Post Series
0—Intro
1—Fundamentalism (Kevin Bauder)
2—Confessional Evangelicalism (Al Mohler)
3—Generic Evangelicalism (John Stackhouse)
4—Postconservative Evangelicalism (Roger Olson)
5—Conclusion and Reflection
I received a new book yesterday from Zondervan (whom my wife works for [disclaimer alert!]) that excites me because of its content and scope: Four Views on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism
all is not so clear within the evangelical camp either. Simply labeling ourselves evangelical no longer suffices. We are conservative, progressive, post conservative, and pre progressive evangelicals. We are traditional, creedal, biblical, pietistic, anti creedal, ecumenical, and fundamentalist. We are “followers of Christ” and “Red Letter Christians.” (9)
And then the kicker: “We are everything, so we are nothing.” (9)
Exactly.
There is this sense nowadays, at least from my estimation, that the term evangelical means little to nothing because it means so much. Contemporary expressions of evangelicalism seem to be moving in several directions all at once. And it doesn’t make matters any better when a prominent president of a prominent evangelical seminary says of Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins “I find nothing in his Love Wins book that violates the standards of a broad Evangelical orthodoxy.”
At times like these I want to join a certain rap artist in asking, “Will the real evangelical please stand up?”
Insert into the conversation this new book with four perspectives on evangelicalism from four able “representatives”: Kevin Bauder (Fundamentalism), Al Mohler (Confessional Evangelicalism), John Stackhouse (Generic Evangelicalism) and Roger Olson (Postconservative Evangelicalism).
This book aims to let each of these representatives of these four points along the spectrum of evangelicalism to define evangelicalism and locate their view in historical context. Along the way they address how they understand Scripture and authority, while also addressing three recently contested issues within evangelicalism: Christian cooperation, particularly between evangelicals and Catholics; open theism, to illustrate their views on doctrinal boundaries; and penal substitutionary atonement, to illustrate a key doctrinal issue relating to the gospel. Then after each contributor establishes their arguments and perspective, the other contributors give critique and pushback in a surprisingly irenic tone.
Of course the world evangelical is rooted in the NT use word euangelion, meaning good news, which relates to “the coming of Jesus Christ and his ministry to usher in the Kingdom of God.” (10) And Luther and the Reformers—from whom our Protestant lineage we owe—were the ones who came to be known as evangelicals, because of their criticism of the Roman Catholic Church and concern for the biblical gospel. And of course from the post-WWII organizing efforts of Okenga, Henry, and Graham we derive an even more, specific evangelical lineage in their task at unifying around and preaching the gospel.
The same is true today. We still bear this good news that Jesus Christ has fulfilled the messianic hopes of Israel—the Jesus Story has completed Israel’s Story, as Scot McKnight has recently argued in defining gospel—through the cross in his death for the sins of rebels and resurrection to bring new life/creation, and we take seriously the command to proclaim this good news and provoke people to repentance, belief, and baptism.
I will be interested to see where I myself land as I make my way through this book. Lord knows I’ve traversed the expanse of the evangelical spectrum, having grown up in fundamentalism, educated in both conservative (undergraduate) and generic (graduate) evangelicalism, moving into the post-evangelical/emergent world in my mid young adult crisis of faith period, and now oscillating somewhere along the middle I think.
My hope is that we as evangelicals would recapture this identity, and I expect each of these contributors to help remind us of it. From what I’ve read so far, the demeanor and tenor of their arguments and push backs should help create a good climate in which we can recapture and rediscover evangelicalism a new.
But first a question before we get to each of the four views: What is an evangelical? What does it mean to be evangelical?
