In this text McGrath makes a number of important orthodox claims. He clearly believes in Jesus Christ, recognizes certain fundamentals of the Christian faith, seeks to counter theological alternatives that compromise crucial Christian beliefs, and is critical of cultural attitudes that undermine the Christian faith. I do not think, however, that he fulfills the goal of this book. He describes that goal in these words,
The essential precondition for a renewed evangelical engagement with intellectual life is confidence in its own coherence and credibility. This study therefore aims to explore the coherence of evangelicalism by bringing out the inner consistency of the evangelical approach and demonstrating the internal contradictions and vulnerabilities of its contemporary rivals.(2)As this essay will make clear, McGrath rightly recognizes that his rivals have distorted Christian truth. He has not, however, been able to lay bare the essential "contradictions and vulnerabilities" of his contemporary rivals. This is due to his not having solved the theological issues that drove his rivals to their false solutions. Among other things, a theological solution would involve overcoming Kant's claim that God the Word cannot be known by the categories of the understanding. Since he has not resolved critical theological difficulties, he is forced to adopt aspects of the positions he rejects. Simply put, he recognizes aspects of Christian truth, but he has not theologically resolved the issues that would place that truth upon a solid theological foundation. I shall show this.
As we shall see, evangelicalism is emphatic in affirming not merely the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, but his definitiveness; however, the affirmation of the former is an important first step in the defence of the latter.(3)McGrath makes the claim of particularity over against all forms of belief that begin with a prior ideological or cultural commitments that justify faith in Christ. For example, liberalism began with a claim to a universal religious experience, Nazi Christians began with assumptions about the form of Christian faith in the cultural and historical context of Germany, old style evangelicalism began with rationalistic assumptions that faith could be reduced to simple propositions of reason, and the theology of Eusebius was tied to a cultural ideal of the Christian emperor. McGrath gives these as examples, and all of them deny Christ's own authority for they affirm that Jesus Christ needs to be validated by something prior to him. Evangelicalism rejects this.
The particularity of the Christian gospel and supremely the person of Jesus Christ as saviour and Lord, does not conflict in any manner with its universal scope. Indeed, the evangelical passion for truth is expressed partly in its focus on the person of Christ, in that Jesus Christ is the truth.(4)
The fundamental revelational axiom of the Christian faith is that only God can reveal God, just as its fundamental soteriological axiom is that only God can save.(5)Secondly, the statements of Christian revelation are true statements. Here McGrath is critical of postliberalism, especially the work of George Lindbeck, one of the more important postliberal thinkers. According to McGrath, Lindbeck allows theology to give up all claims of speaking truthfully of God. Lindbeck does this by making a distinction between first and second order language. First order language for God is the language of prayer, of worship, and of faith. It is language that relates one directly to God or reveals him in some immediate fashion. Second order statements are statements about first order statements. Lindbeck wants to restrict theology to second order statements, to regulative rules about how one uses language to talk of and to God. For him, theology deals with syntax, not semantics. As such, he doesn't want to discuss whether or not theological statements speak the truth of God. But this raises serious questions, and McGrath raises them. Do theological statements relate to God? and if so, how? In what sense if any, are they true revelations of God? Or, how does it happen that religious language can have truth claims? For McGrath, theological statements must reflect truth. They are not simply rules for using first order language. Over against Lindbeck, McGrath asks the following questions,
To allow our ideas and values to become controlled by anything or anyone other than the self-revelation of God in Scripture is to adopt an ideology, rather than a theology; it is to become controlled by ideas and values whose origins lie outside the Christian tradition and potentially to become enslaved to them.(6)
As the rise of Nazism and Stalinism have made abundantly clear, cultural trends need to be criticized. They cannot be allowed to be normative. And that demands that Christianity ground itself on something which transcends cultural particularities namely, the self-revelation of God.(7)
There will be those outside evangelicalism and outside Christianity who will want to make other figures, powers, principles and values of foundational importance. Evangelical Christianity, however, is unashamedly Christ centered. Jesus Christ is the gospel. However complex subsequent theological reflection of this may become, evangelicalism affirms that all must be based upon Christ, and all must be judged by Christ not seeing him simply as a source of ideas, but as the foundation of every aspect of the Christian life.(8)
The critical question which arises from this approach, [that of Lindbeck] to which we shall return later in this chapter, is whether theology is simply about the grammar of faith that is to say, regulation of Christian discourse. To what does this discourse relate? Is there some reality or set of realities outside the biblical text to which the biblical narrative relates? Do theological assertions simply articulate biblical grammar, or do they relate to some objective order, irrespective of whether we recognize this relation or not? As we shall see, one central evangelical anxiety concerning the postliberal approach is that it appears to represent a purely intratextual affair, with little concern for its possible relation to an external objective reality.(9)Against Lindbeck and postliberalism, McGrath and evangelicalism believe that both Scripture and Christian doctrine express truth. Both bring knowledge of an "external objective reality." McGrath's understanding of how this happens will be discussed shortly.
