Evangelicals Embracing Tradition With A Big T (Perhaps Better Than Catholics)

Patheos has had future of Catholicism week, last week there was future of Mainline Protestants week, and this week the Evangelicals have their turn. (Yes I know mainline Protestants have their own evangelical movements within their bodies)

Go to their portal here.

At the top is a good post New Life in Ancient Sources

Some Catholics have been noticing this movement for years and the attack against it within some Evangelical circles.

Let me take some parts.

First Mr Anderson gets something out of the way mighty quick!!

But if these renewal efforts are to be more than passion's fashions, we evangelicals need to cease dating (or "courting," as evangelicals prefer to say) the broader Christian tradition. We need to marry it outright.

There are signs that we might be willing to do precisely that, not least of which is the publication and widespread praise of Jim Belcher's Deep Church, which is a call for evangelicals to ground themselves within church history. Contrary to claims among some proponents of the emerging church, many among the younger generation of evangelicals are increasingly disinterested in the passing faddishness of progressive theology and are returning to a historically centered, creedally expressed Christian orthodoxy. We cannot claim to be progressive until we know not only what we are progressing toward, but what we are progressing from -- and a single generation of data is simply not enough.

I think this is correct. While the term "emerging Church" I can guess mean different things to different people for many it is what Mr Anderson is talking about that is somewhat the norm.

the ongoing popularity of authors like G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis has begun to move the younger generation ad fontes toward the thinkers from whom they learned. The explosion of the classical education movement and the corresponding rise of homeschoolers are creating a new generation of evangelicals who are more aware of the particular vices of our own age because they have engaged with texts from outside of it.

Has not the explosion of the Classical education movement in Evangelical and Catholic circles been one of the more under reported interesting stories?

A shift toward liturgy that Robert Webber first identified in Ancient-Future Faith continues to exercise a strong appeal. The Acts 29 movement has been one of the most prominent bearers of this mantle, as it has brought back the practice of weekly communion into evangelicalism. While some evangelicals continue to be wary of institutions, as the bearers of tradition, institutions are the only means by which the vitality that our generation so desperately seeks will be passed on to the next. The formalization of these practices within the institution of the church makes me hopeful that evangelicalism will prove more resilient than commonly expected

Beneath the surface of this new openness to tradition is an increasing focus on the role of the physical body in the human experience. The centerpiece of this resurgent interest is N.T. Wright's enormously popular Surprised by Hope. But others have moved toward the issue through questioning the role of technology and reasserting the importance of bodily presence. Additionally, the issues many younger evangelicals care most about -- environmentalism, social justice, the arts, poverty, and so on -- depend upon an anthropology that takes human embodiment seriously.

There is a lot packed into those passages. It is of course ironic that a UK Anglican Bishop has had more influence on American Evangelicals and parts of the reformed movement than Anglicans themselves. Also there seems to be almost sacramental overtones in that last sentence. When you couple his thoughts on the concerns of social justice the arts, poverty, with the fact these folks are not progressives theology wise but Credal Orthodox he sounds like Pope Benedict. That is what the authentic Gospel and in fact authentic Catholic social justice is all about!! That is what I mean by title post(perhaps better than Catholics).

Of course, developing such a theological anthropology is no simple matter. The centerpiece must be the reformation of evangelical worship and spiritual practices toward those that view our response to God as training for our bodily postures and habits.

Thus wee more Liturgy and adopting the practice as saying the hours more and more in these communities.

The reintroduction of the church calendar with its cycle of fasting and feasting, corporate kneeling, the recovery of art and beauty within the worship service -- these are the sorts of embodied activities that evangelicals must reintroduce if they wish to live out a fully Christian anthropology, a crucial prerequisite for handing the faith on to subsequent generations. Of course, as in theology, there are abundant resources available within the history and collective experience of the church that we can appropriate with appreciation and discernment.

Ditto from thoughts above

In order to be reconciled with church traditions, evangelicals would do well to cease viewing the history of the church as a regrettable tale of perpetual decline and accommodation to the world. The oscillation of decline and renewal seems to be a permanent feature of the church, for she is comprised of sinners, and yet God in Jesus Christ has been and will remain faithful to her. Evangelicals are deeply committed to history as a discipline. We have fought vigorously in defense of the historical veracity of the New Testament and especially the Resurrection accounts. The life of the church after Christ, however, also has lessons to teach evangelicals -- if we will have the ears to hear them....

Which is simply to say that evangelicals should complement our reading of Calvin -- and even Calvin is not read as frequently or deeply as he ought to be -- with charitable and yet critical readings of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Boethius and Bernard of Clairvaux (one of Calvin's favorite theologians), in order to gain a deeper understanding of church history and find more precise ways of articulating the truths of scripture. We can delight not only in our freedom from a tradition that is sometimes decadent, but in our freedom to recover the gold and jewels that have been lost or buried along the winding path that believers have walked from the resurrection of Christ to the present day.

Exciting stuff

He ends

It is a message that evangelicals must not forget. Lest the emphasis on recovering church tradition become another "gigantic conspiracy of misdirection," evangelicals must remember and must appropriate tradition selectively in light of the truth, so that the ultimate purpose of our liturgies and calendars and embodied practices is to plunge more deeply into "the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus," and thus "gain Christ and be found in him" (Phil 3:8).

Read the whole thing.

Let me add one other thing. I think Catholics should recognize this and think of avenues of welcoming as to this movement. I will post on this later perhaps but I think the new procedures to have Anglican communities are a perfect avenue to tap into this. Since in many ways it seems that a Anglican like Anglo Catholic Patrimony is very agreeable to many evangelicals of this mindset.