Evangelicalism

"I’m a little scared. Yeah. Because I didn’t realize this until recently, and it’s logical, but I didn’t put it together in my own mind in quite the way I have now, which is that in order for Jesus to come back, the world has to end. It has to. So that means there is about 90 to 100 million people that are pretty excited about it. And that’s kind of problematic to those of us who don’t fucking believe that shit. Right? And a lot of those people are in legislative positions. And I’m sitting there thinking, like, “Wait, what’s happening?” Is there any way they’re– they’re crafting policy to accelerate the prophecy? [scattered nervous laughter] Yeah, think about that for a second. Not exactly humorous, but powerful. If you walked up to your state senator or maybe a congressman that was an evangelical, and they were honest, and you said, “I’m a little concerned about global warming. It seems like humans are causing it. We need to do something about it. It’s happening quickly.” They would say, “Not quick enough, to be honest with you. We’re trying to get the flying Jew back. We got coal going, you know, it’s happening. We’re deregulating as fast as we can. We’re gonna make this shit happen.” Problematic, correct?"

"The public upsurge of piety that became known as the Evangelical Revival in Britain and the Great Awakening in America did not arise out of thin air. Besides the direct influence on continental Pietism, it also benefitted from two movements closer to home. First was a powerful international network of dedicated Calvinists who read each other’s devotional works and eagerly followed news about Calvinist reforms elsewhere in Europe. This network enjoyed two strongholds in the English-speaking world. The Puritans in England, who had mobilized during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) in order to push the Protestant Reformation further, were joined by the Calvinists of Scotland, who were led by the indomitable John Knox, in their pursuit of personal godliness combined with national reform. When monarchs James I (1603-1625) and Charles (1625-1649) frustrated these efforts in England, several thousands Puritans migrated to the wilderness of New England in order to set up a “godly Commonwealth” of the sort that English circumstances prevented. Scottish Puritans and the Puritans of Old and New England retained a great deal of medievalism, especially an understanding of Christianity as always corporate or even national, as well as personal. But they also promoted innovations (like the personal conversion) and underscored specific teachings of the general Protestant inheritance (like the need for saving grace) that fed directly into later evangelical movements. The other home-grown influence came from an unlikely source. The High Church party in the Church of England stressed the more Catholic elements in Anglican tradition and also emphasized the necessity of loyalty to the monarch. Later evangelicals drew not so much from these matters of principle as from the practices these Anglicans used to pursue their goals. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, they created voluntary organization, more or less outside the boundaries of the official state church, and they stressed the need for disciplined personal religion and active social outreach. These self-conscious traditionalists also stressed the “primitive Christianity” of the New Testament and the early church as a corrective to their age’s worldliness. They sang the psalms and even a few newly written hymns as a means of encouraging holiness. Most significant, they organize “societies” to promote personal religion and exert an influence for God on society. Early evangelicals poured a new wine into what they inherited, but the wineskins often came from their High Church Anglican predecessors."

"The claim that participation in an evangelical Protestant church diminishes participation in political activity diverges from the current literature in two ways. First, the general relationship between religious and political involvement is a strong positive correlation. Putnam succinctly states the conventional wisdom by noting that churchgoers are substantially more likely to be involved in secular organizations, to vote and participate politically in other ways (Putnam, 2000). Wald (2003) discusses a small library of studies which draw this conclusion (Cassel, 1999; Hougland and Christensen, 1983; Maca-luso and Wanat, 1979; Martinson and Wilkening, 1987; Rosenstone andHansen, 1993). Such studies provide a number of complementary explanations for the positive relationship, including the development of civic skills (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, 1995), experience in democratic decision-making (Peterson, 1992), and development of community attachments (Strateet al., 1989). Wald notes a unifying theme across these studies, however, that applies to this analysis as well, Churches serve as social networks that seem to draw participants into public affairs (2003, p. 37). The argument here is that while evangelicals’ tight social networks facilitate sporadic mobilization, the process by which those networks are formed can also serve to deflate their levels of political activity."

"The term, Evangelical, has had a variety of meanings. In its origins, the words was synonymous with Protestant, albeit embodying a positive witness to the Gospel rather than a negative “protest.” This interchangeability of Evangelical and Protestant was found in the United States until about 1900 and is still common in Germany, France, and other parts continental Europe. In the United States and Great Britain, however, the label Evangelical has also become attached in a distinctive way to persons and institutions affected by the religious renewals or “Awakenings” that have periodically swept trough these lands. The First Great Awakening, associated with figures such as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Tennet family, reached its peak in the 1730s and 1740s. America's Second Great Awakening, tied to names including Charles Grandison Finney, Lyman Beecher, and Lorenzo Dow, ran roughly from 1800 to 1840. Some observers of the great Revivals of Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday, which spanned from 1873 to 1917, thought that they were living in a Third Great Awakening."

