Christians Hijacking History

Although this new book is aimed primarily at right-wing evangelicals in the United States, Catholics and Orthodox have no grounds for feeling smug here. In an American context, many of them--otherwise accustomed to lazy condemnations of "ecumenism"--have been only too happy to join up with their evangelical brethren in the reactionary culture wars which are currently focused on "critical race theory" which they are happy to demonize and condemn without manifestly bothering to understand it. 

More broadly, Catholic-Orthodox historiographical wars have not only kept them divided, but have also manifested many of the same dynamics described in this new book noted below. To pick just two examples at random: Orthodox regularly retail a version of the Fourth Crusade that conveniently leaves out their own attacks on Catholics in the preceding years--to say nothing of Byzantine Orthodox violence against non-Chalcedonians; or they invent out of whole cloth risible ideas about, say, Ireland being Orthodox before "the Franks" got at them. Or consider the competing histories of the Union of Brest and the Pseudo-Sobor of Lviv of 1946: about both, please God, Daniel Galadza and I will ourselves have in print a new book late this year. 

Or consider Catholics and their absurd fights over "tradition" before and after, and in relation to, Vatican II, which I addressed in part here. I looked at some of these historiographical issues in more detail in this essay. In sum, and to amend a phrase of the great historian Robert Taft, of blessed memory and the Society of Jesus, when it comes to hijacking history, nobody has clean hands!

Such historiographical issues are in for some incisive treatment in Kathleen Wellman's forthcoming book, set for fall release: Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches the Past and Why It Matters (Oxford UP, Sept. 2021), 384pp. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

The teaching of history has long been the subject of partisan warfare. Religion often plays a prominent role in these debates, as secular progressives and conservative Christians disagree over which historical figures are worthy of study, how (or whether) certain events should be portrayed, and ultimately how tax dollars should be spent. But what about students who are educated outside the public schools, either in religious schools or at home? How are they learning history, and what effect does that have on our democracy?

Hijacking History analyzes the high school world history textbooks produced by the three most influential publishers of Christian educational materials. In these books, the historian, informed by his faith, tells the allegedly unbiased story of God's actions as interpreted through the Bible. History becomes a weapon to judge and condemn civilizations that do not accept the true God or adopt “biblical” positions. In their treatment of the modern world, these texts identify ungodly ideas to be vanquished-evolution, humanism, biblical modernism, socialism, and climate science among them.

The judgments found in these textbooks, Kathleen Wellman shows, are rooted in the history of American evangelicals and fundamentalists and the battles they fought against the tide of secularism. In assuming that God sanctions fundamentalist positions on social, political, and economic issues, students are led to believe that that the ultimate mission of America is to succeed as a nation that advances evangelical Christianity and capitalism throughout the world. The Christianity presented in these textbooks is proselytizing, intolerant of other religions and non-evangelical Christians, and unquestionably anchored to the political right.

As Hijacking History argues, the ideas these textbooks promote have significant implications for contemporary debates about religion, politics, and education, and pose a direct challenge to the values of a pluralistic democracy.

American Christian Orientalism

Though this recent publication focuses on 19th-century Protestants, there is a good deal of evidence that such essentializing orientalism lives on today in American evangelicalism, and Christianity more generally. Current views of, e.g., Christianity in the Middle East as seen in the eyes of many of my students would reflect this. In any event, a welcome new study: An American Biblical Orientalism: The Construction of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Nineteenth-Century American Evangelical Piety by David D. Grafton (Fortress Press, 2019), 246pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

An American Biblical Orientalism: The Construction of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Nineteenth-Century American Evangelical Piety examines the life and work of Eli Smith, William McClure Thomson, and Edward Robinson and their descriptions of the “Bible Lands.” While there has been a great deal written about American travelogues to the Holy Lands, this book focuses on how these three prominent American Protestants described the indigenous peoples, and how those images were consumed by American Christians who had little direct experience with the “Bible Lands.” David D. Grafton argues that their publications (Biblical Researches, Later Biblical Researches, and The Land and the Book) profoundly impacted the way that American Protestants read and interpreted the Bible in the late-nineteenth century. The descriptions and images of the people found their way into American Bible dictionaries, theological dictionaries, and academic and religious circles of a growing bible readership in North America. Ultimately, the people of late Ottoman society (e.g. Jews, Christians and Muslims) were essentialized as the living characters of the Bible. These peoples were fitted into categories as heroes or villains from biblical stories, and rarely seen as modern people in their own right. Thus, in the words of Edward Said, they were “orientalized."

