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Book Review, Culture, Theology

Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: A Reflection

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by W. Jackson Watts

Recently I read Tom Wolfe’s latest work, The Kingdom of Speech. Wolfe is well-known and controversial journalist who has authored fiction and non-fiction works on a range of subjects. In the aforementioned title, a sort of exploration into philosophy, science, linguistics, and history, Wolfe devotes significant attention to the story of Daniel L. Everett.

Everett was a missionary sent by the Summer Institute of Linguistics to the Pirahās (pronounced pee-da-HAN) Indians in the Amazonian jungle. I had heard of Everett before and discussed his story with a Brazilian friend, though I did not know the whole story. What I did know was so fascinating to me that I picked up a copy of his memoir, Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (Pantheon Books, 2008).

Everett’s primary objective was to learn the Pirahās language—one of the most complicated ones known to man—and produce a successful translation of the Bible. So at the age of 26, Everett made his first journey to the Pirahās. He and his family would spend large portions of the next 30 years working among these unique people deep in the heart of the Amazon.

Everett was well-suited for this specific mission as he had shown himself to be an exemplary student of language during his undergraduate and graduate education. He studied at Moody Bible Institute, but he also would earn his masters in linguistics and a doctorate at UNICAMP (a large Brazilian university). In more recent years he has held positions at many universities, including Illinois State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Manchester.

Everett’s Significant Contribution

This book is significant for several reasons. First, as Christians deeply committed to global evangelism, we can appreciate someone devoting most of their life to an obscure, extremely dangerous place (hence the book’s title), doing the hard work of learning and translation in order to put God’s Word in the tongue of a people. Moreover, though there had been a few previous missionaries to this tribe, none had been successful. Everett notes at the time of his book’s publication that there had never been a known conversion at any period in the history of their tribe! (269).

A second reason the book is significant is because it is more about language and culture than it is the spiritual task of missions. The book interweaves the Everett family’s story with reflections on different theories about linguistics, and how various theories had sought to explain the phenomenon of language. How can Darwinism account for the unique complexities of human language? This question, the subject of Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech, also pervades academic discussions of language. Since this is also a community Everett had been part of for years, his book discusses this issue in great detail.

Everett contends that the language of the Pirahās actually undermines the dominant thesis of modern linguistic theory, promoted by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, now 88, is the most influential figure in the field of linguistics not only in America, but perhaps the world. Chomsky is famous for his notion of Universal Grammar. In essence, this theory asserts that language is primarily genetic in origins, not primarily cultural (as many others believe, including Everett). Grammar, or how language works/fits together, arises from a set of structures innate to human beings. While languages across the world are very diverse, there are some common elements that show language to be inherent to the human genetic make-up.

Because Everett has been able to document how the Pirahās language does not fit the paradigm advanced by Chomsky and others in the field, his research has caused quite a bit of a stir in academic linguistics.

What’s Theology Got to Do With It?

From a theological perspective, it may be tempting to simply say we believe that humans are made in the image of God, and leave it at that. However, there are numerous ways we could deepen our study of what the Bible says about humanity and consider how this might intersect with what we believe about language.

Some have suggested that language is one entailment of being made in God’s image. Others have suggested it is the central meaning of being in His image. Even Wolfe makes several mentions of this particular doctrine in his book and how it relates to this larger discussion of what humans are like.

One thing is for sure: linguists, anthropologists, philosophers, and scientists of all kinds are likely to arrive at different conclusions about language if they operate out of an evolutionary framework.

Intellectuals working from such a framework are forced to try and explain all human phenomena in either cultural or biological terms, or both. Yet in the end they will either simply double-down on the conclusion that human beings are nothing special, just highly-evolved primates. Or they will try to preserve a sense of human uniqueness among all other species, but lack the metaphysical grounding for this belief.

There is much more to Everett’s book that merits discussion here, but I’ll conclude with one final observation. A rather sad reason why the book is significant (SPOILER ALERT) is that in the end Everett tells of his departure from Christianity. This will likely be the only “missionary biography” one ever reads with this conclusion.

