1.4 Evangelical Accounts of the Relationship
1.4.3 The Protestant Work Ethic: A continued dependence on Weber
In searching for additional intramural accounts of Evangelicalism and its relationship to various cultural settings, we find that Warner offers a more extensive work.127 Warner’s account is very close to the context of my thesis, taking in my own wider Evangelical community, and that of my own church denomination. Warner cites over 700 sources for his impressive account of Evangelicalism.128 Yet, as with Guest and others, the only
122 Guest undertook a study and survey of two Evangelical congregations within the same Church, St Michael-le-Belfrey in York. Guest evidences manifestations similar to my own observations of the forces of capitalism at work in the worship life and practices of Evangelicals. See Guest, Evangelical Identity and Contemporary Culture.
123 Ibid., 242-255.
124 David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
125 Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 272.
126 Guest, Evangelical Identity and Contemporary Culture, 23-27.
127 Rob Warner, Reinventing English Evangelicalism, 1966–2001: A Theological and Sociological Study (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007).
128 Warner, Reinventing English Evangelicalism, 249–276.
31 explicit account of Protestant Christianity and capitalism within these sources is made with Weber. Warner does highlight, as does Guest, some accounts from people outside Evangelicalism within methodologies of religion and culture, where the dynamics of marketplace and religion feature.
This lack of accounting is significant. For example, Warner examines how Evangelicals have pragmatically used the tools of marketing available in late-capitalist market societies, such as Alpha, in response to cultural factors of the Enlightenment and existentialism. But he does not explain how Evangelicals ended up making use of capitalist practices like marketing. Warner is important because he confirms my observations of how Evangelicals have indeed taken up the tools of capitalism for the propagation and experience of faith. But we are left needing to understand how and why that state of affairs occurred.129 It is in the work of Bebbington that Warner (like Guest) finds his understanding of Evangelicalism, and of the cultural factors for understanding the nature of its larger social context.130 This reliance on Bebbington may have led to a lack of consideration of capitalism.131
It would seem that those who have surveyed Evangelicalism up close confirm the need for my account. My work may be seen in part as an extension and broadening of the work begun by Guest and Warner. Having established the need for the making of my own account, I now outline the method I will use. I first highlight methodological issues integral to this work, before then outlining the structure of the rest of my thesis.
129 For a thorough assessment of how Alpha is both a product of capitalist possibilities and simultaneously a creative response to them, see Stephen Hunt, The Alpha Enterprise (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004). For other extensive assessments of Alpha, see, Andrew Brookes, ed., The Alpha Phenomenon:
Theology, Praxisand Challenges for Mission and Church Today (Peterborough: CTBI Publications, 2007); and Chris Hand, Falling Short?: The Alpha Course Examined (Epsom: Day One Publications, 1998).
130 Whilst Warner sees himself building upon the historical account of Bebbington, he does claim to modify Bebbington’s thesis, ibid., 20.
131 Bebbington is dismissive of the influence of capitalism upon Evangelicalism; see Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 272. We shall return to this when we review Bebbington in detail.
32 1.5 A Contested Tradition: Locating the research method
…evangelicalism, we contend, is strong not because it is shielded against, but because it is
— or at least perceives itself to be — embattled with forces that seem to oppose or threaten it. Indeed, evangelicalism, we suggest, thrives on distinction, engagement, tension, conflict, and threat. Without these, evangelicalism would lose its identity and purpose and grow languid and aimless.
— Christian Smith and Michael Emerson, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving
I established earlier how we might understand the interactions of Evangelical beliefs and practices within contextual challenges as being like the immune system of a body interacting with environmental factors. I also assume that a contestation of identity within changing environmental conditions is the nature of all Christianity. In other words, Christianity is always contested, and Evangelicalism is especially so, because it has thrived on contestation for its genesis and formation. Christian Smith highlights this internal orientation of Evangelicals, as active engagement towards the world.132 Evangelicals, institutionally and individually, have an innate capacity and ability to re-negotiate their identity within changing cultural environments. In other words, as Guest notes from Smith, “Evangelicals do accommodate their position in response to cultural change, but part of this process of accommodation involves a revitalisation of Evangelical identity, not least by focusing on new sources of opposition.”133 There are, however, others like D. A. Carson who contest strongly for a givenness to Evangelicalism that does not allow for any renegotiation of convictions and boundaries.134 Warner has taken claims like Carson’s to task.135 Warner has demonstrated how Evangelicalism is indeed a contested and renegotiated tradition, such that a recent form of Evangelicalism (the very kind D. A. Carson seeks to underwrite as a pure Evangelicalism):
132 Christian Smith and Michael Emerson, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 88.
133 Guest, Evangelical Identity and Contemporary Culture, 16.
134 Donald A. Carson, “Domesticating the Gospel,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 6, (Winter 2002): 82–97.
135 Warner, Reinventing English Evangelicalism, 35.
33
has unconsciously assimilated a neoplatonic theism, a Reformation forenso-centric soteriology, a Pietist individualism, and enlightenment epistemology and a pre-critical tendency to literalism, then Evangelicalism is a complex construct of historical theology, formulated through an often unperceived interaction with its cultural setting, rather than … a confident and un-reflexive formulation, unadulterated, timeless, and universally
applicable distillation of the Gospel of Christ.136
Bebbington has provided the most detailed and widely accepted historical account of the development of Evangelicalism in Britain to date.137 Even a cursory reading of Bebbington reveals the concrete history of Evangelicals as one of cultural accommodation, resistance, and revitalisation. 138 There is no pristine form and singular Evangelical tradition to transmit unsullied by new and emerging cultures. This leads to further methodological considerations that flow from notions of contestation and re-negotiation. For I am encouraged about the possibility of my own reparative account by the observations of Smith, Guest, and Warner that Evangelicalism engages and revitalises itself through critique’. I locate my method within this Evangelical horizon of ‘self-critique’, as I reconceptualise in order to revitalise, rather than repudiate, my Evangelical tradition.139
1.5.1 Blueprint Ecclesiologies and Reparative Reasoning: Rootlessness versus