This is in no sense to deny or to de emphasize the cognitive aspects of Christian theology. It is merely to observe that there is more to theology than cerebralized information. A theology which touches the mind, leaving the heart unaffected, is no true Christian theology a point stressed by both Luther and Calvin.(10)Finally, for both McGrath and evangelicalism, revelation is historical. It is not derived from timeless universal truths, but founded upon the concrete historical person of Jesus Christ as known in Scripture. For this reason, evangelicalism cannot accept the approach of scholars such as Bultmann and Tillich. These scholars claim that it is the biblical story of Jesus Christ that bears salvation rather than the actual historical person of Jesus given in Scripture. Against Tillich and Bultmann, McGrath affirms that Scripture gives accurate historical knowledge of Jesus Christ, and that this knowledge of Christ is saving knowledge.
While I have argued that this approach [revelation as purely propositional] to Christian doctrine is inadequate, in that it fails to do justice to the full complexity of the biblical notions of revelation, it remains axiomatic for evangelicals that both revelation and doctrine have cognitive or informational aspects.(11)
For understandable reasons, evangelicalism has in the past chosen to focus on the propositional or cognitive element of the complex network of divine revelation an element which allowed evangelicalism to maintain its credibility and integrity during a period of rationalist assault. But the ensuring understanding of `revelation' was itself dangerous deficient, verging on the aridity and sterility which were the hallmarks of the same rationalism which evangelicalism was seeking to oppose. ... Recognizing the narrative quality of Scripture allows the fullness of biblical revelation to be recovered. In no way does this strategy involve the abandoning or weakening of an evangelical commitment to the objective cognitive truth of divine revelation. It is simply to recognize that revelation involves more than this, and to commend the wisdom of avoiding reductionist approaches to the issue.(12)
The method [historical critical method] is to be welcomed, because it takes seriously the incarnational principle, noted earlier, that God has chosen to reveal himself not in some timeless ahistorical form, or in abstract propositions, but in particular historical contexts and through real historical people.(13)What critical theological insight is needed if one is to say, as does McGrath, that the revelation in Jesus Christ is particular, truthful, cognitive, and historical? I would maintain that one would need an objective understanding of revelation. As God the Word takes form in the person of Jesus Christ, in the words of Scripture, and in the proclamation of the gospel, God the Word becomes particular, finite, and limited while still remaining God. In the event of God becoming objective finite, spoken, heard, touched, and seen the mind can grasp God. As this happens, revelation becomes cognitive. In actual fact, it becomes more than cognitive. The whole person including the body receives the Word. While it is God the Word that takes concrete form, it is God the Holy Spirit that enables the mind and the whole self to respond to God as revealed in the Word. This event of God taking form happens as an event. It is not a general property of created existence. It is a miracle, something that comes from without. It happens as God wills, as God acts, as God the Father sends the Son. As an event that becomes events, Christian revelation is historical. In this way one knows God, and in this event of knowing God, God the Word truthfully reveals God. The whole self, body and soul, truly knows God because the revelation is truthful. As in John's gospel, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me."
