated his commitment to catechetical methods. As a reformed minded individual, catechesis has been a long rhythm in my life and home as well. On the other hand, I found the corollaries he made between the New Measures and Roman Catholic sacramental practices to be weak arguments. Perhaps this is because I benefit from the historical foresight that Nevin will shift on this and will favor more appropriation of catholic ideas in his own theological system.

Nevin also held troubling social and theological commitments to patriarchy, with which I disagree. One of his weakest critiques of the New Measures regarded how they opened up space for women to stimulate and lead revival (Nevin, 84). Earlier in the tract, he provides a detailed scenario of a “girl” who had been manipulated by the use of the Anxious Bench. Her genuine concern about her spiritual condition was overshadowed by the excitement of the Anxious Bench. This argument against the New Measures depended upon a characterization of how a particular social group can easily be manipulated emotionally and influenced by the New Measures. Nevin argued, “The truth of this remark will be more clear when we remember that young persons, and females especially, form the main body commonly of those who are drawn to the Anxious Bench.”

While reading, analyzing, processing, and feeling through my experience of John Williamson Nevin’s The Anxious Bench—A Tract for Our Times and considering its function in a mid-nineteenth century theological world, I came to a deeper sense of who we are at the Anxious Bench website. The impulses reflected in the dispute over Finneyism and Nevin’s critique of it does typify who we are. Both Bench’s wrestle with and negotiate the thinking, feeling parts of a world profoundly shaped by our senses. Both Bench’s explore how to be, think, and act in this world.

Commitments of The Anxious Bench

Here are a handful of our commitments that resonate with our identity as The Anxious Bench for the 21st Century.

There is no commitment to consensus among our team of scholars at The Anxious Bench. We are not always going to agree and share like-minded views. If we do this well, we will have vigorous disagreements rooted in our disparate theological, philosophical, and cultural commitments. Meaningful and generative scholarship occurs in a context of collegial friendship without scholarly consensus. To drop a hot take. I think this mode of operation is something we have picked up from the culture of the Conference on Faith and History (CFH), and if you actually sit down and talk to those who participated in the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicalism (ISAE), you will find that this commitment was undoubtedly imbedded in its social ecology.

We will bring who we are to our work at The Anxious Bench. Just as my thoughts post-election are shaped by the experiences I had with real people in real life, all our contributors bring all of who they are to their work. You will always get glimpses of real people working through real life issues. For instance, you might have wondered where I’ve been since my analysis of the Olympic Games opening ceremonies? Candidly, I’ll say that I’ve been processing transitioning my father into a dementia care unit while also teaching a 5:5 load as an instructor. On top of that, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht wanted to publish Jonathan Edwards and Hebrews: A Harmonic Interpretation and release it by January, 2025, so I redirected all my attention to crafting and editing the final manuscript. Let’s just say I’ve been managing a heavy mental and emotional load, and I bring all of that to the Anxious Bench.

We will bring first-rate analytical scholarship to The Anxious Bench. John Williamson Nevin rigorously critiqued the construct of the Anxious Bench and the New Measures. He marshaled theological and rhetorical arguments for his work. He persisted in his engagement and produced a lively and constructive conversation from his work. We believe that we have done this for years and we have prioritized this kind of work. We will continue to do so at The Anxious Bench.

We will speak meaningfully about current events at The Anxious Bench. Our work is intended to be relevant and meaningful. We will not just do dispassionate, analytical historical work. Our work has to be pertinent to the way we all will be in this world, think in this world, and do in this world.

We will study the construct of evangelicalism at The Anxious Bench. Nevin’s work profoundly tackled the intersection of Christian thought with an emerging understanding of a substructure within Christianity called evangelicalism. This same substructure of Christianity will continue to be a preoccupation of our writers. The significance and meaning of this construct is still relevant, and we will continue to produce unparalleled analysis of evangelicals.

We’re not here to generate a side hustle at The Anxious Bench. All of us work on a pittance. We try to create a friction free experience where there are no barriers to our ideas. We’d love to convert this into a digital magazine that gets rid of all these unsightly ads. But this post wasn’t some click-bait to get you to subscribe to our work. It is what it is. An attempt at self-discovery. Because all scholarly historical work is biography. Thanks for reading!

History and Religion

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Anxious Bench

Joey Cochran

John Williamson Nevin

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