What Is an Evangelical?

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Evangelicalism in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library

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Grant, merciful God, that as we reflect on these things together we may gain clarity of thought, increased fidelity to your Word, and a vision of the propagation of the gospel of Jesus Christ in our own Jerusalems and around the world. For Christ’s sake, amen.

What is an evangelical? The question is largely shaped by what kind of tool is used to answer the question. The answer to that question often comes out of diverse disciplines, and the discipline in large part determines the answer. So one has to sort out some methodological questions before one can come to any genuine agreement as to what is the best sort of approach.

For example, some answer the question out of one of the disciplines or a multitude of the disciplines of social science, in which case an evangelical is someone who belongs to one of the self-defining groups calling themselves evangelical. So you go around the world asking, “Who are the people who call themselves evangelicals?” and then you try to find out their profiles in terms of what they think, what they value, and what they believe.

This is a purely empirical approach, and it uses the tools of the social sciences. In that sense, the term evangelical includes strict Calvinists in some parts of the world. It includes snake handlers in Alabama. It includes some charismatics and some anti-charismatics. It includes some Arminians. It includes Baptists and paedo-baptists.

It includes an astonishingly wide variety of people, but it excludes some people who might have historic Christian beliefs, let’s say some Lutherans who never call themselves evangelical in the English-speaking world. They only call themselves Lutheran. Yet in other parts of the world, it’s compounded by linguistic overlaps. In Germany, Lutherans are evangelisch. Is that evangelical or is it not?

Suddenly you discover that this social science approach, though in one sense it seems wise and farsighted, is beset with problems. Moreover, this approach does not ask or answer any fundamental questions about the real relationship of the group with the Bible. Is there real agreement on what the gospel, the evangel, really is? Thus, the social science approach to defining evangelicalism, though it is astonishingly popular today, is, in my view, fundamentally muddle-headed.

It’s this approach that has generated the essays and books that argue, world without end, that evangelicalism is not so much a theological movement or a theological interpretation or a theological historical heritage so much as a potpourri of different people who all have a passion for Jesus regardless of what they believe.

You get these sweeping generalizations because, after all, empirically, there are people who call themselves evangelicals who do believe all this stuff. So although that approach is very common, in my view it is so deeply flawed we’re not going to pursue it here.

A second approach is essentially historical. You try to trace the historical roots of the people who call themselves evangelical. In the English-speaking world, some go back to the eighteenth century and the so-called Evangelical Awakening in Britain. It was called, on the other hand, the Great Awakening in North America.

Others, looking to the continent, remember that Protestants, initially many of them Lutheran, called themselves evangelisch and, therefore, look to the rootage of the Reformation. So evangelicals are those who live in the light of the Reformation, renewed perhaps by the Evangelical Awakening, and then they have generated the various groups that come down today. That’s what evangelicalism is.

I think that’s a little more useful. It ties us a little more to a historical pattern, but it’s an inadequate approach to the question in any case. For a start, that generates the impression that whatever evangelicalism is it started with the Reformation, but if by our own claims and insight we are insisting that we take our shape from the Bible, are we really so cheeky as to say there were no evangelicals until the 1500s? Suddenly, that sort of approach seems a bit narrow.

Worse, it makes us finally the schismatic ones. I mean, there was the great church, and then along came the evangelicals, and they weren’t invented until the sixteenth century. Inevitably, if that’s how you define evangelicalism, we appear to be the schismatic ones. There’s just no way of avoiding it. Therefore, Catholics, in particular, love us to define ourselves that way, because we are always then put on the left foot. We are inevitably in the defensive posture.

Moreover, this sort of appeal to historical rootedness has the further disadvantage of examining the roots but not necessarily shaping or controlling where it goes. At the end of the day, you end up with some of the problems of a primarily social science approach. Namely, our roots might be in, let us say, the Reformation or, alternatively, in the Evangelical Awakening or some combination of the two; nevertheless, the fruit from that historical line has produced everything from the snake handlers to who knows what.

As a result, provided your roots can be traced directly or indirectly to the Reformation or the like, you still have the same messy problem you have with the social science approach to this whole business. So with respect, the sorts of approaches to the definition of evangelicalism that are grounded in social science or in history I find so immeasurably flawed as not to be very helpful to self-understanding or to presenting who we are to others.

Probably the most common approach is that of Bebbington in the United Kingdom, a historian now working in Scotland. His approach is a kind of combination of a little bit of theological definition, a little bit of social science, and a little bit of history. It’s a kind of potpourri of all of them, and it’s better, though in my view it’s still pretty deeply flawed.

He says there is a quadrilateral of priorities (that’s his expression) that is the basis of evangelicalism, and then he defines these four points. The four points constituting the quadrilateral of priorities are conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism. Let me go through them.

1. Conversionism.

He says one of the distinguishing features of this quadrilateral of priorities amongst evangelicalism is this commitment to people being converted. Many other heritages establish a family tradition almost. You’re sort of brought up in the tradition. Thirty years ago, how many Catholics in Poland or Ireland would grow up and think of themselves as getting converted? It just doesn’t make sense.

You’re Catholic because you belong to a Catholic family because you’re Irish or Polish or Slovak or whatever. It defines you in terms of your whole people identity. Whereas evangelicals keep speaking of conversionism. On the other hand, there are some problems with that too. There are some people who hold to an evangelical theology in a more Reformed camp, some of the Dutch Reformed people and some others, who speak of the presumption of regeneration in their children.

It’s not the way I would personally want to go, but when they speak this way, they don’t really stress conversionism a great deal. You enter into the covenant of baptism, and it’s sort of confirmed by acts of faith all through your life and perhaps, in some traditions, also with confirmation of some sort or another, yet their theology may be essentially evangelical. Do you exclude them from evangelicalism? Is conversionism exactly right?

Moreover, it’s the –ism at the end of each of these words that has a little overtone. As soon as it’s not conversion but conversionism, there is a small sneer attached to that in my hearing that may not be fair to dear Brother Bebbington, but it makes me slightly suspicious of the expression just the same. Yes, I would like to see people converted. Does that make me committed to conversionism? It’s not how I want to define myself quite.

2. Activism.

I suppose in the best of evangelicalism there is often a certain kind of activism. In the Evangelical Awakening, for example, the people who were at the front end of social reformation, the people against slavery, the people who were instituting changes in the mines and against many kinds of child abuse, the reformation of the prisons, the institution of the first trade unions.… Without exception, they were all evangelicals who were advocating one form or another of social justice.

On the other hand, there are some forms of evangelicalism that are remarkably pacifist that tend to withdraw, that tend to think in fairly privatized terms of religion. Do we exclude them just because they’re not activist? Moreover, there’s that little expression –ism, activism, again. Moreover, it’s in danger of almost giving you the impression that we’re the only activist ones, and that’s far from being the truth too. So I’m not quite sure that’s exactly right. Although I have some sympathy for the way Bebbington puts these four together; nevertheless, I have some worries.

3. Biblicism.

What shall we do with biblicism? Clearly, one of the distinguishing marks, heuristically speaking, of evangelicalism is a commitment to the authority of the Bible. Fair enough. As soon as you make it biblicism, there’s that –ism that bothers me a wee bit, but this is also tied, in the mind of Bebbington, to a kind of approach to the Bible that took on special freight perhaps with the Princetonians in the nineteenth century.

The Reformers laid a special emphasis on sola scriptura, but then those nasty Princetonians invented things like inerrancy, and if we could just get on to a broader world we’d be a little better off. That’s not quite right historically either. There is a very important book by John Woodbridge called Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal. This book responds to this charge that this high view of Scripture is a late invention.

John Woodbridge is a world-class historian. He did his doctorat de troisiËme cycle, the French more or less equivalent of a PhD, at Toulouse and has published extensively in German and French as well as in English. What he does is simply go through the primary sources, from the second century on, regarding what the church thought of Scripture.

This high view of Scripture, cast in different sorts of expressions and terms, tracks right through until the Enlightenment. Because it’s almost all primary source stuff, it’s very difficult to refute. The chap has done his homework. He’s one of the best historians on this trajectory through church history that I know. He really has done his homework.

Thus, even in, for example, high medieval Catholicism, although there was a whole theory of revelation that was larger than Scripture, a deposit of faith in the written tradition and in the oral tradition of the church interpreted through the magisterial office, nevertheless this was not a depreciation of Scripture in any sense. There was still, at least in theory, Bible-centered authority.

