Recently I have been trying to find a good balanced debate between an evangelical perspective and a liberal or post-liberal perspective on theology. The search is important to me partly as a result of my past: I attended a (for the most part) post-liberal & neo-orthodox seminary, where evangelical perspectives were dismissed as "ignorant fundamentalism." While I attended this school, the school itself was dismissed by conservatives that I knew as being devoid of Christians, and I was warned to be careful or I might wind up in hell. This period in which I experienced joint condemnation was a time of extreme trial for my spiritual health, but by God's grace I prevailed and I am at peace with my evangelical beliefs, even as I consider myself at an advantage with respect to my understanding of a wide array of theology which many evangelicals have never encountered. But as part of my healing process, I would love to see a fruitful dialogue between the two groups, an honest attempt to understand one another's perspectives. But here is what I have seen so far:
The Alitzer Montgomery Debate
The first book I read that was a dialogue between evangelicals and a different perspective was the transcript of a debate between Thomas J.J. Alitzer and John Warwick Montgomery on the "God is Dead" theology. Alitzer was famous for his theology which suggested that the metaphor "God is dead" was the appropriate way to describe the current appropriate existential posture of Christians toward the divine. (That's a terribly inadequate summary of the perspective, but the details of the position are irrelevant). What bothered me about the debate is that Montgomery arrived having read virtually every one of Alitzer's books, and with thorough citations from various authors in response. Alitzer arrived without any real preparation. At one point, amid Montgomery's rebuttle, he said "I've never met anyone who held this view before." It was evident that not only had Alitzer not prepared by reading any of Montgomery's work, he had not even read much evangelical thought at all. It was a frustrating debate (if it can even be called that).
Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? (I know, lame title)
The second book that I've read was primarily a debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan on the historicity of the resurrection. I got this book from a friend, and was a bit embarrassed by it at first, to be honest. I've read lots of Crossan's work, and he is a stud of a scholar, but I've always had the idea that Craig was a bit of a pop culture apologist. I figured Craig would get destroyed, so the book just sat on my shelf for almost two years until I ran out of things to read. But the debate surprised me (really more shocked me) because Craig went into the debate with four key pieces of evidence and four key objections to Crossan's work, which Crossan never once addressed or rebutted. The debate was live, but several contributors from the Jesus Seminar and from evangelical seminaries contributed papers in response, and neither of the Jesus seminar respondents addressed a single one of Craig's main four points or four main objections. Now, I know that Crossan has written huge volumes of historical analysis, so why not address Craig's argument at all? He just talked past him, as did Marcus Borg and Robert J. Miller. It's like the "erudite" and "elite" scholars of the seminar dismissed the conservative points simply because they considered the scholars ignorant from the start, but the conservatives took the Jesus Seminar's arguments seriously (though they did fail to address some key points) but perpetuated the critical condemnation through such pejoratives as "peter pan theology" and jokes about Crossan disappearing in a puff of smoke when God demonstrated that Crossan was wrong in his views. In other words, each side's presentation was skewed from the start by the same assumptions I encountered at Duke, but the irony is that the "liberals" came off looking ignorant, and the "conservatives" came off looking less Christian.
Does anyone know of a good book that allows these groups to dialogue in a serious fashion?
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