"In any case, the Evangelical spirit in this sense can be understood through certain commonalities: * The expectation of a personal conversion experience. To be a Christian involves a wrenching process of being “born again.” As understood from the time of Jonathan Edwards, this commonly starts with an overwhelming sense of one’s sinfulness, followed by throwing oneself on God’s mercy, followed next by an inpouring of the Spirit, or of grace, and completed by a deep sense of gratitude for being redeemed through Christ. The “born again” Christian subsequently turns with enthusiasm to evangelization, seeking to bring others to Christ. The process has often been encouraged by “revivals” that feature sermons, hymn sings, prayer meetings, and altar calls, often lasting a week or more. The Revival Tent became a symbol of this style of Evangelicialism. * Disregard for denominational lines The conversion experience pays no attention to ecclesiastical structures. Evangelists have eschewed distinctions between Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, and so on: born-again Evangelicals might be found in all of them or in unaligned congregations. In consequence, Evangelicals have held little regard for church hierarchy. They have focused instead on building institutions that met specific needs: mission societies; tract societies; and the like. In the late twentieth century, this array of specialized organizations would be called “para churches.” The Evangelical “anti vice” societies, described in detail in Chapter 1, stand as solid late nineteenth-century examples of the same phenomenon. *The Centrality of the Bible. The concept of Sola Scripture, or Scripture alone as a guide to Christian belief, is shared by all Protestants. However, given their disdain for church hierarchies, Evangelicals have given the authority of the Bible still greater emphasis. Most Evangelicals have also affirmed the inerrancy of Scripture: that every word, phrase, and passage is literal truth, directly inspired by God. Other common evangelical traits should be mentioned. These include: emotionalism, which has been carried over from the conversion experience; crucicentrism, or stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross; and-particularly among Americans-‘’a sense of living in a “chosen land” with “millennial purposes’’” regarding the coming of the Kingdom of God."

"There has been a “sea change” over the past century in how evangelical Christians see science, a change rooted largely in the debates over evolution and the secularization of the academy, said Elaine Ecklund, professor of sociology and director of the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University. There are two parts to the problem, she said: The scientific community has not been as friendly toward evangelicals, and the religious community has not encouraged followers to pursue careers in science. Distrust of scientists has become part of cultural identity, of what it means to be white and evangelical in America, she said. For slightly different reasons, the distrust is sometimes shared by Asian, Hispanic and Black Christians, who are skeptical that hospitals and medical professionals will be sensitive to their concerns, Dr. Ecklund said. “We are seeing some of the implications of the inequalities in science,” she said. “This is an enormous warning of the fact that we do not have a more diverse scientific work force, religiously and racially.”"

"Evangelicalism is highly fragmented and its political effects cannot be read off from its religious doctrines. Fragmentation means that its direct political impact is always smaller than might be hoped or feared and therefore no evangelical neo-Christendom potentially dangerous to democracy is feasible. In addition, it does not seem that Third-World evangelicalism will line up with the First-World Christian right on many issues. But the results for democracy are paradoxical. Totalitarian regimes or movements are firmly resisted, as are non-Christian religious nationalisms, but authoritarian regimes which do not impinge on evangelical religion may not always be. The evangelical world is too fissured and independent to provide a firm basis for nation-wide movements advocating major political change. It is thus less ‘use’ during democratic transitions than during periods of democratic consolidation."

"Indeed, the two outstanding religious phenomena in Latin America during the 1970s, and still more in the 1980s, both attracting wide popular support almost everywhere, were fundamentalist. The first was evangelical Protestantism, hitherto banned from proselytizing in Latin America as a result of concordats between states and the Catholic Church, or laws granting Catholicism privileged status. The lifting of these prohibitions led to a large-scale missionary effort by Protestant groups, mainly directed and financed from the United States, where evangelicalism, making full use of television, radio and cable, made huge advances in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, constituting what was popularly known as 'the Moral Majority'. Its efforts in Latin America, especially in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Brazil and Venezuela, met with remarkable success, and by the late 1980s a new generation of trained Latin American evangelists were at work."

"White evangelical protestants are some of the most reliably conservative and Republican voters in the electorate," said Greg Smith, associate director of research at Pew. "African-American protestants, on the other hand, are some of the most strongly and consistently Democratic voters in the electorate." "If you didn't look at them separately," he added, "if you lumped them all together, you would miss a big part of the story about the connections and the interrelations of religion, race, and politics in the U.S."