So again, biblicism by itself is a slippery category and may have overtones of falling into a rather false analysis of the history of the doctrine, the trajectory of the doctrine, that gives the impression that this sort of high view of Scripture was invented by evangelicals, and surely you don’t want to say that if you’re informed by these trajectories of history.

4. Crucicentrism.

This is his way of talking about the way we center on the cross. This element obviously resonates with us in certain respects as well. We’re constantly saying that the gospel is tied to the cross. At the same time, crucicentrism.… Cruci, or cross, is simply from the Latin. Crucicentrism is simply cross-centeredness; it centers on the cross.

The difficulty with this, in part, is what person from any strand of Christendom would want to say, “I don’t want to center on the cross”? After all, it’s not evangelicals who put up crucifixes in all of their rooms. So crucicentrism is such a vague category it’s not particularly distinguishing. One understands sympathetically what Bebbington means, but at the same time it’s not particularly insightful, and it may actually be somewhat misleading.

In fact, I would be prepared to argue that one of the distinguishing features of evangelicalism over against that form of crucicentrism you find in conservative strands of Catholicism is that we have a greater place for the resurrection than for Christ hanging on the cross. There are other differences that are far more important.

Catholicism tends to revere Christ as the baby in Mary’s arms or Christ on the cross but not the powerful Christ resurrected from the dead, although if you say that, a Catholic will take umbrage, because Catholics do believe that. Yet does crucicentrism as a term sufficiently define us and our distinctiveness? I doubt it.

As a result, these different approaches to defining evangelicalism, the social science approach, the historical streams approach, or the fourfold typology of Bebbington, all have, in my judgment, very severe limitations. I think they generate more problems than they solve. Now before I press on with another way, questions about what I’ve said so far?

Male: [Inaudible]

Don Carson: Yeah, that’s right. It really doesn’t make sense there. If assurance of salvation is the defining point, why doesn’t he put this into his quadrilateral? Moreover, at the time of the Reformation, debates over assurance were fundamental. Luther and Calvin had slightly different takes on the matter, but it was really very important as part of the debate that defined the Reformation.

For Luther, assurance of salvation was part of faith. If you lacked assurance of salvation, it was because your faith was not yet sufficiently strong or well-grounded or whatever. Calvin said much of the same but thought there were also some attesting works in the secret work of the Spirit, so it was a slightly more comprehensive view.

But to think that assurance of salvation was invented by evangelicals.… Again, the effect is to make evangelicalism making a late appearance in history, which is pretty problematic if you’re claiming that you’re taking your cues from the New Testament. So I think Bebbington’s work, though it is widely cited everywhere, is in this respect historically naÔve and theologically slightly grotesque.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Yes. He’s not saying that any one of these is a sufficient criterion for evangelicalism. He is saying that what he calls the quadrilateral of priorities, these things taken together as being the priorities of the movement, are what ground evangelicalism.

Male: Doesn’t it mean that if we don’t like each one of them separately, when we put them together it makes much more sense?

Don: Well, the difficulty is they’re each so plastic that with a certain kind of sympathetic reading you could use the same expression for, let’s say, an active order of Jesuits. The Jesuits, for example, for many parts of their lives were activist. They became missionaries in North America amongst the North American natives in Japan, the Far East, and India, and they were often concerned about issues of social justice.

They tried to teach the Bible as they understood it. They were certainly cruciform in some sense, and they were trying to convert people. They were missionaries. So you look through the quadrilateral, and you realize once again that the quadrilateral applies to all kinds of groups besides evangelicals. It’s not a very accurate assessment of things.

You are quite right that he wants the four of them together to be what he calls this quadrilateral of priorities that establish what evangelicalism is. It’s not entirely wrong if you read it with sufficient sympathy. It’s just not very helpful. At the end of the day, in his own hands, he has evangelicalism appearing as a pretty late movement in the eighteenth century. I’m not sure that’s very helpful.

What I would advocate instead is an essentially biblical/theological definition of evangelicalism but with an eye cocked, nevertheless, to history to acknowledge how people have understood the Bible and theology (we don’t want to operate under the illusion that we are not ourselves culturally located) and with some attempt to see how well the expression is tied or not tied to various social groupings today.

If, then, we are coming to this sort of biblical/theological rootage, the place to begin is back with what the New Testament says the evangel, the gospel, is. What is the euaggelion? Then you start proceeding in various theological and historical ways from there. Let me make one or two methodological points before we stretch out. Already, by doing this, you are adopting a posture in which you are claiming to have both a formal principle and a material principle.

That is common language in the whole history of this discussion in the past but almost never used anymore. It’s really deeply unfortunate. The formal principle is the principle of our authority. It is an appeal to Scripture to define us. That’s our authority. In other words, it’s in line with such Reformation slogans as sola scriptura, but it’s in line with the kind of work I mentioned from John Woodbridge as well, in which the Scripture has been the norming norm throughout history until the Enlightenment.

The material principle is the substance of what we think the gospel is. So the question always becomes.… Is what we think the gospel is genuinely shaped by Scripture? The material principle and the formal principle are not two entirely separate principles. We test our material principle by our formal principle again and again, because we acknowledge that there are others who, at least in theory, have the formal principle we have. Jehovah’s Witnesses have the same formal principle we have.

So we acknowledge that having the formal principle does not necessarily define us, because there are some people who have an equally high view of Scripture but a really quite different understanding of it. By speaking of both a formal principle and the material principle, we are still insisting that we’re taking our cue from Scripture.

We are acknowledging our own historical rootedness as to how we interpret the Scripture and are prepared to defend that corner intellectually, historically, theologically, and so on, but at the end of the day we’re also prepared to summarize what the Scripture says is the content of that gospel, and that gives us our material principle.

Within that framework, then, you could obviously spend several days.… In fact, if you were doing detailed work on biblical theology you could spend weeks and weeks lecturing on the material principle; that is.… What is the gospel? What is this good news? How is it put together in Scripture? Every student entering Trinity Evangelical Divinity School has to take a required three-hour semester course that we call Introduction to Biblical Theology.

One of the things we do in this course, besides giving some history of the discipline, is track some of the main strands through Scripture: How does the strand of temple develop, the strand of priesthood develop, the notion of sonship develop, and the notion of sacrifice develop right through Scripture? Or you can start at the other end. Start with Revelation 21–22, find everything in those two chapters that have antecedents in the Scripture, and then track them backwards and forwards.

That, too, is part of establishing how the Bible is put together and contributes finally to how you define the content of the material principle. That is a way of becoming more shaped by the formal principle. It’s biblicist in the best sense: based in the Bible. Obviously, we don’t have time to do all of that here. What I am going to do for the next few minutes is adopt an approach nicely summarized by John Stott in his book Evangelical Truth.

What he does is turn to one passage in the New Testament where the gospel is the subject of discussion and the shape of the gospel in quite a number of its dimensions is laid out. This is not an exhaustive treatment of what the gospel in the New Testament is, but it’s nicely focused and it’s pretty helpful. We’ll begin there. First Corinthians 15. I’m going to read some of the opening verses, beginning at verse 1.

“Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.

After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.” Then he talks a little further about his own history, and then he says in verse 11, “Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.”

Then he goes on in particular to talk about the resurrection in the rest of the chapter. This is to do with the gospel. Verse 1: “I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you.” What comes about in the following verses is an unpacking of Paul’s understanding of what the gospel consists in. It’s one of the things that makes this passage so important.

In this connection, one can say that Paul has already established other things about the gospel. For example, in 1 Corinthians, chapter 1, he says it’s foolishness to the world. He also says it’s the power of God to salvation to all who believe. He says quite a lot of things about the gospel in other places. In this passage, however, he shows that it is characterized by a number of things.

1. The gospel is deeply christological and tied to the cross and resurrection.

It’s the announcement of good news. It’s the euaggelion. It’s the announcement of that which is good tied to the person and work of Christ. So this gospel is Christ died and rose again. This means that any so-called gospel that does not focus on Christ is not the gospel; indeed, that does not focus on Christ dying and rising again, because he says himself, “This is the matter of first importance: that Christ died and rose again.”

In other words, a form of the gospel that does not have Christ’s death and resurrection at its center is already only very doubtfully the gospel. It’s worth pausing for a moment and reflecting on that a little more. In the pre-conference seminar, when we were doing a bit on hermeneutics, I pointed out that in the first century people did not readily speak of four gospels. That suggests that a gospel is a literary genre.