The Christological content of the Christian proclamation is minimized in the writings of Rudolf Bultmann, Gerhard Ebeling, and especially Paul Tillich. Tillich's theology sits so loose to the figure of Jesus that he can dispense with his historical existence and personality without making any noticeable difference to his theology. Jesus illustrates a principle, which can be and is illustrated by others. ... Bultmann understood the proclamation or kerygma primarily in terms of an active and effective word, summoning its hearers to an existential decision. There was thus no informational `content' (concerning, for example, the historical figure of Jesus) to the kerygma. ... However, recent scholarship has decisively undermined the New Testament basis of this trend toward detaching Christian faith from the historical Jesus.(14)
To use Augustine's vocabulary, the point of contact is a latent memory of God, reinforced by an encounter with his creation, which possesses the potential to point us to the source through which its sense of bitter sweet longing may be satisfied.(18)The question then arises, How does this latent memory, this sense of longing, this degree of convergence in search of the transcendent, differ from the feeling of absolute dependence that Schleiermacher claims belongs to all humanity? Until McGrath addresses this question, he has not really addressed the liberal form of religion.
A fundamental impulse which seems to lie behind religious experience the quest for the transcendent can be accounted for within the framework of Christian theology. ... But my basic contention is that the gospel itself enables us to understand why the various religious traditions of humanity exist, and why there might well be at least some degree of convergence among them in relation to a search for fulfillment.(19)
According to this approach, experience is an explicandum, something which itself requires to be interpreted. Christian theology provides a framework by which the ambiguities of experience may be interpreted. Theology aims to interpret experience. It is like a net which we can cast over experience, in order to capture its meaning. Experience is seen as something which is to be interpreted, rather than something which is itself capable of interpreting. Christian theology thus aims to address, interpret, and transform human experience.(24)In regard to his claim that theology addresses, interprets, and transforms experience, McGrath makes several observations. First, theology addresses experience because God transforms human beings. Here McGrath reflects aspects of the objective perspective.
As Calvin pointed out, to know God is to be changed by God; true knowledge of God leads to worship, as the believer is caught up in a transforming and renewing encounter with the living God. To know God is to be changed by God.(25)Liberals could easily make the statements just quoted. Schleiermacher felt he was being true to the essence of Scripture and the Reformers. Nevertheless, liberalism reinterprets these sources in ways that deny their real substance. That is what McGrath needs to uncover at this point. He needs to show how the statements just quoted mean something very different when proclaimed by liberals. To do that, he needs doctrine. He needs to develop the doctrine of the Trinity and Christology in relation to the liberalism and the Reformers. He advances no substantive theological analysis at this point. Without doctrine, there is no real way to separate liberalism from an orthodox position.
To be a real theologian is to wrestle with none other than the living God not with ideas about God, but with God himself. And how can a sinner ever hope to deal adequately with this God?(26)
But, Luther insists, the real theologian is someone who has experienced a sense of condemnation on account of sin who reads the New Testament and realizes that its message of forgiveness is for him or her. The gospel is thus experienced as something liberating, something which transforms our situation, something which is relevant to us.(27)
At its best, Christian theology shares this characteristic of poetic language ... it tries to convey to us the quality of the Christian experience of God. It attempts to point beyond itself, to rise above itself, straining at its lead as it rushes ahead, to point us to a town beyond its map town which it knows is there, but to which it cannot lead us. ... It uses a cluster of key words to try and explain what it is like to know God, by analogy with words associated with human experience.(28)As will be seen, this quotation could well belong in the following section. It is one of many statements that show that McGrath has not grasped how God the Son can become objective as a biblical word or a theological phrase. In the end, he has a liberal understanding of how God speaks, and this will become even more apparent through an analysis of McGrath's response to Lindbeck and postliberalism. Before doing that, however, it might be helpful to say a few more words about Lindbeck.
The origins of this tradition [experiential expressive] in one sense go back to Kant, for he helped clear the ground for its emergence by demolishing the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of the earlier regnant cognitive propositional views. That ground clearing was later completed for most educated people by scientific developments that increased the difficulties of accepting literalistic propositional interpretations of such biblical doctrines as creation, and by historical studies that implied the time conditioned relativity of all doctrines. Kant, however, did not replace the view of religion he had undermined with a more adequate one. ... That breach was filled, beginning with Schleiermacher, with what I have called "experiential expressivism", but this comes in many varieties and can be given many names.(30)Further, Lindbeck is critical of evangelicalism for embracing the older view, the cognitive propositionalist understanding of religious language. In Lindbeck's view, evangelicals really seem to believe that one can speak of God with the same assurance one might have in speaking of a rock, a tree, or a dog. McGrath describes Lindbeck's criticism of evangelicalism and the cognitive propositionalist approach with these words,
Lindbeck argues that this approach [cognitive propositionalist] is to be rejected as voluntarist, intellectualist and literalist, even making the suggestion that those who `perceive or experience religion in cognitivist fashion' are those who `combine unusual insecurity with naïveté'.(31)As an evangelical, McGrath must defend himself against Lindbeck. He does so as follows.
