When I taught philosophy there on a visiting stint in the early 1980s, the theology faculty had become thoroughly entrenched in liberalism. One prominent theologian with whom I spoke was openly disdainful of the school’s orthodox origins. “None of that has any appeal to the younger generation today,” he said.

During the debate over “biblical inerrancy” that raged among evangelicalism for several years in the late 1970s, I remember someone observing that Harold Lindsell’s 1976 book, The Battle for the Bible, which pretty much got that debate going, was more a theory of institutional change than it was about theology as such. That observation made sense to me. While there were some important theological issues at stake, there was also much reliance on the “slippery slope” image, as well as on the story of the camel who, once allowed to put his nose in the tent, eventually moved in to stay. When a key doctrine is abandoned or modified, the argument went, there is no turning back. For evangelicalism, this meant that departing from theology of strict biblical inerrancy could only mean an inevitable move in the direction of consistent liberalism.

Empirical claims about institutional dynamics have to be open to counter-examples, and an interesting one in the theological world these days can be seen at the Free University—Vrije Universiteit—in Amsterdam, a school founded by the great Calvinist theologian-statesman Abraham Kuyper. When I taught philosophy there on a visiting stint in the early 1980s, the theology faculty had become thoroughly entrenched in liberalism. One prominent theologian with whom I spoke was openly disdainful of the school’s orthodox origins. “None of that has any appeal to the younger generation today,” he said. When I pointed out to him that the largest religious youth movement in the Netherlands at the time was Youth for Christ, he scoffed: “That’s just a temporary blip on the screen.”

Two decades later I had a more pleasant conversation with a theologian at the university who scoffed at the very liberalism that had dominated the scene in his earlier years. And he too appealed to the younger generation, but in this case in a very different way. He had been caught up, he confessed, in the liberal theology that he had studied at the Free University, until he was challenged by his teenage daughter. He had been a guest preacher at a local Reformed congregation one Sunday, and at their family dinner afterward his daughter told him that she found nothing in his sermon that spoke to her own spiritual concerns. “My generation needs to hear the Gospel,” she told her father. “Your kind of theology does not touch our lives.” That challenge, he told me, forced him to re-think much of what he had been teaching and preaching. “I don’t even read recent theology anymore,” he told me. “For me it is all about the solid teachings of the early Fathers.”

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