Rather, the initial titles of our Gospels were The Gospel According to Matthew, The Gospel According to Mark, The Gospel According to Luke, and so forth. In other words, it was understood that there was one gospel with various witnesses. It was not really until the second century that the terminology changed so that although this could still be said, nevertheless, it was still understood that there was one gospel and these were multiply attesting books.

Thus, in each of our canonical gospels, mini-biographies of Jesus, if you want to see what the one gospel is, the gospel of Jesus Christ, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, look for the commonalities. Then you discover right away that the gospel turns on the coming of Jesus announced by John the Baptist, his life, ministry, miracles, teaching, culminating in his death and resurrection. That is the gospel.

Of course, it has all kinds of other entailments in what it means and its significance all explained, but that is, at the heart of things, the good news. It’s christological and it’s deeply tied to the death and resurrection of Christ. That’s why some of the contemporary efforts to say that something like the Gospel of Thomas goes back to the first century are not only historically dubious but theologically foolish.

Efforts to make the Gospel of Thomas a gospel don’t work very well for a start because the Gospel of Thomas, so-called (mid-second century at the earliest in my view of the date), is really a collection of 114 sayings. There are only two tiny little snippets of anything historical. There’s no mention of the death or resurrection of Christ. The whole feel of the document is the kind of esoteric teaching of the Gnostics.

There were different forms of Gnosticism. One form of Gnosticism, for example, argued that the Word or the Son of God came upon the man Jesus at Jesus’ baptism and then left him, abandoned him, when Jesus was dying on the cross, and that’s why Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” So it was dear old Jesus all by himself in his narrow little humanity who died, and his death is really not very important.

The really important bit is all this teaching stuff, and this teaching has to do with esoteric knowledge and secret revelation. All Gnostic stuff. But then it’s not the gospel. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is, in fact, the whole story of his whole life culminating in his death and resurrection. Likewise, for those of you who are into gospel criticism and the like, this Q document, from the German Quella, really referring to the substance of the overlapping material between Matthew and Luke …

I don’t mind if people speak of Q material (common material), and it is even conceivable that some of it was written down in a document of some sort, but it has never come to us, and there’s not a shred of evidence, not a trace anywhere, that it was ever considered by anybody a gospel. So now to argue for Q being a gospel and Thomas being a first-century gospel in order to track back a Gnostic form of Christianity into the first century is just historical rubbish of the very first water.

There is but one gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it is tied to the entire person and work of Christ. It’s deeply christological, and it’s deeply cross and resurrection centered. So much so that many people have said that, in some ways, the four gospels can be seen as passion narratives with extended introductions. That’s the way the thing works, and that is really summarized here by Paul.

Although I am focusing on Paul, what I have done by this small excursus is to show that this is tied to the Gospels, to the actual life and times and ministry of Jesus. In other words, he himself says it is bound up with Christ and, as a matter of first importance, that Christ died and rose again. “That’s the gospel I have preached and you have received.”

2. The gospel is biblical.

He keeps saying, “According to the Scriptures.” Christ died according to the Scriptures. He was buried and rose again according to the Scriptures. It’s really very important for our consideration to remember that when the book of Acts describes people going around and preaching or teaching the Scriptures in synagogues and in that context preaching Christ, the Scriptures they’re preaching at that stage are what we mean by the Old Testament documents.

They took the Old Testament documents and preached Christ. In other words, they saw that the Old Testament documents, rightly understood, pointed forward, anticipated, along an array of typological trajectories, the coming of the ultimate Lamb of God, the ultimate temple, the ultimate Passover sacrifice, the ultimate High Priest, the ultimate Messiah, the ultimate King of Israel.

The Christians were reading the Scriptures in such a way that they dumped into Christ. In other words, the gospel they were preaching was biblical. Of course, as that extends outward.… This is only one text, using “according to the Scriptures” for these events, it becomes part of the way we think of things when we say that evangelicals have a formal principle. We want to see things according to the Scripture. That is our norming norm.

3. The gospel is historical.

It’s very important to see this as well. The claim is that this announcement of good news refers to events that take place in space-time history. A little over a year ago, the Anglican archbishop of Perth, who was the primate of Australia (he was at the time; he has since stepped down), was asked by the media, “Supposing the actual grave of Jesus was found, and supposing, by whatever means, it was proved that it really was his grave and the body is still there, what would that do to your Christian faith?” He replied, “Well, nothing.”

“What do you mean? Don’t Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead?”

“Well, yes, but he has risen in my heart, and I don’t need an empty grave to prove that.”

That’s a long way from Paul’s argument here. You have to see that. In the verses that follow beyond what I’ve read, what does Paul say? Let’s think through, he says, the implications of the assumption that Christ did not rise from the dead. First, the apostles were liars. In other words, the witnesses who claimed they had seen Jesus, that the tomb was empty, that they had eaten with him, that Thomas had actually put his finger in the wounds …

They all have to be self-deluded, hypnotized, malicious liars, fanatics, megalomaniacs, or something, but whatever they’re doing, they’re not telling the truth. In that sense they’re telling lies. They’re liars. You can’t trust them, because the public claim is that this has happened in history.

Secondly, he says it also follows, if Christ has not really risen from the dead, that you’re still lost in your trespasses and sins. The argument there is built on an assumption that the other things the Bible says are true and, thus, we’re looking at human beings in the light of what Scripture says. In the light of what Scripture says, we’re rebels against God. We stand under his wrath. We need to be reconciled to him.

What is the ground of that reconciliation if it’s not Christ and his death and resurrection? If the resurrection did not take place, then how can you be sure the death of Christ was actually accepted before God? The resurrection is the vindication of Christ. It’s the attestation that the sacrifice is actually accepted. So if Christ has not risen, then what can you say about his death? You’re just damned.

Thirdly, he says your faith is worthless. That’s because in the first century one of the essential validations of faith is the truthfulness of faith’s object. That’s very different from what we think today, where faith is personal subjective religious preference. That’s all it is. It has no grounding in truth.

Thus, very frequently people say today all over North American and in Europe.… Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, it doesn’t really make any difference, “Well, you have your faith, and I have my faith. There’s no point arguing about these things, because they’re a matter of faith. There’s no point arguing about them, because they’re divorced from reality.

You can talk and discuss reality the way you can talk about atoms and molecules and quarks and the temperature, but there’s no point arguing about faith, because it’s non-testable. It’s not charged by reality. It’s just what I think. It’s a subjective personal religious preference.” That’s not what Paul says. The word faith has a variety of meanings in the New Testament, a variety of overtones, but never, ever is it used in this purely subjective sense.

Faith is more than simply believing in certain objective things. It involves also the element of self-abandonment and trust and so forth, but it is never less. Faith’s object must be true for faith to be valid. That’s why faith is encouraged in the New Testament by the defense and articulation of the truth. It’s very important to see that.

So Paul does not try to encourage faith by banging a drum and saying, “Believe, believe, believe, believe, believe, believe, believe.” He tries to ground faith by showing the reasonableness and the public attestation and the truthfulness of the witnesses who actually say that Christ did rise from the dead. So if Christ did not rise from the dead, your faith is futile. It’s empty. It’s worthless.

Fourthly, he says you’re of all people most to be pitied. In other words, far from this sort of faith being admirable or commendable, like that of the bishop of Perth, he thinks it’s stupid. You’re just a joke. You’re to be pitied. You’re believing something that isn’t true. What’s the sanity of that? So Paul is very tough-minded in this area. He’s not at all sentimental. He doesn’t want to permit you to believe something that isn’t true.

All of this means that the basic gospel is historical. It’s worth thinking about that a little more in a broader context as well. How much of Christian religion, how much of the gospel is tied irrefragably to history? It’s astonishingly important. I don’t know how you’d do it, but supposing you could prove that Gautama the Buddha never lived. Would you destroy Buddhism? Of course not. The believability and coherence of Buddhism is not irrefragably tied to the existence of Gautama.

Gautama is believed to be a great teacher of the whole structure and a great exemplar personally of Buddhism’s values, but in the various schools of Buddhism, one of which is pretty close to atheistic, it’s not tied to the man Buddha himself. So if you could prove somehow (I don’t know how) that Buddha never lived, you wouldn’t jeopardize Buddhism. Buddhism’s believability turns on its internal coherence, its perceived consistency, its ability to make sense of life, and so on.

