Post-Christendom Evangelicals

Andrew Perriman has a blog called P.OST, in which he pleads for a new evangelical way. He says: "I regard myself as an evangelical, but the social and intellectual structures that have sustained and made sense of modern evangelicalism are disintegrating, and it is not at all clear that modern evangelicalism can or should survive their collapse... How much of our sense of what the New Testament is, how it speaks, how it hangs together, how it is authoritative, is bound up with the Christendom-modern paradigm? And how much of that can survive the collapse of the Christian-modern paradigm?"

Perriman's vision for evangelical Christianity is that it will free itself from the following constraints:

(1) The stifling framework of European Christendom, which (happily) is now disintegrating. The evangelicalism of the future needs to be post-Christendom evangelicalism.

(2) The restricting legacy of the sixteenth century Reformation.

(3) The negative and claustrophobic effects of conservative Reformed Christianity.

To rescue authentic Christianity from these problematic things, says Perriman, will need courage and determination (and creative imagination). Christians will need to borrow from the New Perspective on Paul and from the Emerging movement, both of which have recast Christianity in ways that are (in Perriman's estimate) new, fresh, innovative, down-to-earth, enterprising, risk-taking, and incarnational. However, we are told that we need to be even MORE radical than these two initiatives. Evangelical Christianity does not merely need to change its theological orientation; Perriman wants evangelicals to de-theologise and deconstruct their evangelical understandings to a significant extent and view the New Testament more dialogically and historically than they have ever done. Perriman complains: "The modern gospel is the product of an excessive theological preoccupation with the salvation of the individual. It has led generally to the eclipse of scripture as historical narrative".

In a post made on 17 April 2010, Perriman said: "The Western Christian tradition, which is the contextualization of the biblical narrative under the conditions of European imperialism and rationalism, is disintegrating rapidly. We are having to repent not only of a geographical imperialism but also of a historical complacency; and we are having to ask just how much of what we have taken to be self-evidently true is really just the final clamshell packaged consumer product at the end of a long Christendom manufacturing process. This is why it is so important right now to go back and look at the unprocessed raw material again. What did the 'faith' of the re-emerging people of God look and feel and taste like before it got funneled into the Christendom machine?"

In a post made on 12 November 2011, Perriman said: "I would suggest that the church is having to - or will have to - let go of the notion that we are a religion of a text whose authority is theologically constructed. I suggest that we are having to - or will have to - work with the notion instead that the New Testament is a collection of historical texts, bound up in the messy contingencies of history, much more narrowly confined in its outlook than theology has understood it to be. And I would also suggest that by imaginatively re-entering the dialogue, we will discover how the narrative is inherently authoritative and formative."

Notice in the last sentence of the above paragraph the words "inherently authoritative". Dear me. What a curiously conventional, traditional, hidebound, backward-looking expression for a courageous and forward-looking radical like Perriman to use! That is the sort of language that belongs to stodgy old dinosaurs like James White and Al Mohler and Jason Stellman...

Further, Perriman uses words like "contingent" (and sometimes even "accidental") to describe the formation of the Bible and its relation to Israel's history (in a post made on 6 January this year, he commented as follows: "the biblical story cannot be reduced to the myth-like dimensions of the modern evangelical gospel - not without losing touch with the reality of the thing. It is a historical story and suffers from all the complexity, particularity, ambiguity, and short-sightedness that are part-and-parcel of historical existence"). Whereas traditional views of the Bible are entirely compatible with conclusions about its authoritativeness, I am not sure how Perriman's account of the Bible can consistently lead to any sort of meaningful "authority" for Christian readers.

If you are excited by Perriman's program (which I emphatically am not), you can read all the articles on his blog here. The good thing is that Perriman writes SHORT articles, so he will not take up much of your time. The unfortunate thing is that Perriman's articles are mostly too short to allow him to explain in any detail or with any clarity what his program really involves, which is convenient for Perriman but frustrating for us...

To be fair to Perriman, you can always buy and read his books, especially his latest one: The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom, Wipf and Stock, 2010. (Somewhere on his blog, Perriman sums up one of the purposes of this book with the words: "How to rescue Romans from the fish tank of Reformed theology and return it to the sea of history".)

P.S. The comment below is by Andrew Perriman...