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The Narrow Way: Gracing the Whole World

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The most exclusive claims about Jesus as the only way and teachings about Hell come from Jesus’ own teachings as recorded by all four Gospels. So if we are to take Jesus and the four Gospels seriously, we must reckon with these as his claims, not those of a later generation of church leaders. Paul’s, Peter’s, James’, and John’s epistles and Revelation reinforce these claims. If we take Scripture seriously as received from the Apostles and the Church fathers, we cannot and should not ignore these hard teachings of our Lord, nor should we abdicate to the “critical scholarship” from Jefferson to Bultmann to Bishop Spong that would create an enlightened Jesus that conforms to the image and likeness of modern man.

I Found It … And You Didn’t

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In 1976, bumper stickers and billboards appeared across America that said simply “I Found It!” Organized by Campus Crusade (now known simply as CRU) and disseminated through local congregations, the idea was that strangers would ask what had been found and you’d answer “Jesus” as an opportunity to share testimony or four spiritual laws. According to CRU’s material, 85% of all Americans were exposed to the campaign.
The following year I took my first sociology of religion course, one that redirected my career in wonderful ways. It was in that class that I learned that religious organizations operate on some definable sociological principles even as they maintain deep concerns about personal and social transformation. I have been blessed and cursed with that duality for over 35 years.
Today I look back at the “I Found It!” campaign with a different set of lenses that I used as a young adult in my Nazarene church in Indiana. When I look today, I see a dynamic that is central to understanding evangelicalism in America: the importance of separation between insiders and outsiders.

Topic #2: Evangelicalism and the Exclusivity of Christianity

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Evangelism is a core focus of American evangelicalism. The importance of preaching the gospel, sharing the faith, and reaching out to the lost is indicative of a particular attitude toward non-Christians. This in turn leads to a particular perspective on the purpose of dialogue with adherents of other religions, whether as individuals or as groups. In light of this commitment to evangelism, some “leading questions” are:

Evangelical Orthodoxy and Catholicity

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The introductory reflection included a basic orientation around these three terms and that they comprise, especially in the 21st century, the main branches of Christianity. When I think of orthodox Christianity in terms of confession and community I think of something like Paul’s “declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Ac 20:27) and the guarding of wholesome doctrine that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ as we have it in the NT. Based upon the “deposit of faith” (the “once for all revealed” Jude 3), we come to discover that Christianity has become so immense and diverse geographically and ethnically that none of these three broad communities is insufficient to encompass it. Fortunately, scripture and the Patristic tradition in confession and theology have become the common property of the world; anyone can avail themselves to it and benefit salvificly thereby.

What does “evangelical” really mean?

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there can be no doubt that evangelicals cannot claim to be “known by their love” as Jesus had hoped.  My intuition is that a new dictionary that defined “evangelical” in terms of its most common usage in public discourse today would produce an unflattering definition that would alarm most of us.

Evangelicals and the Stewardship of Words

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The depreciation of words makes it extraordinarily difficult to rehabilitate them.  “Let’s just get a new one,” many will say. But as someone who taught for a decade at an institution where the word “evangelical” meant something—Trinity Evangelical Divinity School—I’d like to argue for the hard work of resuscitating the word.

Future Questions

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I am sliding into this conversation from one of the “frames” that John Hawthorne uses to define the modern evangelicalism—the world of Christian higher education, represented largely by the institutions in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.  Having served now at four of these institutions, I have often found myself in the midst of earnest discussions about the current state of evangelicalism, whether as a panelist or simply an eavesdropper.  To my ear at least, efforts to define evangelicalism seem far more vital to institutional leaders and veteran faculty than they do for younger faculty and students, who often seem eager, as Sarah Ruden cogently observes, to be part of a movement that “doesn’t need to explain itself” but rather “just needs to be itself.”

“Evangelical” is an Adjective, not a Noun

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My story is similar to the one John Wilson told in his post, in that I was introduced to the terms “evangelical” and “evangelicalism” during my freshman year at Wheaton. Prior to that, I simply thought of myself as a Baptist Christian. Thereafter, I ran into “evangelicals” and “evangelicalism” everywhere. “Evangelical” became an all-pervasive noun, seemingly more important than the denominational traditions from which we came. That one was a Methodist or a Presbyterian or a Baptist seemed to matter far less being an Evangelical. Furthermore, some seemed to think (as many still do) that evangelical is basically synonymous with Christian. 

Imagining the Evangelical and Evangelical Positioning

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The term “evangelical” like the Gospel, is the common property of all Christians. As I come to this conversation, I am thinking about Wolfhart Pannenberg’s prediction about the 21st century: Christianity will be made up primarily of three groupings: Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical. When he chose to use he had at least two very broad orientations in mind: all three terms are essential to Christian self-description and “evangelical” has come to mean something which is both modern and orthodox, in contrast to a disappearing theological and ecclesiological liberalism where the reality of revelation through Christ is either completely malleable, de-centered and indeed, anthropocentric or only part of the historic symbology of the Christian religion and nothing more.

Lived Evangelicalism – Present Conditions and Future Possibilities

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As these first posts from our friends indicate, there is such a thing as evangelicalism understood from historical, theological, sociological and cultural perspectives, and then there are all sorts of evangelicalisms in their more popular forms that are lived out by all sorts of people in all sorts of churches with all sorts of understandings of what it means to “be” an evangelical.  It is evangelicalism at this more popular level I find fascinating with lived beliefs and practices that perhaps say more about who evangelicals are in their own self-understanding, and give us insight into present conditions and future possibilities.