This is a collection of essays by academics, but it does not limit itself to an academic audience. The educated audience, or the audience that feels the need to be educated on contemporary American evangelicalism (undergraduates), will find the book highly valuable. The essays have the virtues of clarity, charity, honesty, good sense, and good writing. In addition, the book is not a study of divisions and differences; rather, it is a confrontation of four quite distinct evangelical understandings of “the spectrum of evangelicalism.” As the editors put the task assigned the authors,
Each seeks to define evangelicalism and locate his view in historical context. Since evangelicals describe themselves as people of the Book, each contributor discusses how he understands Scripture and its authority. For purposes of clarity, we have asked each contributor to address three issues recently contested within evangelicalism. First, to explain their views on Christian cooperation they will evaluate the Evangelicals and Catholics Together movement led by Charles Colson and the late Richard John Neuhaus, which started in the 1990s. . . . Second, to illustrate their views on doctrinal boundaries, they will address debates over open theism. . . . Finally, they will explain their views on penal substitutionary atonement, the belief that Christ took on God's wrath for sinners. (17–18)
The four authors, all senior academics, represent fundamentalism (Kevin Bauder), confessional evangelicalism (Albert Mohler), generic evangelicalism (John Stackhouse), and postconservative evangelicalism (Roger Olson). Each essay receives responses from the other three authors. Thus the reader has not only an informative essay by a participant with a careful delineation of the essential marks of his version of evangelicalism, but also immediately attached responses informing the reader of the issues raised by other segments of the movement. This is not a debate, and so no one wins, but the authors seem informed by one another and grateful for the opportunity to unfold their own views. Though the authors are frank about their differences, I detect no odium theologicum. The leaders of tribes internal to the Catholic Church seem not to have reached this level of maturity.
The issues of most interest to this reader are the various readings of the standing of the Catholic Church as a Christian church community (or not!); the degrees of separation entailed by one's definition of “evangelicalism”; whether there is a “mainstream fundamentalism” and whether fundamentalism accords with the intentions of the evangelical movement of the second half of the twentieth century; and, finally, just how far the Reformation's solae control the movement. These questions are addressed helpfully in the essays and responses.
This book belongs in every college and university library and in the library of every teacher of American religious and theological history. Undergraduate reading lists and assignments in this subject area should contain it. Graduate courses in the area will benefit from reading and discussion of it.