On the Ecumenism of Exploding Heads

I shall let you in on three secrets:

1) In the 1990s, numerous evangelicals entered Orthodoxy, details of which are to be found in several studies, including the superlative one of D.O. Herbel, Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church. (I interviewed the author here.)

2) Some of those converts turned around and scorned their Protestant heritage, and indeed all non-Orthodox Christians of whatever tradition, loudly and virulently denouncing them as heretics and any efforts at working with them as guilty of the "pan-heresy" of "ecumenism," all phrases that nobody uses except tendentiously and as weaponry.

3) Some evangelicals repay the favour, as it were, if they even know anything at all about Orthodoxy, which they often regard as being in essence a version of Roman Catholicism: icon-worshipping, Mary-devoted, priest-confessing, works-righteous folks with too many statues in their churches and too much formality in that weird biscuit ceremony they call 'Mass' or 'liturgy.'

What, then, will past and present evangelicals and Orthodox alike make of the co-operative efforts of a new book that brings both together in missionary efforts? Will we see an ecumenical explosion of heads?

Edited by Mark Oxbrow and Tim Grass, The Mission of God: Studies in Orthodox and Evangelical Mission (Wipf and Stock, 2016), 270pp. is a collection of essays which has garnered a variety of positive blurbs from evangelical and Orthodox folks:

This is a 'must read' collection of essays that are rooted in prayer, in the Scriptures and in the rich histories of two very different traditions. The variety of topics and perspectives are presented by senior scholars and leaders, giving the reader an excellent glimpse into the ways in which Orthodox and Evangelical Christians around the globe have come together to participate in God's transforming mission. I highly recommend it for all pastors, seminary and Bible college students and staff. (Dr. C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell, PhD, Executive Director, Theological Commission, World Evangelical Alliance.)

The wealth of material in this extraordinary symposium is indicated by the widely dispersed backgrounds - geographical, cultural, and theological - of its contributors. I cannot think of a comparable example in which the evangelical mission of the Church is placed so firmly in the varying contexts of theology, ethics, exegesis, ecumenism, and spiritual transformation. Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, Orthodox Pastor in Chicago and Senior Editor of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity 

Can Evangelical and Orthodox Christians move from exclusion and competition of the past to mutuality and complementarity in the present? Can the depth of a powerful spiritual tradition be (re)discovered and in some ways appropriated by modern activistic evangelizers and can they both be enriched by each other's strengths? The amazing recent dialogues in the spirit and under the umbrella of the Lausanne Movement for world evangelization - as documented by this extraordinary book - provide us with promising answers to these questions. Diversity, quality and experience of the contributors assure the reader that this compendium points the way toward a future of greater understanding and desirable partnerships in the mission of the Triune God in our complex world. Ecumenism at its best! (Dr. Peter Kuzmic Eva B. and Paul E. Toms Distinguished Professor of World Missions and European Studies, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.)

The Mind of Christ and a Psychoanalytic Mind (III)

As part of an on-going series on Christianity and psychoanalysis, I turn next to a recent collection edited by Earl Bland and Brad Strawn, Christianity and Psychoanalysis: a New Conversation. After more than a century of psychoanalytic thought and practice, and after endless, and frequently incorrect or at least exaggerated, portrayals of Freudian hostility to "religion" (cf. my comments on reading the Freud-Pfister correspondence), there seems to have developed in the last decade or two a willingness on both sides to offer fresh re-consideration of faith in psychoanalysis and faith in God. That is to be welcomed, and this book purports to continue such re-considerations, especially among evangelical Christians--though, curiously, one article, with the very promising title of "Ecumenical Spirituality, Catholic Theology, and Object Relations Theory" shows no serious engagement with Catholic theology at all, the author being herself a peripatetic Protestant who seems slyly to suggest that her having once attended a Catholic church (in which her parents had her baptized) is sufficient to qualify her to write about these matters. The article is a disappointment.

