Solid Ground: 25 Years of Evangelical Theology
Eds: Carl R Trueman, Tony J Gray, Craig L BlombergContributors include: Packer, Goldingay, Marshall, Bauckham, Bray, Helm, Lyon, Drane
Apollos, 2000, 319pp, £14.99, hbk
I remember when the journal Themelios (Greek for ‘solid ground’) first came out in 1975. I had just started at Spurgeon’s College and evangelicalism was on an ‘up’ with a new confidence and a new generation of conservative theological gurus who had not had to live through the battles that scholars like Stott and Bruce had fought for academic respectability. Liberal theology was going out of fashion as fast as humanism. With Oxbridge Christian Unions bulging, there were few clouds on the horizon, save for loony charismatics. (Indeed, Trueman in his final essay sees too much ‘success’ as one of the present dangers for evangelical scholarship.)
This collection of essays reflects some of the issues that have exercised evangelical academics over the last quarter century, and also shows how they have had the luxury of engaging with contemporary culture and some ‘purely’ academic issues while the theological ‘opposition’ was in disarray. The journal is on the British side of ‘international’ (I notice that Volf’s planned contribution on Latin American Liberation Theology was omitted from the book), and there had to be some distancing of evangelicalism from US fundamentalism. The work includes David F Wright’s extended book review of James Barr’s 1977 broadside Fundamentalism (SCM).
The 16 reprinted essays cover most areas. Of course one of the major problems for a Bible based (rather than tradition based) movement over these past decades has been hermeneutical methodology (how we interpret the Bible), which in turn affects our application of scripture - an area in which evangelicals have always excelled.
This is an interesting collection, which will remind evangelicals of the groundwork that has been laid over the past 25 years and will help non-evangelicals to understand the hopes and fears of a movement that is still very, very big worldwide.
Church Times