As difficult as it was for me to read the conclusion of the book, I think the reasoning he gives is a sobering cautionary tale. I’ll leave it to others who read to glean lessons from this. To me, it is a tale of how increasingly gradually bracketing out theology and communion with God from anthropological and linguistic research can make a person intellectually vulnerable to the already-present spiritual vulnerabilities of life in the world, especially on the mission field.

Simply put, if Christian doctrine is always revised in light of the latest scientific consensus on a particular question, and if one does not carefully guard their walk with the Lord, they will find that the complexities of life will gradually erode the commitments of their soul. Everett was confronted for years with the hardships of life in the jungle, the contentment of a lost tribe to continue rejecting Jesus, and trying to untangle the mysteries of language and culture. This is a tall order for anyone.

Although most of us will continue to dwell in a familiar Western world, we should recognize that there are many complex burdens in serving God and understanding His world. Therefore, we must maintain spiritual vigilance in the fulfillment of our ministries, regardless of where they take us.

 

Church Life/Ministry

Phillip Jensen on Apologetics & Evangelism

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by J. Matthew Pinson

Recently I listened to a podcast by Phillip Jensen, the evangelical Anglican pastor from Sydney, Australia. Despite the obvious doctrinal differences between Free Will Baptists and Reformed Anglicans, Jensen and the Matthias Media folks down in Sydney are interesting people to watch. They demonstrate what it means to have aggressive, growing, evangelistic churches in the highly urban, post-Christian setting of Sydney. Yet at the same time they show how to do this by relying on the sufficiency of Scripture and not giving in to gimmicks and depending on attractional, market-driven, or seeker-driven approaches to get churches to grow.

I want to commend to our readers a podcast Jensen did on “Apologetics and Evangelism” that my son Matthew and I listened to recently. It piqued my interest for two reasons: First, Jensen emphasizes the importance of apologetics for ministry to people in urban, secularized settings. Answering life’s inescapable questions—not trendiness and niche-marketing to “felt needs”—is so important in ministering the gospel to meet true needs of modern people.

Second, Jensen’s approach to apologetics and evangelism reminded me a lot of Leroy Forlines’s. For example, he says we don’t need to meet objections that people don’t have. In other words, many people’s objections to Christianity aren’t really rational in nature; so apologetics doesn’t need to be introduced in an evangelistic encounter unless it becomes necessary.

He also says, like Forlines, that churches need to be more zealous about evangelism. Jensen believes (rightly, I think) that our main problem in evangelical churches today is the lack of zeal for apologetics and evangelism, not the fact that we aren’t culturally relevant enough or don’t understand demographics and marketing well enough.

Jensen says,

“Evangelism is something that both Christians and non-Christians agree upon. That is, they don’t like it. The non-Christians don’t want to be evangelized, and we’re, very simply, terrified of doing it. . . . By nature, we never will evangelize (unless you have a very unusual personality). . . . We can talk about evangelism till the cows come home, but in half an hour of doing it, we’ll learn more than merely talking about it and reading yet another book on the subject.”

Also, like Forlines, Jensen believes that apologetics is more about answering life’s existential questions and showing people what their true spiritual needs are than providing logical proofs, “evidence that demands a verdict,” etc. Now, apologetics and evangelism are both what Jensen calls “rational” activities. They’re about reasoning with people. But we need to get away from the idea that we can somehow “prove” Christianity to be true beyond reasonable doubt, and so on.

At the same time, like Forlines, he believes that some presuppositionalists go too far in the direction of “fideism” (not relying enough on rationality in apologetics). So, in the vein of Forlines, and people as diverse as Edward Carnell, Ronald Nash, Francis Schaeffer, and Alvin Plantinga, Jensen leans toward presuppositionalism but acknowledges the importance what I call the “chastened” use of evidences (e.g., discussion about the reliability of the New Testament text) in apologetics.

We need to be more concerned these days about apologetics and evangelism than most evangelical churches are. I encourage the readers of this blog to listen to this podcast from Phillip Jensen and forward the link to as many pastors, youth and family pastors, and Christian leaders as you can.

 

Church History, Theology

Niebuhr on Theological Education

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by W. Jackson Watts

It is common to modern American religious experience to consider the relationship between the Church and the Academy. Specifically, what is the proper relationship between local churches and Christian colleges, universities, and/or theological seminaries?

