{"id":4108,"date":"2009-01-13T00:10:58","date_gmt":"2009-01-13T00:10:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/jesuscreed\/2009\/01\/artists-struggling-with-evange.html"},"modified":"2009-01-13T00:10:58","modified_gmt":"2009-01-13T00:10:58","slug":"artists-struggling-with-evange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2009\/01\/artists-struggling-with-evange.html","title":{"rendered":"Artists Struggling with Evangelicalism 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hempton.jpg\"<\/span>On this blog we have given lots of attention to faith and science and the struggle scientists have with the orthodox Christian faith. What about artists? I read this statement not long ago and want to have a conversation about it: “For all the well-known and oft debated problems associated with reconciling faith and science, the ability to reconcile artistic creativity with Christian orthodoxy has proved to be a much bigger stumbling block for the evangelical tradition<\/i>.” And by “artistic” is meant literature, the stage, painting, etc. <\/p>\n

So the statement of David Hempton<\/a> in his newest book, Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt<\/a>\"\"
\n<\/strong><\/em>. Hempton studies these figures: Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Francis Newman (J.H. Newman’s brother), Theodore Dwight Weld, Sarah Grimke\/Elizabeth Cady Stanton\/Frances Willard, van Gogh, Edmund Gose, and James Baldwin. <\/p>\n

He investigates why these folks, one-time committed evangelicals, became disenchanted.<\/p>\n


\nWhy do you think artists may struggle more with the evangelical faith than even scientists?<\/p>\n

It is standard among evangelicals to define “evangelical” with David Bebbington’s famous four points: conversion, Bible, cross, and active Christian living. But Hempton appeals in this book to another set of factors drawn from W.R. Ward, who finds these: experiential conversion, mysticism, small-group religion, vitalist conceptions of nature, a deferred eschatology, and opposition to theological systems. These characteristics Ward finds in the earliest evangelicals of the 18th Century. He draws this conclusion: “An infallible text read with wooden literalism, an instant millennium, an absence of mystery, a lack of interest in nature, priestly personality cults, and modernist soteriological systems are not what the early evangelicals had in mind<\/i>” (5). This is no small conclusion and I’m keen on seeing how this way of framing “evangelical” will shape the concerns of this book.<\/p>\n

The disenchantent of the people Hempton studies “did not usually result in complete abandonment of their religious faith and an embrace of atheism.” And “it would be a mistake to conclude that the subjects examined here ended up as defenders and purveyors of an insipid moral relativism and behavioral libertinism” (17).<\/p>\n

I have myself studied “apostasy” (Finding Faith, Losing Faith: Stories of Conversion and Apostasy<\/a>\"\"
\n<\/strong><\/em>) so this book naturally interests me. I believe pastors and college professors and chaplains, not to say parents and siblings and friends, could have some serious interest in Hempton’s studies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On this blog we have given lots of attention to faith and science and the struggle scientists have with the orthodox Christian faith. What about artists? I read this statement not long ago and want to have a conversation about it: “For all the well-known and oft debated problems associated with reconciling faith and science,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicalism"],"yoast_head":"\nArtists Struggling with Evangelicalism 1 - Jesus Creed<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2009\/01\/artists-struggling-with-evange.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Artists Struggling with Evangelicalism 1 - Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On this blog we have given lots of attention to faith and science and the struggle scientists have with the orthodox Christian faith. What about artists? I read this statement not long ago and want to have a conversation about it: “For all the well-known and oft debated problems associated with reconciling faith and science,…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2009\/01\/artists-struggling-with-evange.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-01-13T00:10:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/jesuscreed\/files\/import\/imgs\/Hempton.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Scot McKnight\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Artists Struggling with Evangelicalism 1 - Jesus Creed","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2009\/01\/artists-struggling-with-evange.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Artists Struggling with Evangelicalism 1 - Jesus Creed","og_description":"On this blog we have given lots of attention to faith and science and the struggle scientists have with the orthodox Christian faith. 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