Apologetics
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 60, No. 2 – Spring 2018
Managing Editor: W. Madison Grace II
By Owen Strachan. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015. 240 pages. Hardcover, $24.99.
With this nicely packaged work, Owen Strachan offers an accessible overview to the intellectual movement known as neo-evangelicalism. Strachan has been seriously studying evangelicalism for a decade. Drawing on both the considerable historiography of evangelicalism and his own archival research, Awakening the Evangelical Mind is drawn from Strachan’s dissertation, completed under the supervision of Douglas A. Sweeney at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Awakening the Evangelical Mind is not driven by a strong thesis nor is it heavy-handed in argumentation. Rather, Strachan aims to recount how a small coterie of post-fundamentalist elites led an intellectual revival among born-again Christians, which shaped the trajectory of evangelicalism for the rest of the twentieth century and arguably to the present day. Although polemical in some public spaces, in person Strachan is winsome, warm, generous, and quirkily funny (Full Disclosure: Owen is a friend). The latter qualities come through in Awakening, making the book fun to read even as it deals with a seriously important topic and revolves around people who were quite serious about themselves and their tasks.
Strachan focuses on the personalities at the center of neo-evangelicalism, hearkening back to an earlier model of historical writing that has fallen out of favor with many professional historians. Yet, this “great man theory” of history works well for his topic. After all, the evangelical intellectual renaissance of the mid-twentieth century was led by a relatively small group of highly motivated leaders whose personal relationships one-with-the-other provided the organizational framework for the movement. These visionary leaders pushed, pulled, and pressed evangelicalism towards greater intellectual endeavors and greater cultural engagement.
Their compulsion towards this goal led them to seek academic credentials beyond the fundamentalist fold. In this effort, many young men ended up in Boston, matriculating at Harvard Divinity School at a time when HDS desperately needed enrollment. In Boston, many came in contact with pastor-theologian Harold John Ockenga (1905–1985), who had traveled that path ahead of them, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, a respected non-evangelical school. Further, he modeled a rigorously intellectual, academically-informed pastoral ministry for these “Cambridge evangelicals” (77). Over the years, Ockenga would lead several critical evangelical institutional endeavors such as founding Fuller Seminary (f. 1947), birthing the National Association of Evangelicals (f. 1943), and providing impetus for the Evangelical Theological Society (f. 1949) through the Plymouth Scholar’s Conferences of the late 1940s. Clearly Strachan’s hero, Ockenga is the pastor-theologian par excellence, fully capable of pastoring a congregation comprised of an elite Bostonian laity while comfortably engaging the emerging evangelical intelligentsia with alacrity.
The contours of this story are well known for those who are familiar with the work of Joel Carpenter, George Marsden, and Garth Rosell. However, Strachan’s archival research adds freshness to the story, providing additional depth and, at times, completely new material. Information drawn from the Ockenga and Park Street Church Papers reveal much interesting material, not only about Ockenga but the movement as a whole, while Carl Henry’s dream of establishing a top-tier research university firmly committed to an evangelical worldview emerges from the Henry Papers. Reading between the lines, the intellectual reinvigoration of the evangelical pulpit embodied in Ockenga represents one of the great successes of neo-evangelicalism for Strachan, while its inability to launch “Crusade University” typifies its failure, demonstrating just “how fragile the evangelical movement proved to be” (157).
Strachan’s general assessment is correct. Indeed, the movement was even more “fragile” than he thinks. Disagreement at the margins—such as over potential “behavioral standards” at Crusade University—were not themselves the source of this fragility but reveal trouble at the center. At its heart, the neo-evangelical movement demonstrated a solid, sincere, and doctrinally-grounded unity around a minimalist core (the doctrinal position of the National Association of Evangelicals, for example, was a brief seven-point statement). Whereas unified efforts that centered on a “cause” were often successful, those that aimed towards a more robust center almost always failed in the long run. Here, Strachan’s appreciation leads him to place too much retroactive hopefulness in the awakening of the evangelical mind.
Awakening the Evangelical Mind focuses almost exclusively on elites, not really considering ecclesial leaders (pastoral and parachurch) or rank-and-file participants. While it is unfair to expect that Strachan would deal exhaustively with those groups in an intellectual history, evangelicalism is at its heart a grassroots movement, so folding them into the story just a bit would have strengthened the book—or perhaps shifted some of the analysis.
In Strachan’s telling, the robust intellectual life of contemporary American evangelicalism owes its legacy to the neo-evangelical movement. Without a doubt, he is correct. Alongside its evangelistic and ecclesial foci, neo-evangelicalism injected a significant impulse towards cultural and intellectual engagement into evangelicalism, an impulse that persists to this day. As a result, although there is still much that passes for good scholarship that should not, evangelical scholarship and scholarship by evangelicals has multiplied exponentially—to the benefit of us all. For that, twenty-first century evangelicals owe a debt of gratitude to the mid-century neo-evangelicals.
