Last year, the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies published William Tuck’s book, Modern Shapers of Baptist Thought. Shout-out to Bill Tuck and Fred Anderson for this fine compendium of 24 key Baptist influencers from John Broadus to Jimmy Carter, from Addie Davis (look her up!) to Gardner Taylor.
As any history major will tell you, you can forecast your trending future by knowing the trajectory of your history. A surprising (to me) forebear and example of this is found in Tuck’s chapter on Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick once preached, “Transcendence without immanence would give us deism, cold and barren; immanence without transcendence would give us pantheism, fatalistic and paralyzing” (Tuck, p. 66). Tuck then goes on to describe how Fosdick’s Christological placement within the deism-pantheism extremes shaped his views on pacifism, social action and ministry.
John Chandler
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The extremes of deism — where an all-transcendent God who creates and fixes everything — and pantheism — where we are all gods of a sort, calling the shots alongside of all of the other gods — could be used to describe today’s extreme edges of sometimes bitter Christian conversations in the so-called culture wars. I’m not suggesting that today’s ultra-neo-Reformers are deists, or that extreme social progressives are pantheists. But some of them can see those edges from where they are shouting.
Perhaps we would do well to follow our Baptist forebear Fosdick in his framing the issues of the day theologically in terms of a spectrum of transcendence-immanence, of deism-pantheism. The hot-topic conversations would begin with a confessional acknowledgement that all participants were inside the outer edges of orthodoxy, fully acknowledging the Lordship of Christ as revealed authoritatively in Scripture. And then, once those in dialogue confess shared orthodoxy, it’s game on, with the full body of Christ in the spirit of iron sharpening iron.
Of course, many publically accused Fosdick of heresy. And name-calling within the Christian tribe continues unabated today; I can’t foresee that trend ending any time soon, sadly. But when Fosdick called for “a theology beyond modernism,” he was onto something I hope we see more of in the future: the employment of classic constructs of theology as a conceptual framework within which we can respond to emerging culture.
John Chandler (john.chandler@vbmb.org) is leader of the Spence Network, www.spencenetwork.org. Follow the Spence Network on Facebook and Twitter.