Ronald Nash's Evangelicalism

Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason is an important contribution to the ongoing debate within evangelicalism about how to get along as a family of churches. Her narrative reveals how this family of churches has sought to grapple with inherited problems and the fractures between its Holiness-Pentecostal, Reformed-Baptist, and Mennonite-Brethren wings (Lutherans are absent; Anglicans occasionally appear). Different theological sources and emphases sometimes mean these camps talk past one another. Yet, by cataloguing the diversity of sources she succeeds in her stated aim of showing just how broad evangelical intellectual life is.

Having said that, her discussion of presuppositionalism within the evangelical world does not get at the full range of positions. Worthen rightly associates presuppositionalism as a stated method within the Reformed-Baptist arc of the evangelical world. But this presuppositionalism is largely discussed in terms of two streams, namely that flowing through the Westminster theologian Cornelius Van Till and that flowing through his Presbyterian nemesis Gordon H. Clark. One evangelical philosopher left out of her account who does not fit neatly in either of those camps is Ronald Nash, a Reformed Baptist who ran a program at Western Kentucky University for over two decades before retiring in 1991 to take another post at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando and then finishing out his career at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Nash trained a lot of students in the evangelical world.