The Evangelical Narrative

Here is a story the American press completely missed: Rick Warren, the highly successful pastor of Saddleback Church and the author of the best-sellers, Purpose Driven Church (1995) and Purpose Driven Life (2002), ministers the Bible in ways at odds with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). Saddleback does not baptize infants. It does not have an evening Sunday service. Warren does not even mention Sabbath-observance as part of a purpose-driven life. Warren and his church officers do not subscribe to the Westminster Standards, nor do they affirm the eternal decree or predestination. In fact, almost nothing that goes on at Saddleback could be construed as Presbyterian or Reformed. Dog bites man. Shocking!

Or is it? The reason journalists have failed to report on this breach within contemporary Protestantism, aside from the OPC's obscurity, is that no one expects Warren or Saddleback to conform to the faith and practice of a Reformed communion. Warren is a Southern Baptist and Saddleback, if it has any ecclesiastical affiliation, is connected to the Southern Baptist Convention. To expect Warren to be a conservative Presbyterian is to apply a standard that is arbitrary.

Indeed, to imagine that Warren should conform to Reformed teaching is a truly shocking idea. For one, it's a free country and American Christians practice their faith in a variety of ways that are often antagonistic to other believers. For another, Warren is successful in ways that the OPC obviously is not. And for one more reason, the standard for evaluating Warren is evangelicalism, not Reformed Protestantism. Presbyterians may belong to evangelicalism, but clearly evangelicals don't belong to Presbyterianism.

Yet, when journalists employ the word evangelical they generally lump Warren with the ecclesiastical heirs of J. Gresham Machen. The term evangelical assumes that Warren and Orthodox Presbyterians are the same on everything that matters. If this is true, why would Warren not be invited to preach in an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation (or an OP minister asked to preach at Saddleback)? Why would sessions of Orthodox Presbyterian congregations refuse to recommend Saddleback to members when vacationing at Disneyland? And why is Saddleback not in fellowship with any of the communions in the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council? So if Warren and Orthodox Presbyterians are of the same religious identity, why don't journalists ever take these differences into account in their reporting? If they can tell the difference between social and fiscal conservatives in the GOP, or between fast food and slow food, why not the differences among Protestants outside the mainline denominations?

Journalists don't take these differences seriously because very few conservative Protestants do. The latter have learned a story of evangelicalism that denies the importance of distinctions among Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, the megachurched, and Emergents. The perspective yielded by standard histories of evangelicalism is that conservative Protestantism is one big happy tent under which the likes of Warren, Tim Keller, Pat Robertson, Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Al Mohler, Ravi Zacharias, Charles Stanley, Chuck Swindoll, Tony Perkins, and George W. Bush, or Martin Luther, Richard Hooker, Jonathan Edwards, John Witherspoon, and Francis Asbury all convene for fellowship and support.

History Has Consequences

When did evangelicalism begin? One answer is that evangelicalism as a distinct expression of Protestantism started after World War II through the efforts of leaders such as Billy Graham and Carl Henry. But over the last thirty years, religious historians have demonstrated a longer history for evangelicalism than one that starts, say, in 1949, the year of Graham's Los Angeles crusade that gave him national celebrity. Some trace American evangelicalism's roots back to the First Great Awakening of the 1740s when through the preaching, travels, and writings of evangelists such as George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, conversion and revivalism became the norm conservative Protestantism. Other historians go back even farther to seventeenth-century Puritanism and the sixteenth-century Reformation when Protestants rejected the rites and ceremonies of Roman Catholicism to recover the good news of the gospel. After all, Lutherans, the original Protestants, identified themselves as evangelical because of the conviction that they had recovered the good news (e.g., evangelion) of salvation by faith alone.

