May 24 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

Find similar articles E-mail this page

Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith
by Richard J. Foster, forword by Martin Marty, Harper SanFrancisco; 424 pp.; $20

A famous cover illustration from the heyday of the New Yorker showed a map of the United States, most of which was taken up by New York City. Evangelicals have been guilty of a similar kind of parochialism. In the mostly Baptist congregations where I grew up, we heard a lot about the first-century church. Then there was a huge historical blank until the Reformation; we heard a little—very little—about Martin Luther (not John Calvin) and a lot about Catholics, who had departed from Scripture. Oddly, there was almost nothing about how the Baptists started, how they related to the Reformation, and so on; we took another history-defying leap right into the twentieth century. Tradition? That was something Catholics bowed down to, a human creation usurping divine authority. We didn't need tradition; we just read the Bible, plain and simple.

But of course we were kidding ourselves. We were a tradition: the Evangelical Tradition. In the typology proposed in Richard Foster's new book, Streams of Living Water, this is one of six "great traditions" or "streams" that together constitute the rich heritage of Christian belief and practice. These include the Contemplative Tradition, focused on "a life of loving attention to God"; the Holiness Tradition, through which "we are enabled to live whole, functional lives in a dysfunctional world"; the Charismatic Tradition, focused on "a life immersed in, empowered by, and under the direction of the Spirit of God"; the Social Justice Tradition, calling us to "a life committed to compassion and justice for all peoples"; and the ...