294 - The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology

The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology
By Richard Lints
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1993. 359 pp. $19.99.

Evangelical theology must constructively engage the modern world So argues Richard Lints, Associate Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, in this welcome book about a new approach to evangelical theological method. Although evangelicals claim to offer an alternative to modernity, the irony is that they themselves have often made inadvertent accommodations to modern culture. By adopting an approach to theology that too often relies on the cult of personality, makes shallow appeals to biblical proof-texts, and requires unquestioning assent to a narrow set of fundamental beliefs, evangelicals, says Lints, have bypassed the constructive theological reflection the church today so urgently needs.

For Lints, a more adequate method is to attend to the complex fabric innt which the essential beliefs of evangelicalism are woven and by which alone they acquire intelligibility. Evangelical theologians have been hampered in this effort because they tend to identify themselves with the trans-confessional and often parachurch movement of evangelicalism rather than with the rich and multifaceted heritage of their own Christian faith traditions. To lean against this reduction of the faith to just another "ism," Lints calls for a principled pluralism, one that would allow for a diversity of evangelical opinion to coexist and for evangelicals to embrace and cultivate their own traditional roots, be they Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, or Baptist. To eschew such openness and to continue the monolithic appeal to a historical theological litmus tests will mean the severing of doctrines from their broader biblical and theological contexts.

In order to remedy this superficial inattention to context, evangelical theology must refocus its attention upon the whole counsel of God as revealed in the entire canon of Scripture. The goal is to construct a biblically derived framework for theological reflection, and the key to this is to be guided not so much by the content of Scripture as by its structure. The appropriate structure, in Lints's view, is the overarching matrix of God's covenantal history of redemption.

Having hammered out a biblical framework around the blueprint of redemption history, the evangelical theologian will then cultivate a vision by which to understand the contemporary cultural situation. The theologian must give an exposition of this vision in a contemporary idiom and then offer an application of the vision that will illumine the present cultural situation.

As guidance for conducting this endeavor, Lints offers four brief but competent case studies from the theological past, studies on Luther and Calvin, Reformed orthodoxy, Jonathan Edwards, and Gerhardus Vos.

296 - The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology

These he favors because of the attention they give to framework, though one wishes Lints would have made more explicit how the frameworks of these historical figures inform the one he himself is advocating. More successful and more interesting is a section on the theological present, which sketches out some of the distinctive features of postmodern theology. Lints makes the promising assertion that evangelicals should engage both positively and critically this movement of postmodern thinking, but he remains, once again, rather vague as to precisely what this means in practice.

The erudition with which Lints surveys recent intellectual trends raises the hope that, at long last, a new generation of evangelical theologians may be able to nudge evangelicalism toward a genuinely constructive conversation with the modern and emerging postmodern world. One is surprised, then, to discover that, when the book finally turns from analysis to construction in the concluding chapters, it is still mostly a narrow band of evangelical theologians who appear as the author's principal conversation partners. If evangelicals want to revitalize their theology, then names such as Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and Wolfhart Parmenberg, to name just a few, need to be included in their conversations, along with a full (and -not merely selective) openness to knowledge derived -from the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Doubtless, one may agree with Lints that the framework that supports the house of theology should be biblical, but it takes other building materials-the windows, doors, and paint of knowledge from other disciplines-to turn one's theology into a real house and not a mere scaffolding.

Lint's work promises new beginnings for evangelical theology. It will be for the good of the whole church if he and those sympathetic to him are able to succeed.

William Stacy Johnson
Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Austin, TX