Attributing the origin of evangelicalism to either the eighteenth or the sixteenth centuries turns out to be crucial for understanding contemporary Protestants. If evangelicals go back to 1517, Lutherans, Reformed, and Southern Baptists are as much evangelicals as the megachurches, the Emergents, and the Pentecostals. Because none of these Western Christians are in fellowship with the pope, they are necessarily Protestant and therefore implicated in the Reformation's rejection of Rome's teaching on salvation. But if evangelicalism began with the revivals of the eighteenth century, then the Protestants who stress conversion and holy living-as opposed to church membership and attending the means of grace-started a new kind of Protestantism. In other words, if evangelicalism "began" after Protestantism began, then evangelical Protestantism represents something different from the original faith of the Reformers, and Billy Graham is not an organic and logical successor to John Calvin.

To regard evangelicalism as a new and different version of Protestantism is not as crazy as it seems, as if only keepers of the flame for Calvin and Lutheran want to avoid being confused with Joel Osteen and Bill Hybels. Mark Noll, as respected a church historian as exists on the North American part of the planet, has argued that evangelicalism started later than the Reformation and that George Whitefield captured its chief impulse when explaining his own ministry. Despite being ordained as an Anglican priest, Whitefield said, "It was best to preach the new birth, and the power of godliness, and not to insist so much on the form: for people would never be brought to one mind as to that; nor did Jesus Christ ever intend it." (1) For Whitefield, the importance of the new birth trumped the claims of his ordination. For subsequent evangelicals, the individual convert's experience matters more than baptism, small group prayer more than corporate worship, the simple teachings of the Bible more than creeds, and the fellowship of the Spirit more than church membership.

Noll has also commented on the significance of this reorientation of Protestant devotion. As much as Puritan New England may have fertilized the soil from which revivalism sprang, evangelicalism broke significantly even with Puritan understandings of the church and Christian life in ways that point to the differences between evangelicalism and historic Protestantism. Noll writes:

Although Puritans stood against Catholic and Anglican formalism, salvation for the Puritans was still mediated by institutions-family, church, even the covenanted society; in evangelicalism (at least in American forms), salvation was in principle unmediated except by the written Word of God. Puritans protested against nominal ecclesiastical life, but they still treated institutions of church and society as given; American evangelicals created their own communities, at first ecclesiastical, then voluntary. Puritans accepted authority from designated leaders; American evangelicals looked to authority from charismatic, self-selected leaders. Puritans fenced in enthusiasm with formal learning, respect for confessions, and deference to traditional interpretations of Scripture; American evangelicals fenced in enthusiasm with self-selected leaders, individualistic Bible-reading, local grassroots organizations, and intuitively persuasive reason. (2)

In other words, the evangelical faith to which revivals gave birth upset the structure, order, and ministry that the Protestant Reformers believed God had delegated to the church.

Regarding evangelicalism as new and different makes perfect sense of what happened in the early eighteenth century. Before the First Great Awakening, Protestantism was overwhelmingly churchly; that is, the forms, teachings, liturgies, and polities of the state churches defined the faith and practice of Protestants. The main branches of Protestantism were known by their ecclesiastical expression: Lutheran, Reformed (or Presbyterian), and Anglican. The only Protestants outside these corporate bodies were the Anabaptists-radical Reformers who renounced the state and the church's entanglement with the sword as the source of the church's corruption. Before revivalism, parachurch ministry, entrepreneurial evangelists, and quiet-times were inconceivable. To be a Protestant was to be a member of a church, and to grow in grace meant attending diligently to the weekly ministry of the church, through preaching, the sacraments, Lord's Day observance, catechesis, and the oversight of church officers.

But with the rise of evangelicalism came the decline of this historic form of Protestantism. In Whitefield's words, "the new birth" and "the power of godliness" counted more than church forms. The thrust of an informal, experiential, and individualistic Protestantism was to make faith and devotion independent of the church, Word, and sacrament. The old churches, according to revivalists, encouraged Christians merely to go through the motions. Those older churches produced nominal Christians who lacked intense and assuring experiences of their genuine faith. Nominal Christians only went to church, but converted believers did much more. These extra-ecclesiastical acts of evangelical devotion-such as small group fellowship, witnessing, and the renunciation of worldly activities-demonstrated genuine faith. Participation in the work of the institutional church was insufficient for the truly saved.

