Brian Auten over at the Boar's Head Tavern wrote this regarding a review of a biography about Bonhoeffer that raises the issue of whether or not evangelicals have tried to rehabilitate the German Lutheran theologian as an evangelical. This does not surprise me. I mean, let's consider how evangelicals have easily assimilated C. S. Lewis into their fold even though he had a few views that would not have been considered "evangelical" during his lifetime by those who considered themselves evangelical.
Bonhoeffer is merely the new subject of assimilation for evangelicals. C. S. Lewis got assimilated into evangelicalism decades ago even though he wasn't evangelical by any significant stretch of the imagination. Lewis had no real problem with theistic evolution and was way too liberal for the evangelicals of his time. But he wrote very well and was a gifted storyteller as well as a scholar. Ergo he got retroactively assimilated into evangelical thought. Bonhoeffer was a liberal German Lutheran theologian but he wrote some fine meditations on the Christian life and, more importantly, he opposed National Socialism. So retroactively he, too, must be assimilated into the evangelical fold. The idea that the Christian thinkers who prominently opposed racial hatred, tyranny, and the abuse of government power were all pretty liberal thinkers in key ways ranging from Martin Luther King to Bonhoeffer to Lewis is something evangelicals want to work around.
Who can evangelicals point to in the last few centuries who had true evangelical bona fides and spoke out passionately on society? Niebuhr? Naw, he's neo-Orthodox and too influenced by Barth (oh, but wait, what about Bonhoeffer ... ). R. L. Dabney was a conservative evangelical thinker in the old-school sense of things and he even anticipated the total secularization of American society through the public school system. Oh, but he said that public education would make Negro children better criminals than they already were and sided with the Confederacy during the American Civil War/War of Northern Aggression. He also made a weak argument against the use of instruments in corporate worship. Well, uh, okay, so a lot of conservative evangelicals balk at citing Dabney.
As Mark Noll put it so many years ago, the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there isn't much of a mind. Sure, we've got preachers and theologians but in other academic disciplines there's not much to speak of. This is precisely why men like Bonhoeffer and Lewis, who during their own lifetimes were denounced as having defective theology and a defective understanding of salvation by those who really WERE evangelicals,, are now being assiduously assimilated into evangelicalism. Why?
Well, I would say the simplest reason is that evangelicals are so hard up for anyone who influenced the real world, as opposed to the evangelical subculture, that a Bonhoeffer opposing the Nazis or C. S. Lewis writing Christian allegories that people read is vital. It is vital because in decades of culture war making we can't just have pundits and preachers, we need people who can be shown to be "evangelical" who allow evangelicalism to be more than endless soap-boxing about being different from the world and, maybe, contributing something positive to it. Few people would dispute that Bonhoeffer's opposition to National Socialism was bad. Few would dispute that C. S. Lewis wrote charming books and was a gifted communicator. Anyone who actually reads their work would disavow their being evangelical in any generall American acceptable sense of the terms. Retroactively assimilating Lewis and then Bonhoeffer into evangelicalism is useful in making sure that evnagelicals have people non-evangelicals have ever even heard of in tackling the culture war. That Lewis and Bonhoeffer have been posthumously conscripted into an evangelical culture war would not have met with the approval of either man.
But evangelicals are often content to read about things rather than engage the things themselves. Now obviously I don't speak of all evangelicals because there are plenty of evangelicals who engage things. I do think Noll's observation that much evangelical thought tends to restrict itself to doctrine and to a slightly lesser extent politics. One of the lesser aspects of the legacy of Francis Schaeffer is that many evangelicals use his books as an excuse to avoid reading the books he read, watching the movies he watched, listening to the music he listened to. They take his highly idiosyncratic and personalized assessment of how "the Christian worldview" or "secular humanism" played out in this or that cultural artifact and thus avoid interacting with things they have no interest in.
Schaeffer's overview of Western culture is valuable in many ways but his overview fails to help us in assessing any number of things. For instance Schaeffer's writings have no accounting for the Catholic approach of the French composer Olivier Messiaen. Do you say that his music reflects humanism or secularism when most of his major works are Catholic reflections on Catholic doctrines? Well, uh, that would be tough to pull off. Schaeffer might have listened to the post-tintinabulae music of Arvo Part and have considered it a sign of monistic ontology without recognizing that Arvo Part is Eastern Orthodox.
Now if evangelicals are attempting to assimiliate Bonhoeffer as they have Lewis this should give us a moment of pause. Do Lewis or Bonhoeffer need to be evangelical for us to benefit from them? Was Augustine, arguably the greatest shaper of the map of Western Christian thought, anything close to an evangelical by contemporary measurements? If Mark Driscoll can give Augustine a failing grade for his attitudes toward marriage while affirming his importance or Lutherans can concede that Martin had some issues with anti-Semitic sentiments ... or that Calvinists could concede (the Reformed Baptists anyway) that they think Calvin botched the issue of infant baptism then perhaps this should be a signal to those of us who identify is evangelical that maybe, just maybe, modern American evangelicals don't realize that every evangelical will fail in light of the grading standards of contemporary evangelical thought.
