Journal: Southeastern Theological Review
Volume: STR 12:2 (Fall 2021)
Article: The Importance Of Being Earnest: Evangelicalism’s Aesthetics Of Sincerity
Author: Karen Swallow Prior

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The Importance Of Being Earnest: Evangelicalism’s Aesthetics Of Sincerity

Karen Swallow Prior

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

Abstract: A recent debate between theologians James Eglinton and Michael Bird illuminates questions about the aesthetics of evangelicalism, in particular the place and limits of its characteristic earnestness. Historically and theologically, this earnestness arose against a backdrop of the earlier eighteenth century marked by sharp religious and political divisions which served as a breeding ground for satire—a mode or aesthetic that is in many ways the opposite of earnestness. Yet, even in as emblematic a satirical work as Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, earnest, even fervent, religious commitments prevail, albeit through indirection. The spirit of seriousness that undergirded the evangelical movement and, later, the ethos of the Victorian era hinders a dialogism more prone to cultivating a genuine and authentic faith, particularly within the context of the later modern age depicted by the philosopher Charles Taylor. Inasmuch as style is substance, the circumspect posture of humor is its own kind of earnestness.

Key Words: Charles Taylor, earnestness, evangelicalism, humor, Jonathan Swift, satire, Systemic Theology

All human language—even the language of the Bible—is varied in its richness, layerings, and depths. Literary language—especially the language of the Bible—is even more so. To read the Bible literally requires reading it literarily, with an eye for all the ways in which words communicate—directly and indirectly, straightforwardly and sideways, seriously and humorously, earnestly and ironically. This is the essence of hermeneutics: reading a text in such a way so as to understand not merely the words themselves but their meaning.

Earnestness And Edmund Gosse

The devastating results of a hermeneutic derived from a flat understanding of language, a hermeneutic that fails to consider the literariness of the Bible’s language, including its use of narrative, poetry, symbol, and other figures of speech, is shown dramatically, tragically, in the life and works of English poet, critic, and biographer Edmund Gosse. Gosse,

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whose life spanned from 1849 to 1928, lived in the wake of evangelicalism’s peak influence in England’s Victorian era, an age known—like the evangelicals themselves—for its earnestness.1

The only child of his evangelical parents, Gosse was raised in his father’s belief that his child was among the elect and in his mother’s hope that “I should be the Char...