Words can be known directly and immediately by the human mind, without the need for any intermediaries. To know the words of Scripture is thus to know immediately the realities to which they relate. This theory of language is of foundational importance, as it undergirds Hodge's belief that today's reader of Scripture can be `assured of encountering the very words, thoughts, and intentions of God Himself.' Yet this metaphysical idea has been borrowed along with others of equally questionable theological parentage from the Enlightenment.(32)Secondly, in regard to Lindbeck's claim that evangelicals are naive intellectualists, McGrath responds by saying that evangelicals now have a more sophisticated understanding of language than that found in the older evangelicalism. They no longer believe that one can speak of God with the same assurance that one speaks of trees, dogs, or rocks. To validate his position, McGrath sets forth his ideas on language for God. I will quote him exhaustively at this point. I do so in order to make two points. First, as McGrath's thinking unfolds, he gives up the idea that language for God can be propositional. Language for God is much more subtle, elusive, poetical. He does, however, maintain the cognitive aspect in that the mind must be active in order to receive revelation. That is virtually a truism. Secondly, because he hasn't really come to terms with Kant, he will adopt the liberal view that religious language expresses religious experience. This will be quite obvious in what follows. Here is McGrath.
If an experience is to be articulated in words, in order to communicate or to attempt a communal envision of this experience, some form of a cognitive propositional dimension is inevitable. Yet his does not reduce the experience to words, but simply to attempt to convey it through words.(33)In light of the above quotations, McGrath makes the following claims: 1. The experience of the divine cannot be reduced to words, it can only be conveyed. 2. The experience cannot be put in propositional or literal form. This would be a degeneration. 3. Words point toward the thing experienced. They do not define the experience. 4. Words cannot capture the experience in its fullness. 5. Words point to an experience, they begin to sketch its outline, but the experience is elusive. It cannot be reduced to words. 6. Poetry and symbolism are required. 7. What is glimpsed in religious language is intimated, something beyond the horizon of our comprehension, something tantalizing we cannot enter.
Such rhetorical analyses of experience offer a means by which a cognitive account may be given of experience without in any sense reducing experience to propositional form or degenerating into `literalism' in the vague by ultimately pejorative sense of the term employed by Lindbeck.(34)
The fundamental insight here is that human words cannot adequately define experience, but may nevertheless point towards it, as signposts.(35)
Underlying the profundity of human experience and encounter lies an unresolved tension the tension between the wish to express an experience in words, and the inability of words to capture that experience in its fullness.(36)
Words can point to an experience, they can begin to sketch its outlines but the total descriptions of that experience remains beyond words. Words point beyond themselves, to something greater which eludes their grasp. Human words, and the categories which they express, are stretched to their limits as they attempt to encapsulate, to communicate, something which tantalizingly refuses to be reduced to words. It is the sheer elusiveness of human experience, its obstinate refusal to be imprisoned within a verbal matrix, which points to the need for poetry, symbolism, and doctrine alike. An impatience with precisely this elusiveness appears to underline the rejection of any cognitive component to doctrinal statements.(37)
The intimation of something further, beyond and signposted by experience, is characteristic of human experience. We live on the borderlands of something more something intimated, something ultimately lying beyond the horizons of our comprehension, yet on occasion intruding into our consciousness. Experience and language point beyond themselves, testifying that something lies beyond their borderlands, yet into which we tantalizingly cannot enter.(38)
Recognizing the narrative quality of Scripture allows the fullness of biblical revelation to be recovered. In no way does this strategy involve the abandoning or weakening of an evangelical commitment to the objective cognitive truth of divine revelation.(39)These two statements are not theologically coordinated with the view of language McGrath uses in response to Lindbeck. One needs Trinity and Christology here. In my first essay on Objective and Ecstatic. I made the following statement, "In the objective view, theological statements can literally refer to God the Word who became objective. Theological language can also contain symbolic aspects since the Word reveals God the Father who is holy and transcendent." From this perspective, and referring to McGrath as just quoted, the "commands of God" are God the Son in objective form. The "God who commands" is the Father who sends forth his Son as the incarnation of God's commands. The event of hearing the "commands of God" leads one to the Father who commands, but the Father who command "dwells in light unapproachable," so that the commands themselves, though objective, symbolically and poetically point beyond themselves to the transcendent Father. Since McGrath has not worked the matter out theologically, he does not propose an evangelical alternative to Lindbeck, nor does he theologically ground the objectivity of the biblical revelation. Were he to do so, he would not offer a liberal response to Lindbeck. He would allow theology to follow Scripture and affirm that a critical aspect of the biblical revelation is cognitive and propositional.(41)
