Glimpses of Another Land

Like many in my postwar generation of American evangelicals, I grew up in churches (mostly Baptist in my case) where the word “evangelical” was rarely heard. (References to “evangelism,” on the other hand, were ubiquitous.) Not until I was 12 years old—when I discovered Christianity Today magazine—did I begin to get a glimmer that there was something called “evangelicalism.” We had been evangelicals all along, but I hadn’t known. Even today, most American evangelicals don’t define themselves, in the first instance, as evangelicals, while others who appear to fit the definitions proposed by historians, sociologists, and theologians explicitly reject the label, often bristling at it.

Forgive me for emphasizing this point about the fluidity and many-sidedness of evangelicalism, which won’t come as news to anyone who has studied its history. I think it’s important to keep in mind in the course of our conversation. So, for instance, on our first topic—evangelicalism and the broader Christian tradition—we find in the history of evangelicalism no single stance or attitude that can be called definitive for this particular stream of the faith.

John Wesley, for example, whose influence on the development of American evangelicalism was enormous, drew from a rich array of Christian sources, ranging widely in time and space and crossing all kinds of ecclesiastical boundaries. At the other end of the spectrum, there have been strong tendencies  in evangelicalism toward a narrow biblicism, intensely suspicious of “tradition” and cut off by choice from conversation with other streams of the faith.

In my lifetime, both of these opposing tendencies—and manifold variations in between—have flourished. The impact of C. S. Lewis’ “mere Christianity,” evangelical-Catholic rapprochement, Richard Foster’s recovery of Christian disciplines, and projects such as the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture—from InterVarsity Press, an evangelical publisher par excellence—are but four salient examples from a long list attesting to evangelical openness to the broader Christian tradition.

“Openness” can lead to conversion. Our daughter Mary, the third of our four children, attended Wheaton College. In a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, she met a young man from Texas, John Puryear, homeschooled in a self-described fundamentalist family. John and Mary were wed shortly after graduation, and soon after that they began the RCIA process to enter the Roman Catholic Church. They are now the parents of our four grandchildren.

I couldn’t follow them into Catholicism, but I don’t feel that a gulf has opened up between us. On the contrary, Wendy and I rejoice in the depth of Mary and John’s faith and the everyday practices in which they are raising their children. The truths that we repeatedly affirm together—in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—put the differences between us in perspective.

In Glimpses of Another Land: Political Hope, Spiritual Longing, Eric Miller includes an essay entitled “Elusive Unity,” written just after the death of Carl F. H. Henry. The essay uses Henry’s life and work to consider the vicissitudes of modern American evangelicalism and the hope for Christian unity—“a unity always beyond our reach,” Miller writes, “yet necessary all the same.” Amen.