So, alas, is the rest of the book. It is of course well known to me, as an editor of scholarly collections and scholarly journals, that collections of articles often make for wildly uneven reading. The best parts of the book--that is, those having some substantial engagement of worthy matters, and written in the best style--are the introduction and conclusion by the editors. That, as I well know, is often the way with such collections, for only those parts are under an editor's direct control. Between one's own beginning and ending of a book one must contend with many other writers of uneven skill and reliability. There is only so much editing one can do to bad writers without turning their entire contribution into a "typewriter job" (Midge Decter) which is more yours than theirs. (Editors must, at some point, possess and exercise a degree of askesis in which they mortify their very understandable urge to completely re-write someone else's article to make it what the editor would have written himself.)

This collection is written by and directed towards evangelical Christians. The intellectual impoverishments of evangelical Christianity are many, and have been much commented upon by others, so I will not retail those here. (Flannery O'Connor once memorably wrote that the besetting sin of a Catholic is snobbery, and I confess to having a hard time keeping mine in check when confronted with evangelicalism.) But they do bedevil this book in many ways. Given on-going and ever-deepening evangelical interest in patristics and the wider Christian tradition, the lack of engagement with those traditions by the authors in this book makes the sum of their efforts rather arid. A little more engagement with, inter alia, such Fathers as Evagrius, could make any "new conversation" between Christianity and psychoanalysis much deeper and richer.

The same could be said for renewals in Trinitarian theology and especially theological anthropology. But one cannot review a book that was not written, nor fault writers for not writing the book that reviewers think they should have written. One must, rather, review the book that was written. So let me do that here, briefly showing the better parts.

The editors rightly note in the first chapter that "psychoanalysis, in the right context, can be used as a primary tool for psychological and spiritual formation" (29). That remains, however, a desideratum, surely, for the people and places where this happens are, it seems to me, vanishingly few. Many seminaries in the Catholic world have psychologists either on call or on the faculty, but I know of almost none who are practicing psychoanalysts. One searches in vain on such sites as Catholictherapists.com for full-fledged analysts, which is a pity because, as I noted earlier this year, there is an expanding body of evidence showing the superiority of analysis to other therapeutic methods in some crucial areas.

In their conclusion, the editors seem to set out some future lines of inquiry, all of which have the welcome and happy effect of refusing to hew to the strict "orthodoxies" of some in the (especially American) psychoanalytic community, which has long been recognized as at odds with Freud in some ways, including his openness to lay analysis (that is, to analysts who were not medically trained, as indeed Freud's own daughter Anna was not). More recently, there have been debates about analytic technique, and the editors commendably show themselves flexible and willing to consider that "the external trappings, such as the use of a couch or number of sessions per week" need not unduly define nor too narrowly restrict what constitutes psychoanalysis. Short-term, once-a-week encounters in the consulting room can indeed be psychoanalysis, just as sessions over the phone or Skype are now increasingly being used by psychoanalysts.

Their concluding words are very much worth pondering, and set forth a gracious and open vision of engagement: "Psychoanalytic treatment is a participation in 'God's ongoing work of caring,'...involving love as a fundamental way of knowing" (259). Moreover, "for the Christian in psychoanalytic treatment, something much deeper is occurring. Both therapist and patient are participating eschatologically in the redemptive and reconciling work of Christ" (262). I very much wished for much more robustly developed reflection along these lines in this book, and hope that perhaps the editors, singly or together, might in the future expand these trajectories of thought into a more deeply challenging work, perhaps without the ballast of other contributors weighing down their commendable, necessary, and welcome labors.