Scripture, as we have seen, possesses a strongly objective dimension, in that it tells us about the way things are; it also possesses a subjective component, through which it offers to transform our inner lives ... As Luther put it, we read Scripture not simply to learn of the `commands of God' (mandata Dei) but to encounter the `God who commands' (Deus mandantus), and to be transformed as a result.(40)
Underlying such attempts to achieve clarity of concepts and modes of discourse is the recognition that doctrinal affirmations are to be recognized as perceptions, not total descriptions, pointing beyond themselves toward the greater mystery of God himself.(42)In regard to doctrine, we have the following: 1. Doctrines are perceptions, not total descriptions, which point toward God. 2. Doctrines only represent, in and of themselves they are not literal. 3. They interpret Christian experience, provide a foundation. 4. Doctrines "describe" something that cannot be reduced to words. Hence doctrine is like poetry. Its congruence with experience is one of "resonance." 5. Doctrine points to the inexpressible. 6. Doctrine is metaphorical, provides analogies, or metaphors for theological reflection. 7. Doctrine is a skeleton, framework, or channel for Christian experience. 8. Doctrine does not reduce the mystery of God to propositions. As in Schleiermacher, doctrines express an experience.
For such theologians, doctrines are reliable, yet incomplete descriptions of reality. Their power lies in what they represent rather than in what they are in themselves.(43)
Christian doctrine attempts to give shape to the Christian life by laying the foundations for the generation and subsequent interpretation of Christian experience.(44) The language of Christian theology functions under constraints similar to those affecting poetry: it is obliged to express in words things which by their very nature defy reduction to these words; nevertheless, there is a fundamental resonance between words and experience.(45) Cognitive theories of doctrine recognize that words are on the borderlands of experience, intimating and signposting the reality which they cannot capture. To apply pejorative epithets such as `intellectualist' or `literalist' to the cognitive propositionalist approach to doctrine is to fail to appreciate the power of words to evoke experience, to point beyond themselves to something inexpressible, to an experience which their author wishes to share with his or her readers. It is also, of course, to fail to do justice to the many levels at which cognitive or propositional statements operate.(46)
Theological statements simply do not operate at the same level as mathematical equations. The charge of `literalism' is vulnerable to the extent that it risks overlooking the richness of non literal language, such as metaphor, as a means of articulation, and the importance of analogy or models as a heuristic stimulus to theological reflection. It is simply a theological truism that no human language can be applied to God univocally; indeed, it is from the recognition, rather than the denial, of this point that cognitive approaches to doctrine begin.(47)
The cognitive dimension of Christian doctrine is the framework upon which Christian experience is supported, the channel through which it is conveyed. It is a skeleton which gives strength and shape to the flesh of experience.(48)
To caricature Christian doctrine, then, as mere word play or as an attempt to reduce the mystery of God to propositions is to fail to appreciate the manner in which words serve us. In order for my experience to be expressed, communicated to or aroused in another, it demands statements in cognitive forms. That these cognitive forms fail to capture such an experience in its totality is self evident, and hardly a matter for rhetorical exaggeration: it is one of the inevitable consequences of living in history and being obliged to communicate in historical forms. Schleiermacher recognized that doctrine expressed an experience constituted by the language of the Christian community, thus pointing to the delicate interplay of cognitive and experiential elements in doctrinal formulations.(49)
What is needed at this point, in addition to Trinity and Incarnation, are the theological doctrines of appropriation and the communicatio idiomatum. By appropriation, language applied to Jesus Christ is objective, describing events, actions, objects, things given to our understanding. He was born of the Virgin Mary, he ate, drank, spoke, acted, and was visibly crucified under Pontius Pilate. Specific concrete things can be said about him, using language that is objective, the same language we use for other visible and audible objects. By the communicatio idiomatum, this language used of objects also applies to his divine nature, so that it is appropriate to say that God the Word was born, that the divine Word lived, spoke, acted, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. In this way language applied to God the Word, as known in Jesus Christ, is the objective language of ordinary life, and therefore, it can be said that the words, deeds, and appearances of God can be literally known by the mind. At the same time, however, Jesus Christ reveals the Father, the transcendent Father, the God who "dwells in light unapproachable," (1 Tim. 6:16). For that reason, the objective language of Scripture, objective by appropriation to the Son, is symbolic in reference to the Father, the God who creates out of nothing, whose ways are not our ways, whose inexpressible glory is revealed by the Son. To my mind, a good way to understand this is to think of Thomas, commanded by Jesus to put his finger in the print of the nails and to place his hand in Christ's side. As Thomas heard Christ's words, saw the wound, touched the prints of the nails, objective events received by the senses, known by the mind, expressed in objective language, he encountered something that transcended his understanding, something ex nihilo, "My Lord and my God" (John 20:28).
