Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals: Why We Need Our Past to Have a Future
By Gavin Ortlund
Crossway Books, 2019
218 pages (cloth), $21.99
Think back to the 1980s television show Family Ties. Readers born since then may be surprised to learn this was Michael J. Fox’s start as a Hollywood celebrity. In this sitcom, the actor (who went on to star in the Back to the Future trilogy of films) played a conservative, Alex P. Keaton, who admired Ronald Reagan and was introduced to conservatism by Rush Limbaugh. Now imagine that Alex wanted to understand politics beyond the Republican Party of the 1980s. He might find his way first to the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle, and then turn to the Romans and become familiar with Cicero and Roman law. Next, he might sample some Christian authors such as Augustine, Aquinas, and John Calvin. By then, Alex would be ready for early modern political theorists such as Machiavelli, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke.
Would that mini crash course in the development of political ideas in the West allow the young conservative to understand the nature of the United States’ political traditions? In a sense, it would, since the founders read and reflected on many of those sources in their understanding of rights, small government, and the danger of tyranny. At the same time, Alex would need to read many more sources to understand the American colonists’ objections to the English Parliament’s taxes, their views about monarchy and executive powers, republicanism, federalism, and the debates that led to the ratification of the US Constitution. Even then, Alex would be a fairly long way from the origins of the Republican Party (1856) and its ideals, not to mention the outlook of post-World War II movement conservatives and their capture of the Republican Party during the 1970s. Which is to say that if Alex spent time with ancient, medieval, and early modern political philosophers, he would be much smarter about the wisdom that has informed the study of politics (politicians in liberal democracies only need to win elections, not have graduate degrees in political science). But would Keaton be any smarter about Reagan’s outlook or political experience?
That is a question many readers may ask while reading Gavin Ortlund’s Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals. What the author means by “theological retrieval” is by his own admission hard to define because it has no definite borders or institutional outlets. It is a trend over the past fifteen years or so that has seen Protestant theologians look beyond the Reformation for “new sources of inspiration and synthesis.” Some of this retrieval, according to Ortlund, is compensation for older Protestant prejudices against Roman Catholic theology or a mentality that regarded the medieval era as the “dark ages.” Ortlund is convinced, and this is the reason for the book, that the greatest resource for the contemporary church is the theology of the whole church, Protestant and earlier.
After a chapter in which Ortlund contrasts Protestant attitudes to medieval and ancient theology—from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries—he turns to what is arguably the heart of his argument. In the next two chapters, the author explains why evangelicals need retrieval theology. In both, he gives valuable overviews of recent discussions about Protestant identity in relation to the pre-Reformation church. Recent conversions by Hank Hanegraaff to Eastern Orthodoxy, Christian Smith to Roman Catholicism, and Robert Webber, clearing the Canterbury Trail—these examples indicate the need for evangelicals to be better acquainted with the past. Evangelicals are inherently restless and the past offers stability. Ortlund believes that evangelicals can find such ballast in historical theology, while maintaining born-again identity. A recovery of the past will help Protestants be “better Protestants.” In the treasures of earlier theology, evangelicals will find “transcendence, community . . . something big to live for.”
The specific benefits of retrieval come when earlier theologians fill holes where Protestant theology is weak (an example is the doctrine of angels), cultivating sensibilities that are not present (such as the doctrine of divine simplicity), and reframing modern theological debates (the atonement). Ortlund concedes that retrieval has the danger of flattening out the past, such as using it as a judge to settle contemporary debates, reading old theology as an archivist might preserve ancient books, or even so identifying with Roman Catholic theology to become Roman Catholic. The analogy Ortlund uses is American geography. As someone who grew up in the South and the Midwest, he had associated Washington, DC, with the cities of the Northeast corridor. When Ortlund lived there, however, he discovered more about the mid-Atlantic region of the East Coast and appreciated the nation’s capital as having an identity distinct from New York City, Philadelphia, or Boston. By analogy, studying ancient and medieval theology gives Protestants a more accurate picture of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
The last half of the book (four chapters) provides specific instances of theological retrieval. Here, Ortlund moves from his introductory, why-this-matters lecture to the doctoral seminar. He presents relatively technical historical theological treatments of the doctrine of God, the atonement, and pastoral theology. This part of the book is where readers not trained in theology or aware of historical theology may lose heart. It also underscores the Alex Keaton problem of going to the past for help with the present. Someone who takes their politics from conservative talk radio or their theology from their congregation’s pastor may well stumble over the case for retrieval and the resources it yields. Indeed, Ortlund’s book does not sort out the different levels of theological knowledge of academic theologians, pastors, and the laity. The author is himself a pastor of a Baptist church in California; and unless this is an exceptional congregation, readers might well wonder how Ortlund would present this book to an average evangelical Baptist in the United States. Readers might also wonder if introducing ordinary Baptists to John Owen, the London Confession of Faith, and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress are better places to start introducing theology to doctrinally rudderless evangelicals.
This is not to say that retrieval has little value. In fact, one of its most important accomplishments—and Richard Muller deserves much credit here, though Ortlund refers to the Calvin Seminary historical theologian only once—is to show that the Reformation and Protestant orthodoxy did not emerge in a vacuum. Protestants built on ancient and medieval theology, even while bringing fresh insights into the study of Scripture. Understanding what came before the Reformation and noticing which authors the Reformers read, praised, and critiqued is one way to appreciate the breadth of church history and Protestantism’s place in it.
What is not clear in Ortlund’s case for retrieval, though, is whether contemporary Protestants will use older theological sources to circumvent Protestantism’s own developments, as if turning to Augustine and leaving aside Charles Spurgeon. In some sense, that contest is not a fair fight, since Augustine is read and admired in ways that outshine Spurgeon. At the same time, within the Baptist and evangelical worlds, Spurgeon is a figure who passed on Protestantism to the contemporary world. That makes his contribution for Baptists and evangelicals more important than Augustine. As odd as that judgment may sound, it is a chief hurdle for retrieval theology to clear. How did the faith of Protestants come down to the contemporary church? Augustine, for good or ill, is akin to that first group of Baptists who worshiped with Roger Williams in Providence, Rhode Island. Going back to the emergence of Baptists from seventeenth-century Puritanism will not help twenty-first-century Southern Baptists sort out their current theological and practical debates.
D. G. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College and is the author of American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2020).