Rediscovering Spiritual Riches in the East

Evangelicals coming into Orthodoxy, or being interested in her traditions, are not new, though some commentators have recently suggested that the movement is on the wane. Nevertheless, later this summer will see a new book by a major evangelical publisher that shows interest in Orthodox spirituality: James Googin, ed., Reading the Christian Spiritual Classics: A Guide for Evangelicals (IVP, July 2013), 340pp.

About this book we are told:

Ever since Richard Foster wrote Celebration of Discipline in 1978, evangelicals have hungered for a deeper and more historic spirituality. Many have come to discover the wealth of spiritual insight available in the Desert Fathers, the medieval mystics, German Pietism and other traditions. While these classics have been a source of life-changing renewal for many, still others are wary of these texts and the foreign theological traditions from which they come. The essays in this volume provide a guide for evangelicals to read the Christian spiritual classics. The contributions fall into four sections. The first three answer the big questions: why should we read the spiritual classics, what are these classics and how should we read them? The last section brings these questions together into a brief reading guide for each of the major traditions. Each essay not only explores the historical and theological context, but also expounds the appropriate hermeneutical framework and the significance for the church today. Together these essays provide a comprehensive and charitable introduction to the spiritual classics, suitable for both those who already embrace them and those who remain concerned and cautious. Whether you are a newcomer to historic spirituality or a seasoned reader looking to go deeper, you will find this volume to be a reliable resource for years to come.

Chapter 8, by James Payton Jr., is entitled "Reading Orthodox Spirituality." Payton is the author of the 2007 book, which I reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, entitled Light from the Christian East: An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition.

Chapter 10, by Michael Glerup, is entitled "The Church Fathers and Mothers."

New Series on Orthodoxy in the 21st Century

The World Council of Churches has just announced the publication of a new series of books, "Doxa and Praxis: Exploring Orthodox Theology."

The first two publications will be released later this summer. The first is by the well-known Orthodox theologian Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and is titled Orthodox Theology in the Twenty-First Century. The second book is by the series editor, Pantelis Kalaitzidis, Orthodoxy and Political Theology.

The WCC has also recently published several books of interest to Eastern Christians, including the edited collection of essays, Just Peace: Orthodox Perspectives (WCC Publications, 2012).

About this book the publisher tells us:

Despite their largely pacifist origins, Christianity and Christian traditions can claim only limited success in their efforts to conciliate conflict, avoid violence, and stop war. The eminent contributors to this deeply reflective book believe it is time to look to the East, to the very different perspectives among Orthodox Christians, on issues of war and the justice that must undergird peace. From Europe and Russia, as well as the Middle East and Asia, two dozen Orthodox theologians and church people cast the classic dilemmas of war and peace, military service, just war, and religious nationalism into a deeper theological framework. The book examines: the historical characterizations of Orthodoxy in a variety of settings and nations (Greece, Oriental Christianity, Bulgaria, Armenia, Western Europe, etc.); dilemmas of nationalism for the churches; the Russian Orthodox Church and the military; the invasion of Iraq; globalization; fundamentalism; interreligious tensions; the ecclesial vocation of peacemaking.

Also just released in January of this year is another edited collection,  Building Bridges: Between the Orthodox and Evangelical Traditions (WCC Publications, 2012), 268pp.
About this book the publisher tells us:

In recent decades, Evangelicals and Orthodox Christians have encountered each other more widely than ever before. Relationships have often been difficult and dogged by misunderstanding. How can two Christian traditions, which seem so different, begin to understand each other and find common ground? Is it possible for Orthodox and Evangelical Christians to move from competition to co-operation and develop relationships marked by mutual respect? What are the key theological issues between them which need to be faced? And what might these two traditions be able to offer together to the whole church? Building Bridges presents papers, reports, and reflections from a remarkable series of seminars, bringing together representatives of these streams of Christianity. Held at Bossey, Switzerland, between 2000 and 2006, the seminars built on earlier consultations and brought together theologians and church leaders from a wide range of Evangelical and Orthodox churches. The topics explored include the nature of salvation, the role and place of Holy Scripture, the nature and purpose of the church, and what it means to be human. Building Bridges will be a stimulus to further dialogue between two traditions of considerable theological and demographic significance.

