Classical Theology vs. Modern Evangelical Experientialism

A Pragmatic Orientation

So much of the modern world is preoccupied with immediate practicality and measurable results. Thus, classical humanities have been eclipsed in the schoolroom, to be replaced with disciplines that have an obvious application to the workplace. What is the point of reading Homer, for example, when one could spend that time learning how to read a balance sheet or how to manage a sales campaign? Truth is perhaps not reduced to its ability to generate results, but those truths that do are likely to be prioritized, while those that do not, neglected or ignored.

This pragmatic orientation of wider society has its counterpart in the church. We can all be vulnerable to the tendency to instrumentalize the gospel by demanding that it has to have some direct, practical relevance, whether that be in terms of action or experience. This is the Christian equivalent of that instrumentalized reason and pragmatism that dominates so much of modern culture. We want the gospel to do something and to do so in an obvious, immediate way. We want it to change lives, improve our communities, or transform politics. For the modern mind, so much of the understanding of truth correlates to that idea or practice that delivers the right results. And the church, particularly the evangelical church, is not immune to that impulse. Yet as noted above, so much of the language of classical theism, such as the Nicene categories of homoousios and hypostasis, seems abstract and remote from daily life. This means that classical theology is likely to appear dry, pedantic, and irrelevant to everyday Christian life in an evangelical Protestantism oriented toward emotional and practical responses to the gospel.

Connected to this thinking, one very poor reason for rejecting classical theology might be that it is not therapeutic in today’s sense: Because it asserts the doctrine of God as prior to all things, it does not pander to the modern need to be made to feel good about ourselves. Swaths of modern Christianity have been shaped by moralistic therapeutic deism. This is not so much a set of intellectual commitments as a mood. It makes God a therapist, the gospel a means of serving personal needs, and a sense of individual happiness and well-being here and now, not glorifying God and enjoying him forever, as its chief end. Classical theology is incompatible with this philosophy. It does not answer our immediate needs but stands prior to them and in judgment over them. It demands that we understand ourselves in terms of God, not that God accommodate himself to our felt needs and desires.

Classical Theology for the Modern Mind

Carl R. Trueman

In Classical Theology for the Modern Mind, historical scholar Carl Trueman examines how remembering history, reciting creeds, and studying ecclesiology counter cultural pathologies that inhibit modern minds.

Evangelicalism, with its experiential emphasis, is vulnerable to these and other tastes of society. This susceptibility can be discerned in popular piety in a number of ways. For example, intercessory prayer by nature focuses on those things that we would like God to do for us. That is not in itself objectionable. Indeed, what would intercession be if it were not asking for God to do something for us? But it is striking how often the priorities of such prayers focus on bodily health rather than spiritual maturity. Prayers for such needs are not wrong, but the emphasis reflects the way that Christian intuitions have been shaped by the priorities of modern Western society. We live in a world that sees physical well-being as very important in a manner that Paul, for example, did not—if the emphases of his intercessions recorded in Scripture are a sound guide. Prayers of thanksgiving also reveal our priorities, typically focusing on those things that God has done for us. Again, to express gratitude for God’s actions toward us is appropriate. But the Psalms also indicate that thanksgiving for who God is in himself should also be a part of a believer’s devotional life. That this features so little in many of our prayers reveals the way that the modern world’s orientation to the self has shaped our piety. But it also renders strange or irrelevant those contemplative dimensions of the piety that arose naturally out of a classical theology whose first preoccupation was God as God.

In its very essence, the gospel gives priority to God and no quarter to modern therapeutic sensibilities.

There is also the issue of congregational worship. Perhaps its heyday has passed, but certainly from the late 1960s to the first decades of the twenty-first century, many churches adopted contemporary forms of worship and hymnody that arose out of a culture that often regarded the past as hidebound and also prized spontaneity and emotion. These postures foster a church ethos that would be at best indifferent and perhaps even hostile both to history as a source of positive knowledge and to the kind of theology that does not offer an immediate emotional charge. Contemporary worship has also tended to remove from the liturgy of the church hymns that were saturated with classical theology, too often replacing them with songs of far less theological depth. All of this quietly shapes the Christian imagination in ways antithetical to the great creedal doctrines of the church.

In setting forth these latter reasons for rejecting classical theology in this way, I am of course also hinting at the positive case for classical theology. The gospel is not reinvented every Sunday. That is why history—specifically the history of the church’s reflection on and exposition of the gospel and all that the gospel involves—is of importance today. Further, the church’s worship always connects somehow to the past, even in those churches that pride themselves on their contemporary worship ethos. If Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb. 13:8) and if the human condition is the same today as it was in the first century, then there has to be some deep level of continuity in worship across the ages. The gospel is also not to be instrumentalized and reduced to its practical implications and outcomes; it requires reflection on and worship of God as he is in himself, not simply as he has chosen to act toward us. And therefore the gospel’s truths are not to be determined by its therapeutic value or made coterminous with how it makes us feel. In its very essence, the gospel gives priority to God and no quarter to modern therapeutic sensibilities. All these considerations should press us to recover the classical theology that expressed gospel truths so well. In doing so, not only will we have better theology, but we should also have better worship and devotion, both corporate and individual.

This article is adapted from Classical Theology for the Modern Mind by Carl R. Trueman.

Carl R. Trueman (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is a contributing editor at First Things, an esteemed church historian, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including Strange New World; The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self; and Histories and Fallacies. He is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

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