In the February First Things, Jordan Hylden, a self-identified young evangelical, responds to Tony Campolo’s recent book, “Letters to a Young Evangelical”. In the correspondence section of the current First Things, Campolo responds and Hylden adds a sur-reply.
Hylden is right about one thing: Campolo’s book is frustrating because it suggests that the moral substance of some social issues, such as abortion, is fuzzy, when it is not. What Campolo should say is that there is not necessarily one “evangelical” political approach to such moral questions (and even then, Campolo should better represent why there is perhaps justifiably a relatively broad consensus within evanglicalism on the general politics of some of these big moral questions).
But overall, Hylden’s criticism is unfair. This is even more evident in his correspondence with Campolo in the current issue of FT, in which Hylden lamely bashes not only Campolo, but also all things emergent — even to the tiresome point of dropping Brian McLaren’s name as a scare token.
I sent this in to FT’s correspondence section — let’s see if it gets published:
Jordan Hylden’s zeal to bash the emerging church movement, Tony Campolo, and all else that fails his sniff test, is a shame. When Hylden suggests Campolo and the emerging church movement “have had the courage to emerge from worn-out things like Christian doctrine,” he apparently is oblivious to the work of theologians such as the Stan Grenz, John Franke, Scott McKnight, Leslie Newbiggin, James K.A. Smith, and others, who identify with or whose work informs much “emergent” thinking.
I wonder whether Hylden has any idea, for example, about the potential connections that James K.A. Smith has identified between the robust theological movement of Radical Orthodoxy and emergent sensibilities? And does Hylden have any notion of how John Franke, an Origen scholar, is reaching back into the Patristic tradition to find fresh ways of revitalizing evangelical hermeneutics and theology? Can Hylden trace Newbiggin’s missiology to the emerging church’s missional posture towards contemporary postmodern culture? Apparently not. Hylden is instead content merely to whisper the scary words “Brian McLaren” into the inquisitor’s ear.
Hylden seems equally oblivious to the devastating impact a generation of political and theological crankery has had on American evangelicalism. Hylden self-identifies as a young evangelical, but he seems not to care that the angry, spitting rhetoric of some of evangelicalism’s so-called leaders has made many young believers — as well as, sadly, most young unbelievers — wonder what all of this has to do with the Jesus who sacrificed himself for the world in love on the cross.
Tony Campolo and the emerging church can indeed be frustratingly obtuse sometimes. It would be wonderful if Campolo, McLaren and other emergent leaders would “speak the truth in love” about clear “traditional” social-moral issues such as homosexual practice and abortion. But I, for one, am thankful that someone is willing to expose how far contemporary Western evangelicalism, for all of its goods and blessings, seems to stray sometimes from the central “good news” of the gospel. And I’m not even so young anymore.