The thing about the culture wars is that if evangelicals were actually somehow "making culture" instead of pontificating about culture they wouldn't feel any need to retroactively assimilate non-evangelicals like C. S. Lewis or Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Whatever "culture making" or "going upstream" entails it probably involves interacting with a bunch of ideas and thinkers who are not, strictly speaking, evangelical. We're not going to have any sway or influence in any culture if we are only committed to "thinking Christianly" as theology bloggers would have us do.
Evangelicals seem constantly tempted to focus on doctrine and politics to the exclusion of other spheres. If we're so busy fighting whatever we think the culture war cosntitutes we won't be making anything for the culture other than a reputation for fighting about the direction we think the culture should be going. A pastor I admit I like, Mike Gunn, once said that evangelicals are so eager to jump on what is wrong in any film or novel or creative thing that they rarely step back to affirm what is right about it. A recent example from the last five years I can think of would be the film WALL-E.
If you only see it as "too green" or "too critical of American consumerism" you forget that there are plenty of other positive things about the cartoon. It's a fun cartoon. In the long run which film will be more likely to influence a generation of people, WALL-E or Fireproof? When evangelicals produce things like Left Behind and other evangelicals debate whether or not its dispensationalist eschatology is even properly evangelical then we're stuck in a feedback loop where people make second or third-rate whatever it is and evangelicals debate about the doctrinal points rather than assessing the quality of the writing or art itself.
What is more the biggest names in evangelicalism are still basically nobodies in the grand scheme of things. History will remember Billy Graham. But John Macarthur? John Piper? R. C. Sproul? Ben Witherington? Most people don't even know about Spurgeon or Sunday or even Finney. We evangelicals have inflated our historical significance with respect to both the past and present. We are a team full of people who, to go by blogs and press releases are happy to say they are part of the fastest growing church in this or that region or who have published this or that book.
Read any blurb about any mover and shaker in evangelicalism and what are we likely to see? Let me guess--follower of Christ, husband of X, father of three to seventeen children, pastor at Z church and lover of a particular sports team. In other words, fairly generic stuff. It's fine to be married and have a few kids but there is a particular strain of evangelical that seems to think it's a big deal to sell yourself as being a "one woman man". It's like there's a tacit protocol that you have to mention your spouse first before you mention being a pastor so that people don't get the idea that you're so careerist that you'd sacrifice time with your family even though mentioning the wife is itself a careerist move within Reformed evangelical circles for reasons to simple to explain. :)
But it seems that those kinds of claims and counterclaims are what occupy evangelicalism. If anything the terrible paradox of contemporary American evangelicalism is that we want so desperately to matter ot the culture around us we don't realize that that is why we don't matter. The apostles did not set out to change the world but to proclaim the true king of the world. The cultural transformation that postmillenialists, reconstructionists and revivalists hope we can create if we just unlock the magic words and procedures to "redeem culture" for Jesus' fame seem to easily forget that all of that world-changing stuff was an accidental by-product of coming to terms with the implications of the kingdom of God and that the king in the kingdom is Jesus.
The fact that evangelicals seem so eager to retroactively assimilate the likes of Bonhoeffer and Lewis, whose concerns were neither evnagelical as such nor necessarily to "redeem culture" should be instructive. We are so hard up for people in our own traditions who have transformed society in any way we cast about for a Lewis or a Bonhoeffer. They at least "could" have been evangelical in some nominal sense. We can't very well retroactively assimilate Flannery O' Connor (Catholic) or T. S. Eliot (who converted to Anglicanism from Unitarianism and so couldn't possibly be construed as "one of us" in any evangelical sense). I'm not aware of any evangelicals who really rush to include Martin Luther King Jr. as part of the team.
Noll was right to talk about the scandal of the evangelical mind. We really have covered the bases on theology already and have competing theories about how to handle politics. But if evangelicals were ever supposed to "move upstream" and "redeem culture" the admittedly anecdotal evidence at hand suggests that evnagelicals will never really get into the making culture part in any easily observable way. Jesus did end up telling people "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation."
We as Christians so often want to see the city or society or whatever transformed by Christ and what I realize I and other evangelicals have overlooked is that often what this really means is "I want to see society transformed by MY faith in Christ." I hadn't stopped to think about this particular temptation until years after I was no longer part of a church that has talked a lot about doing all sorts of things "for Jesus' fame". I don't doubt we have worked toward that end ... but the thing about temptation is that it comes to us most often as an add-on to what Christ has called us to rather than an outright substitute. Fundamentalists have been saying for decades that apostates like Bonhoeffer and Lewis are popular with evangelicals because evangelicals are just worldly losers. The extent to which evangelicals keep trying to retroactively assimilate people who are by contemporary evangelical standards fairly liberal suggests that the fundamentalists are at least half-way right.
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