Panel during the Friday, August 25, 2017, public forum entitled, “Learning to Engage Our Muslim Neighbors.” From left to right: Michal Muelenberg, John Azumah, Richard Mouw, Marion Larson, Rick Love, and Cory Willson (facilitator).

Yet it has been rightly said that Christian responses to Islam and Muslims in the post-9/11 world represent “a struggle for the soul of the Christian faith”. How individual Christians, congregations, and the larger church engage with their Muslim neighbors and with Islam generally has tremendous import for the mission of Christ’s church and for Christian witness worldwide. This conundrum is true around the world and is increasingly as relevant in North American communities, large and small.

While the American context was the focus, input came from leading majority world voices, particularly Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Organizers understood that living in an age of the global church requires wisdom from those parts of Christ’s body for the American church to properly and effectively continue to play its leading role in global missions. The hope is that this gathering will spur on future smaller consultations that bring together Muslims and evangelicals to discuss pressing issues and tensions that exist between Christians and Muslims in America. Several participants are already engaged in these types of conversations and projects with Muslims. For example, Fuller Seminary, Columbia Theological Seminary, and Pentecostal Theological Seminary regularly teach courses involving engagement with the reality of Islam and its adherents at various levels of theological and dialogical discourse.

J. Budziszewski is professor of philosophy and government at the University of Texas at Austin, and has written a number of well-recognized books on political theory, politics and virtue ethics, tolerance and liberalism, and natural law ethics, among other topics. For the project which formed the backbone to this book, a conference was sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Prouts Neck, Maine, in September of 2003, where initial drafts of the essays published here were presented. In this review, I will summarize the book’s structure and arguments, briefly explicate on the central dilemma plaguing the formation of an evangelical political theology, and comment on why these matters are of relevance also to Pentecostal and charismatic Christians today.

After a short introduction by Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the two lead essays by Budziszewski, which constitute more than half of the book, lay out the basic issues and set the tone of discussion for the volume. In the first essay, Budziszewski suggests that one major reason why evangelicals have not yet developed a robust political theology is that their commitments to grounding any theological agenda biblically do not work well with the fact that there are insufficient biblical guidelines for such a task. In fact, political theology needs a more hearty acknowledgment of the role of general revelation precisely in order to provide a theological justification for evangelical engagement in matters related to the wider public square, as well as theological guidelines for how evangelicals might concretely proceed. But, as Budziszewski then attempts to show in his second longer essay on the four formative thinkers announced in the book’s subtitle–Carl F. H. Henry, Abraham Kuyper, Francis Schaeffer, and John Howard Yoder — evangelical hesitation about embracing this particular theological idea (of general revelation) further complicates their already difficult task. In Budziszewski’s analysis, the political theology each of these evangelical thinkers suffers because they falters at key points in their projects with regard to the doctrine of general revelation: Henry is hampered by a nagging premillennial and dispensationalist defeatism in addition to an ambivalence about the (perhaps all to Catholic) idea of general revelation; Kuyper by an underdevelopment of his ideas of common grace, sphere sovereignty (of the state, society, and the church), and principled pluralism; Schaeffer by an unbalanced emphasis on apologetics which in turn neglected the pragmatic dimensions of engaging the public square, as well as by his acceptance of the presuppositionalist school of apologetics along with its suspicion regarding general revelation; and Yoder by a sectarian and countercultural orientation which is not predisposed to exploring the continuities between Christians and non-Christians, even for the purposes of public engagement. As a result, these four evangelical theologians, as formative as any for evangelical thought and action, have been unable to bequeath to their descendents the much needed resources to more fully develop the kinds of orienting ideas, practical programs, and cultural apologetics needed for a more vibrant evangelical political theology today.

The remainder of the volume includes four essays by scholars responding to Budziszewski’s readings of these evangelical theologians and a concluding after word reflecting on the conference discussion as a whole. David Weeks, a Henry scholar and political science professor at Azusa Pacific University, attempts to provide a thicker description of Henry as an evangelical theologian as well as fill out, in dialogue with Henry, some of the details which Budziszewski has identified with regard to the formulation of an evangelical political theology. Similarly, John Bolt, a Kuyper scholar and systematician at Calvin Theological Seminary, basically agrees with Budziszewski’s remarks about Kuyper, but provides a further elaboration of how the Kuyperian theological vision can be reappropriated in the service of evangelical thought and political action. Not surprisingly, William Edgar, a presuppositionalist philosopher and theologian at Westminster Theological Seminary, responds to Budziszewski both by locating the larger socio-cultural, political, and theological framework of Schaeffer’s apologetics and by explicating how the logic of presuppositionalism leads to a different set of concerns that may be complementary rather than opposed to the logic derived from a commitment to the doctrine of general revelation. Finally, Ashley Woodiwiss, a political scientist at Wheaton College, responds that even if one cannot go all the way with Yoder, yet one must respect how his Anabaptist and Mennonite perspective informed his scholarship and produced vision of the gospel focuses on the church as an alternative politics, an distinctive praxis, and a subversive mode of cultural engagement, all of which combine to perhaps even undermine the received framework of questions concerning evangelicalism as well as political theology. The book concludes with Jean Bethke Elshtain’s (Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago “A Friendly Outsider’s Reflections” (her title) on the entire exchange.

