Two Evangelical Manifestos
Robert E. Webber's Ancient-Future Faith and D.H. Williams's Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism
Daryl Charles
July 1, 2001
Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World, Robert E. Webber (Baker, 1999), 240 pages Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants, D.H. Williams (Eerdmans, 1999), 243 pages Just when evangelicals thought they had comfortably adapted themselves to the times, two books appear-very different in their approach and style-which beckon them to critically distance themselves from the times. What's a poor evangelical to do? True, defining "evangelicalism" as it negotiates its way into the twenty-first century is notoriously difficult, as social critics both inside and outside the camp have observed. Is it foremost a social- cultural phenomenon? A political predisposition? A mood? Perhaps a theological orientation? Making matters worse, many-if not most-evangelicals share the free church legacy of renouncing (or at least being suspicious of) confessionalism of any type. Both authors are self-confessedly true sons of the Protestant Reformation tradition and American evangelicalism. More importantly, both are reflecting debates that are internal to evangelicalism itself while articulating what evangelicalism yet needs to become in order to speak convincingly within a religiously pluralistic society. Robert Webber is no stranger to ecumenical dialogue or to the question of evangelicalism's interaction with culture. In fact, it is his work of two decades ago, Common Roots (published in 1978 by Zondervan), that finds itself repackaged and recontextualized under the title Ancient-Future Faith. Webber's pedigree, moreover, is unassailable: his father played a key role in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1930s and 1940s, while his father-in-law was a founding ...
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