Go to Hinduism. Supposing you could prove that one of their more important gods, Krishna, never lived (I don’t know how you’d do it, but supposing you could) would you destroy Hinduism? Hinduism has a view of truth and reality as more or less being one. All of reality is on one large plane that embraces good and evil and the gods and the non-gods. There are millions and millions of these gods as truth erupts in various ways.

The aim of life is to rise higher in this mess of total reality of truth through various cycles until you come to greater self-awareness. If in all of this somehow (I don’t know how) you could take one of the gods out, well, there are millions and millions of others. If you don’t go to a Krishna temple, go down the street to a Shiva temple. There are a lot of other gods. You’re not going to destroy Hinduism by this sort of means.

Go to Islam. You go to your friendly neighborhood imam and ask the question, “Do you believe that Allah, blessed be he, had he chosen to do so, could have given his final revelation to somebody other than Muhammad?” Probably he will misunderstand the question. He will say, “No, no, no. You don’t understand. We believe that Abraham is a great prophet and Moses is a great prophet and Jesus is a very great prophet, but the greatest prophet, the last prophet, the final prophet with the revelation of God is Muhammad.”

You say, “You know I’m a Christian. I don’t see things quite that way; nevertheless, that’s not quite my question. That’s not really what I’m asking. I’m not asking whether or not you think Muhammad is the greatest and final prophet. I know that’s what you think, but that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking do you think that Allah, had he so decided, could have given that final revelation to somebody other than Muhammad?”

Of course he will say, “Of course. The revelation is not Muhammad. Only Allah is sovereign. Only he is god. He does whatever he pleases. We believe he did give that final revelation to Muhammad, but that does not mean Muhammad is himself the object of faith. It’s not that he is himself the revelation.” Isn’t that what he would say? Thus, in that sense, you could even pull Muhammad out of the whole equation. In fact, you can’t, because they do believe he was the one who gave it. Nevertheless, he is not, in that sense, integral to the claimed putative revelation.

Now come to Christianity. Here it is not even coherent to ask the question, “Could God have given his revelation to somebody other than Jesus?” because the revelation is Jesus. This revelation has manifested itself in space-time history such that if the incarnation, to use the language of John.… “Whom we have seen with our eyes, whom our hands have handled, whom we have heard with our ears, whom we have touched concerning the word of life.”

If that’s not true, then the entire thing falls apart. If you don’t have the historical revelation, “The Word became flesh,” you don’t have Christianity anymore. If you don’t have his death on the cross, you don’t have Christianity anymore. If you don’t have the resurrection, you don’t have Christianity anymore. These are all things that happened in space-time history. It’s a deeply historical revelation.

Now that does not mean we think that all we’re doing when we’re bearing Christian witness is saying, “Our version of history is better than your version of history.” We acknowledge that to come to grips with Christ’s resurrection, there is the sinful inclination of our hearts. We don’t want to bow the knee. There are spiritual insights, so you’re into the large apologetic questions of presuppositionalism versus evidentialism, and so on. There’s a whole history of such debates, but at the end of the day, Christian witness, Christian apologetics, cannot ever avoid history.

In North America, every year around Easter time a flood of books and articles come out raising questions about, “Did Jesus actually rise from the dead?” Every year there’s another whole packet. This year we were blessed with The Da Vinci Code and the Judas gospel and a variety of other things. I got embroiled inevitably in one or two of these. It’s sort of an annual event.

One I got embroiled in was a book that I don’t think has hit over here yet by James Tabor called The Hidden History of Jesus. I won’t go through Tabor’s whole thesis, but it’s such a reconstruction of the first century that at the end of the day you don’t have a virgin birth and you certainly don’t have a resurrection. He admits he’s a philosophical naturalist. People living in the real world can’t believe any of this sort of rubbish.

In addition, Jesus not only married Mary Magdalene, which a lot of people have tried to say before, but his whole plan was to continue the Davidic dynasty in a purely human sense, so his heir and successor was already designated. It was the person we call James the Just, but unfortunately, Peter and Paul eclipsed him in the documents that have come down to us. James was really number one.

The chap on ABC (American Broadcasting Corporation) who was tasked to push this book in some of their programs, interestingly enough, was a Christian, a converted Muslim. How this particular converted Muslim had come to faith was very interesting. Muslims come to faith in a variety of different ways. How he came to faith was peculiarly interesting in this case.

As a young man, he had spent a lot of time in mosques asking historical questions about Muhammad, but he could never get answers. Somewhere along the line, he met a Christian who was pretty informed, and when he asked him historical questions about Jesus, he got a lot of answers. He became a Christian. So now he comes across this book that’s trying to destroy the historical basis of Christianity, and inevitably, he feels outraged.

So he went to his pastor. His pastor referred him to me, so I got on national television to try to refute this historical rubbish. It was very interesting to watch someone who had come out of another world religion who understands, coming in from the outside, as it were, how important the historical claims are to the basis of what the gospel is. In that sense, once again, the gospel is christological, biblical, and historical.

4. The gospel is theological.

It does not simply concern a variety of historical events, a string of pearls detached from one another except by the accidents of history. It is bound up with a certain kind of God-centeredness. It’s seen even in the slogan here too. I’ve kept saying the words, “Christ died and rose again,” but that’s not quite what the text says. The text says, “Christ died for our sins and rose again the third day.” That’s the matter that’s of first importance.

As soon as you put it that way, you see that within the frame of reference of Scripture, that he died for our sins, this is (to use Paul’s language in 2 Corinthians 5) to reconcile us to God. In other words, it’s a God-centered view of things. He didn’t just happen to die without any particular significance and rise again by a spectacular miracle and that’s good news. That’s not good news. It’s odd, but it’s not good news.

The good news is that he died for our sins and rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures, by the plan of God, so that we might be reconciled to him. In other words, it’s a deeply theological vision as well. Now that’s worth thinking about too, because although this is only one passage, it raises, in a supreme way at this point, the question, “What did the cross achieve?”

One of the things I find somewhere between consistently disappointing and mildly perverse is that kind of treatment of the atonement that simply surveys how the cross has been understood in the course of history and then invites you to pick one. How has the cross been understood? Well, some Christians have thought of it primarily in moral exemplary terms. He died willingly and suffered unjustly, so we also should die willingly and be prepared to suffer unjustly.

Then there’s a substitutionary penal atonement view. He dies bearing God’s wrath in our place. Then there’s a Christus Victor view, Christ the Victor view, in which somehow by his death he overcomes the powers of darkness. There are five or six major views across the history of the church plus many sub-views. So people say, since Christians have understood the cross so differently, “Well, pick one for goodness’ sake. Don’t get uptight about it. Why do you thunder away on one particular one?”

Methodologically, this is perverse. It is suggesting that we are prepared to abandon our formal principle. The real question is.… What does the Scripture say about any or all of these views? Does the Scripture authorize any of them, or several of them, and if it authorizes several of them, how does the Scripture itself put them together?

Thus, for example, in 1 Peter 2 you find, very strongly pushed, the moral exemplary implications of the cross. “Don’t think that if you’re suffering justly because you’ve been naughty that there is anything worthy in that, but if you suffer unjustly then you’re following the pattern of Christ himself who suffered unjustly.” It’s a moral exemplary view.

By the end of the chapter, Peter also reminds us that he was bearing in his own body our sins. He bore our sins in his own body on the tree, which is part of a Petrine substitutionary penal authority view. You start asking how these things come together, and they are put within a broader theological framework in which Christ by his death reconciles us to God.

Yes, he overcomes the powers of darkness, but he overcomes the powers of darkness precisely because the powers of darkness can no longer lay anything to our charge, to our account, because Christ has borne our sin and our guilt. Thus, the Christus Victor theme, I would argue, is theologically and biblically grounded itself in the penal substitutionary view. To try to abstract it from it is to walk away from the formal principle.

5. The gospel is apostolic.

In one sense, this is really a sub-point under historical, because those first witnesses were either apostles or those within the apostolic orb. That’s one of the ways in which Scripture is itself grounded under the terms of the new covenant, but here, in particular, it’s the apostles who bear witness to the resurrection, to this climactic view.

In other words, when we speak of the holy apostolic church, the emphasis is not on lineal descendants, as in Catholic thought. It’s on the peculiar witness function of those first apostles. It’s very important to see this. There are some people who define the church in terms of lineal connection through the bishops all the way back to the apostles.

By an apostolic church, what they mean is an organic connection of lineal descendant … not genetic descent but lineal descent of authority; one set of bishops ordaining the next generation of bishops ordaining the next generation of bishops so that the church finally is defined by this lineal descent.

