Product Description

Renewing the Center has been an influential catalyst for many in the emerging church. With a new foreword by Brian McLaren and a new afterword from John Franke, the second edition updates the book for the contemporary church scene and shows how Stanley Grenz's theological insights continue to shape postmodern church movements.

In this book, Grenz challenges evangelical Christians to take stock of their faith and its relationship to the world around them. According to the author, "The postmodern condition calls Christians to move beyond a polarity that knows only the categories of 'liberal' and 'conservative' and thus pits so-called conservatives against loosely-defined liberals. The way forward is for evangelicals to take the lead in renewing a theological 'center' that can meet the challenges of the postmodern--and in some sense post-theological--situation in which the church now finds itself."

Grenz begins with a historical survey, considering the influence of two major strands within evangelicalism. He goes on to sketch a creative vision for a renewed evangelical theology that faces the intellectual challenges of its time. He further envisions an "evangelical center" through the establishment of a "generous orthodoxy" that enables the church to fulfill its mission in the world.

Renewing the Center is an important book for professors and students of theology, pastors, and church leaders.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #573592 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780801031816
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Library Journal
A leading voice among American theologians, Grenz (theology and ethics, Carey/Regent Coll., British Columbia) builds upon and advances the discussion begun in his Revisioning Evangelical Theology. The first four chapters explain the "three concentric circles of evangelical theological history": the Reformation, the Evangelical revival of the 18th century, and modern conservative evangelicalism. The second half of the book is devoted to the author's call for a critical appropriation of postmodern insights for evangelical theological tasks. Grenz rejects the present "two-party system" of an orthodox commitment to an "external definable, and transcendent authority" and the "progressive" commitment to "resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life." He calls for a "generous orthodoxy, read through the lenses of conservative piety" that is left without too detailed a definition but is doctrinal in orientation and focuses on the gospel of salvation by faith. Perhaps in his future studies Grenz will spell out more of what this means in terms of specific doctrines and actionable policies. Recommended for public and academic librariesDEugene O. Bowser, Univ. of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"... bears all the virtues that one expects from a book by Stanley Grenz: clarity, fair-mindedness, thoughtfulness, comprehension, and faithfulness." -- -Gary Dorrien, Kalamazoo College

"Grenz presses the question of whether evangelicalism can embrace a doctrine of the Church that is believably universal and comprehensive." -- -The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus Editor in Chief, First

"His exposition is a tour de force that commands our attention, and merits our gratitude." -- -J. I. Packer, Regent College

"I highly recommend this book and hope that it receives the wide reading that it so richly deserves." -- -Ken Collins

"This is a book to be read carefully, more than once, in conversation with friends." -- -Robert A. Pyne, Dallas Theological

"This is an important and provocative book... Stan Grenz has set forth an interpretation that cannot be ignored." -- -Timothy George,

From the Inside Flap
According to Stanley Grenz, "The postmodern condition calls Christians to move beyond . . . [a] polarity that knows only the categories of 'liberal' and 'conservative' and thus pits so-called conservatives against loosely defined liberals. . . . The way forward is for evangelicals to take the lead in renewing a theological 'center' that can meet the challenges of the postmodern, and in some sense post-theological, situation in which the church now finds itself."

Grenz begins with a historical survey, considering the influence of two major strands within evangelicalism. He goes on to sketch a creative vision for a renewed evangelical theology that faces the intellectual challenges of its time. He further envisions an "evangelical center" through the establishment of a "generous orthodoxy" that enables the church to fulfill its mission in the world.

Stanley J. Grenz (D.Theol., University of Munich) is the Pioneer McDonald Professor of Theology and Ethics at Carey Theological College and professor of theology and ethics at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author or coauthor of over twenty books.

Customer Reviews

Read it and decide about the premises for yourself
I write this to encourage you to look beyond the only customer review this far. For example, start by simply clicking above to view all of the editorial reviews of this book. Many good minds have commended it to you.

I'd hate to see you decide not to read this book based on one other person's conclusions. I happen to disagree with him about the 'faulty historical premises', 'fallacies', 'tired old dichotomy' and 'caricatures'. But this is not the place to argue that. If you don't have your mind made up in agreement with that critic about this one, basic premise, then I encourage you to read the book and then decide what you think.

Intriguing, but based on faulty historical premises
This is a well-written and intriguing book that ultimately fails to deliver on its promise to provide a way to renew the theological center. The book's proposals are based on well-worn phrases that caricature nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelicalism. Grenz is still pushing the old fallacy we saw as far back as the 1970s in books like Theodore Dwight Bozeman's book on Scottish Common Sense and Baconianism. That fallacy is this: intellectual types like the Princetonians were the only ones who believed in the inerrancy of Scripture. Pietists in the Anabaptist and holiness and other anti-Calvinist movements did not buy this Enlightenment line until the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, when they felt intimidated by the liberals and higher critics into casting their lot with the Fundamentalists, thereby taking shelter in that movement.

The implication of this is that tired old dichotomy that evangelicalism can be divided into doctrinaire and pietist wings. But things are not that uncomplicated and neat. There is an apparently neglected body of research that shows all manner of pietists, Anabaptists, holiness, Arminians, Restorationists, Mormons, etc., etc., who held strong notions of propositional revelation and the inerrancy of the autographs before the the Princetonians had time to have an impact on the intellectual landscape of American Christianity. Grenz's data is very obviously based on secondary sources, and then they are the best known historical works, rather than scholarly articles or monographs that provide counterevidence to the thesis on which his book is based (intellectualism vs. pietism).

I realize that the wisdom he appeals to is quite conventional (e.g., Calvinist Joel Carpenter's assertion that inerrancy is not the kind of category that Wesleyans related to, etc.), yet if he had probed beneath the surface, even reading sermons, periodical articles, and other "non-theological" sources from uneducated pietists in early nineteenth-century American Christianity, he would have found that the dichotomy on which his book is based is a caricature, and he would have had to retool the way he explains the "Princetonian" and "Fundamentalist" reliance on "Enlightenment categories."

One more thing that I found disappointing from a scholar of Grenz's magnitude. In discussing the "Neo-Evangelical movement," he said that "some in the movement" held to the dictation theory of biblical inspiration, yet he didn't go on to cite any sources. This is just irresponsible.

I am sympathetic to some of the proposals Grenz made in the final chapter of his book, particularly about ecclesiology, and I do think we must reckon with postmodernism. Yet, I think we must get our account of just how modernism impacted evangelicalism beyond caricatures and easy dichotomies if we are to understand how to forge a viable evangelical theological witness in a postmodern context.

caving in to postmodernism
This is a book that reveals the breadth of what has become "evangelicalism" and reveals the degree to which evangelicals have capitualted to postmodernism to their own detrement. For example, Grenz on how we respond to other religions reaches the startling conclusion that our answer will come from the question: "Which theologising community articulates an interpretive framework that is able to provide the transcendent vision for the construction of the kind of world that the particular community itself is in fact seeking?" (p281). Clearly each religious community believes that its own vision is the best way to produce the kind of community it desires - but the question remains, who or what decides whether any goal or approach that pertains to any particular community is valid or superior to another? Without any obvious recourse to objective Truth (i.e. the revelation of Scripture) we are left helpless and only able to offer "well it works for me" apologetic. Grenz's reluctance to talk in Truth categories risks producing a "Christianity" that is so far removed from that of the New Testament as to be unrecognisable. It is right that Christians engage with our postmodern world and seek to understand it and respond to it - but this response causes me great concern.