Harriet A. Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals (Oxford Theological Monographs; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [2008 in paperback]), 400 pages, ISBN 9780199532537.

Fundamentalism and Evangelicals is a revealing and fascinating book. Harris gives a close and objective reading of the evidence that modern evangelicalism is ruled by a fundamentalist mindset, which, as Harris defines it, primarily has to do with an insistence on the factual content of Scripture. This book is not so much about naming two separate streams (evangelicalism and fundamentalism), but rather about the fundamentalist side of evangelicalism. This book is largely a (mostly friendly) response to James Barr’s critique of fundamentalism (found in Fundamentalism [1977] and Beyond Fundamentalism [1984], along with various articles). It is therefore worth noting that Barr largely agreed with Harris’s response, which is strong testimony to its worth: “[W]here she differs from my own past judgements, I generally accept her correction” (review of Harris, in Journal of Theological Studies 51 [2000] 408-11). Although Harris is aware that the terms “fundamentalism” and “evangelicalism” should not be used interchangeably, she pointedly allows a good deal of the overlap to remain in the reader’s mind throughout this book. This inevitably will annoy some readers (as no one really wants to be called a “fundamentalist”), but I found it challenging and refreshingly honest. I say this even though I count myself an “evangelical” (in the broader sense of the word).

Harris is the chaplain of Wadham College (Oxford University), and, as such, her treatment of evangelicalism is somewhat stronger from the English side than from the American side. I should also note that her discussion of Pentecostals is not always accurate. For example, Harris mistakenly refers to the Journal of Pentecostal Theology as a “British counterpart” to the journal Pneuma (p. 82 n. 12). Undoubtedly she was confused by the (then) location of the imprint (Sheffield, England). In terms of editorship and the balance of contributions, both journals are American.

Harris obviously does not care for the fundamentalist insistence that the truth of Scripture lies in its factual content. Like so many before her, she tries to connect the propositionalist focus of modern evangelical hermeneutics with the Common Sense Realism of the Scottish Enlightenment. Her attempt falls flat, as it fails to consider propositionalism on its own. Harris falls victim to the idea that you can debunk a view simply by deconstructing its history. In this case, the error is double, in that propositionalism is a notion going back way earlier than Common Sense Realism. Harris’s alternative to propositionalism represents the weakest point of the book. Her rather dismissive attitude to the notion that Scripture is primarily propositional (and to the question of how factualness relates to truth) is disappointing, as she shows little regard for the historical genre of much of Scripture, nor does she trace out the “fundamentally” factual content of the gospel message lying at the center of the New Testament. In this regard, I have to say that James Barr’s books on fundamentalism still hold the edge, as he never loses sight of the creedal shape of Christian belief.

Timothy Larsen, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), xvii + 789 pages.

Ever come across the name of an evangelical leader, like Lesslie Newbigin or Oswald Chambers, and wondered who they were or what they taught? This dictionary is a great solution for quickly finding a sketch on the life and background of leaders the editors have included in this who’s who of evangelicals.

Pentecostal/charismatic leaders have much to appreciate in this volume because many early holiness and Pentecostal leaders, healing evangelists, and contemporary charismatic teachers and leaders have been included. While this dictionary does not contain as many entries of significance to today’s Pentecostal/charismatic as a specialized dictionary such as the International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Zondervan, 2002),¹ the articles are significantly longer and give a deeper introduction to the beliefs and accomplishments of the subjects.

Timothy Larsen is professor at Wheaton College.

Some of the biographies well-read Pentecostal/charismatic leaders will recognize are: the Wesley brothers, Charles Finney, Edward Irving, Andrew Murray, Charles Parham, William Seymour, Alexander Boddy, Smith Wigglesworth, Aimee Semple McPherson, Donald Gee, Watchman Nee, Kathryn Kuhlman, David Du Plessis, Dennis Bennett, Demos Shakarian, John Wimber, Kenneth Hagin, Loren Cunningham, David Wilkerson, Oral Roberts, Michael Harper, Gordon Fee, C. Peter Wagner, J. Rodman Williams, and Jack Hayford. Of course, numerous other people that have shaped evangelical Christianity, from Martin Luther to Billy Graham, are included in this dictionary.

This attractive volume deserves a home in every Christian reference library.

Reviewed by Raul Mock

¹ A review of the new IDPCM appeared in the Winter 2003 issue (Vol 6 No 1) of the Pneuma Review.

Publisher’s page for Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals: www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=2925