Godspell and “The Westminster Captivity of Evangelicalism”

Warning: My non-American readers may want to skip this one.

I have been planning to respond since reading Regent Divinity School’s Dale Coulter blogging about the perceived dominance of Westminster Theological Seminary in evangelical Christian theology in America. To crudely summarize a nuanced argument, Coulter believes that Reformed folk generally and Westminster Seminary particularly--news flash!--pursue an overly intellectualized form of theology that downplays the affections and experience. The occasionally strident emphasis of the so-called “New Calvinists” (some of whom are identified with Westminster Seminary-California) on defending the doctrine of justification also puts him off. Coulter’s comments on dropping the term “justification” from English language Bibles are also worthy of a comment.

I still plan to address both directly but attending Sunday's production of Godspell by the Regent University Theatre (I know, I know. You’re asking yourself: Why do they persist in the Anglophilic spelling of “theater”? But I digress.) gives me a chance to do a two-fer (or maybe even a three-peat).

The show was outstanding. The costumes, choreography, music, vocals, acting, staging, and every other production value were outstanding. Typical of Regent I hasten to add. We’ve owned season tickets for years and have gotten far more bang for the buck than we could rightfully expect.

But what has Godspell to do with Reformed theology, Westminster Seminary, or justification? Absolutely nothing. And that’s the point. Godspell purports to be drawn from Matthew's gospel but as I watched I saw nothing of any of Matthew’s accounts of Jesus’ birth or miracles. I listened attentively and heard only the most oblique reference to Jesus’ assertions of his divinity. And, for the life of me, based on Godspell, I have no clue why Jesus died. The purpose of his resurrection--in the words of Godspell’s Jesus--was to enable his post-intermission monochromatically-clothed followers to “build the city of man.” The Sixties live!*

Are the New Calvinists a bit obsessive about the doctrine of justification? Perhaps; it seems unlikely that N.T. Wright was in Paul’s sights in Galatians. Might they be guilty of an overemphasis on the intellect at the expense of the affections and experience? Hard to argue with that. Is the atonement more than forensic? Absolutely; it is grounded in union with Christ. Is the Gospel more than rectification of a legal relationship? You bet; the "gospel" is the announcement of the coming of God's Kingdom. But “god-spell” without what the old and new Calvinists called the penal substitutionary atonement is far less than the Gospel.


*Lest anyone mistake my critique of Godspell for criticism of the Regent University Theatre, remember (as I fully acknowledge) that Godspell is a musical, not systematic theology.