Atlantic article, Evangelicals, and the culture war

[Jay313 (Jay Johnson)]

McKnight has a take on Gerson’s article on the Jesus Creed: What Gerson Got Seriously Wrong.

Mainly, he takes issue with Gerson saying that evangelicals, unlike Catholics, don’t have a theory of social engagement. As examples, McKnight points to Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, as well as Kuyper and Schaeffer. The problem with the latter two is that they frame the evangelical response to modern culture in terms of a “war,” which we discussed more than a month ago in this thread:

What I learned by interviewing creationists and evolutionists for five years

I was also heavily influenced by Schaeffer when I read him as a teenager in the '70s. I agree he lost his way, but the social-political path was the direction he was headed from the start. He was influenced by Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch Reformed theologian and politician. Kuyper’s thought laid the groundwork for the original “culture war” of fundamentalism vs. modernism in the 1920s. Being a good Calvinist, Kuyper took the idea of “total depravity” to its limit, as did his disciple Cornelius van…

@JRM offered a more nuanced view of Kuyper in that discussion. Perhaps he has a take on Gerson’s article, or McKnight’s reply to Gerson? Maybe a blog post of his own on the subject? (Sorry for the poking and prodding, Richard. haha)