What Evangelicals Can Learn From Their Fundamentalist Heritage, will be published in November. Mouw recently exchanged e-mail with The Atlantic 's Joshua Friedman. The changes have been extensive. As an evangelical college student in the late fifties and early sixties, I found the atmosphere very restrictive intellectually. Asking questions about basic theological issues was strongly discouraged.
Today there is a greater appreciation for the intellectual life.
Evangelical colleges and seminaries are more inclined these days to support good scholarship on the grounds that thinking clearly about things is a healthy activity for the Christian community. All of this has been helped along nicely by the emergence of a marvelous informal network of evangelical scholars, many of them teaching at evangelical schools, but others working at major secular universities. Good things have also been happening in the theological seminaries, but here the progress has been a little slower. Evangelicalism is a movement shaped by many theological battles of the past, and evangelicals tend to watch their theologians a little more closely than they do their philosophers, historians, and literati. Fuller is a refreshing place in this regard, and this is due in great part to David Hubbard, who led the school as president for thirty years.