Restive Evangelicals

There stands the suffering Christ, crowned with thorns, waiting to be crucified. He is draped in the American flag; the picture bears the legend, “And they crucified Him.” Thus page one of Volume I, Number 1 of the religious journal Post-American. There is valid theology and precedent behind the depiction of Jesus as suffering at one’s own hands or those of one’s countrymen. Rembrandt painted his own face on a Roman soldier standing by the Cross, and during World War II a Swiss artist scandalized his pompatriots with a Crucifixion in which the soldiers wore Swiss army helmets. With the post-American, however, it is clear that the message is not, “we too are guilty,” but rather “America alone is guilty.”

What’s remarkable is that the post-American was founded by students of the theologically conservative Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Although Trinity belongs to a small denomination of Swedish origin, the Evangelical Free Church of America (1972 membership 70,500), it is the sixth largest Protestant seminary in the United States and is continuing to grow while older and more famous schools languish. Trinity—and its students—are resolutely committed to the traditional Protestant view of the authority and absolute trustworthiness of the Bible, and for this reason it has become one of the major sources of evangelical ministers for a number of denominations whose own seminaries are more liberal.

HB

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Harold O. J. Brown

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There stands the suffering Christ, crowned with thorns, waiting to be crucified. He is draped in the American flag; the picture bears the legend, “And they crucified Him.” Thus page one of Volume I, Number 1 of the religious journal Post-American. There is valid theology and precedent behind the depiction of Jesus as suffering at one’s own hands or those of one’s countrymen. Rembrandt painted his own face on a Roman soldier standing by the Cross, and during World War II a Swiss artist scandalized his pompatriots with a Crucifixion in which the soldiers wore Swiss army helmets. With the post-American, however, it is clear that the message is not, “we too are guilty,” but rather “America alone is guilty.”

What’s remarkable is that the post-American was founded by students of the theologically conservative Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Although Trinity belongs to a small denomination of Swedish origin, the Evangelical Free Church of America (1972 membership 70,500), it is the sixth largest Protestant seminary in the United States and is continuing to grow while older and more famous schools languish. Trinity—and its students—are resolutely committed to the traditional Protestant view of the authority and absolute trustworthiness of the Bible, and for this reason it has become one of the major sources of evangelical ministers for a number of denominations whose own seminaries are more liberal.