Finally, released last November is a third collection of essays, Many Women Were Also There: the Participation of Orthodox Women in the Ecumenical Movement (WCC Press, 2011), 244pp. About this book the publisher tells us:

In this book, the distinctive voices of Orthodox Christian women wrestle with the realities of their lives and contexts - but also of their faith - within the long and ambiguous legacy of the Christian tradition for women. Keenly aware of the insights and shortcomings of Orthodox Christianity, they reflect the historical, theological, and practical aspects of women's experience. Drawing especially from North America, Europe, and Greece, the book includes noted theologians and biblical scholars, as well as women in ministry, counseling, political science, and public service. Together they envision a future in which Christian life delivers on the promise of those early days when "many women were with him."

Hans Boersma on Sacramental Theology in our Time

I noted the recent publication of Hans Boersma's new book, Heavenly Participation: the Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry. I interviewed him about this book and related questions, and here are his thoughts:

AD: Tell us a bit about your background

I grew up in a wonderful Reformed family in the Netherlands, where my Dad served as a Pastor.  After taking a degree in education (and a compulsory one-year stint in the army) in Holland, I moved to Canada (Surrey, BC), where I started teaching at an elementary school.  There I met my wife, Linda, who taught at the same school.  I soon decided to pursue further education—studying history at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, then doing an M.Div. at the Canadian Reformed Seminary in Hamilton, Ontario, and finally pursuing a doctorate in theology at the University of Utrecht.  I served as a pastor in Aldergrove, BC, for three and a half years, and then started teaching theology at Trinity Western University, an evangelical liberal arts university in Langley, BC.  For the past six years, I have taught at Regent College, an international evangelical graduate school of theology in Vancouver.  My wife and I have five children, one of whom is still at home with us.

AD: What led you to write this book?

The most immediate reason for writing it is probably that two colleagues, Richard Mouw from Fuller and John Stackhouse from Regent, both suggested I should write a more popular version of my Oxford book on nouvelle théologie. Writing popular books doesn’t come easily to me, but in the end I did decide to try it, because I feel passionately about the issues I am writing about in this book.  Perhaps I could highlight two of them.  First, I have an increasing conviction that modernity has left us with a terribly flat, horizontal, this-worldly perspective.  I am strongly convinced that earlier viewpoints rightly saw that this-worldly created appearances veil a deeper, transcendent depth, a reality that as a Christian I believe ultimately goes back to the eternal Word of God himself.  Put differently, God’s gifts of the created order participate sacramentally in heavenly realities.  This perspective gives us a much richer appreciation for the world in which we live and at the same time helps us focus more distinctly on what is ultimate: eternal life in the Triune God himself.

Second, and connected to this, I believe that there are theological emphases that modernity has difficulty appreciating, such as the importance of Eucharistic celebration, the role of tradition in passing on the Christian faith, and biblical interpretation as a spiritual rather than just an archaeological practice.  The 20th-century Catholic movement of nouvelle théologie --Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar most notably—have taught me to approach theology from a different angle, one that doesn’t focus just on propositional accuracy but that looks at theology as an entry into the mystery of the Triune God. It’s not that I want to pitch mystery over against propositional truth; it’s more that our human truth statements participate sacramentally, as it were, in divine Reason.  Once you take this perspective, Eucharist, Tradition, and spiritual exegesis take on a great deal more significance.  In short, the book is a bit of a manifesto.  It is a cry from the heart about what I believe is important as we go about our theological business in our contemporary modern (and postmodern) culture.

AD: For whom did you write the book--did you have a particular audience in mind?