In Anselm, Barth found the key to overcoming Kant. Prior to Anselm,
Barth had accepted Kant's belief that God could not be understood by the
categories of the understanding. After Anselm, and only after Anselm,
was Barth able to overcome Schleiermacher and write his Church Dogmatics.
McGrath has not responded to Lindbeck because he hasn't really come to terms with Kant, with the core of liberal theology, nor with a sound understanding of Chalcedon. In light of his purpose in this text, he has not demonstrated the "internal contradictions and vulnerabilities" of liberalism and postliberalism, nor has he made plain the "coherence of evangelicalism by bringing out the inner consistency of the evangelical approach."
For Christians, Jesus is the embodiment and self revelation of God. At the heart of the Christian faith stands a living person, not a book.(50)Without a sound understanding of God's speech, Word, or act, thought usually oscillates between two poles. On the one hand, there are those who believe that Scripture is the literal Word of God. They hold that its phrases, words, and deeds give the very thoughts and deeds of God so that by reading them one immediately knows God. This is fundamentalism as well as the Princeton School. McGrath rejects this approach. The other alternative is to believe that God is transcendent in such a way that God cannot be identified with the biblical text but is something beyond it. This is the position that McGrath accepts. That is why he will say that "Scripture is not Jesus Christ," that Scripture is a "channel" that biblical tests cannot be "identified directly" with revelation, and that redemption in Christ is "something real which lies beyond the text of Scripture, which is nonetheless rendered and mediated by that text," and that the "person of Jesus Christ existed before the texts of the New Testament were written down," as if the texts were quite different from the person. In critical respects, when it comes to Scripture, McGrath is a liberal.
Despite its high view of Scripture, evangelicalism has resisted the temptation to identify the text of Scripture with revelation. Scripture is regarded as a channel through which God's self revelation in Jesus Christ is encountered. Although it is a bearer of that self revelation in Christ, it is not to be identified directly with that self revelation. Scripture is not Jesus Christ. Yet as Kuyper so aptly put it, we cannot encounter Christ in any form other than that which we find in Scripture. . . . There is a strongly Trinitarian dimension to the evangelical understanding of revelation, which is particularly evident in its affirmation of the distinctive role of the Holy Spirit.(51)
For evangelicals, there is something real which lies beyond the text of Scripture, which is nonetheless rendered and mediated by that text that is, the Christian experience of being redeemed in Christ. The emphasis on intratextuality tends to obscure the fact that the person of Jesus Christ stands at the centre of the Christian faith and did so before the texts of the New Testament were written down.(52)
Negatively, some evangelicals have argued that all critics are influenced by their own cultural, philosophical, and theological presuppositions, and that much of the criticism that has seemed to undermine the authority of Scripture has reflected a deep rooted prejudice against the miraculous, which rests upon rationalist rather than Christian presuppositions. Even scholars whose work has been on other ways especially illuminating have sometimes found it hard to come to terms with biblical miracles and prophecy. Evangelicals rightly reject criticism based on such prejudice as, in the first place un-Christian, and in the second as based upon a flawed methodology, in which a secular worldview is imposed upon the biblical material.(54)Apparently, evangelicals believe in the biblical miracles. But that raises an important question: What is the significance of the biblical miracles? Before Hume, Kant, and the Enlightenment, the claim was made that miracles validated the truth of revelation. That is still true, but more needs to be said. The Word became flesh to redeem the whole person including the flesh. For this reason, the gospels devote as much space to Jesus' healings and exorcisms as it does to his teaching and preaching. In fact, the two are intimately related, the one validating the other. If evangelicals believe in the biblical miracles, they then need to do what the New Testament so clearly claims that disciples of the risen Lord Jesus did: preach, teach, heal, cast out demons, and more. A theologian that takes Scripture seriously will be involved in these things, and speak for a church that does these things. But McGrath does not make these clear and obvious claims. Here is his description of Christ's present work.