""The term 'evangelical' has a very broad set of meanings in Christianity. In its origins, it refers to the evangel, which is a Greek word from the New Testament that refers to the 'good news,' or the gospel of Jesus Christ," said John Green, professor of political science at the University of Akron and an expert in the intersection of [politics]] and religion, in an August interview. "In some sense, all Christians have an element of being an evangelical, because they all share to one degree or another those basic Christian beliefs," he added."

"You could dismiss this all as pedantry — that using "evangelicals" as a catch-all term for a certain group of Christians is a harmless shorthand, like calling all tissues Kleenexes or all sodas Coke. But then, consider how pollsters and pundits often separate white and black evangelicals based on their political views. That's one piece of a bigger problem: the degree to which "evangelical" may be becoming redefined by its political associations. "While evangelical, in this traditional sense, is really a religious word," Green said, "it's become very strongly associated with Republican and conservative politics, because since the days of Ronald Reagan up until today, that group of believers have moved in that direction politically." Indeed, that association has grown stronger in the last couple of decades. In the late 1980s, around one-third of white evangelicals identified as Republican, according to Pew. Earlier this year, Pew found that 68 percent of white evangelicals do."

"1976 was the first year Gallup asked Americans if they had been "born again," as Hackett wrote in a 2008 paper. The organization's measurement methods varied over the next decade, but in 1986, the organization first asked the "born-again or evangelical" question that it uses today. Over that time, self-proclaimed born-again Christians and evangelicals helped reshape the political landscape. In 1976, the born-again former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter was elected to the White House. After that, political interest in evangelicals and born-again Christians remained, but Rev. Pat Robertson's 1988 second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses in particular made it clear that white evangelicals were swinging Republican. Outspoken Christians like George W. Bush continued the trend of winning over these conservative Christians, and targeting those voters is still a key campaign strategy for politicians like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum."

"Rainey, who leads Covenant Church in Shepherdstown, W.Va., said several colleagues were forced out of their churches after promoting health and vaccination guidelines. Politics has increasingly been shaping faith among white evangelicals, rather than the other way around, he said. Pastors’ influ-ence on their churches is decreasing. “They get their people for one hour, and Sean Hannity gets them for the next 20,” he said."

"I think the scandal of the evangelical mind today is the gullibility that so many have been brought into — conspiracy theories, false reports and more — and so I think the Christian responsibility is we need to engage in what we call in the Christian tradition, discipleship. Jesus says "I am the way, the truth and the life." So Jesus literally identifies himself as the truth, therefore if there ever should be a people who care about the truth it should be people who call themselves followers of Jesus."

"We are amazed by the Christians' stupidity in receiving our teachings and propagating them as their own. Judaism is not only the teaching of the synagogue, but also the doctrine of every 'Christian Church' in America. Through our propaganda the Church has become our most avid supporter. This has even given us a special place in society, their believing the lie that we are the 'chosen people' and they, gentiles. The gullible clergy in one breath instruct their parishioners that we are a special, chosen people while in another breath proclaim all races are the same. Their inconsistency is never discovered. So we Jews enjoy a special place in society while all other races are reduced to common equality."

"[C]onservative evangelicals lacked the Catholic social justice framework that would have led them to treat the protection of human rights as a political priority. Although a few politically progressive evangelicals in the late 1960s and early 1970s wanted to meld evangelical theology with a call for human rights and social justice, these evangelicals were few in number and had only a limited following; most evangelical political activism in the era was anchored in the concerns of the political right, not the left. Communism, moral disorder, and the sexual revolution were the primary targets of politically active conservative evangelicals in the late 1960s; the language of human rights was not yet a major part of conservative evangelicals’ political vocabulary. Most evangelical political campaigns of the era had as their primary goal the salvation of the nation from moral destruction, not the protection of human dignity. Yet ironically, it was their interest in saving the nation and in battling the sexual revolution that eventually led them to embrace the cause of saving the unborn, even though the campaign against abortion was not a political priority for them in the late 1960s."

"Some evangelicals had already suggested that Roe represented the collapse of Christian values in the nation and symbolized the rise of a secular state. Christianity Today, for instance, had reacted to Roe by declaring in its February 1973 issue: “Christians should accustom themselves to the thought that the American state no longer supports, in any meaningful sense, the laws of God, and prepare themselves spiritually for the prospect that it may one day formally repudiate them and turn against those who seek to live by them”. But until Schaeffer, this was not a dominant idea among evangelicals. Most politically active conservative evangelicals in the mid-1970s were still more likely to see sexual promiscuity or feminism as a greater threat than abortion, and they were not likely to cite Roe as the chief symbol of a secular state that had rebelled against Christian values."

