Fundamentalism is not a movement towards orthodoxy but a movement away from orthodoxy.

Reading people like David Hayward is always helpful. You should read more of David Hayward. In fact, I don't believe you can really understand Western Christianity if you don't consider the consequences of its ideas, and Dave is a result of some very stupid ideas which Christians now embrace.

If you don't read about Billy Sunday or Bob Jones or Lonnie Frisbee or Ted Haggard or Bill Hybels or Kent Hovind, you might think these are occasional exceptions to the rule, and the rule is men like Polycarp, Augustine, Aquinas, Ambrose, Calvin and Merton. My own theory is that one of the purposes of Christian academia is to foster that misapprehension. When you bring home your diploma and show it to your wife as some feeble explanation for why you spent all that time in your study away from her, you'd like for her to come away with the belief that you are prepared to discuss the men on the second list. If you tell her you were something of a classroom authority on Jimmy Swaggart, you will soon be talking to the hand.

Christians really don't believe ideas have consequences any longer. They have some vague notion that there are bad ideas out there and that they won't sleep peacefully until they are squelched with extreme prejudice, but unless the ideas come from other academics they are not really dangerous, and to treat them as lethal is a little unbalanced.

The truth is, every error is fatal—eventually. All errors aren't immediately fatal, and we lose track of the small errors in our battles over the big errors, and I'm sure that can't always be helped. But one result of this misperception is that we organize our objections according to the size of the errors and the threat we perceive in them. And what literate person is going to read David Hayward and perceive any real threat? A guy still struggling with his adverbs can't really grasp our reasons for studying systematic theology.

Clearly we need more perceptive people.

We used to have some perceptive people, but unless their ideas dovetailed nicely with pressing agendas, they didn't really require us to change anything. So that when men like Machen and Tulga and Tozer pointed out the bizarre and caustic aftereffects of fundamentalism, no blustering fundamentalist needed to reconsider his tangents. Even after the publication of Majesty Hymns! How much of church liturgy and history has been savaged and abandoned to bring fundamentalists to the point where they could fracture over which Bible translation was inspired?

Similarly with Neo-evangelicalism: so long as there was sufficient bowing and scraping toward evangelism and relevance and "reaching the world in our generation", it didn't really matter what differences it entertained about what the Gospel included or excluded. And this confusion was recently documented for us in the Manhattan Declaration. What began as a pious pose on "seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering" ended up dividing the evangelical world over a definition of the Gospel.

Excellent work, gentlemen!

Having resolved all the disgraces addressed in the Evangelical Manifesto of May 7, 2008, we move on to the grand imperatives of the Manhattan Declaration of October 20, 2009.

I'm going to suggest that we are not being led by thoughtful men who understand ideas at all; we are led by hysterical men gripped by obsessions and personal needs. Whether it is a fracas over what homosexual actor played in what religious movie or whether it is about how many goats we can buy for the people in Burundi, we are adrift in the worst possible way. The center has not held. In fact we have forgotten what a center does.

So we have made a home for people like David Hayward and Doug Pagitt, and these latter-day divines are not just comical, they have become typical. The faith they seek to share, or the faith they are losing and then finding and then losing and then finding is not really a faith by any classical definition. Religion today is not a culture of ideas; it is a battleground of obsessions. It is a nest of private desires and political expectations. It is not a consolation for our sorrows or an affirmation of our hopes.

David Hayward helps us see that.