Did you know that Vincent Van Gogh went through an intensely evangelical phase in the 1870's? That he taught Sunday School, and attended prayer meetings and preached in Richmond Wesleyan Methodist Church? It didn't last of course. But his spiritual journey is one of the fascinating stories told in David Hempton's latest book, Disenchanted Evangelicals. There are seven studies of people who moved away from an earlier enthusiastic, dogmatic and activist Evangelicalism. Each study allows Hempton to explore important evangelical social attitudes related to the move from Evangelicalism to a more open, liberal, pluralist or secular faith position. It would be a mistake to invest those words with negative head-shaking disapproval – an attitude far too readily available to evangelicals as first response to those inner shifts in others that signal the movement of personal conviction and faith commitment in new directions.
Reading the stories of these all too human people, and Hempton's sympathetically critical study of what was going on in their inner lives and outer circumstances, it becomes clear that these were people of strong principle, thoughtful criticism, ethical passion, and open-eyed honesty about the theological limitations, social consequences, psychological costs and moral censoriousness, of Evangelicalism as they encountered it, and for varying lengths of time were enamoured with and lived it. Their disenchantment with a form of Christianity that had initially been the driving force of their lives, points to a number of perceived shortcomings in Evangelicalism as a movement and form of Christianity, which for them called in question the capacity of Evangelicalism to sustain faith in the rapidly changing world of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The story of George Eliot's evolution away from evangelical principles to a highly moralised form of agnostic humanism provides a superb case study in moral analysis. The laser-like precision with which George Eliot homed in on hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, dogmatic bullying, culture-denying piety, masculine chauvinism and much else, made it impossible that a mind so ruthlessly honest would for long tolerate, what she increasingly pereived as a full contrary mindset. Eliot's celebrated demolition of Dr Cumming's fundamentalism in her essay in the Westminster Review is here placed in the context of her later backward looking critique. It still reads as an extended moral exposure of malign tendencies Eliot believed were endemic to Evangelical piety; this piece of irresistible polemic should be set reading for evangelicals who suffer from yet another of the afflictions Eliot lampooned – smugness.
Then there's the chapter on Van Gogh. Hempton makes no attempt to add to the varied explanations of Van Gogh's psychological and mental ill-health. He is too good a historian to be caught out in the reductionism that often underlies such analysis, diagnosis and too confident conclusions. Instead he explores Vincent's letters, the available biographical material, and some of the paintings, to trace the spiritual development that occurs within the heart and mind of one whose inner anguish and whose art, whose faith and way of coping with life's demands, embodies one of the key moments in the fortunes of Christianity in late modernity. The chapter is sub-titled Evangelicalism and Secularization. The 'hard pilgrimage' of Van Gogh, from doctrinally strident Dutch Reformed orthodoxy, through Wesleyan Methodism and evangelistic mission work, to a faith position removed to another intellectual universe, is traced by Hempton in a chapter worth the price of the whole book. he provides an analysis of three paintings which offer a different master narrative of the secularizatuion process. This section of the book is much too important to skip over. I'll include a fuller post on it as the next stage of this review.
On a different note altogether, Ian represented our College at a recent colloquium on Baptist Hermeneutics held at South Wales Baptist College in Cardiff. He's doing several posts on it over at the College Blog.
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