Home

Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Feminism

Viewpoints

Quote of the Month

Quarterly Newsletter

On-Line Discussion Forum

Letters to the Editor

Mission

The Persecuted Church

Ecumenical Connections

How You Can Help

The VOW Budget

Contact VOW
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I recently did something that I suspect few of us really enjoy doing – I thinned out my library.  It was a job that had to be done because there was no room on my shelves for anything new.  They were packed, sometimes three books deep.  I was having an increasingly difficult time finding what I was looking for, and the disorder was beginning to offend against my sense of library propriety. 

As I did my dusty work, it occurred to me that while I have read many big, heavy, thick “tomes” during the past forty-five years, it has been two rather small ones that made the biggest impact on my life – Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, and Edward John Carnell’s, The Case for Orthodox Theology.

Carnell’s The Case for Orthodox Theology is now out of print.  Published in the late 1950’s by Westminster, it was part of a trilogy that was intended to introduce lay readers to three then-contemporary theological viewpoints.  The other two volumes in the collection were William Hordern’s, The Case for a New Reformation Theology, and L. Harold DeWolf’s, The Case for Theology in Liberal Perspective.

In what he called his “Casebook,” Carnell differentiated between classical reformed orthodoxy and fundamentalism.  The latter he characterized as orthodoxy-gone-cultic. 

Carnell paid a terrible price for making this important distinction.  When the book was published, many of his former friends and supporters turned on him, and the stress became so great that by the time I met him in the early 60’s, he was a broken man.  By 1965 he was dead – either by an accidental overdose of his sleeping medications, or more intentionally by suicide.  No one knows for sure.

The current conversations about dividing the Presbyterian Church have caused me once again to think about my teacher and the “Casebook” – and with Sylvia’s permission I have reproduced a chapter from it in the hope that his insights may constructively  inform our thinking.

To some, Carnell’s words will sound anachronistic.  He writes from a different time and place in history – one that had its own distinctive set of problems.  His discussion of Dispensationalism, for example, will strike many contemporary readers as odd.  So may his warnings against fundamentalism, as most of us believe that there isn’t a fundamentalist bone in our bodies.  One will be able to find very little direct, one-to-one correspondence between Carnell’s critique and the situation in which we currently find ourselves.  It will be easy for us to say, “The phenomenon that Carnell is analyzing is dead and gone.”  And, in many respects it is.

But, for those who are willing to read between the lines, there are lessons in this critique that will allow us to learn from other peoples’ mistakes rather than by repeating them ourselves. 

Edward John Carnell was the finest teacher with whom I ever studied.  So, even if you are disinclined to read the entire attachment, I encourage you, at the very least, to read the following paragraph, and to measure yourself against its warnings:

“The mentality of fundamentalism is dominated by ideological thinking.  Ideological thinking is rigid, intolerant, and doctrinaire; it sees principles everywhere, and all principles come in clear tones of black and white; it exempts itself from the limits that original sin places on history; it wages holy wars without acknowledging the elements of pride and personal interest that prompt the call to battle; it creates new evils while trying to correct old ones.”