Alex Davis


Critical Loyalty

March 12th, 2008

After granting that the content and thesis of Consuming Jesus are in themselves enough to establish its prophetic importance, Davis explores how the book’s implicit tone of loyalty to the evangelical movement can be understood as an especially potent prophetic power.  Beginning with an account of his own initially tepid reaction to the book, Davis goes on to propose that Metzger’s tone fits within a tradition of critical loyalty inseparable from Biblical history itself.  Critical loyalty, Davis suggests, has the strategic power to stir Christians blessed with a critical vantage of the church to consider anew what it means to be loyal to the church, and to ask how (and why) sharp criticism and faithful loyalty can (and should) be united.  He concludes the essay with a call for the proliferation of conversations and resources concerned with appropriate applications of critical loyalty to modern evangelicalism.

Critical Loyalty