Context is everything in understanding people (including me)

Last updated on: August 18, 2011 at 7:27 pm by Roger E. Olson

Context is everything in understanding people (including me) 2011-08-18T19:27:15-05:00 Roger E. Olson

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A few comments responding to my post about the label “evangelical” and why I can’t give it up have stimulated me to think about and attempt to explain the importance of understanding people’s contexts.

I’ve often wondered why some people I admire and consider fellow postconservative evangelicals eschew that label and even sometimes criticize me and other postconservatives or progressives among evangelicals. I’m thinking of one person in particular. I won’t name him here. But he is a very well known progressive evangelical president of an evangelical seminary.

I’ve read him and heard him speak and I know his career well. The seminary he heads is noted as a progressive evangelical institution and his writings have demonstrated that he is open to new ways of thinking and often defends progressive evangelical thinkers like Rob Bell.

But he was adamantly opposed to our Word Made Fresh manifesto (about which I blogged recently and posted at my old blog). He wrote a column for Books & Culture saying we should drop the “post-” and just be conservative evangelicals. When we invited him to our first annual meeeting of the Word Made Fresh Forum he refused to sign the statement and criticized Stan Grenz and others of us who were trying to carve out some space for fresh and faithful evangelical theological reflection.

I had a hard time with that. And he’s not the only one. But when I sat back and tried very hard to understand I realized something. He’s a member of a mainline Protestant denomination that is drifting far to the left politically and theologically. As I thought about others who I consider progressive evangelicals who seem ambivalent and ambigous about their commitments I realized every one of them–people I think of as open and progessive among evangelicals but at the same time take very conservative positions publicly–I realized they ALL belong to mainline denominations that are dying out because of their liberalism (read “nominal Christianity”).

On the other hand, I have worked my entire career in contexts where fundamentalism is the main threat–not mainline wishy-washy-ness. I and some of my friends have to look over our shoulders for the heresy hunters who would love nothing better than to ruin our reputations as evangelicals–sometimes by lying about us. (Yes, as I’ve explained before, that has happened to me many times.)

Those other folks, who I think are, for the most part, right where I am theologically but refuse to join any movement to promote openness among evangelicals, are all looking over their shoulders at the ruins of their mainline denominations being destroyed by liberal theology. (By “liberal” here I mean like the mainline Protestant seminary president who I heard give a paper title “God and her survival in a nuclear age” at the end of which she said she didn’t really know anything about God. She was clearly using “God” as a cipher for nature to give a religious sound to her politically-driven agenda.)

I will name on person as an example of what I’m talking about. One of my theological heroes, someone who died recently and to whom I am dedicating a book, was Donald Bloesch. He was my mentor “from afar.” That is, when I was wavering theologically, reading him rescued me. He showed me how to be both evangelical and progressive. However, late in his life and career Bloesch took a turn–not away from his progressive evangelical project but toward outspokenness against radical religious feminism (including inclusive language about God) and panentheism, process theology, etc.

Why? I think because he saw his own denomination, the United Church of Christ, going down the tubes, so to speak, into vapid liberal mushyness. At least that’s how I think he saw it. He wasn’t very concerned about fundamentalism as it was no threat to him. He taught his entire career at a mainline Protestant seminary. Without giving up any of his progressive evangelical openness (e.g., authority of Scripture without inerrancy and a “big tent” view of evangelicalism), his main concern became the danger of liberal theology in mainline denominations. That was his context.

Others of us have found ourselves in total agreement with Bloesch and other progressive evangelical theologians and leaders but having different concerns because of different contexts. I got to know Don Bloesch toward the end of his career and we thought very much alike. But I didn’t share his passion to fight radical feminism because it didn’t exist in my context. And he didn’t share my passion to promote biblical egalitarianism, although he embraced it, because his context was way, way beyond that.

My thesis is that there are very many progressive, even postconservative evangelicals who won’t jump on that bandwagon or get with our program because they are mainly concerned with fighting extreme liberalism and radical theology in their mainline denominations. In other words, THEIR “conservative evangelicalism” is virtually synonymous with my “postconservative evangelicalism” but we are facing opposite directions in terms of the dangers we face.

In the overall scheme of things, meaning in the wider world of so-called “mainline Protestantism” (which should probably really be called “old line Protestantism” as Martin Marty says), I AM VERY CONSERVATIVE! Yes, you heard that right. I’m conservative. But context determines what those labels mean. I’M NOT CONSERVATIVE compared to the neo-fundamentalists in my religious social context. I AM CONSERVATIVE compared to the liberals and radicals so populous in the so-called mainline academy and denominational hierarchies. For God’s sake (I mean that literally)–I believe in the supernatural. I believe in the Trinity. I believe in the deity of Jesus Christ. I believe in the resurrection. I believe in hell! All that makes me a dinosaur among mainline Protestants. But just because I don’t wave the inerrancy banner high and believe in women in ministry I’m a “liberal” or “post-evangelical” among neo-fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist Convention and other conservative evangelical contexts.

So when I say I’m “postconservative” I MEAN among evangelicals who I see as having swung dramatically to the right in recent decades. I DON’T MEAN I’m not conservative at all. In certain professional societies, for example, I stick out like a sore thumb as what many of them would consider a fundamentalist! I mean I can no longer consider myself a conservative within my own religious milieu which is evangelicalism because the center has shifted so dramatically to the right since I was in a centrist evangelical seminary.

For goodness sakes, people! I’m a premillennialist! 🙂

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