New Pantagruel 3.1

The New Pantagruel 3.1 is up and, as usual, it offers a feast of meaty articles from a variety of perspectives. I haven’t has a chance to dig in yet, but this article on the resurrection of Caelum et Terra looks good, as does this piece by Michael Baxter on the notion of “one nation under God.”

Also, “Fr. Jape” is his usual saucy self in dissecting the foibles of various sects within Christendom. Of particular interest to me was this bit on Mark Noll’s desire to create an “evangelical tradition”:

“Culturally adaptive biblical experimentalism,” as Noll has in the past described the Evangelical ethos, has always sounded to me like “making it up as we go along and turning out to be just like everyone else.” That idea can’t have escaped Noll’s attention. Alan Wolfe, Ron Sider, and Christian Smith (among others) have recently charted Evangelicalism’s dipping into what Smith has called the “heresies” of “moralistic therapeutic deism.” (Carla Barnhill might stand as a case in point.) And certainly Noll has chafed at Evangelicals’ penchant for a right-wing politics that he found impossible to support in the past several presidential elections. In this regard Noll was not alone, and aside from my deep disagreement with Christians (including some of our compatriots at tNP) who abstained from voting or who opposed the incumbent (and despite my sympathy for their motives), it says something singularly significant that Noll finds himself so politically and ecclesially alienated from both his Evangelical brethren and his “classical” Protestant cousins. Wanting a “tradition” but not content with any particular tradition as it actually exists–including Evangelicalism as it is–Noll seems afflicted with the very poverty of coherence that he knows is the fruit of “life without tradition.”