"By portraying the campaign against abortion as a fight against the tyranny of a secular state, Schaeffer reframed what had been a Catholic human rights cause grounded in New Deal liberalism and transformed it into the centerpiece of a conservative evangelical fight for the restoration of Christian-based law in the nation and curbs on the power of the secular judiciary. Unlike Catholics, conservative evangelicals had never been advocates of the New Deal social welfare state, and they distrusted government efforts to eradicate poverty through federal programs. Most evangelicals supported capital punishment and saw no problem with wars against Communism; they therefore had no interest in linking the pro-life cause to antinuclear or antiwar movements. But they had a long tradition of campaigning against sexual immorality and moral vices, so a campaign against abortion that was linked to a broader defense of sexual morality, moral order, and the restoration of Christian values in government appealed to them. At a time when many conservative evangelicals were becoming increasingly alarmed about the sexual permissiveness and changes in gender roles in American society, and at a time when many feared that the state had rejected Christian values, the use of Roe as a symbol for the evils of a secular state made sense."

"Since the 1930s, a number of countries in Latin America have experienced rapid growth in the expansion of evangelical Protestantism. Has this religious change produced concomitant changes in the political landscape? Some scholars have seen the possibility of a Weberian ‘Protestant ethic’ emerging, making the region more amenable to democratic capitalism. Others have argued that the ‘otherworldly’ nature of these new (predominantly Pentecostal) evangelicals lends itself to a more apolitical outlook and a deference to authoritarian rule. Using survey data from four countries– Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico – this article concludes that denominational affiliation has little effect on political attitudes."

"While Protestantism in Europe and the United States has tended to be linked to an active support of political democracy, the same has not been universally true for Latin American Protestants. Ireland notes that the‘prevailing stereotype of Pentecostal crentes [believers] is that they are apolitical conservatives who leave the injustices of the world to the Lord’s care, privatizing public issues and giving implicit support to authoritarian political projects’. After providing evidence from interviews with two Brazilian Pentecostal he concludes that this stereotype is largely true. His reasoning is largely derived from the fact that Pentecostal theology places far greater emphasis on achieving rewards in the afterlife than in the present world. Such a mindset creates a predilection for political apathy and acceptance of the status quo, which in Latin America has often been authoritarian. Deiros echoes this assertion by claiming that "fundamentalists tend to consider evangelism – in its narrower or ‘spiritual’ sense – to be the only legitimate activity of the church and remain wary of current trends toward church involvement in political affairs. They fear that such involvement may lead the church away from its central evangelistic mission into a substitute religion of good works, humanitarianism, and even political agitation...Because fundamentalists place the end of history outside of history, their social conscience is subdued, and their organizations reinforce this oppressed conscience by supplying a sociocultural structure which attributes a sacred character to the state of oppression...Any claim for justice or liberation from oppression is transferred to a remote eschatological future." This stereotype is augmented by several high profile cases wherein some evangelicals supported dictators or political leaders with an authoritarian bent: Efrain Rios Montt (Guatemala); Jorge Serrano Elias (Guatemala); the ARENA party (El Salvador); Augusto Pinochet (Chile) and Alberto Fujimori(Peru). For example, Smith and Fleet argue that in Chile, during the Pinochet years, Catholics and mainline Protestant denominations, most of which were opposed to the dictatorship, worked closely together. In contrast, the new denominations (Pentecostals as well as [Jehovah’s] Witnesses and Mormons) were more favorably disposed to the military government."

"Africa is by and large conservative, and many poor countries are susceptible to charity with a socially conservative agenda. It’s within this context that many US evangelical churches go to Africa to win the battles that are being lost at home. Many of them subscribe to the dominionist movement, which supports turning secular governments into Christian theocracies. They pressure NGOs not to accept Christians in same-sex marriages. Missionaries have traversed the length and breadth of Africa for centuries, so this 21st century American campaign is just the latest in a long line of foreign influence."

"Rev Jackson George Gabriel, the curate of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan and Sudan, tells me that he welcomes outside encouragement, confirming that the American branch of his church “are telling us to stand firm against homosexuality”. In a country where President Salva Kiir has said that homosexuality will “always be condemned by everybody”, and where the public shaming of gay South Sudanese by local tabloid media is growing, his stance enjoys a lot of support."

"Part of the agenda of US evangelical churches is explored in a 2014 report by the Rev Kapya Kaoma called American Culture Warriors in Africa: A Guide to the Exporters of Homophobia and Sexism, which is endorsed by Desmond Tutu. Kaoma is an Anglican priest from Zambia now living and working in the US with the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts due to threats against his life. His work paints a picture of the myriad of US groups and their African allies who, he says, are “seeking to impose their intolerant – and even theocratic – interpretations of Christianity on the rest of the world”."

"In Uganda, American evangelicals have partnered, and sometimes trained, local pastors and church leaders to push extreme, anti-gay legislation. Leading newspapers outed people as “top homosexuals”, such as Frank Mugisha, and gay men and women face discrimination and violence."

"Bishop Senyonjo of Uganda, a rare voice in his country advocating for LGBT rights, also hopes that churches will change their ways. “Evangelicals, wherever they come from the US and elsewhere, should bring good news of inclusion and love of God rather than sowing seeds of discrimination and hate,” he tells me before adding: “The Gospel is supposed to be liberating to marginalised people.”"

"Evangelical theology has not reached the self-confidence of Roman-Catholic and post-liberal Protestant theology, and some off its strongest thinkers borrow from the two latter schools. But more of them are learning from their own tradition (for example, from Jonathan Edwards’s mammoth philosophico-theological project and John Wesley’s capacious if diffiuse theology_, and sounding distinctive voices in the world of Christian theology. The result has been a new profusion of evangelical theologies. Already, at the end of the 1990s, Lutheran theologian Carl Braaten was saying that “the initiative in the writing of dogmatics has been seized by evangelical theologians in America….[M]ost mainline Protestant and progressive Catholic theology had landed in the graveyard of dogmatics, which is that mode of thinking George Lindbeck calls ‘experimental expressivism.’ Evangelicals, on the other hand, still believe theology is reflection on what comes from outside their experience as the Word of God. Perhaps for that reason, they have more to say-talking not just about themselves but about a transcendent God. If any event, they have been remarkably productive. In the first decade of this new century, the presses have groaned under the weight of books by evangelicals in systematic theology, historical theology, ethics, hermeneutics, biblical theology, philosophical theology of culture, public theology, theology of science, and a host of other theological subdisciplines. But this is not the evangelical theology of the 1970s. Back then, evangelical theology had little but contempt for the charismatic movement because of what seemed to be its loosey-goosey attitudes toward doctrine and serious thinking. Now some of the new-known evangelical theologians-Clark Pinnock and Amos Yong, for example-are charismatics and Pentecostals, and few theologians hold tightly to the old theory that charismatic gifts ceased after the apostolic age. In the 1970s, there was a sizable gulf between dispensational and Reformed theology, with neither side talking to the other. Now that a respected scholars such as Darrell Bock and Craig Blaising have developed “progressive” dispensationalism, that gap has narrowed. The questions have also changed, in 1976, which Newsweek magazine dubbed “The Year of the Evangelical,” evangelical theologians debated inerrancy of the Bible, the timing and existence of a millennium, Karl Barth’s neo-orthodoxy, and the threat posed by abortion-on-demand. They agreed that liberal theology was bankrupt, tradition suspect, and universalism (the view that everyone will eventually be saved) impossible. Most evangelical writers were convinced that Roman Catholicism was a religion of works, and apologetics a useful way of showing that Christian faith is reasonable. Other religions were barely on the theological radar-except as proofs that only Christian would be saved. Almost a half-century later, the assumptions and questions have shifted dramatically. Evangelical theology has accepted the collapse of foundationalism-the notion that there are, or should be, logical or rational grounds for belief. Although most still see a clear line separating Roman Catholic from evangelical theological method, and some still regard Catholicism as sub-Christian, many have learned from the Catholic theological tradition and agree with the Lutheran-Catholic Joint declaration on Justification (1999) that the catholic tradition does not teach salvation by works. Basic theological differences between Calvinists and Arminians remain, but today’s debates swirl around the role of women in the home and church, what it means to care for creation, whether justification was too narrowly defined by the Reformation, whether God knows our future choices, if non-Christians cab be saved and learn religious truth through their traditions, if we need to change our thinking about homosexuality, and whether the damned are destroyed or eventually saved. All assume the Bible is final authority for Christians, but some are saying we ought to learn about the Bible from (mostly Catholic) tradition. Theologians on both sides of the debate over tradition are divided over the basic task of theology-whether it is to reapply existing evangelical and orthodox tradition to new issues, or to rethink and possibly change the tradition as theologians gain “new light.” All evangelical thinkers recognize that revelation in Scripture contains propositions-ideas that can be expressed in words-as well as non-propositional elements such as stories and images that also reveal. Nearly all would agree that the Bible tells one grand story. But while some think revelation is God both acting ‘’and’’ speaking so that doctrine and experience can never be separated, others say revelation is about God’s acts rather than words and the essence of faith is experience not doctrine."

"As Mark Noll explains in the next chapter, the word “evangelical” goes back to the Greek noun evangelion, which means “glad tidings”, “good news” or “gospel”, the last of which goes back to an Old English word for “God talk.” Three times the New Testament says that someone who proclaims the gospel of Christ dying for our sins is an evangelistes (evangelist). Evangelicalism has always proclaimed this salvation that comes from Christ’s death with a peculiar intensity. Noll shows the origins of the movement in Pietism, the eighteenth-century awakenings, and the Enlightenment. He unpacks David Bebbington’s widely accepted fourfold definition-a movement marked by conversionism, Biblicism, activism, and cruci-centrism. Evangelical theology on the other hand, is something of a different animal. While evangelical theologians would not reject any of Bebbington’s marks as inaccurate, they typically speak with more theological specificity. Most would endorse Karl Barth’s definition of the word (though Barth was not an evangelical in the American or British sense of the word): “Evangelical means informed by gospel of Jesus Christ , as head afresh in the 16th-century Reformation by a direct return to Holy Scripture.” Some important evangelical thinkers such as N.T. Wright and Thomas Oden are now questioning the primacy of the Reformation. But all would agree with the following six evangelical “fundamental convictions,” first proposed by Alister McGrath: 1. The majesty of Jesus Christ, both as incarnate God and Lord and as Savior of sinful humanity; 2. The lordship of the Holy Spirit, who is necessary for the application of the presence and work of Christ; 3. The supreme authority of Scripture, recognizing that the language of Scripture is culturally conditioned but that through it God has nevertheless conveyed the eternal, unconditioned Word. Scripture is to be interpreted with the help of reason and the best tools of scholarship, with attention to differing genres; 4. The need for personal conversion. This is not necessarily an emotional experience but at least involves personal repentance and trust in the person and work of Christ, not simply intellectual adherence to doctrine. 5. Commitment to evangelism and missions. 6. The importance of religious community for spiritual nourishment, fellowship and growth. Every one of the above distinctive is shared by most other Christians. What makes this list evangelical, however, is the degree of emphasis which evangelical theology places on the six marks, and the forms which they take. For example, all Christians say evangelism is important at one level or another, but not all regard it with the urgency evangelicals often show. Some regard social service as evangelism, and others do not consider conversion to faith in Christ to be necessary. When Billy Graham conducted his first crusade in New York City, some Protestant mainline leaders ridiculed his efforts-not only because he did not emphasize structural social reform but also because theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr regarded personal evangelism as theologically wrong-headed. Some of those same churches today speak of personal evangelism as essential to the growth of the church in the world, but they send out fewer missionaries and do less to train their members for the task of evangelism than their evangelical counterparts typically do. While all Christians speak of the need to turn from the world to Christ, evangelicals have placed more emphasis on conversion because of the Puritan and Pietist legacies from which Edward, Whitefield, and Wesley learned."

"Evangelical theology is often regarded, both by the media and much of the academy, as fundamentalism put into writing. But they are really two different ways of thinking, which can be identified in eight ways identified in eight ways. Some evangelical theologians might hold some fundamentalist beliefs, and some fundamentalists might share evangelical attitudes. But most evangelical theologians would distinguish their outlook from fundamentalist perspectives in the following ways. 1. Interpretation of scriptures Fudamentalists tend to read Scripture more literalistically, while evangelical theologians look more carefully at genre and literary and historical context. Another way of saying this is that fundamentalists tend to assume that the meaning of Scripture is obvious from single reading, while evangelicals want to talk about layers of meaning. For example, more fundamentalists will understand the first three chapters of Genesis to contain, among other things, scientific statements about beginnings, while evangelicals will focus more on the theological character of these stories-that the author-editor was more interested in showing that the earth has a Creator, for example, than precisely how the earth was created. 2. Culture. Fundamentalists question the value of human culture that is not created by Christians or related to the Bible, whereas evangelicals see God’s “common grace” working in and through all human culture. For evangelicals, Mozart may not have been an orthodox Christian and quite possibly was a moral failure as a human being, but his music is a priceless gift of God. Culture is tainted by sin, as are all other human productions, but it nevertheless can reflect God’s glory. 3. Social action. There was a time when fundamentalists considered efforts to help the poor to be a sign of liberal theology, because proponents of the social gospel during the modernist controversy of the 1920s were theological liberals. Until recently many fundamentalists limited their view of Christian social action to struggles for religious freedom and against abortion. Evangelicals have been more vocal in their declarations that the gospel also calls us to fight racism, sexism, and poverty."

"4. Separatism. For many decades in this country fundamentalists preached that Christians should separate themselves from liberal Christians (which sometimes separate themselves from liberal Christians (which sometimes meant evangelicals) and even from conservatives who fellowshipped with liberals. This is why some fundamentalists refused to support Billy Graham-Graham asked for help from mainline Protestant and Catholic churches, and sent his converts back to these churches for further nurture. Evangelical theology puts more emphasis on engagement with culture while aiming to transform it, and working with other Christians toward common religious and social goals. 5. Dialogue with liberals. Fundamentalists have tended in the past to believe that liberal Christians (those who doubted Jesus’s bodily resurrection, the essential sinfulness of humanity, and the importance of blood atonement) were Christian in name only, that there was nothing to learn from them, and there was no use trying to talk to them once they refused to accept the fundamentalist version of the gospel. The evangelical approach has been to talk with those of more liberal persuasions in an effort to persuade and perhaps even learn. John Stott and Clark Pinnock have both engaged in book-length dialogues with liberal theologians. 6. The ethos of Christian faith. Although most fundamentalists preach salvation by grace, they also tend to focus so much on rules and restrictions (do’s and don’t) that their church members could get the impression that the heart of Christianity is law governing behavior. There is a similar danger in evangelical churches, but evangelical theology focuses more on the persona and work of Christ, and person and work of Christ, and personal engagement with that person and work of Christ, as the heart of the Christian faith. 7. Fissiparousness. Many evangelical groups have fractured and then broken again over that seems to later generations to have been minor issues. But the tendency seems worse among fundamentalists, for whom differences of doctrine, often on rather minor issues, are considered important enough to warrant starting anew congregation or even denomination. Because evangelical theology makes more of the distinction between essentially and non-essentials, evangelicals are more willing to remain in mainline Protestant churches and in evangelical churches whose members disagree on nonessentials. 8. Support for Israel. Fundamentalists tend to see the modern state of Israel as a direct fulfillment of biblical prophecies, and say God’s blessing of America is contingent on its support for Israel. Evangelicals generally see the creation of Israel in 1948 as at least an indirect fulfillment of prophecy, lacking the complete fulfillment because there has not been the spiritual renewal that the prophets predicted. Evangelicals run the gamut in support for and opposition to Israeli policies. But while many other Christians see Israel as just another nation-state, fundamentalists and evangelicals typically think today’s Israel has continuing theological significance."

"If evangelical and fundamentalist ways of thinking differ on both content and practice, evangelical theology differs from classical protestant orthodoxy more on method. Evangelicalism tends to use the principle of ‘’sola scriptura’’ more radically than the Protestant traditions out of which it grew. That is, when it subscribes to the doctrines of the great creeds of the church (yet some evangelicals and their theologians don’t crying “No creed but the Bible!”), they do so not because the creeds teach the doctrines but because they believe the doctrines have biblical support. Evangelical theologians are not always averse to reading the great fathers and mothers of the church (such as Macrina, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and now Mother Teresa) or to learn from the historic confessions, but they typically insist that they do so with critical care. They want to reserve the right to use Scripture as a trump card over tradition when they see conflict between the two. Others, such as “post-conservative” Roger Olson, say they want to be open to further light breaking out from the Word that might compel either a reshaping of doctrine or new doctrine entirely. Evangelical theologians say they reject liberalism’s faith in human experience as a final norm for truth and morality. Against the homogenizing tendency of liberal theology, which would postulate an underlying religiosity common to all faiths evangelical theology emphasizes the particularity of Christian revelation and the uniqueness of Christian spirituality. While liberals place a premium on person autonomy and appeal to internal norms (conscience and religious experience), evangelicals have usually stressed human responsibility to God who has given us external norms in Jesus Christ and Scripture."

"William Abraham reflects further on evangelicalism’s “ecclesial ambivalence,” and claims that agreement on sola scriptura, often thought to be the only source of unity in the movement, has actually multiplied disputes because it spawns differing interpretations. Abraham shows that evangelicals, despite these differences, have ironically played a pivotal role in the history of ecumenism. He makes the intriguing suggestion that orthodox theology’s search for agreement on authority and epistemology has been misdirected, and that in fact the early churches reached agreement on theological essentials without agreement on either authority or epistemology. If unity has been elusive among evangelicals, John Witvliet insists that evangelicals have generally shared a deep resistance to ritualism and ceremonialism in worship, because of their demand for heartfelt ardor. According to Witvliet, evangelical worship has highlighted preaching, congregationalism singing, classical evangelical hymns, and personal and family devotions. Evangelicals are divided between memorial and participationist views of the Lord’s Supper, with similar differences in their attitudes toward baptism. Recently, Witvliet says, some strains of evangelical worship have yielded to sentimentalist and consumerist temptations."

"Some years ago, evangelical historian Nathan Hatch said “there’s no such thing as evangelicalism.” By that he probably meant that evangelicalism and its attendant theologies constitute a many-headed monster that regularly transforms itself into new shapes. But historic evangelicalism does not a recognizable character, as this volume will repeatedly demonstrate. William Abraham warns in his essay on ecumenism that “it would be a mistake…to dismiss evangelicalism as a useless category for understanding Christianity; without it we would have to invent a functional equivalent immediately.” For it represents a network of Christian “bound together by a loose but identifiable cluster of convictions and practices that have been and continue to be a potent religious force.” But what will be the future shape of evangelicalism? And what of evangelical theology. The recent explosion of evangelicalism in the Global South means that future evangelical theology, which is already beginning to come from Asia and Africa and Latin America, will give more attention to the reality of spiritual powers in history and manifestations of the supernatural such as dreams, visions, healing, and direct messages from the Spirit. Because of the tendency of majority-world Christians to take the Old Testament more seriously, evangelical theology will have more a Jewish flavor and be less inclined to spiritualize prophetic promises of land and kingdom. It will be far less ready to sever the connection between moral and dogmatic theology, as Northern theologies have done. Therefore future evangelical theology will be less tempted to relax traditional understandings of sex and marriage. But is will also deal with new issues, says Mark Noll, such as the destiny of ancestors and what it means for families and large groups to convert en masse."

"As the mainline Protestant traditions become more of a sideline, and evangelicalism vies with Roman Catholicism for dominance in the Global South-the new center of gravity in world Christianity-evangelical theology may continue to be influenced by Catholic thought. Rivals often come to resemble each other. Catholics and evangelicals have fought abortion together. Evangelical theologians increasingly draw sustenance from Catholic moral and historical theology. Catholics have launched a new evangelization in partial response to evangelical gains in Latin America, and Catholic theology has reshaped its formulation of justification as a result of evangelical and other Protestant theological dialogues. Evangelicals will continue to believe that Catholics submit themselves to a human magisterium rather than the divine Word, and this will be sounded with more vigor in Global South churches. But just as sixteenth-century Protestant and Catholic theology reacted against each other and thereby influenced each other, twenty-first-century evangelical theology may unwittingly find itself to be not only a leavening agent in the broader church catholic but also shaped in part by its principal challenger."

"By the start of the twenty-first century, evangelical Christianity had come to constitute the second largest grouping of Christian believers in the world. Only the Roman Catholic church enjoyed more Christian adherents than the evangelical churches. By comparison with other world religions, evangelicals-taken only by themselves-were more numerous than all but Muslims and Hindus. But what is meant by “evangelicals” or “evangelicalism”? These are by no means easy questions. The terms are even much disputed among those whom others casually lump together as evangelicals. Billy Graham, the American evangelist who was probably the world’s most widely known “evangelical” in the twentieth century, was repeatedly chastised throughout much of his public career by self-described “fundamentalists” for abandoning the separatism that they considered a non-negotiable aspect of the Christian faith. Yet most observers class “fundamentalism” as a subcategory of overlapping with “evangelicalism.” Yet most observers class “fundamentalism” as a subcategory overlapping with “evangelicalism.” David Yongi Cho, a Pentecostal minister, pastors the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, Korea. With over 700,000 members, as announced on its Web site, it is the largest single congregation in the world; the same Web site affirms that the church “practices faith, love, and service based on the cross of Christ and the Bible,” a strongly evangelical formula. Pastor Cho and his church have, however, been criticized by other self-described evangelicals as pagan for adapting Christianity to ancestral Korean practices (for example, the prayer mountain as replicating aspects of shamanism) and or replacing the Christian gospel with magical formulas that promise health and wealth. Yet most observers have no difficulty recognizing Cho’s brand of Pentecostal Christianity as a variety of evangelicalism."