Charles Kugler's Plea and Warning to Evangelicals

 From Houston Baptist University Theologian Chris Kugler in Christianity Today:

“I’m surprised people are still even trying to run in those circles.” 

That’s what my colleague—a New Testament scholar who signs up to all the ecumenical creeds and staunchly defends the inspiration of Scripture—said to me. And by “people”, he was specifically referring to Bible and Theology Profs running in conservative evangelical circles.

It’s simply assumed—and one sees it again and again in practice—that if you get the academic training, you will find life in many evangelical churches difficult, if not impossible.

But why? Why do most Bible scholars and Theologians say: “I give up. I’m exhausted. It’s time to go Anglican/Episcopalian/Methodist/Presbyterian, etc.?”

As one who has spent 6 decades in this environment, been educated in its institutions of higher learning, and experienced the vicissitudes and what Professor Kristin Du Mez has  perceptively referred to as the "Cancel Culture" invariably associated with teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at two evangelical schools, I understand the sentiment completely. It's an experience I never would have imagined when I signed up for such a career when I entered graduate school 42 years ago.

One pertinent question is why this is so. Kugler suggests, in my estimation rightly:

It’s because so much of evangelicalism—with respect to philosophy, theology, and hermeneutics—is at least 30 years behind the curve.

If this is so, a second, more pertinent question, presents itself: What can be done, if not to fix the problem entirely, at least to mitigate its worst manifestations? For Kugler, it's a matter of humility, discretion, scholarly responsibility, and a proper, historically sensitive understanding of Luther's insight of the "priesthood" of believers:

A couple of points in this regard:

1. Training is important. You should not sit under a pastor who has no serious biblical or theological training (and there are, of course, many different kinds of training).
2. MacArthur, Sproul, Piper, etc., are not reliable Bible scholars or Theologians. There’s a reason why they’re almost universally regarded in academia as unreliable biblical or theological guides. It’s not because “academia is liberal”. It’s because most of the experts recognize that folks like this—however much good they have done for the kingdom of God—don’t demonstrate the necessary competencies to handle complex historical, biblical, and theological issues with skill and nuance. There’s a reason why many have flocked to Wright, McKnight, Bird, etc. It’s not just because they’ve found in these scholars a tasteful balance and nuance. It’s because they recognize a requisite competency.
3. Rediscover the great ecumenical creeds of the church as the markers of genuine Christianity. Stop making your church’s doctrine number 89 a “gospel issue”.

And this is, for me, a plea and a warning. There are some merits to a “Mere Christianity Evangelicalism”. But it must beware of falling prey to some of the worst of the unintended consequences of Luther’s Reformation.

The priesthood of all believers does not entail the “scholarhood” of all believers. And that’s something with which Luther would have emphatically agreed. 

I applaud Kugler's warning as well as his advice. One wonders, though, whether in today's climate it will be heeded, or even if heeded, the slide to ever-increasing diminishment can be stemmed. Last month I penned an obituary for Evangelicalism, one I wish would have been premature. But, alas, I don't think so. The "movement," such as it is, is too associated―shamefully, not merely in public perception―with an American political agenda that is in large measure antithetical to that of a genuinely Christian worldview. It is, moreover, too theologically diffuse: not only the old Calvinist/Arminian and Reformed/Dispensationalist divides, tricky to navigate as they always were, but, more to the point, the increasing prominence of neo-charismatic and prosperity teachings which the outside world looks at, entirely properly, with a mixture of bewilderment and disdain. Indeed, to this entirely self-interested observer, "evangelicalism" truly lacks a center from which any meaningful self-definition can suffice.

Most to the point, however, and central to Kugler's warning, is the overwhelming anti-intellectualism of the movement (indeed, a characteristic not limited to conservative religious expressions). This charge is central to his first point concerning preachers with no serious academic theological training. Years ago, during my first year teaching at an evangelical college, I made the comment in a chapel panel discussion that everyone who planned to go into the pastorate needed to go to seminary―and not just any seminary, but one that prioritized exegesis in the original languages, a grammatical-historical-critical hermeneutic, and historical theology. Afterwards, I was pulled aside and gently instructed in the "error" of my ways. Many, if not most, of these prospective ministers would be preaching in small rural parishes and wouldn't be able to afford such extra training, I was told. What I said could be understood as a belittling of the education they were then receiving (one wonders if similar advice given to pre-med students would have been received so negatively). I could understand the point. Perhaps I could have softened what I said―which goes for just about everything I say―and suggested they make every effort to do so if at all possible. 

But the prevailing "Vo-Tech" view of ministry and ministerial preparation in so much current evangelicalism is the problem, is it not? If ministers and Bible teachers, naïve in their own understanding of Scripture, simply teach what, to them, is the "clear" meaning of the text, they simply pass on their own misinterpretations and consequent failures in contextualization to the faithful. The problem is exacerbated when, as is so often the case, Evangelicals look to men (always men) like MacArthur as authorities and "defenders" of the verities of the faith (one caveat: Kugler is being a bit unfair to John Piper; despite my massive disagreements with the latter over his strident defense of the so-called "Old Perspective of Paul" and what, to me, is his highly objectionable, smug Patriarchalism, Piper can certainly lay claim to being a bona fide biblical scholar, having earned a ThD in New Testament at the University of Munich under the estimable Leonhard Goppelt, and whose first two published works were scholarly monographs on Jesus' Love Command and The Justification of God in Romans 9). And now we are reaping what has been irresponsibly sown over the past number of decades. 

The problem is not, as Kugler notes, "liberalism," however one wants to define that "scare" word. The colleagues he writes about, just as my own grad school teachers, all subscribe to the great ecumenical creeds of the 4th-5th centuries and confess to the Bible's authority and "inspiration"―i.e., the original text, as best as we can determine what it is, is "God-breathed" in the sense that it is entirely adequate, if interpreted properly, to convey the message intended by God. One could even add the easily abused term "inerrancy," so long as one avoids the modernist trap and nuances it properly, taking into account authorial intent, ancient literary and historical conventions, and (in terms of discerning the significance of the text for today) what my friend Bill Webb has called a "redemptive movement hermeneutic." 

Such painstaking nuancing, however, causes one to realize that the real issue is one of hermeneutics, not bibliology. "Evangelicalism," as it largely exists today, attributes to "inerrancy" a hermeneutical function, to wit, privileging a literalistic, indeed modernist, reading of the text as inappropriate to the Torah as it is to the Book of Revelation. "History," as recorded in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, must be interpreted via the canons of ancient (both ANE and Greco-Roman) historiography, not those of the 19th century positivist historian Leopold von Ranke. And, it goes without saying, an improper historical understanding of the text guarantees a misguided appropriation of the text for today.

This may sound pessimistic, but it need not be. Kugler's plea is mine as well. Both pastors and laypersons need to watch out for where they get their information about the Bible. Do they take the word of non-scholars, be they orthodox and educated like MacArthur or less theologically-oriented charlatans like Paula White? Or do they look to responsible scholars of the church, such as N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight, Mike Bird and, I would add, Darrell Bock? For Evangelicalism to survive in any fruitful form, we had better hope the latter.