Book Review for Week 7: Fitch, David, E., The Great Giveaway (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005)

David E. Fitch is  a pastor of Life on the Vine Christian Community of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Long Grove, Illinois, and is adjunct professor of ministry, theology, and ethics at Northern Seminary.

The Great Giveaway by David Fitch is a sweeping critique of the Evangelical Church in North America.  His thesis is that the message, purpose, and ethos of the larger Evangelical Church have been co-opted by, or have been given away to, the meta-narrative of capitalistic liberalism, and so this church has lost touch with its own meta-narrative given to it by scripture and Christian tradition.  After laying out this problem in the introduction, Fitch then devotes each of his chapters to different “marks” of the church, how each has been corrupted by this alien meta-narrative, and then he offers suggestions for how the Evangelical Church can reclaim these marks to become more authentically Christian.

The lens through which Fitch carries out his critique is postmodernism.  As a philosophical system, or school, which is essentially driven by a critique of modernism, postmodernism gives Fitch the tools with which he can examine the Evangelical Church’s compromising relationship with capitalistic liberalism—which is essentially modernism’s favorite son offering its own version of salvation, one which need be distinguished from the salvation offered by the favorite son of Christianity.  In fact, the main problem with modernist assumptions is that they don’t take into account the need for such distinctions.  Modernism, confidently wielding the tools of the scientific method, does not just believe that reality is all of one piece, but it mistakenly believes that the scientific method offers the only hermeneutic necessary for discovering this reality.  Postmodernism, however, questions such confidence. For instance, the truth buried in the Bible cannot just be dug up by an individual who can employ the historical critical method sufficiently.  Rather, such an individual brings a whole host of assumptions created by her situation in time and space to her reading of the Bible, and so all knowledge is a cultural construct.  For Fitch, then, the gospel cannot be understood outside of a strong, self-conscious community, which takes seriously the need to create disciples formed by a Biblical meta-narrative.  So the thrust of Fitch’s critique is leveled against the individualism that has invaded the Evangelical church and against the economic system that has, as its foundation, the promotion of the individual over the community.

In terms of my case study, I have been thinking about whether or not the phenomenon of a “Young Adults Fellowship” group can even be faithful to the type of vision that Fitch is promoting.  Because such a group often took the place of church for many of these 20-somethings, there was a way in which they were isolated from fellowship with both older and younger Christians who might be able to enrich their culture thereby giving them more of a “story” to bear fruit in their lives.  The tendency of Evangelical churches to separate and isolate the generations from each other, where those with a natural affinity for one another easily commune, seems antithetical to the gospel vision where Christ creates a new community of people, despite their differences. And can Fitch’s vision of the type of support offered in a healthy Christian community be adequately embodied in such a single generation group? His critique of the Evangelical
Church’s relationship to capital seems especially incisive.  When we bemoan the radical discrepancies between the rich and the poor and try to rally Evangelical support for our causes, how much of what we are trying to do is an uncritical embrace of a capitalistic ethos, which says that having the utter freedom to purchase is one of the greatest goods there is. Rather, Fitch offers that a greater good is promoting a mutual interdependence between members of a church community so that when needs arise people don’t immediately look for an economic escape from the freedom of want but look towards each other for other kinds of support as well.  But this support seems to necessarily imply the participation of a range of members at different stages of life.  So, for my case study, I will want to introduce a model of multi-generational kinds of fellowship.