I wrote this book primarily for evangelicals.  I write as an evangelical for evangelicals, trying to persuade them that we need to regain a pre-modern sensibility if we want to properly navigate the challenges of late modern culture.  Younger evangelicals increasingly react against the propositionalism of an earlier generation.  Unfortunately, however, too often this reaction goes hand in hand with a further radicalizing of the Reformation.  These younger evangelicals continue to reject the authority of tradition, they are nervous about authority structures, and they are often radically biblicist, rejecting a harmonious weaving together of reason and faith, philosophy and theology.  In terms of Christian living, the individualism of their evangelical past renders them susceptible to the same moral vapidity and indecisiveness that characterizes the broader cultural context.  I am trying to suggest to them that by anchoring ourselves more deeply in the Christian tradition, we find resources there that help us overcome some of our unhelpful evangelical cul-de-sacs.  At the same time, I suspect that my appeal for a sacramental mindset isn’t important only for evangelicals.  The desacralizing of the cosmos has deeply affected other traditions, including Catholicism, as well.  So, I am hoping that the book gets read also outside the evangelical orbit.

AD: Were there any surprises as you were writing?

Not really, to be honest.  Although writing often takes me a long time, I was able to write this book quite quickly, during a few summer months.  The reason is that the book comes fairly directly out of my teaching and research.  Much of the material that you find here I have dealt with at Regent College in my classes, in one way or another.  Among my friends and colleagues at Regent, we have discussed and debated the issues involved for a number of years.  So, I was relatively clear in my mind about what it is what I wanted to do.  Also, the second part of the book draws heavily on nouvelle théologie, a topic on which I had just published an earlier book. So, I was already into the topic and knew how I wanted to rework the ideas. If there was any surprise, it was perhaps how strongly I felt about the issues involved, once I began to put pen to paper for a more popular audience.

AD: Though much of your focus is on Western Christians, evangelicals especially, is it possible to say that some of the challenges today to sacramental theology and sacramental practice are really faced by all Christians, East and West alike?

I think there is no doubt that Christians in the East face many of the same challenges that we encounter in the West.  Western culture is increasingly becoming a global culture, so to think that Eastern Orthodoxy would somehow be immune to the de-sacramentalizing challenges that are ours in the West would be naïve.  At the same time, it seems to me that the Eastern love for patristic theology gives Orthodoxy certain emphases for which we, in the West, should be grateful and from which we should learn.  I am thinking, for instance, of the importance of participation, of deification, and of typological exegesis, which naturally find a home in the Eastern mindset.

AD: Your book does draw on numerous Eastern Fathers as well as contemporary Eastern theologians, including of course Alexander Schmemann. What drew you to them? What do you think they have to offer evangelical theology today?

I indeed draw on several Eastern Fathers, though not exclusively so.  I also draw fairly extensively also on St. Augustine, whose Platonist-Christian synthesis was, I think, profound.  I love his distinction between ‘use’ (uti) and ‘enjoyment’ (frui), which recognizes that our ultimate aim is heaven and that we ought to use earthly gifts mere as sacraments, which are meant to bring us home.  I also use St. Irenaeus, whom perhaps we may describe both as an Eastern and as a Western theologian. 

But I indeed also use Eastern theologians, and I am currently writing a book on embodiment in St. Gregory of Nyssa.  His mystical, anagogical (upward-leading) theology is absolutely profound, I think.  I am attracted to theologians such as Irenaeus, Gregory, and others especially because they recognize that created realities find their purpose of being in the very life of God.  The East—along with the Greek Fathers—has always maintained clearly that this-worldly realities (and especially human beings!) are not strictly autonomous or self-contained, but that they find their true meaning and identity in their ultimate aim, our Christ-filled heavenly future.

AD: You reflect at some length on the challenge that medieval Nominalism poses to a coherent sacramental theology. How has the ressourcement movement helped in dealing with Nominalism?

