I realize that it has been an extremely long time since I last posted, but perhaps this will finally put a button on a few things. The real question I am dealing with is how Grace Haven theology got to the point at which I left, and the answer has to begin a very long time ago.
Well before 1950
There have always been theological divides within Christendom, and the Protestant Reformation illustrates that point beautifully, but things really came to a head in the middle of the 19th century. There had always been an enormous number of denominations in America, but this was a different battle. Earlier divisions were largely national or based on high-level theological disputes (for example, what, exactly, happens to the wine during Eucharist), but this one was different. Archaeology, modern technological advances, and such (even the invention of the steam locomotive) convinced people that we had arrived at some sort of peak in human understanding, so anything in the Bible which did not seem to fit was obviously wrong and stupid. We had found archaeological evidence of ancient Greeks and Romans, but not of Hittites, so obviously any biblical reference to Hittites was wrong and stupid. We know now that the earth is round like a ball, so the gospel comment in Acts 1:9 that Jesus went “up” into heaven was obviously wrong and stupid.
It is worth noting that these objections to the Bible were not coming from atheists or from people in other religions; these comments often came from clergy and scholars who called themselves Christians. One powerful result of this uproar was a profound split between “Fundamentalists” and “Liberals”—and the split occurred in many denominations. Fundamentalists tended to be anti-modern and anti-intellectual; Liberals tended to be intellectual but anti-spiritual.
Both camps tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
1970s: We attempted to put it together
A third stream arose in the 1970s: people who were deeply spiritual believers but who wanted to honor quality scholarship and culture. Names such as Robert Webber and Francis Schaeffer appeared. Schaeffer’s L’Abri in Switzerland was dedicated to reaching out to young European intellectuals with the Gospel. L’Abri alumni such as Jerram Barrs and Egon Middelmann showed up at Covenant Seminary, and the movement was off and running. (That’s where I ran into the movement.)
We needed a name for this new thing, and came up with “Evangelicalism.”
Alas, things went downhill. Schaeffer jumped onto the cause célèbre bandwagon of anti-abortion (really a Roman Catholic issue long before any Protestant church noticed). Evangelicalism always had an “us against them” feeling, aimed at both Liberalism and Fundamentalism, so we began to think in terms of walls. LGBTQI rights came into the picture, and the Liberals embraced the idea of accepting gay people, so both the Fundamentalists and the Evangelicals dug in their heels. The Right Wing of the church figured out that they were more likely to “fix” society through laws (not always applied very scrupulously) than through conversion. And somehow, in the minds of many, Christianity became very American, very white, very materialistic, and anyone who said otherwise was both a traitor and a heretic. “Evangelicalism,” a great name for thoughtful, spiritual Christianity, shifted and became the label for a very brittle brand of USA-promoting Christian Nationalism.
Where Grace Haven fits in
If you look at pictures of the main building, The Lodge, from the 1970s, you will be struck by how Swiss it looks. That was no accident. Hod Bolesky, a Mansfield industrialist, visited L’Abri, apparently experienced some sort of religious conversion, and dedicated an enormous amount of money to replicating the Swiss experience in Richland County. It was not just architecture; the library of the Lodge had a vast collection of Schaeffer lecture tapes, and in the early days, the learners were expected to spend hours each week listening to him and discussing his ideas.
The problem was that Grace Haven did not have any scholars of the same calibre as Webber, Barrs or Middelmann, and had a deep commitment to anarchy. The idea from the very beginning was that each house church, each nuclear family, was its own little cult. Nobody had any right to tell anyone else what to do, and (of course) any connection between Grace Haven and the rest of Christendom was deeply suspect. People really believed that this little group of a hundred or so people in rural Ohio was going to completely fix the rest of the Christian world.
After a while, the anarchistic trend subsided a bit, but never completely; the anti-intellectual feelings stayed put. When I first arrived at the Farm, the Lodge library had a complete set of the Ante-Nicene Church Fathers (9 volumes of writings from the time of the Apostle John until about AD 325) and the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (14 more volumes, bringing us up to the 8th century). Those went away rather soon, along with a LOT of quality books. And in common discussion, C.S. Lewis and J.I. Packer gave way to the latest Bible bookstore trendy item.
The result of all this was that, without a core of agreed theology, the loudest voice prevailed. Even if it was wrong. Voices such as Bill Gothard and Leanne Payne and “Focus on the Family” drowned out real theology.
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