John Williamson Nevin, a nineteenth-century theologian, saw as well as any American has before or since the differences between the old and new forms of Protestantism. Nevin's own experience as an under-graduate at Union College was decisive. He had been reared in the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian tradition of a churchly faith. This devotion was premised "on the idea of covenant family religion, church membership by God's holy act in baptism, and following this a regular catechetical training of the young, with direct reference to their coming to the Lord's table." Such Protestant faith was churchly, according to Nevin, "as holding the Church in her visible character to be the medium of salvation for her baptized children, in the sense of that memorable declaration of Calvin (Institutes 4.1.4), where, speaking of her title, Mother, he says: 'There is no other entrance into life, save as she may conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us from her breasts, and embrace us in her loving care to the end.'" (3)

But what Nevin experienced during a college revival was that the godly efforts of his minister and parents were beside the point. He wrote that "one of the first lessons inculcated on me indirectly by this unchurchly system, was that all this must pass for nothing, and that I must learn to look upon myself as an outcast from the family and kingdom of God, before I could come to be in either in the right way." Revivals, he explains, were "based throughout on the principle, that regeneration and conversion lay outside of the Church, had nothing to do with baptism and Christian education, required rather a looking away from all this as more a bar than a help to the process, and were to be sought only in the way of magical illapse or stroke from the Spirit of God." (4) This contrast between the churchly system of Word, sacrament, and catechesis and the revivalistic scheme of the born-again experience was precisely the difference between the new and old forms of Protestantism.

Getting the history of evangelicalism correct is not simply an academic matter. Bound up with the question of evangelicalism's origins is the question of the church. Was Protestantism originally a form of Christianity indifferent to church membership and correct forms of doctrine, liturgy, and polity? Was the Reformation a revival? Or was it an effort to reform the forms of Western Christianity to make them conform to Scripture so that the church would minister faithfully to members who depended on the means of grace for salvation and growth in grace? If Protestantism was originally evangelical in the Whitefieldean sense, then lumping J. Gresham Machen and Charles Stanley together makes sense because the difference between Presbyterians and Southern Baptists is unimportant. But if Protestantism was originally churchly, if creeds, polity, and worship were decisive in being a Christian, then saying Presbyterians and Southern Baptists are the same because both are evangelical is a repudiation of the Reformation.

Putting the Church Back in Fellowship

For many evangelicals, a construction of Protestant identity based on belonging to the church and depending on her ministry is unnecessarily sectarian and even unbiblical. This objection, as already argued, assumes what it does not prove; namely, that the practices and teachings of Lutherans, Reformed, and Episcopalians are not as important as the common, sincere, and heartfelt convictions of a Whitefield, Tennant, or Wesley, or that revivalism is more biblical than the ministry of Word and sacrament. And yet, the evangelical objection to churchly Protestantism is closer to liberal Protestantism than few conservative Protestants care to consider or admit. As provocative as this charge may seem, it actually accounts for patterns in twentieth-century American Protestantism.

Between 1870 and 1920, the largest Protestant denominations in the United States strove to cooperate in a variety of organizations that would create greater Christian unity and strengthen the Protestant character of American society. The culmination of these efforts came in 1908 with the formation of the Federal Council of Churches, although in 1920 those same churches considered an even closer form of cooperation, an organic union that would have turned these denominations into one mega-denomination (the United Church of Canada is an example). The leaders of these ecumenical efforts were not liberal, but many were supportive of the American tradition of revivalism and soul winning. Still, these ecumenical efforts turned out to be a major factor in the fundamentalist controversy. Fundamentalists opposed church union because they saw cardinal doctrines of the faith-like inerrancy and the Virgin Birth-being sacrificed for the Social Gospel. Other conservative Protestants opposed church union not simply because of their belief in the infallibility of the Bible or the deity of Christ, but because cooperation meant giving up particular aspects of being Lutheran or Reformed. J. Gresham Machen in the Northern Presbyterian Church, Missouri Synod Lutherans, and Christian Reformed were examples of denominational conservatives who resisted having their church identity swallowed up in a generic and cooperative Protestantism.