Nominalism isn’t able to recognize that the way we identify created objects is better or worse depending on how well our naming of them corresponds to their eternal, heavenly archetypes. Nominalism, by rejecting the real existence of eternal essences or archetypes, forces us to be curved in upon ourselves and on this-worldly objects.  The result is fragmentation in how we see people and objects relating not just to God but also to each other. This modern sense of alienation and fragmentation seems to me to stem ultimately from a tearing of the sacramental link between heaven and earth. A retrieval or ressourcement of patristic and medieval sources can be tremendously helpful here, because this earlier tradition assumed a Platonist-Christian perspective that looked at earthly objects as anchored in what Plato would have called eternal ‘forms’, but which Christians identified as Jesus Christ himself.  Knowledge, therefore, even of temporal, earthly objects is based on Jesus Christ. This is something of which the Church Fathers were deeply aware. The twentieth-century Catholic ressourcement movement was, I think, in many ways an attempt to overcome the secularity that was impinging on European society, and these theologians tried to do so by recovering the sacramental modes of knowing and of reading Scripture that had been current in pre-modern society.

AD: Much of the ressourcement movement, of course, was led by French Jesuits and Dominicans. How has an evangelical of Dutch extraction teaching in Canada come to know and be influenced by their thought?

When I taught at Trinity Western University (1998-2005), we had an informal reading group of evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox theologians, which we called ‘Paradosis’ (Tradition).  One of the books that we read was Yves Congar’s Tradition and Traditions.  

Congar's book revolutionized my thinking: I saw here a Catholic theologian who, on the one hand, was able to impress on me the inescapable force and significance of tradition—in ways that my own background had never done; and who, on the other hand, made very clear that he didn’t regard Scripture and Tradition as two separate sources of authority and that Scripture was materially sufficient for all Christian teaching.  In other words, Congar (and, as I now realize, most Catholic thinkers today) held to some form of sola scriptura.  Congar’s insistence that Tradition, based as it is in Christ, itself is sacramental in character left a strong impression on me.

Around the same time, my department asked me to present a paper on biblical interpretation.  My reading of Irenaeus had already made me nervous about the often strictly historical (and this-worldly) approach of much contemporary biblical exegesis.  As I did some research for the paper, I came across an excellent essay by Henri de Lubac on spiritual interpretation.  De Lubac made clear that the fourfold exegesis of the earlier tradition wasn’t a silly relic of the past but could continue to inform our exegetical practices today, without negating some of the more helpful contributions of critical exegesis. Moreover, de Lubac made clear that this exegesis was a sacramental practice.  So, I had encountered two theologians who were obviously sacramental in their thinking, and I knew that at some point, I had to explore their theology further, to see what I could learn from it.

AD: Your book is a wonderful model of how to do theology ecumenically, and a great reminder that today no Christian scholar can afford to work in the solitude of his own tradition. And yet for some--especially Orthodox--"ecumenism" and its cognates is a dirty word (the "pan-heresy"). Do you attract flak among evangelicals for so openly drawing on Catholic and Orthodox thought?

Many of the issues that I discuss in the book I presented first in a team-taught course at Regent and in public dialogue with my colleagues.  I dedicated the book to my colleagues and students at Regent, precisely because I am so very grateful for the open discussions that we regularly have at Regent.  That’s not to say that we are always in agreement.  As I mention in the book’s preface, we do find ourselves disagreeing on issues, sometimes even vehemently so, but we all believe that what binds us together in Christ is far more important than the theological differences that we have.  And so, I think we disagree well, and we talk, discuss, and debate as friends among each other.  It’s one of the best ways, I think, of doing theology in today’s society, and our students are certainly grateful for it.

As to the broader evangelical world beyond Regent College, I don’t know if I can fully evaluate that.  My evangelical reviewers so far have been most generous.  I suspect that one reason is that the themes I put forward in the book increasingly echo among at least some of today’s evangelical theologians.  For whatever reason, I have not encountered any kind of sharp denunciations of my book, and even those who are apprehensive of some of my emphases tend to take the arguments that I put forward seriously and engage it on its merits.  So, thankfully, I have no reason to feel defensive about the approach that I have taken in my ecumenical endeavours.