From The Margins A Celebration Of The Theological Work Of Donald W. Dayton

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 30 (2008) 147-191

Christian T. Collins Winn, ed., From the Margins: A Celebration of the Theological Work of Donald W. Dayton (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2007). xiii + 433 pp.

There are few more deserving of a Festschrift than Donald Dayton. His multifaceted work has decisively inﬂuenced a generation of scholars, myself included. He has changed the way many of us see and understand theological movements, and shaped the way we go about our own work as historians or theologians. Quite simply, he has made a diﬀerence, and for that we are grateful.

This is a well-conceived text that covers the breadth of Dayton’s work. T ose familiar with only a portion of his writing will be surprised if not amazed by the scope of his inter- ests: Wesley, Barth, Pietism, Methodism, the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, Evan- gelicalism, global Christianity, ecumenism, women’s studies, and popular religious culture. Dayton has made his mark in each of these areas.

In light of this, we are fortunate that the major portion of this volume consists of twelve well-chosen essays by Dayton, each representing a diﬀerent area of interest. Four are previ- ously unpublished. The previously published essays range from as early as 1976 until as late as 2004. Simply to collect these articles in one volume in itself makes this a valuable text.

Eleven of the essays have pairs of respondents. Most of these responses are short, helpful reﬂections that often link testimony of Dayton’s impact on the writer with explaining the signiﬁcance of his work for scholarship. Some of the responses — such as Amos Yong’s on the John Fletcher debate between Dayton and Laurence Wood, or Frank Macchia’s fresh reading of Barth and Warﬁeld on Scripture — are signiﬁcant contributions in themselves.

The volume is opened by a perceptive introduction by the editor, identifying ﬁve key aspects of Dayton’s thought. Tese themes include “phenomenological analysis,” “a theo- logically informed hermeneutic of suspicion,” “the ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis as liberation theology,” “the constitutive relation of theology and ethics,” and, perhaps, Dayton as a “the- ologian of hope” (xix-xxii). The evidence for these themes is amply provided by Dayton’s essays themselves. The volume concludes with a lengthy autobiographical response by Day- ton that illumines much about his struggles, inﬂuences, and developing concerns. While worrying about the imprecision of such terms as “margin” and “center” (412), Dayton goes on to acknowledge that he “often worked from the ‘margins’ as a deliberate strategy of change that avoids a direct attack on the center from the center” (423). This is, he says, the way he has observed change occurring both historically and sociologically through both the Holiness and Pentecostal movements.

In my own opinion after reading these essays, Dayton is a happy subversive, intent on overthrowing commonplace but oppressive interpretations and replacing them with more accurate, liberative ones. He has a number of strategies for doing this. One is simply to tell untold stories and discuss unread texts, which by their sheer numbers and pervasiveness demand new historical interpretations. Best-known is his recovery of evangelical social radi- calism in the nineteenth century, including antislavery, women’s rights, and a concern for the poor. It is a story some still do not want to hear. Douglas Strong notes that “both secu- lar historians and the religious right have a vested interest in maintaining the usual carica- tures regarding evangelical attitudes towards social concerns” (45). Yet increasingly, Dayton’s scholarship is having its eﬀect even there.

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 30 (2008) 147-191

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Dayton also subverts common understandings by providing fresh readings to familiar texts and ﬁgures, most notably in his work on Barth. And ﬁnally, he has insisted that the voices of marginalized Christians today, mostly found in the Two-T irds World, be taken seriously and on their own terms .

Dayton seeks to expose the ideological commitment behind common understandings of who is at the center and who is on the margins, whether of Reformed Evangelicalism or liberal ecumenism. Hence his challenge to those who put the Princeton theologians, rather than Finney, revivalism, and the Holiness movement, at the center of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism in his “The Search for Historical Evangelicalism” essay. Likewise, in his “Yet Another Layer of the Onion: Or, Opening up the Ecumenical Door to Let the Riﬀraﬀ In,” Dayton argues that the ecumenical movement, “while supposedly more objective and criti- cal, is shaped by implicit theological commitments that place themselves at the center and rule out the data that would challenge its assumptions” (292). Such a “condescending” (418) attitude prevents ecumenists from listening to Holiness, Pentecostal, and Keswick voices, much less appreciating their potential contributions to the ecumenical church.

The results of Dayton’s subversive scholarship is evident throughout this volume: He argues for the dominance of the “Pentecostal” paradigm over the “Presbyterian” as an inter- pretation of Evangelicalism, Pietism over scholastic inerrancy in understanding Scripture, the social radicalism inherent in Wesleyan and Holiness movements, and embourgeoise- ment as the driving factor moving Methodists from Wesley to liberalism and Holiness and Pentecostals to inerrancy and neo-fundamentalism.

What struck me most in reading these articles — some of which I read decades ago — was their sheer freshness and intellectual power. T ey have lost none of their ability to inform, challenge, and illumine. If you have not read Dayton, or have not read him in a while, I strongly recommend this volume. It indeed honors Donald Dayton, but it is a gift to us all.

Reviewed by Henry H. Knight III

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