Interestingly enough, a similar dynamic played out in the 1940s when the word evangelical as we now use it was coined. In 1942, progressive fundamentalists wanted to see if they could unite all conservative Protestants in a single organization that would stand for the true faith as opposed to the mainline churches' Federal Council. The National Association of Evangelicals was the result of these efforts and, like the Federal Council, the NAE was also indifferent to the specific features of being Lutheran, Wesleyan, Reformed, or Baptist. It drew up a list of nine essential doctrines as the basis for membership. Granted, its list was longer than the Federal Council's one doctrine, Christ is Lord; but the NAE was no more sensitive to the features and traditions of historic Protestantism than was the Federal Council. Just as denominational conservatives from the 1920s opposed church union, so conservative Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Reformed refused to join the NAE. Their reason was that they could not cooperate with other Protestants outside their tradition in the ministry of the Word, nor was the NAE a sufficient vehicle for fellowship across denominational lines.

These examples of American Protestant ecumenism reveal two approaches to Christian fellowship and membership: one rooted in the churchly Protestantism of the Reformation; and the other stemming from evangelicalism's indifference to the church. For the former, the old Protestants, fellowship extends to those of like faith and practice as defined by the creeds, worship, and church polity of a particular Protestant tradition. For the new Protestants or evangelicals, fellowship extends to anyone who has a personal relationship with Jesus. This is why, by the way, evangelical identity today increasingly applies even to Roman Catholics and members of liberal Protestant denominations. Next to having Jesus in your heart, church membership does not matter. The evangelical paradigm does not consider that church membership may in fact be a chief indication of one's relationship to Jesus Christ, such as the way the Westminster Confession of Faith asserts not of the invisible but the visible church that it "is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation" (25.2).

Some might still object that using denominational characteristics to define Christian fellowship needlessly undermines the fellowship that evangelicals already enjoy as precisely that unity for which Christ prayed. This objection assumes that evangelicalism actually provides a more basic Christian identity and form of fellowship than a denomination or congregation.

This objection ignores that no greater form of fellowship exists for Christians than at the Lord's Supper. There, believers experience and embody not only their communion with Christ but also with other believers. And yet, as warm and fuzzy as this sounds, the Lord's Supper is inherently a churchly enterprise, one that can be administered only by an ordained minister, takes place in a worship service, and conforms to the creeds and worship directories of a specific denomination. Furthermore, to participate in the Supper at most conservative congregations one needs to be a baptized member of a church that preaches the gospel (i.e., a well-disciplined Communion).

The problem with the Lord's Supper for new Protestants is that more expansive forms of fellowship exist than for Communion. An American Protestant can be on the mailing list of a popular television preacher, subscribe to an evangelical magazine, attend a parachurch campus ministry, identify with a pollster as a born-again Christian, participate regularly on an evangelical blog, or go to a contemporary Christian music concert. Without the big tent of evangelicalism, Protestants are a disjointed, fractious, and diverse group with little chance of influence or being noticed. Consequently, many conservative Protestants prefer the feeling of fellowship that comes from belonging to communities other than the church. Even though a great vagueness holds these parachurch organizations and ministries together, the size of evangelicalism appears to make up for the generality. Misery loves company.

All the while, American Protestants are neglecting through church membership and fellowship at the Lord's Table the most profound, mysterious, and efficacious form of belonging available to believers this side of the marriage feast of the Lamb.