Coming to grips with the Age of Reason: An analysis of the new evangelical intellectual agenda, 1942-197

This study analyzes the intellectual agenda of the new evangelicals from 1942-1970. It demonstrates the struggles that the new evangelicals had in their attempt to make evangelicalism intellectually credible. The chapters in this study analyze the intellectual background from which the new evangelicals emerged, the new evangelical repudiation of fundamentalism's lack of concern for intellectual credibility, the fundamentalist opposition to the new evangelicals, the intellectual agenda of the new evangelicals, and the intellectual vision of Edward John Carnell. This study concludes that the new evangelicals made strides forward in their attempt to make evangelicalism intellectually credible, but failed to get beyond the entrapments of the theological issues of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. As a result, the new evangelicals spent most of their intellectual energy on theological issues rather than wider intellectual concerns. The new evangelicals were also sidetracked by a bitter war they had waged with fundamentalists as well as a significant amount of divisiveness between themselves.;This study has analyzed the intellectual contributions of Edward Carnell to new evangelicalism. His correspondence and his writings have demonstrated that he understood the intellectual needs of evangelicalism in a way that many of his peers failed to comprehend. He understood the necessity of letting go of the negative image of fundamentalism as a first step toward an intellectually relevant new evangelicalism. He understood as well the theological trappings of dispensational premillennialism that was associated with fundamentalism and the need to move beyond them to a much broader, tolerant theological tradition.;The new evangelicals influenced the present generation of evangelical intellectuals, but the overall intellectual focus continued to show more concern for theological issues rather than the wider academic concerns of which the new evangelicals originally set out to pursue.