I’m often interested to see how people from the past have spoken of this relationship. Sometimes interesting insights come from unfamiliar quarters. Such is the case as I was recently perusing H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry.

Niebuhr (1894-1962) was a fairly distinguished theologian in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Best known known for his 1951 Christ and Culture (which is still in print and widely read), Niebuhr’s writings spans theological, church history, ethics, and several other fields. His career was mostly spent as a pastor and professor in the St. Louis area, an Illinois college president, and finally as a theologian and ethicist at Yale. However, he spent considerable years as a denominational leader and educator.

He was born into a family which belonged to the Evangelical Synod of North America, which over the years has merged with several other denominations, moving increasingly away from its origins as a church body of German Reformed heritage. As both a pastor and professor, Niebuhr had many years to think through the relationship between the work of the church and the work of the seminary.

Late in his career he directed The Study of Theological Education in the United States and Canada. This study was essentially a center founded under the leadership of the American Association of Theological Schools, though it was backed financially by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. The work of this study center was to evaluate the purposes, methods, and perceived effectiveness of Protestant theological seminaries in North America. They consulted with nearly 100 seminaries, including faculty and students. They also met with a number of leading denominational executives from some of the larger church bodies at that time, as well as recognized pastors.

After much study into the nature of and purpose of the church’s ministry in connection with theological education, the first fruit of their work was a book authored by Niebuhr entitled The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry: Reflections on the Aims of Theological Education (1956). The volume, though out of print now, provides a great deal of insight in the climate of theological higher education of the 1940s and 50s, especially in the mainline church. I also found Niebuhr’s meditations on the role of theological education to be fascinating as well.

In the final section of the book, he speaks of the theological school as “the intellectual center of the Church’s life.”[1] He does not mean that the seminary necessarily does all the thinking for the church. A close reading will disabuse readers from thinking this is what he has in mind. Rather, Niebuhr’s conception of the mission of the church and the seminary is that love for God grounds and directs the intellectual work of both the church and the seminary. He explains as much in the following excerpt:

Though intellectual love of God and neighbor is not the supreme exercise of love, yet it is required and possible since man is also mind and does not wholly love his loves if his mind does not move toward them. He cannot truly love with heart, soul and strength unless mind  accompanies and penetrates these other activities as they in turn accompany and penetrate it. The coldness of an intellectual approach unaccompanied by affection is matched by the febrile extravagance of unreasoning sentiment; the aloofness of uncommitted understanding has its counterpart in the possessiveness of unintelligent loyalty. When the whole man is active the mind is also active; when the whole Church is at work it thinks and considers no less than it worships, proclaims, suffers, rejoices and fights.[2]

As I was reading this remark I couldn’t help but call to mind Leroy Forlines’ emphasis on the Total Personality. Just as Christianity in general speaks to the mind, heart, and hands, or our thoughts, feelings, and practices, the intellectual pursuits of the seminary facilitate the church by reminding it of love’s inextricable entanglements in this pursuit.

We should be clear that Niebuhr and Forlines (and Free Will Baptists in general) certainly don’t have a ton in common otherwise. Niebuhr’s thought largely embodies a form of liberal theology often called “neo-orthodoxy.” While mostly associated with Swiss theologian Karl Barth, neo-orthodoxy at its core is an attempt to move beyond Protestant liberalism, while still rejecting a traditional, biblical view of revelation. Additionally, theologians in the early-mid twentieth century who were associated with neo-orthodoxy, despite their significant differences, all made significant revisions to other historic Christian doctrines.

The main up-shot of Niebuhr’s insight above is the type of anthropological holism it emphasizes. I increasingly find a type of holism emphasized in the work of other theologians, namely those who have had invested significant time in church and denominational leadership, as well as the classroom. Niebuhr certainly had both, which probably enabled him to see how some of the errors which both the church and seminary could fall prey to as they carried out their respective ministries.

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[1] H. Richard Niebuhr, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry: Reflections on the Aims of Theological Education (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), 107.

[2] Niebuhr, 111.

 

Theology

A Book Worth Your Time

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by Randy Corn

Getting Religion. By Kenneth Woodward. New York, NY: Convergent Books, 2016. 466 pages, $14.90 ebook.