[Evangelicalism proclaims] An emphasis upon conversion or a `new birth' as a life changing religious experience.(55)As a result of the foregoing, evangelicals believe that the gospel affects the heart, the emotions, the entire self, the inner life, relationships, and the imagination. It entails a transformation, a new structure of existence, a transforming friendship. The general impression is that the message of the gospel is more existential than incarnate, transforming the soul but not the body. In fact, these phrases have a rather spectral quality in comparison to the biblical revelation. According to Scripture, Jesus not only preached and taught (something Evangelicals do), but he also fed the five thousand, cast out demons, healed the blind, the sick, and the lame, confronted the Pharisees, and much, much more. I haven't seen many evangelicals doing these things. Jesus does them, and an obedient church will do them in his name. I have included examples on this website but you will not find them in McGrath. There are several reasons for this. Historically, evangelicals have not emphasized the healing power of Jesus. One can, for example, see this in Calvin. There are other reasons as well. In the opening pages of this text, McGrath states,
Christian theology cannot remain faithful to its subject matter if it regards itself as purely propositional or cognitive in nature. The Christ encounter with God is transformative. As Calvin pointed out, to know God is to be changed by God; true knowledge of God leads to worship, as the believer is caught up in a transforming and renewing encounter with the living God.(56)
A theology which touches the mind, leaving the heart unaffected, is no true Christian theology a point stressed by both Luther and Calvin.(57)
The gospel is thus experienced as something liberating, something which transforms our situation, something which is relevant to us.(58)
Through faith, the believer is caught up in a new outlook on life, a new structure of existence, embodied paradigmatically in Jesus Christ, and both in their proclamation and person, believers reveal this story of Jesus Christ.(59)
Scripture, we have seen, possesses a strongly objective dimension, in that it tells us about the way things are; it also possesses a subjective component, through which it offers to transform our inner lives an offer which, in the evangelical experience, is more than justified, and leads to an emphasis upon evangelism as the means by which others might share in the same `transforming friendship' (James Houston).(60)
We need to purge rationalism from within evangelicalism. And that means recovering the relational, emotional, and imaginative aspects of biblical spirituality, which the Enlightenment declared to be improper. As Martin Luther constantly insisted, Christianity is concerned with totus homo, the `entire human person', and not just the human mind.(61)
... evangelism is about the proclamation of an objective truth with the expectation that this will give rise to a subjective response that is to say, a response which involves the heart, mind and total being of those who hear it. The Enlightenment notions of `truth' and `knowledge', as critics such as Kierkegaard pointed out with such vigour, fail to engage with human nature in all its fullness, and focus instead on a purely cerebral `faith', devoid of emotion and transformation.(62)
Evangelicalism has long since got past the stage where it needs to feel defensive about anything, and is perfectly capable of mounting a sustained bid both for a justified presence within the academic community, and for intellectual respectability as a serious option of thinking people in today's world.(63)I do not believe, and I have fourteen years of graduate study as background, that it is possible to maintain one's academic respectability and affirm and act upon the full gamut of Jesus' words and deeds as living options today. Or conversely, if one achieves academic respectability, it is only possible because one has failed to practice the biblical acts of the Lord Jesus, to associate with those who do, and to make this a constitutive aspect of one's theological enterprise. There are doubtless exceptions to these generalizations, but not many.
Evangelicalism is determined to `let God be God', and to receive, honour and conceive him as he chooses to be known, rather than as we would have him be. At its heart, evangelicalism represents a relentless and serious attempt to bring all our conceptions of God and ourselves to criticism in the light of how and what God wishes to be known.(65)