Skip to main content

What is evangelicalism?

My question to readers about Mark Noll has drawn only one response thus far, but what helpful response! I've finally gotten around to reading the link Ian provided. I find the term 'Evangelical' to be frustratingly vague. It tells me very little about the beliefs of the person I am dealing with. The Wikkipeida entry wasn't much help either. This is taken from a review of Mark Noll's Is the Reformation Over? The author, Carl Trueman, a Reform churchman, is not as optimistic as Noll about the prospects for a post Reformation Church:
To cut to the chase: what is evangelicalism? It is a title I myself identify with on occasion, especially when marking myself off from liberalism, another ill-defined, amorphous, transdenominational concept. But in a world where there are "evangelicals" who deny justification by faith as understood by the Protestant Reformers, who deny God's comprehensive knowledge of the future, who deny penal substitutionary atonement, who deny the Messianic self-consciousness of Christ, who have problems with the Nicene Creed, who deny the Chalcedonian definition of Christ's person, who cannot be trusted to make clear statements on homosexuality, and who advocate epistemologies and other philosophical viewpoints which are entirely unprecedented in the history of the orthodox Christian church, it is clear that the term "evangelical" and its cognates, without any qualifying adjective, such as "confessional" or "open" or "post-conservative", is in danger of becoming next to meaningless. And, even when one qualifies the noun in these ways, it is not immediately clear that one is then talking about subsets or modifications of a single, overarching, coherent movement. Indeed, there are many ways in which I, as a confessional, Reformed Christian, have far more in common with many Roman Catholic theologians than others who routinely claim the title of evangelical. After all, there are evangelicals who repudiate almost all the cardinal points of faith which Protestants and Catholics at the Reformation held in common and which were never disputed. Mark Noll is obviously not such, and his own vision of evangelicalism is clearly a gracious, thoughtful, orthodox and in many ways attractive one; but I am not convinced that the definition of evangelicalism which underlies this book is strong enough to enable the realization of that vision or to allay my fears about the movement as a whole, if indeed it is meaningful to speak of it as a single movement. The key to understanding evangelicalism in relation to Catholicism seems to me to lie in part in understanding the crucial difference between the Catholic Church as an institution with clearly defined doctrinal commitments, and evangelicalism as a broad, trans-institutional movement with a vested interest in framing its doctrinal commitments at the level of complexity which the coalition can sustain. The result is that evangelicalism as a movement will always tend towards an ideal of mere Christianity. And that is fine, providing it is understood that this will in turn always tend to attenuate evangelicalism's connection to the past and thus limit its capacity to draw coherently upon that past. In this context, one might add that the current predilection in some evangelical quarters for using the language of postmodernism for revisioning or reconceptualising theology seems less a radical revolution in evangelical thinking and more the appropriation of the latest academic idiom for playing the well-established traditional evangelical game of non-dogmatic, lowest-common denominator, mere Christianity.
This answers why I can find myself in agreement with some who use the term, while being puzzled by others. What do the groups have in common? Well, dissent - but grasping the degree and form of dissent helps understanding tremendously. Both reject the historical church for various reasons, but for some the historical church is an eccesiastical structure, some of whose teaching can be redeemed. For others, it's more like the whole things needs to be reinvented from top to bottom: structure, teachings, all based on present ideas about the past more than real history. It's rather pessimistic view, IMHO. Admissable evidence is defined too narrowly, and faith and reason are simplistically opposed. I haven't read Noll's book but I wonder if he had in mind the former group, while Trueman has the later. Myself, I share Noll's optimism about the first group and Trueman's pessimism about the later group. I also see the radical dissenters as inherently fractious and unlikely allies of anyone, even each other.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reuters joins CNN on the bench

Makes room for CanWest to join the majors Kudos to CanWest for calling a terrorist a terrorist . Many, including The Last Amazon , will be happy to hear it. Reuters is among the worst of the major western news services, where I would also place the BBC and the CBC. Unsurprisingly, Reuters is not happy about the changes CanWest made to Reuters wire stories: Our editorial policy is that we don't use emotive words when labeling someone," said David A. Schlesinger, Reuters' global managing editor. "Any paper can change copy and do whatever they want. But if a paper wants to change our copy that way, we would be more comfortable if they remove the byline." Mr. Schlesinger said he was concerned that changes like those made at CanWest could lead to "confusion" about what Reuters is reporting and possibly endanger its reporters in volatile areas or situations. "My goal is to protect ...

Wordpress

My move to Mac has been very happy except for two issues - gaming and blogging. For websurfing and multimedia, a Mac is of course a terrific machine. Games on the Mac platform are often ports of games made for the larger PC market and that means a Mac gamer will have to wait for the port. I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I am very happy that the Mac port of Civilization 4 is finally here. Well, my copy isn't here quite yet - but it has been ordered and ought to be here soon. The blogging issue is more complicated. I'm not fond of writing my posts in a browser window. This goes back to when I was first blogging and I lost one or two large posts into the ether. After that I moved to w.bloggar - a great little app that let me compose on my desktop and then click send when all was said and done. I have not been able to recreate that experience on my Mac, and not for a lack of trying! I looked at Marsedit , but that forces you to compse while staring at a bunch of HMT...

A very limited form of inquiry

Real Clear Politics is carrying commentary on James Q. Wilson's WSJ article on ID (got that?). Wilson, the respected social scientist, gets it mostly right when he says that ID is not science because it can't be tested: So ID is not science. Does this mean that science, in any way, implies the non-existence of God? No. Does this mean that belief in God is irrational and that we should all be "free thinkers"? No. Does this mean that it is impossible to arbitrate between various theories of the existence/non-existence of God and come to some reasonable conclusions? No. Does this mean that we cannot say that humanity is meant to exist? No. In other words, rationality outside of science is quite possible, and has been around for a long time. How do you think humanity invented science in the first place? We surely did not do it scientifically. Science as we know it is the product of millennia of philosophical debate -- from Aristotle to Lakatos. Science depends upon phi...