As the articles in this issue of Modern Reformation suggest, evangelicalism is experiencing a change in seasons: former evangelical statesmen are passing from the scene, new evangelicals don't seem to rally around the same issues and ideas as their forefathers, and it's increasingly difficult (if it was ever really possible) to identify clearly what an evangelical is. If you have any warm feelings at all about evangelicalism, you want some answers: Where is evangelicalism going? Who better to turn to for answers than the individuals whose lives and work helped create and shape evangelicalism. Modern Reformation is honored to include the reflections of these evangelical leaders, pastors, and scholars as we seek to understand our own time and the future of the evangelical expression of Christianity.
To anticipate the future of evangelicalism we must reflect on its history. Many evangelicals have been inclined to deny that evangelicalism has much of a history or that it is a unique religious tradition. They prefer to see themselves as simply adhering to biblical religion. But American evangelicalism has a history. It is grounded in the Great Awakening and the Wesleyan revivals of the eighteenth century stressing the religious experience of conversion to new life as the heart of the true religion taught in the Bible.
This evangelical movement has had remarkable success. Until the first part of the twentieth century a large majority of Protestants in America thought of themselves as evangelicals. As the church historian Sydney Ahlstrom put it: "Revivalism became a steady feature of advancing Protestantism throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. But the antebellum period was the great time of evangelical triumph. These were the days above all when the 'Evangelical United Front' took up the manifold causes of moral renewal, missionary advance, and humanitarian reform-with revival preaching almost always leading the way." (1)
Yet for all the success and strengths of evangelicalism, it always suffered from being a reductionistic form of religion. In the eagerness of evangelicals to promote revival and evangelism, many traditional concerns of Christianity (such as predestination, original sin, the nature of grace, the relation and significance of justification and sanctification, sacraments, ministry, worship, and ecclesiology) were marginalized or eliminated from the evangelical core.
The church, however, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Evangelicals often found themselves adding to their religious core rather eccentric concerns. Charles Finney embraced the notion of Christian perfection. D. L. Moody promoted a fascination with prophecy and premillennialism. Some embraced a variety of social issues from abolitionism to prohibition. Others came to focus on the extraordinary work of the Spirit. Still others were challenged to accommodate their faith to the emerging intellectual challenges of the late nineteenth century. All of these supplements to the evangelical core strained evangelical unity, but especially the last point would bring evangelicals to a deep divide.
In the late nineteenth century, higher criticism of the Bible and evolution began to challenge standard elements of orthodox Christian teaching. By the early twentieth century, that unity began to rupture. Between 1910 and 1915, twelve volumes of scholarly essays defending the traditional Protestant understanding of the authority and character of the Bible and other basic doctrines were published under the general title, The Fundamentals. These essays were moderate in tone and did not have a great impact at the time they were published. But they did provide a label around which conservative evangelicals increasingly rallied: fundamentalists.
By the 1920s, theological differences between conservative evangelicals and progressive evangelicals had become so great that the conservatives began to abandon the word "evangelical" because they felt it no longer had a clear meaning. Increasingly, the two sides of evangelicalism became known as the "fundamentalists" and the "modernists" or "liberals."
In the 1940s, Carl Henry and some other somewhat moderate fundamentalists began to feel that the label "fundamentalist" had too many negative connotations. They began to resurrect the older term "evangelical" and call themselves the "new evangelicals." They adhered to the core doctrines of the old evangelicalism (and fundamentalism), but sought to be less antagonistic and isolated than the fundamentalism of the 1930s.
This new evangelicalism took institutional form in agencies like Fuller Seminary, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the periodical Christianity Today, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the Evangelical Theological Society. These agencies did a great deal to rehabilitate revivalist conservative Protestantism as vital popular religion with intellectual respectability and to make it again a potent force in American culture.
The high point of the new evangelicalism's accomplishments was the International Council for Biblical Inerrancy established in the 1970s. This agency provided a popular and scholarly defense of the evangelical doctrine of the Bible's inerrancy and made a significant contribution to articulating and buttressing this vital doctrine.
In the latter part of the twentieth century, the reductionist weakness of evangelicalism again clearly manifested itself. Evangelicals supplemented their religion with contemporary music and contemporary worship. Opposition to abortion and political lobbying became the leading social concerns. And again intellectual challenges arose, such as open theism, the new perspective on Paul, and the authority of Scripture.
In the early twenty-first century, "evangelicalism" has again become a word with almost no meaning. The range of religious convictions held by "evangelicals" has become absurdly wide. Unlike the situation in the 1920s, however, there seems to be little prospect of a great evangelical divide. As long as evangelicals can convince themselves that they are promoting conversion and have a significant cultural impact on America, they seem largely content with their theological contradictions.
As a church historian, I recognize that millions of Americans continue to identify themselves as evangelicals and that the evangelical movement is still doing much that is good. But as a Reformed minister, I believe we need to recognize that evangelicalism is an inherently unstable form of religion, especially because of its reductionism. What Christians need today is a form of religion that embraces the fullness of the biblical revelation.
Here is my big finish: Let us stop worrying about saving evangelicalism. That cannot be done. Let us rather promote confessional Reformed religion, which has the strengths of evangelicalism at its best-and so much more.