That’s not what apostolic authority here means. For a start, the apostle Paul himself can say in Galatians 1:8–9, “If we apostles or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel than the gospel that has been preached to you, let him be anathema.” In other words, Paul does not say, “Provided we apostles tell you that something is true, it’s true; just shut up and believe it.”

Rather, he says that even an apostle might get something wrong, and that’s why in the very next chapter he can rebuke Peter, who, as far as I know, was also an apostle. Here are two apostles disagreeing with each other. No, he says, what is the normative thing is not apostolicity in the abstract, still less apostolicity descended through further people who are apparently in lineal descent from them, but the gospel itself.

In other words, there is in Scripture, it seems to me, an emphasis on soteriology and revelation over ecclesiology. As soon as you reverse this and put ecclesiology (the structure of ecclesiastical descent) above soteriology and revelation, you’re opening the doors for huge aberrations. In this case, then, the insistence that the gospel is apostolic is very important.

I mentioned just in passing in one of my public biblical expositions that in the New Testament the pastor is the elder, the bishop, or our translations sometimes say overseer. There aren’t many people who disagree with that. There are some, but even a staunch Anglican like J.B. Lightfoot has an extended excursus in his Philippians commentary to demonstrate that point. There are more up-to-date discussions today, but that really is the majority view.

It’s not until the second century that the bishops begin to have oversight over a number of other elders and pastors. It’s surprising how early this comes about, and Ignatius, as everybody knows (maybe 115 or thereabouts), actually goes so far as to say, “Where the bishop is, there is the church.” That’s very interesting.

One of the reasons for this is the church was expanding so fast at the time that many local assemblies just didn’t have the smarts, the trained people, the theological oomph, the discernment to handle the traveling people who came by, so people would start referring them to the central figure, who knew an awful lot more, who would begin to have veto power over these other congregations.

Thus, you began to have the rise of what came to be called monarchical bishops, bishops who were ruling a wee bit like kings over a whole lot of other assemblies. This, in the first instance, was a form of doctrinal and moral self-protection. The people who really do know tell us. What this means is that although the motives were originally very good to give these people extra authority, eventually there were all kinds of rather pernicious things that flowed from it.

The church began to define itself in terms of the bishop. You can’t find that in the New Testament. You can’t even find the church defining itself entirely according to the apostles. At one level, yes, the apostles mediate the truth to us and, thus, the gospel is apostolic, yet at the same time, it’s apostolic insofar as they bear witness to the gospel, but it is the authority of the gospel and its revelation that is finally determinative.

6. The gospel is personal.

Notice how the chapter begins. “Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.” You see right away that it is not simply good news in the public arena that affects you whether you like it or not.

There is a sense, for example, in which consideration of the providence of God is like that. In the Bible, the expression the kingdom of God is used in a variety of ways. When the psalmist tells us that his kingdom rules over all, you don’t have to be born again to enter that kingdom. You’re in it whether you like it or not. You can be a flat-out atheist and you’re in that kingdom. You don’t have to do anything to be in the kingdom.

You’re in it by virtue of the fact that God is God. He’s sovereign, and you don’t do anything to be in it or not. How you submit to it is another matter, but on the other hand, the kingdom of God in that providential sense is not intrinsically personal. Whether you trust him, whether you have faith in his wisdom, then it becomes personal derivatively, but nevertheless, you’re in it whether you like it or not.

But this gospel is very personal in the sense that it must be, finally, individually believed, and then you are individually saved. Of course there’s a corporate dimension in the fruit of all of this. I’m not denying that either. But it is, at the end of the day, personal in that it saves persons when this gospel is received and believed and held firmly.

With this sort of approach to what the gospel is, it is still worth considering how this biblical theological understanding of what the evangel is is worked out in history. Some of us, for example, who have read a lot of Reformation literature, may be inclined to think mistakenly that the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone was invented by the Reformers. Not true.

There’s a very helpful book, for example, by Thomas Oden called The Justification Reader, where he simply works through the Patristics and shows how often justification is worked out there. Not always in exactly the same formulations, not always in exactly the same frame of reference, but it’s not as if it was thought up for the first time when Luther nailed his theses on the door of the Wittenberg church.

Moreover, one has to say that because this was not one of the debating points at the time of the fathers, therefore it did not achieve equivalent precision. On the other hand, most of the deep christological debates did take place in the first four centuries, generating the Council of Nicaea and Chalcedon and these great christological formulations.

Now they too are cast in the particular categories of their age, distinctions between person and substance that people are still arguing over, but nevertheless, it was an attempt to understand what Scripture says. When Athanasius is tackling these things before Nicaea, he is told, because so many of the bishops seem to be going in the opposite direction toward some form of what we now call Arianism because of the influence of Arius …

It seemed as if they were going in the other direction, but Athanasius kept going back to Scripture, text after text after text, and he was told in that context, “Athanasius, the whole world is against you.” He replied, “Then it’s Athanasius against the whole world.” That is either supremely arrogant or it is a kind of commitment to the formal principle. Convince me out of Scripture.

Luther found himself, on an entirely different issue, in the same position when he was called before the council. When he’s called before the council and told to renounce his views, he does not say, “Oh, I can’t do that.” What he begs for is a night to study and think about it and pray yet one more time, because he realizes he’s taking on something huge. Is only Luther right?

At the end of the day, because of the formal principle, the next morning when he comes back he says, “To go against Scripture is neither wise nor good. Here I stand, so help me God. I can do no other.” It’s an appeal to the formal principle. So these things are often churned out in their formulations in the context of controversy, but even before that controversy erupts, the rudimentary structures are part of the sweep of this sort of confessionalism across history.

So understood, evangelicalism that is shaped and defined in this way, at its best, is nothing other than a reflection of the best attempts to be faithful to the gospel as presented in the New Testament. That’s all it is. If you attach that to a particular movement, a social grouping, that comes across as saying, “Our group is better than your group,” and it just sounds arrogant.

On the other hand, if you are holding to the formal principle and the material principle and you’re not claiming some special insight or intrinsic moral or epistemological superiority to your group but are simply trying to be faithful to what Scripture says, both in its content (the material principle) and to the authority principle of Scripture to which you will, in fact, submit, then evangelicalism so defined, at its best, is nothing other than the best exemplar of faithfulness to Scripture, of biblical fidelity to the gospel.

Nevertheless, because of our humanness and our faulty frames of reference, that we have to be corrected and we all have our blind spots.… This is why the best people who have thought about these things across the centuries have distinguished (not always using the terms I’m about to use) between a boundary-bounded set and a center-bounded set. In other words, it’s possible to articulate what the gospel is and bow in principle to Scripture, but then you start asking, “Who is in and who is out?”

In a boundary-bounded set, you have a very tightly defined perimeter, and everybody is either inside the perimeter or outside the perimeter. Then you have to have an astonishingly precise, well-defined, immovable barrier or you start adjusting who’s a heretic and who’s orthodox again and again and again. In a center-bounded set, you define things as tightly as you can at the center and say, “So far as I can see, this is what the gospel really looks like under the formal principle of the authority of Scripture, so this is what an evangelical is.”

Nevertheless, you acknowledge that people might adhere to most of those principles but maybe not one of them, or they might interpret one of them a wee bit differently, or they might begin at the center and then gradually move out. At some point, you can move out so far you’re an atheist. At some point, everybody would say they’re outside. The person himself or herself would say they’re outside.

Someone like James Barr, even Don Cupitt, can begin, in some sense, with an evangelical connection, and if you move out far enough, they themselves would say they’re not evangelicals anymore. Don Cupitt finally resigned his Anglican orders. He was so far out he couldn’t even see himself as Christian anymore. Before you get that far, you might move out just to the point where, for example, you’re a theist but no longer believe Jesus is God or you’re broadly in the Christendom tradition but no longer believe Jesus rose from the dead.

At some point you’re outside, but just exactly where that point is might be hard to discern, even though some people, once they’ve gotten far enough out, are really out. In a center-bounded set, in other words, you’re not in a mad panic all the time to discern who’s in and who’s out. On the other hand, when people start coming to faith, it’s sometimes difficult to find out whether they’re in yet. They’re moving in. They’ve started from completely outside, and then they’re moving in, and at what point they are Christians …

They may have really responded positively in faith to Christ. They’re enthusiastically for him, but they know so little of the content of the gospel they’re still quite a long way out in the structure of their actual personal beliefs, and it’s going to take some time before they’re shaped and reshaped and reshaped by the formal principle, by Scripture itself, to be reasonably consistent with this core, this center, that bounds the set. I think any other approach to defining who’s in and who’s out breeds far more problems.

Moreover, this also allows us to do something else that is very important. I’ve indicated already that there are some groups, for example Lutherans in the English-speaking world, who just about never use the category evangelical. They’re Lutherans; they’re not evangelicals. In Romania, there are some Baptists who say they’re Baptists; they’re not evangelicals. There are different ways of using these terms, and there are parts of the world where the term evangelical is more or less equivalent to fundamentalist, which is another social category.

So the terms slip around a bit, but with this theological approach to what evangelicalism is, I’m quite prepared to say that some people who don’t call themselves evangelicals are under my definition, and many people who call themselves evangelicals aren’t under my definition. Thus, you are now miles away from the initial approaches to defining these things with which I began. You are now conflicting with the social science view of what an evangelical is.

You are a little closer to the best historical alignments, but even there, just because your rootage is in something or other does not mean that’s where you yourself are. For example, there have been a number of polls taken in North America to show that in the domain of some areas of public morality … let’s take divorce and remarriage … evangelicals in the United States have the same divorce and remarriage rates as the rest of the population. It’s a bit of a shocker, isn’t it? But it’s the truth.

If you ask in your poll, “Are you an evangelical, yes or no?” and then you take all of the people who say, “Yes,” which implicitly is operating on a kind of social science model (those who designate themselves evangelicals belonging to that group, to that herd), and then find out how many have been divorced and how many have been remarried, the results are statistically indistinguishable from the polls taken for the nation as a whole.

On the other hand, as soon as you put in some extra filters, things change. If you no longer ask simply, “Do you call yourself an evangelical?” but now you ask, “Are you an evangelical?” “Yes.” “Do you go to church at least once a week, yes or no? Do you read your Bible at least two or three times a week, yes or no? Do you believe the lordship of Christ over your life in all that you say and do and think is important to the direction of your life, yes or no?”

This by itself is not asking the deepest questions of the soul. “Are you genuinely born again, sister?” How do you do that in a poll? These are merely public filters, and people even then might be lying through their teeth. But insofar as you have now added filters to the original poll, the interesting thing is when you ask the divorce/remarriage question about that group, then there is a wide diversity. Far smaller numbers of those people have been divorced and remarried.

Since the gospel that is proclaimed in the New Testament is a gospel that does change lives, pretty soon you’re driven to the conclusion that there are millions of people in North America who think of themselves as evangelicals but aren’t, just as there are millions and millions of people who don’t think of themselves as evangelicals but are. Now you’re driving with a kind of biblical-theological definition of the category.

At that point, somebody says, “Well, if there are so many people who apply the term to themselves but aren’t and so many people who don’t apply the term to themselves and are, why don’t we find some other term that applies to everybody appropriately?” Great. Wonderful idea. What’s it going to be? That’s the problem. Christian? That’s another biblical term.

On the other hand, that applies to everybody and his or her cousin, and sometimes it doesn’t mean anything more than nice. There are some people in this increasingly secular society where if you call them a Christian they’re insulted. “I’m not a Christian; I’m an atheist” or “I’m an agnostic.” But there are other people where you say, “I’m a Christian and you’re not,” and they say, “What’s the matter? Don’t you think I’m nice?”

You realize there is no term that suits entirely, and you have to say that even if there were, add 5 or 10 years and all kinds of people would apply it to themselves who aren’t just because they want the cachet, or some people don’t like some other Christians in this camp, some other evangelicals in this camp, and immediately they go and call themselves something, or they might be evangelicals but they’re Baptist evangelicals, or whatever, and suddenly that becomes more of the defining movement.

That is why, at the end of the day, I’m not too satisfied by the merely historical lineaments, I’m not too satisfied by the social science approaches, and I’m certainly not satisfied by Bebbington’s approach. At the end of the day, you have to come back to something that tries to be in line with the formal and material principle of evangelicalism or I don’t think the discussion is very useful.

Carl F.H. Henry in North America played a huge role in twentieth-century forms of evangelicalism. He was a close friend of Billy Graham, but he also was the founding editor of Christianity Today, and this during the time when Christianity Today was widely seen as the premier thought journal for confessing evangelicals in America. He was the genius behind the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin from which, eventually, Lausanne came. His fingers were in all of the pies in North America.

He died just a couple of years ago at the age of 90. We had a special memorial service for him at Trinity since he had taught as adjunct there for many, many years. In his last few years, he and his wife lived in a retirement home about two hours from our home, and my wife and I used to drive up and see them about every six weeks. He had lost his son to cancer, and his daughter lived a long way away, and she was fighting cancer, so my wife and I used to go up there pretty often.

We had long chats. He was on so many painkillers that when he was on the full dose of painkillers it was hard to have a good conversation with him, but when he knew I was coming he would come off the painkillers for a day just so he could talk. He’d sit there in agony but with a good mind. Then as soon as I left he’d get back on the painkillers again. It was painful to watch. You start saying, “Boy, doesn’t the resurrection look good?”

There’s an Old Testament scholar in Australia, Frank Andersen, who’s now up there and a bit decrepit and suffering a wee bit, and if you turn to him and ask, “Frank, how’s it going?” he says, “I’m not suffering from anything a good resurrection can’t fix,” which is a great line. There are times when I hope I live long enough to use it, but probably I’ll be suffering from Alzheimer’s and I won’t remember it. There’s something glorious about that kind of straightforward faith.

When you had these long conversations with Carl, he would quite straightforwardly talk about whether or not the term evangelicalism would be useful much longer. He wasn’t sure it would be. It’s important not to be simply married to a term. Any term can be prostituted at the end of the day. It’s why Christian is not a particularly useful term. In certain contexts it’s useful, but it’s nowhere near to what it means in the New Testament in its rare usage.

Yet at the same time, I don’t see any other term on the horizon, so it becomes worthwhile trying to explain the term and unpack the term and see if it can be useful amongst people like us, which is why we have seminars and workshops like this one on what evangelicalism is at the end of the day. Perhaps at this point we ought to open it up for discussion and questions before the break.

Male: What exactly is a center-bounded set?

Don: It comes from a field of mathematics. A set is some sort of array of entities. With a boundary-bounded set, the things that belong to the set and the things that don’t are sharply marked by a boundary. In a center-bounded set, you define the thing from the center while acknowledging that there are some elements that only have a statistical likelihood of being in or out. You can’t see from the center exactly where the boundary is.

Male: But there is a boundary somewhere.

Don: It’s center-bounded. You can clearly see when something is right outside. In that sense there’s a boundary, but it’s precisely that you’re defining things from the center. So clearly, in the New Testament, there is a sense in which you can be outside. Otherwise, church discipline is not possible. You cannot say with Peter to Simon Magus, “Your money perish with you.” Clearly, there are issues that are fundamental.

With some people you can say they’re clearly in, and with some people you can say they’re clearly out, but just who is in and out on the edges gets a bit blurry, because it’s only, in mathematics, a statistical likelihood of whether you’re in or out. It’s only a mathematical analogy, but it’s a way of saying you define what the gospel is from the center rather than trying to have a detailed set of rules.

Otherwise, in Christianity, what you ultimately end up with is a form of legalism. There are some people who, in the name of Christianity, try to establish what the Jews called “a fence around Torah.” God says, “Don’t do this,” but we’re not quite sure what this is, so we’ll add several more rules beyond that, and if you don’t get close enough to the sin to commit the sin because you’re not doing these other things, then you’re all.… So keep the Sabbath.

Eventually, you have 39 rules, 39 bits of prohibition in Mishnah Shabbat and other documents in order to protect the Sabbath. Then your being in or out is established on whether or not you’re keeping the rules. Pretty soon, you’re in a form of legalism from which there is no final escape. So I really do think it is very important in biblical Christianity to insist there are ins and outs, that church discipline is not only possible but mandated, and that there are huge dangers if you’re heading out, but at the end of the day still to keep it a center-bounded set.

Male: Have you ever met a Christian who would not regard themselves an evangelical in places you’ve described?

Don: Oh yes. I haven’t unpacked this at great length, but if you have really informed Catholics, for example, they won’t be satisfied with a really strict and rigorous appeal to Scripture as sola scriptura. Rather, there’s a deposit of revelation in the church with its own oral tradition with a final authority in the magisterium. Yeah, all kinds of people.

You start unpacking these kinds of things a little bit more, then the centrality of the cross and the resurrection for personal faith and salvation and reconciliation to God begins to clash somewhat with Eastern Orthodoxy because of its heavy emphasis on the incarnation at the expense of the cross and resurrection.

Obviously, I’ve just sketched in the bits and pieces, but pretty soon this is going to get tied tighter to how a person is genuinely right before God. Is a person right before God finally by the works we do or does the cross and resurrection really establish the basis in which we’re there? Then you’re into debates about justification.

I’ve just given the macro sketch of the whole thing, but obviously, if you push farther, you begin to have such different ways of handling all of these things. At the same time, it’s generous enough that you don’t have to hold to a Presbyterian ecclesiology or something.

Male: Can I ask you a question?

Don: Sure.

Male:[Inaudible]

Don: I don’t mind the question, but it’s a perverse question. The first question is, “Is there any single scrap of evidence that he did marry her?” (Mary Magdalene.) There isn’t. Not a single scrap. Not one.

Male: Their point would have been he could still have been the Savior.

Don: But what’s the point of that? Moreover, it would raise at least some moral questions and maybe even some ontological ones. Jesus had peculiar nature as the God-man. He was genuinely man, and he could have no doubt married, but at the end of the day, that would also raise at least some questions about his moral obligation to protect his wife and family. That’s at least worth raising.

The point is it is in itself a perverse question, as if they’re asking the question, “Well, what does it matter if he married? If people want to believe that, it doesn’t matter.” I would say that’s the wrong question to ask. It’s the other people who are making a counter-claim against Scripture. They’re claiming that he did marry her. Show me one scrap of evidence. Just one scrap. From the first century, there’s none.

You can ask these further derivative questions if you like, and then there are some answers that can be given, and I’ve just mentioned one. On the other hand, to respond too quickly by saying, “What difference does it make?” is already to concede too much to the other side, as if there’s any reason for them taking this position in the first place.

Male: About the ontological part of it …

Don: It would at least be odd. What it would spell out I have no idea, but it’s at least odd. On the other hand, it’s just speculation, so why go down that line? It’s not helpful to the gospel. It’s not helpful to anything. It’s just raw speculation. There’s no ground for even worrying about it. It’s like asking the question, “Could God have created an alternative universe?” Well, I don’t know. Perhaps. Who cares? It’s not where I am in terms of promulgating the gospel. It’s just the rawest of speculation.

Let’s reconvene now. Stott, if you recall, has a sixfold typology. It would be possible even from this passage to add one or two more items to the typology if you wanted to. Do you recall how the first verse reads? “Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand.” There is implicitly in this gospel an announcement thing going on. It is not only christological and biblical and apostolic; it is heraldic. It is preached.

The very notion of euaggelion begins with aggelion. It begins with the message that is announced. It is an announced word. It is a good announced word. Hence, elsewhere Paul can write to the Corinthians.… He can say that people are saved by the foolishness of.… Some of our translations have preaching. That’s not quite right. It’s a participial structure. It’s “by the foolishness of the thing preached,” which in the context is the gospel itself. That’s the whole context of 1 Corinthians 1–2.

It’s the foolishness of the thing preached, not merely the foolishness of the thing discussed or acted out. In the very nature of the case, it is kerygma. It is announced. It is proclaimed. There’s a public heraldic element. That’s what makes it good news. That, in part, is what ties Paul’s description of the gospel to what we think of as the Great Commission to proclamation, to mission, to evangelism, to promoting the gospel, to call in and edify the elect, and so on.

In other words, there are one or two other elements that can be added to this sixfold typology, and in my judgment, one of them that must be added is this proclamatory thing, this kerygmatic thing, this mission-evangelizing thing. It is intrinsic to the nature of this gospel that because it is good news, it is good news that is to be articulated, defended, proclaimed, and so forth.

There is another element that probably needs to be tacked in here as well. Though it is merely an inference from chapter 15, yet outside of chapter 15 it is pushed very hard in any case, not least in the Corinthian epistles. Even here, however, Paul says, “By which gospel you are saved,” but salvation in Paul is not merely eschatological salvation. You’re saved from the wrath of God at the end, but meanwhile you can live like the world, the flesh, and the Devil and it doesn’t make any difference.

Salvation for Paul, and in the New Testament generally, is a holistic concept, which means that already there is an entailment in how you live. Already in this epistle Paul has said things like, “Look at all this long list of disgusting sins, and such were some of you, but you have been sanctified. You have been justified.” This kerygmatic gospel saves us holistically now, and thus there is a necessary entailment in transformed living.

There are many different ways the New Testament has of getting that across. For example, to go to an entirely different corpus with an entirely different vocabulary, in John 3, in the passage about the new birth, after Jesus has tied his understanding of the new birth to Ezekiel 36 and the nature of the transformation that comes from water, which signals cleansing, and the power of the Spirit, which signals renewal, he gives an illustration.

He describes the wind blowing. That turns in part on a pun, because pneuma can refer either to wind or to spirit, as can ruwach in Hebrew. It’s a useful sort of obvious pun. He says the wind blows, and you hear its sound. You see what it’s doing, but you cannot say exactly where it comes or how it’s put together. Think about that before you come to the next line of the text.

You can picture Jesus and Nicodemus standing on a street corner on a darkened night in Jerusalem, and a tumbleweed goes by. You see the effects of the wind. Or it’s a cool night after a hot day and you feel the air moving on your skin. But not even today, and certainly not in the first century, are you likely to think, “Oh, there must be a high in the Arabian Desert. This is a cyclonic wind because it’s coming from the southwest.” You’re just not thinking in those terms.

Exactly where it comes from and how it works, who knows? But what you don’t deny is its effects. Who can deny the effects of wind? Then he adds, “So it is with everyone who is born of God.” In other words, you may not be able to explain all of the mechanisms of new birth, but you can’t deny its effects. The assumption is once again the universality of effects.

That sort of thought comes across in many different ways in the New Testament, but the notion of a genuinely saved, transformed, born-again, justified believer, someone who has been genuinely affected by the gospel, who is living indifferentiably from the world, is simply incoherent in New Testament thought. In that sense, it may be worth saying that this gospel is salvific, which does come from this text. “By this gospel we are saved.” That might well be worth getting across as well.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Not really. What I really said was it’s implied. It’s in part an inference, but it’s implied by the language of 1 Corinthians 15. It’s why I reread verse 1. “By which gospel we are saved.” Then the question is.… What does Paul mean by “saved”? It’s rare that he wants to restrict salvation to a purely future phenomenon, even though the culminating salvation we have to wait for. First Corinthians 15 is not to be abstracted from 1 Corinthians. You should be reading 1 Corinthians 15 within the context of 1 Corinthians.

In the light of what he says in chapter 6, this long list of vices.… “And such were some of you, but you have been washed. You have been sanctified. You have been justified.” There’s a notion of salvation there that implicitly demands change of conduct. So much so that if there’s not change of conduct, like the man who’s sleeping with his stepmother in chapter 5, get rid of them. It’s very brutal. Thus, the notion of salvation is already built into the text before you get to this particular use of the verb.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Yes, but then I would have had to take a few hours to explain Romans. I have just chosen one passage because a lot of things come together.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Sure, of course. That’s why I said at the beginning the proper way to do this is a whole biblical theology. All I’m saying is that in terms of inference, you don’t even have to leave this passage for that point, although it isn’t spelled out in detail here the way some of the other ones are made a little more explicit. It’s just hidden behind the one verb to say in the passage.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: How would you determine that just in theoretical terms? There are only two ways you could at least in theory determine it. One of the ways is if there are a lot of passages that say A is more important than B, and I can’t think of one in the New Testament. The other way is by finding passage after passage after passage that deals with the transformation now and almost nothing about the future. That’s not right either.

When you think that the Master himself pictured things in terms of eternity.… “Don’t lay up treasures on earth, but lay up treasures …” How many of the parables of the kingdom.… Though they talk about how the kingdom is dawning now, the kingdom is like seed planted now, yet many of these parables have this ultimate culminating bit, where the angels come back and reap the harvest, or a parable like the sheep and the goats, and these go to eternal life and these go to eternal judgment.

How does the very New Testament end? With a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness, which goes back to language from Isaiah 66. At the end of the day, the salvation then turns not so much on whether it’s present or future. That kind of discussion is almost always agenda-laden. Rather, ultimately, what you start seeing is that salvation means ultimately that we are reconciled back to God.

