The Coming Great Revival: Recovering the Full Evangelical Tradition by William Abraham (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 487 The Coming Great Revival: Recovering the Full Evangelical Tradition. By WILLIAM ABRAHAM. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984. Pp. 120. $12.95. This, Abraham's most recent book, provides a very helpful introduction to the dynamics and tensions within the modern evangelical movement. By " evangelical " Abraham is referring specifically to a movement that emerged in the 1950s as a group of young scholars and church leaders like Carl Henry, Bernard Ramm, and Billy Graham self-consciously distanced themselves from their fundamentalist roots. In particular, these " evangelicals " sought to purge fundamentalism of its more bizarre associations and then graft on to its core of doctrines (the famous five fundamentals ) a social conscience, learned scholarship, good manners, and a less schismatic view of the church. Abraham writes as one within this modern evangelical tradition who is concerned about the obvious tensions and problems within the tradition that are preventing it from making a full and healthy contribution to the life of the church. As examples of these problems and tensions, he notes the recent defections of one-time evangelical leaders like Harold Lindsell and Francis Schaeffer, who have returned essentially to a fundamentalist stance. He also points to a developing evangelical scholasticism evident especially in the recent five-volume opus of Carl Henry. Finally, he reviews critically what he considers to be a cosmetic, and therefore inadequate, attempt to revise the evangelical movment by Robert Webber. While not mentioned by Abraham, one could also include here the tensions created for evangelicalism on the other side of the spectrum by what Richard Quebedeaux has called the " young evangelicals." These would include figures like Ronald Sider and Jim Wallis, who critique evangelical orthodoxy from the anabaptist perspective. This critique was one of the forces that led to the polarization of the movement that Abraham describes . Abraham is more than a chronicler. His primary concern is to determine the root causes of the current problems in the evangelical movement and suggest a way to overcome them. He argues that these causes are essentially expressions of the fact that evangelicalism has still not adequately separated itself from its fundamentalist roots. In particular, he notes four areas where he believes evangelicalism has retained undesirable aspects of its fundamentalist roots. In the first place, evangelicalism has continued in the fundamentalist tradition of being overly " cerebral." That is, it tends to define faith as a set of beliefs that must be accepted and to stress orthodoxy as more 488 BOOK REVIEWS important than orthopraxis. Abraham does not illustrate this aspect, but it could be easily done. Secondly, evangelicals, like their fundamentalist parents, place a high priority on establishing, defining, and defending authority. As might be expected, the particular emphasis is on having or creating an absolutely reliable authority to determine matters of (intellectual) belief. The development of detailed confessions of faith is an example of this concern. However, the example Abraham emphasizes, and has discussed at length in previous works, is continuing evangelical concern to defend views of biblical inspiration that usually translate into defenses of inerrancy. The third major characteristic of fundamentalism that Abraham detects still residing in evangelicalism is a lack of openness to the diversity present within the movement. Several sources have contributed to the evangelical movement-Pietism, revivalism, classic Lutheranism and Calvinism , Methodism, etc. Obviously, such divergent sources could not merge without some willingness to learn from each other and find compromise solutions to some historic debates. Unfortunately, this has rarely happened . Instead there have been numerous attempts to defend the true evangelical position against " pseudo-evangelicals." Finally, Abraham notes that evangelicals as a whole are as prone as their fundamentalist mentors to overlook or deny the fallible human character of theology. Their confidence in the human intellect often leads them to transfer the inerrancy they ascribe to Scripture to their doctrinal systems. For Abraham, each of these characteristics must be overcome if evangelicalism is to make a vital contribution to the life of the church. His book is a call for a revival among evangelicals that will enable them to make this move. To suggest he is not simply a utopian dreamer, he recalls a model of such a revival and a resulting...