Theology Today - Vol 37, No. 3 - October 1980 - BOOK REVIEW - The Emerging Order: God in an Age of Scarcity

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The Emerging Order:
God in an Age of Scarcity
By Jeremy Rifkin with Ted Howard
New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1979. 303 pp. $ 10.00.

This book is not an exercise in careful argumentation. Rather, the authors' generalizations are broad and their assertions sweeping. The central thesis of this apocalyptic tract-for-the-times is as follows: "The end of the age of material expansion is upon us. The liberal ethos, a world view that has dominated the thinking of the industrialized nations for the past three centuries, is about to meet its final, climactic challenge, as new values begin to vie for public acceptance. The manner in which the United States and other industrialized nations choose to

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adjust to the new realities brought about by the coming age of scarcity will determine the parameters of the struggle that lies ahead" (p. 84). The authors see the evangelical-charismatic movement as the community which can provide the resources for the restructuring of cultural values in "the emerging order," but they recognize that the prospects are ambiguous. Evangelical Protestantism might "take the lead once again and establish a forum and agenda for a radical social departure, or has more often been the case in the nation's past, become the pawn of other political interests" (p. xi).

Rifkin and Howard are co-directors of The People Business Commission in Washington, D. C., and as disillusioned liberals, they have turned to populism in politics and evangelicalism in religion. One has to applaud the attempt of this book-to set forth a challenge to prevailing attitudes of growth and exploitation and to propose "a new covenant vision" based on stewardship of human and natural resources. It may even be true that evangelicals and charismatics will play an important role in reshaping American society in "the age of scarcity." This book has already been widely heralded and will probably be extensively studied, especially in churches, but as a religious and political document, it suffers from three grave defects that undermine its thesis.

First, one of the central themes is an historical argument that the values of the modern West were rooted in the theology of the Protestant Reformation, particularly the theology of John Calvin. But Weber, Troeltsch, and Tawney, not to speak of Calvin, would turn purple to see how their ideas have been used and abused in the hands of Rifkin and Howard. For example, "Calvin perceived a world in which the lone, autonomous individual performed his personal calling for the glory of God. For him, unceasing work and unlimited personal accumulation were at the heart of each individual's role in life.... In Calvin's world there was no rest, or allowance for replensishment. There was only an unrelenting battle to gobble up as much low-entropy matter and energy as possible" (p. 253).

Making Calvin into a low-entropy matter and energy gobbler is paralleled by the authors' analysis of the history of evangelicalism in America. They blithely argue that evangelicalism was central to the American Revolution, which is a possible proposition, and then they single out the liberal New England preacher Jonathan Mayhew as an example of political evangelicalism. They credit evangelicalism with being "the primary catalyst" in the abolitionist movement but fail to mention that evangelicalism was also powerful in the defense of slavery. Similarly, they make few distinctions within evangelicalism today, lumping Rex Humbard, Robert Schuller, Jerry Falwell, and the Sojourners community into the same camp. Evangelicalism was and is a complex and diverse movement, and if the authors want to forge a political platform based on evangelical ideas, they can't assume that evangelicalism is a monolith.

Second, the book is plagued by not only historical distortions but also

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theological naivete. Rifkin and Howard summarize evangelical-charismatic theology in twelve pages, ringing the changes on biblical authority, God, sin, evil, conversion, the atonement, the church, and "witness and service" in paragraph summations. They find great joy in announcing that the doctrine of creation has been "discovered" as part of their projected second Protestant Reformation and that the stewardship of creation will be the center of the new evangelical charismatic theology. How this will work is never explained or developed, and whether the doctrine of creation could be used as the foundation for evangelical theology is problematic. The genius of evangelicalism is its radical insistence on redemption, not creation, and at this point the authors' theology and political predelictions seem very much at odds.

Finally, there is a disturbing anti-intellectualism and anti-modernism in Rifkin's and Howard's treatment. Modern science, medicine, and technology have brought admittedly mixed blessings, but they need not be overthrown with the cavalier abandon that these authors too often demonstrate. Likewise, there are currents of religious renewal in the charismatic and evangelical movements, but one swallows hard when the religious alternative is posed as the definitive answer to the crisis of scarcity. For example, Rifkin and Howard extol the virtues of faith healing as opposed to modern medicine and the power of glossolalia over "any satellite network." "The gift of prophecy," they write, "is more powerful than any computer information system.... [Prophecy] comes directly from God. Therefore, it is information that is more than reliable; it is providential and inerrant" (p. 225).

Rifkin and Howard may not be false prophets but they are untrustworthy. Certainly the church needs to rethink traditional values and assumptions, but this should be done with the kind of intellectual rigor that has characterized Christian ethics at its best. Rifkin and Howard fail to provide that approach, and in the process they render a disservice to evangelical Protestantism which is increasingly attracted to rightwing politics. If evangelicals provide the heart of a second Protestant Reformation, Rifkin and Howard are not Luther and Calvin.

John M. Mulder
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey