Category Archives: evangelicalism

TBTM20070709

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In the circles I tend to move in, being called a ‘liberal’ is a bit of an insult – it means that you don’t take the faith seriously etc etc. Now I don’t think that’s true, but I was just wondering – in certain circles, is being called an ‘open evangelical’ now taking on the same sense? That is, are ‘open evangelicals’ the new ‘liberals’? I’m musing on this since finding this site last night, especially looking at this page.

BTW I’ve read one John MacArthur book – Ashamed of the Gospel – and I thought it was rather good. I suspect I’ve got quite a bit of affinity with (some bits of) the conservative evangelicalism that site represents, though some of it I see as barbaric and a long way from the Way.

A High View of Scripture? (Craig Allert)

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This was an extremely lucid, engaging and stimulating survey of how the New Testament canon was formed. Although I had the ‘big picture’ already, I learned a tremendous amount of new detail through the book. It’ll form a key resource in my autumn series of talks. Here’s a juicy quote:

“Before there was even Scripture, there was the faith; the early church did not set the limits of the scriptural canon as the paramount task of nascent Christianity. Its first goal was to settle the content of the faith, and it did this using means other than the Bible… the early church would never have restricted the term ‘canon’ to the Bible alone… Each element in the canonical tradition of the church has a part to play in the whole, and the canonization of Scripture took place within this whole.”

What was most intriguing was the central role given to the apostolic tradition as the source of primary authority, including for the words of Jesus. “Scripture” was not the centre of gravity for the community, and there was no such thing as “the Bible” for hundreds of years. Fascinating.

Not by our own feelings

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A post going into more detail with my thoughts about ‘conversion’. Click full post for the text.

My principal concern and criticism of evangelicalism lies in the way that it relocates the source of religious authority from an institution to an inward sentiment, ie the personal experience of God’s activity normally described as ‘conversion’. There’s a sense in which this is healthy, but what I want to outline are the ways in which it is decidedly unhealthy.

It’s not Scriptural.
I’m grateful for all the feedback to my question on this topic, but many of the references provided, it seems to me, are read anachronistically when they are read as justifying the emphasis upon particular experience. What I mean by that is the Scriptural understanding of ‘the heart’ is different to a contemporary Western understanding of ‘the heart’. So far as I am aware, in the Bible, the ‘heart’ is the seat of judgement and will (sometimes other internal organs), and there is no division between ‘the head and the heart’, understood as a conflict between judgement and passions. The conflict takes place within the heart as a whole. So when we are encouraged by the prophets with the vision of having our hearts of stone replaced by hearts of flesh this is not a reference to becoming more sentimental – it is a reference to making decisions more compassionately, with regard to their effect upon our neighbour. The division current in our society between ‘the head’, meaning judgement and rationality, and ‘the heart’, meaning affections and sentiment, I believe to be wholly foreign to Scriptural categories. I could be wrong on this (please point it out if I am) but this seems to undermine many (not all) of the Scriptural references offered. I’m not disagreeing with the Scripture references as describing a change of heart (ie that which is essential to faith) but that they necessarily describe a “conversion” as it seems to be understood in contemporary evangelical culture.

One of the core texts for me is Romans 10.9, which describes, in my view, the core Christian proclamation and expression of faith, but Paul goes on to say ‘For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified’. Here he’s using ‘heart’ in the way I understand above – it is the ground of the personality, the fount of all that follows. I have no doubt that a ‘change of heart’ can be dramatic with profound physical expressions, as with Paul on the road to Damascus. Yet it also seems to me that the process can be gradual – we are not given much detail about how the other apostles grew in faith; I rather doubt that they all had a Pauline conversion! The dramatic and overwhelming personal experience is undoubtedly one way in which God can redeem a soul; I think it is not only presumptuous to imagine it is the only way, but Scripture testifies to diversity in this matter.

A different way of saying this same point is to say that it’s a product of human culture: I’ll go into this in more detail in my talks, as it’s an area where I’ve done quite a lot of research on the context into which evangelicalism was born, but Noll puts it judiciously: “… in other significant ways, evangelicalism was itself an authentic expression of Enlightenment principles. Evangelicals… held, with Locke, that the self’s personal experience was foundational for obtaining reliable knowledge. ‘True religion’, for evangelicals, might be recommended by tradition and by formal authorities, but until people personally experienced the love of God in their hearts, evangelicals held that their standing before God had to be in doubt”. I just don’t see this as legitimately derived from Scripture, and as the wider culture starts to move beyond Enlightenment principles, the influence of the Enlightenment on evangelicalism will become much clearer.

It undermines the church and causes active and profound spiritual harm in the life of Christian believers.
What I mean by this is that when the experience within a believer is given pride of place, the inherited tradition and wisdom of the church is progressively undermined. This means that the possibilities of correction to the individual will become fewer and fewer. This is really about the doctrine of original sin, and the ever-present potentiality of human self-deception. I do not wish to deny the reality, power, and salvific effect of dramatic conversions when they genuinely happen. What I object to is the use of such an experience to demarcate the Christian from the non-Christian. That is, I want to say that the testimony of a ‘conversion’ has no necessary and irrevocable link to the presence of the Holy Spirit within a believer. There are believers who have not had this conversion experience where the Holy Spirit is a shaping force in the life; there are those with eloquent testimony where the Spirit is absent. The root point is primarily that we are not in a position to judge between believers on the basis of such a putative occurrence.

Where there is an emphasis upon this sort of experience, and where in particular it is seen as the marker of salvation, it can cause profound spiritual harm, both in the lives of individual believers (John Wesley himself comes to mind, but I’ve had direct dealings with the consequences in many individuals) and also in the life of a church community (West Mersea carries scars from this). What evangelicalism sometimes seems to have become is an insistence that unless you use particularly effusive and emotional language then you are going to hell, and it therefore has absolutely nothing to say to those who are weak, vulnerable and depressed, other than asking for more and more exertions of belief. The one who is depressed is blamed for the depression; the light burden of Christ has become the crippling weight that destroys the soul. Instead of a works-righteousness there is now a creeping experience-righteousness, each of which is equally Pharisaical. I believe that the inherited traditions of the church have much richer and wiser guidance to offer in terms of shaping the ongoing life of the Christian community.

It leads to quietism (seen most obviously, in the present day, in things like the SBC statement denying global warming).
Conversion is about the shift from a ‘nominal faith’ to an embrace of ‘true religion’ – one which grips a person, which makes a difference in their life. It seems to me indisputable that this shift is essential to Christianity – it underlies all of Jesus’ disagreements with the Pharisees for example, and the Scriptural instruction on this is vast. Yet what matters in this conversion is the orientation of the character; that is, what will then flow, what are the fruits? For we are also told consistently throughout Scripture that deeds count (see Rev 20.12-13 for the most explicit description of that judgement!) Before misunderstandings can run away too quickly THIS DOES NOT UNDERMINE THE PRIORITY OF GRACE! It is to say that when grace is active in our lives it will inevitably have an effect on the way that we live.

The prayers in the BCP are eloquent on this subject: “O God, the strength of all them that put their trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers, and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping of thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.” (Collect for First Sunday after Trinity). At the heart of the BCP’s spirituality – of Protestant spirituality! – it seems to me, there is no room for any pride on the part of the Christian; there is instead an acknowledgement that we proceed solely by grace, both in terms of our inner dispositions (‘will’) and in terms of our outer accomplishments (‘deed’). Yet the outer accomplishments still matter; the wider world still matters. This is what I think has become lost through the evangelical understanding of ‘conversion’, understood as the inward experience of salvation.

I believe that the Spirit is found in the interplay between the institution and the individual, and that excessive reliance on one pole will inevitably lead to idolatry. In correcting (necessarily correcting) the institution so successfully, evangelicalism has itself now become an institution in need of radical correction. In December 1789 John Wesley wrote some advice to Sarah Mallett, one of the earliest Methodist lay preachers, which included this advice: “You are not to judge by your own feelings, but by the word of God.” Like many things that Wesley said, this seems to me to be right.

The Rise of Evangelicalism (Mark Noll)

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Just finished this, which was a really good historical overview – just what I needed as I start to research evangelicalism more thoroughly for my autumn Learning Church series. I am now much clearer in my mind about what evangelicalism is, and what I like and don’t like about it. I’m most particularly intrigued by the influence that High-Church theology had on its beginnings, mainly via the Wesleys, as I suspect that there is the stream where I would locate myself, in what Noll calls ‘primitivism’: “the faith thought to have been practiced with great purity in the church’s very first centuries… imitation of the faith and life of early believers, ascetic practice for the self, godly discipline for society and regular participation in the church’s celebration of the Eucharist”.

I’m not going to say too much more in this review because so many issues were raised that I want to explore them in separate posts, but it’s probably worth sharing some longish quotations.

The four key ingredients [as defined by David Bebbington]:
– conversion, or ‘the belief that lives need to be changed’;
– the Bible, or ‘the belief that all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages’;
– activism, or the dedication of all believers, including lay people, to lives of service for God, especially as manifested in evangelism (spreading the good news) and mission (taking the gospel to other societies); and
– crucicentrism, or the conviction that Christ’s death was the crucial matter in providing atonement for sin (ie providing reconciliation between a holy God and sinful humans).

If evangelicals were strong in personal reassurance before God, they were weak in the formation of worldviews. If they stripped away other considerations to focus on the need for a Saviour, they sometimes also stripped away the urgency to think generally about responsible Christian life in the world. The remarkable effects from concentrating on Christian experience as depicted in Scripture were often matched by the deliberate devaluation of intellectual tradition. At the end of the day, evangelical concern for society reflected the character of the movement as a whole. It was a pietistic movement that did much good in the world. But as a pietistic movement its focused attention on the spiritual tended to edge aside, rather than stimulate, self-conscious attention to the social.

At its worst, this new evangelicalism neglected, caricatured and distorted the inherited tradtions of Reformation Protestantism. Evangelical beliefs and practices could foster a self-centered, egotistic and narcissistic spirituality and also create new arenas for destructive spiritual competition. From in-group cliches, associations and institutions, evangelicals sometimes constructed new barriers to alienate humans from each other. They could turn so obsessively inward as to ignore the structures of social evil. Most important, evangelicals could trivialise the Christian gospel by treating it as a ballyhooed commodity to be hawked for its power to soothe a nervous, dislocated people in the opening cultural markets of the expanding British Empire.
But at its best evangelicalism provided needed revitalisation to English-speaking Protestant Christianity. It breathed vibrant religious life into stagnant or confused religious institutions. It created dynamic communities of self-giving love and international networks of supporting fellowship. It reached out to many at the margins of respectable society. From authentic personal experience it provided a dynamism for addressing corporate evils. Most important, it communicated the beauty and the power of the Christian gospel in a wide variety of settings and through that gospel provided a wider range of individuals with purpose before God and meaning for this life, and it did so for the long haul.

Great stuff.