Mouw, Richard. Adventures in Evangelical Civility: A Lifelong Quest for Common Ground. Brazos Press, 2016. Originally this review was published here in Christian Courier.
Peter Schuurman
“I desire to have both heaven and hell ever in my eye, while I stand on this isthmus of life, between two boundless oceans. And I verily think the daily consideration of both highly becomes all men of reason and religion.”
I begin this review with a John Wesley quote from 1747 because in this intellectual memoir Richard Mouw identifies himself as a Kuyperian pietist who gives credence to Wesley’s conversion experience of having “a heart strangely warmed.” The main theme of the book is the common ground of human existence, the nexus where heaven and hell—and their theological counter-parts of common grace and the antithesis—play out their competing–and complementary–narratives.
I’ve heard Mouw speak a number of times, covered some of his thoughts in my writing for Christian Courier, and once–on the grounds of Princeton University at the 100th anniversary of Kuyper’s Stone Lectures–asked to shake his hand. I’ve read most of his books, and as a social philosopher who James K. A. Smith calls a predecessor, I see Mouw as a kind of mentor in social philosophy for me through the last three decades or so. I was grateful for his writing as a young campus minister at the turn of the millennium. Thankfully, he graciously agreed to shake my hand.
I’m glad he wrote this book, summarizing his intellectual legacy from his own perspective. Decades of his writing are summarized together in one book, with the benefit of hindsight along the way. He exemplifies what Nicholas Wolterstorff has called the key to a flourishing university culture: dialogical pluralism. An openness to a wide variety of worldviews that are accountable to engage earnestly with each other towards the common good.
This book is not a memoir of Mouw’s embodied life—there is no mention of his wife, his descendants, the congregational disputes he weathered or his travels across the globe. There is some mention of his days as professor at Calvin College and a few moments from his 20-year presidency at Fuller Theological Seminary in California. But the book is most deliberately an investigation of a theological theme that runs through his whole academic career: a passion to find common ground with those outside the church. More specifically, what that means is an enduring inquiry in the Kuyperian notion of common grace—divine favour directed to all humans, regardless of their final salvific status. In other words, heaven permeates earth beyond the church. The kingdom of God is vast, unbounded by our peccadilloes and passions, and mysterious in the best sense of the word.
Don’t get confused about my blog title: Mouw is not sinless or flawless in his philosophical theology. “Saint” is just a word for a Christian–any son or daughter of God who lives their life as if under the watchful eye of God. That is the Protestant take on the word, at least. But I do see Mouw as a good model of what it means to be a Christian scholar, and so if some of the connotations of “saint” bleed into your image of him, I think God doesn’t mind. In Lewis Smedes’ lingo, he seems like a “pretty good person” for a sinner with his own shades of creaturely brokenness and pain.
In his personal quest, Mouw lives up to the title—adventures in evangelical civility. He recounts his engagements with the work of Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes, as well as his debates with Anabaptist Yoder and the detractors of Neibuhr’s Christ and Culture. Mouw’s approach is gentle, always charitably “on the one hand” and then “on the other hand,” and never disrespectful or cynical about his critics. He is a little defensive at points where he feels he was misrepresented by others and he wants to set the record straight, although he states in the beginning he wanted to avoid such recounting. Memoirs should not be a last-ditched effort to get the last word. Yet engaging the disputes of the day is the life of a public intellectual—a title he accepts but attributes to a few “lucky breaks” in his career.
Mouw is a Reformed Evangelical, stating that a “thin” generic evangelicalism requires support from “thick” confessional streams and their ecclesiology. As others have said, “Evangelical is not enough.” But neither is Reformed systematics and philosophical rigour. He similarly insists Kuyperian movements need to retain Kuyper’s pietism—the heart-felt experience of God’s love. In fact, of the purported three strands of Dutch-Calvinism in North America—doctinalist, pietist, and culture-transforming—Mouw states, philosophical as he may be, “in the final analysis, I’m a pietist.” And in opposition to those who believe “culture-transforming” is the equivalent of “Kuyperian” he rebuts: “truth be told, I think Abraham Kuyper was also a pietist.” Kuyper led an exodus from the Dutch mainline denomination of his day, and penned many beautiful devotions, some of which are captured in his piously titled To Be Near Unto God. Mouw recognizes that pietists can be anti-intellectual, escapist, and sectarian. Yet he maintains that if our culture-transforming and ecumenical efforts are to flourish, they must be “guided by a personal and communal godliness, by hearts that desire the kind of holiness without which none shall see the Lord.”
So if holiness is something that you can’t find any relevance for as a Christian, there may be something missing in terms of your holistic spiritual development. It isn’t everything to the Christian life, but it certainly is one aspect of it. Apart from grace, it can be legalism. But it can be the workings of grace in the here and now.
I appreciate Mouw’s humility in two respects. For one, he states from the beginning: “I continue to worry a bit about my heavy reliance on commonness.” While his experience of church conflict and evangelical aggression turned him to pursue the virtue of civility, he recognizes that a new more tolerant generation may have the opposite challenge: they need to be encouraged to have resilient convictions. He worries: “my own preachments about civility could easily be encouraging serious theological decline.” That is quite the statement about his own life work! Ever wary of the brow-beating orthodox evangelist, Mouw still recognizes that the lines between civility, tolerance, and indifference can get pretty thin. Hell on earth—to which the antithesis draws our attention—still calls for our on-going vigilance, in our neighbours’ tradition and in our own hearts. The devil never sleeps. Which is to say, there are powers that seek to undermine the work of justice and peace in our world. Don’t be nonchalant about the call of the church and its discipled folk.
Mouw’s common grace worries are complimented by an appreciation for uncertainty. At the start, he declares theology to be what a Catholic professor called “a mystery discerning enterprise.” At the end of the book, Mouw reflects a little on his ecumenical adventures in dialogue with Catholics, Anabaptists, and Mormons and his practice of “bracketing” the apologetic and soteriological issues. These mostly positive experiences have got him wondering if common grace “may in the end time be revealed to be saving grace.” He’s got in some hot water for saying that, and he quickly admits such evangelical universalism is a hunch, not a biblical surety. He lives with a wide embrace. He concludes with Deut. 29:29: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever, to observe all the words of this law.”
This book is a chronicle of an intellectual journey that includes insight into Reformed and evangelical cultural dynamics through the last fifty years. I would be more critical than Mouw of the evangelical culture in the United States, especially of late; evangelical support for Trump has been controversial at best and disgraceful, if not appalling at worst. This older, reflective Mouw can be a little too nostalgic for me at times (see my deconstructive work here).
Although Mouw’s canonization as a Reformed saint is still pending, this is a gem of a book. It’s a beautiful academic memoir of a key Reformed public intellectual who has modelled with his mind and heart the depth, applicability, winsomeness, and grace of a Christian world and life view. Thanks, Professor Mouw.
Sensus Divinitatis 