In 1976 I was twenty years old and had my first opportunity to cast a ballot in a presidential election. I voted for Jimmy Carter, largely because of the furor he created by proclaiming himself “born again.” Four years later I would vote for Ronald Reagan because, like few candidates before him, he publicly embraced the values which most evangelicals hold dear. I have often wondered how many voters were swayed by these or similar factors in the election of our 39th and 40th presidents, or for that matter any of them. Kenneth L. Woodward’s book, Getting Religion, goes a long way toward giving an answer.

The subtitle of this book is “Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama.” Far from being a dry recitation of sociological facts, the author weaves a personal memoir into the tapestry of American society, especially as it relates to religious faith. Woodward was the religion editor for Newsweek magazine for nearly four decades. This gave him extraordinary access to the movers and shakers of American religion, from evangelicals like Billy Graham and Bill Bright to Mormon leader Boyd K. Packer, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.  He either reported on, or was present for, most of the events in the past forty years that made the landscape of American religion what it is.

The great value of this volume is that it helps the reader gain perspective on all of the varied religious impulses in our country over the past half century. While the section on the author’s own Roman Catholic background is interesting, and the discussion of mainline Protestants is enlightening, the section dealing with Evangelicals was of greatest interest to me.  In chapter three, Woodward argues that while “Entrepreneurial Religion” is not a theological phrase, it is Evangelicalism’s distinguishing feature. The proof of this assertion is not so much in the churches that constitute the movement, but in the para-church organizations which Evangelicalism has spawned.

The book gives a short recitation of the televangelist scandals, and also some interesting information about such organizations as the Moral Majority and the Religious Roundtable. While the author is sympathetic to Billy Graham and Bill Bright, he saw Jerry Falwell as playing dangerously close to scandal financing the Moral Majority out of revenue from his broadcast ministry. This the Lynchburg preacher justified by a phrase in the fine print of his promotional literature, which allowed him to spend any money raised as he saw fit!  Woodward summarized, “The key to his personality, I always thought, was his determination to make good as well as make waves” (chapter 12).

The volume closes with two chapters dealing with the current political situation.  The first “Piety and Politics” dealing with the Republican Party and the last “Religion as Politics,” focusing on the Democrats. This is one of the best explanations I have seen about the polarization in American politics, why broadly speaking you don’t find moderate Republicans or conservative Democrats.

In his epilogue, the author sums up the shift in public morality due to the underlying erosion of what was a Christian consensus in American life. Woodward quotes sociologist Christian Smith who had done extensive surveys of teenagers and college students. His frightening conclusion is that most have adopted what he calls, “moralistic, therapeutic deism.” This means that college students think God wants them to be nice, happy, and that He is not all that involved in the day-to-day living of their lives.

If you are looking a broad analysis of the influence of religious faith in our current culture and how we got here, this is the book for you.

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*Chapter location is given in lieu of page numbers due to the review being of the iBook version of this volume.

Book Review, Church History, Theology

Arminian and Baptist: A Review

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by Theological Commission

Occasionally members of the Commission for Theological Integrity publish articles, essays, book reviews, and full-length books. As this occurs we hope to keep readers abreast of these developments, especially if they will be useful and informative. We see this as an extension of our work of being an effective Commission.

Recently we learned of a new review of one of Dr. Matt Pinson’s most recent books, Arminian and Baptist: Explorations in a Theological Tradition (Randall House, 2015), written by Kevin Jackson. This review appeared at the website for the Society of Evangelical Arminians (SEA).

Readers can find out more about this interesting and eclectic fellowship of self-identified Arminians here and here. The Commission (nor the National Association of Free Will Baptists) have a formal relationship with SEA. However, there are some who have been associated with both the NAFWB and SEA. They occasionally reference Free Will Baptists and Free Will Baptist authors.

Even for those who have not yet read Arminian and Baptist, this review will provide a brief overview of the chapter content. Also, the reader’s self-idenfiying as a Wesleyan Arminian (and reviewing the book from that perspective) gives something of a window into some of the distinctions between Reformed or Classical Arminianism and Wesleyan Arminianism that aren’t merely perceived, but actual.

We leave it to readers to make their own judgments about the accuracy of the Mr. Jackson’s assertions and perspective. Readers can also find other material on Pinson’s book here, here, and here.