In other words, the very nature of our lostness in biblical terms is our alienation from God. There are many people today who are uncomfortable with talking about the wrath of God. In this latest book by McLaren, for example, he says it is wrong to speak of God being angry with us. God’s stance toward us is love. Rather he is upset that we are doing nasty things to each other. God does not have a personal problem with our sin except that he’s upset that we’re doing sinful things to each other.

From a biblical standpoint, that’s grotesque. All you have to read is the very surface of the text of the Old Testament and see that God is upset not only because we’re doing nasty things to each other, like in Amos with social injustice, and this sort of thing, but far more characteristically he becomes wrathful over idolatry. “The Lord your God is a jealous God.”

In other words, the fundamental thing in the Old Testament that calls down God’s wrath on us is our anti-Godness, our idolatry. That idolatry issues in all kinds of social injustice, but at the end of the day, at the heart of everything is the de-Godding of God. The marvelous thing about the Bible is that even while it portrays God as being against us because of his holiness and our sin, it also portrays him as loving us because that’s the kind of God he is.

Thus, the whole drama of the outplay of the story of redemption is how this God, who really does stand against us in judgment, nevertheless comes after us anyway and provides a sacrifice by which we are reconciled to himself. That is what it means to be saved. It is to be reconciled to God. Out of that flows also how we’re reconciled to each other and the implications for this life and for the consummated splendor to come, but the ultimate wholeness of life turns, in the first instance, on being reconciled to the God who is our Maker.

That turns once again on the big storyline. Virtually any other approach turns out to be deeply agenda-driven. This actually comes back to what we said earlier about this gospel being theological. At the end of the day, the whole notion is Christ dies for our sins, but it’s for our sins understood within the line of this huge depiction of what sin is. When we try to explain what sin is to people around us, do we not often use essentially horizontal sins?

It’s terrible if you’re cruel. Stalin is sinful. Don’t you agree that that’s bad? If you abandon your spouse and leave him or her in the lurch caring for three children, isn’t that sinful? Isn’t that bad? Well, yes. The Bible says all kinds of things like that are bad, but at the end of the day, the heart of badness, the heart of darkness, is the de-Godding of God. It’s idolatry. It’s defying God. That’s what makes sin sin.

Therefore, if you have a statement here about “Christ died for our sins,” it can’t be with an ad hoc social science definition of sin. It has to be with a definition of sin that comes from Paul’s understanding of sin, which is essentially and deeply biblical.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: If I were expanding this now, at the end of the day, because the gospel is biblical, it’s according to the Scriptures, then obviously you can put more things in here by asking, “What does the Bible prescribe or prohibit?” There will be certain kinds of things that will have to be specified as certain kinds of denials are introduced.

For example, I have not here specified deep Trinitarianism, but nevertheless, by saying that this gospel is christological and according to the Scriptures, I’ve set the frame of reference in which I am prepared to defend Trinitarianism to the death, because I think it’s mandated by Scripture. In that sense, I would want to argue that evangelical Christians likewise subscribe to the early major creeds.

I have not specified it here because I’ve restricted myself to the biblical categories of this passage, but the biblical categories of this passage with their associations and extensions outward.… As soon as you start saying it’s christological and it’s according to the Scriptures, then you have to ask, “Who is Christ according to the Scriptures?”

Then whether you like it or not, you’re into these sorts of Trinitarian issues. Then you’re also into openness issues. In my view, the openness view of God cannot be justified from Scripture. It can only be justified by a very selective reading of Scripture. In that sense, I think it is a deep betrayal of Scripture. Do you want me then to say someone who takes this view is outside the camp? Then I’m coming back to what’s a center-bounded set.

There are some people in this camp who hold deeply to substitutionary atonement and all kinds of things. How far out do you have to go before you start saying they really are entirely outside? But they’re sufficiently far outside that I don’t want them on my faculty or teaching in my church. Beyond that, I’ll leave it up to God who’s a believer or not. That’s not my final decision, is it? But I think they’re teaching false doctrine. That is serious.

Male: Does this theological definition leave any Christians out? Catholics would agree with everything you said, I would think.

Don: This was a question that was raised over here before. What I said then I’ll repeat. This is starting from the center to have in one passage a nice summary that lays down some important things. In the first instance, there are certainly some people who call themselves Christians and have ecclesiastical positions of power who nevertheless deny the resurrection, so it does exclude some people.

Beyond that, if you start talking about the death of Christ for our sins and it’s according to the Scriptures, you will start trying to unpack further what Paul and other New Testament writers understand by the death of Christ and how it does forgive our sins. What is that based on? Is the forgiveness of our sins and our acceptance before God finally a matter, in part, of Christ’s death on our behalf and partly a question of a form of obedience that actually grounds God’s acceptance?

Then you’re into all the biblical passages (start with Galatians, Philippians, and Romans) that talk about the nature of justification. At that point, then, compare that with what the Catholic confession of 1993 says about justification. Just go and look at it, and then ask if you can really square it with Paul. I don’t think you can. At some point, in other words, this is just the beginning of a discussion that shows how you can start to think about the gospel in biblical, theological terms.

Don’t forget that I started off by saying that if you’re doing this properly, what you really have to do is give your whole biblical theology. That’s why there’s an ongoing mandate to teach the whole counsel of God in the church. That’s so whether it has to do with openness theology or Trinitarianism or justification by grace alone through faith alone or whatever. You start somewhere, but then you can tighten things up.

One of the exercises I was going to give you a little later if we had enough time, let me just go to it now instead. I picked up a document that offered six definitions of the gospel. They’re really interesting. One or two of the contributors.… I’ve talked with all of them. I know all of these people. One or two of them have been looking for brevity, the briefest possible statement of the gospel.

Here’s a brief statement of the gospel by a colleague of mine, a good and godly man. “The good news of the completed work of Christ on the cross for the redemption of sinners.” I would say that’s correct. That is the gospel. On the other hand, it’s a bit like saying, “What is an atom?” Well, an atom is the basis of all physical existence, and it consists of certain particles, positive, negative, and neutral, that operate according to certain mathematical laws.

I suppose that’s correct, but you could say a lot more about electrons and protons and neutrons, and then you could descend to quarks, and then you could talk about the nuclear weak force and the electromagnet forces that actually control the movement of the electrons themselves and orbits versus orbitals and the nature of quantum mechanics and on and on and on. So what is an atom? Definitions have levels of sophistication.

You want to make sure that what you’re saying when you’re saying it simply is right, but just because you’re saying something right that’s simple does not mean it’s sufficient for every context. Then you need increasing levels of sophistication because of the demands of the more complicated context. That’s not playing by different rules. That’s so in all human conversation.

Who is God? He’s the sovereign, transcendent Creator of the universe. That’s true. You’ve said nothing about Trinitarianism. You’ve said nothing about redemption. You’ve said nothing about his holiness even. You’ve said something true, but there are increasing levels of sophistication. What does it even mean to say “personal transcendent”?

So in something like “The good news of the completed work of Christ on the cross for the redemption of sinners,” well, a Jehovah’s Witness could affirm that. The redemption of sinners is right. It’s at the center of things, but it doesn’t say anything there about the cosmological implications of the gospel, reconciling all things to himself and the renewal of the universe.

There’s no basis here for thinking in larger cultural or ecological terms or anything like that, but there are some texts that do something with that. There’s nothing here that’s distinctively Trinitarian. At the same time, you don’t want the gospel to be absolutely everything in the Bible, because if you make the gospel absolutely everything in the Bible so that what the Bible is about is the gospel in some inclusive sense, then what you lose is the sense of the dawning of something new with the coming of Christ. You lose the storyline.

There is a general sense in which the Bible is about the gospel in that the storyline is moving to the good news and the Old Testament forms are a form of good news themselves, which anticipate the culmination of the coming of Christ. There are two or three passages … for example, Hebrews 3–4 … where we’re told the Hebrews who came out of the land of exodus and were going into the land of rest had the gospel preached to them. That’s the word that is used.

But the writer is not so naÔve as to think they had preached to them exactly what is being preached in Hebrews or Romans. Rather, it was good news of God redeeming them, and it becomes part of the typology that points to the ultimate good news. They’re sophisticated writers. Precisely because there is progress along redemptive history, to make the gospel the word that captures absolutely everything taught in the Bible turns out to be a bit mischievous.

It doesn’t show the relationship between, for example, the old covenant and the new. The sense of newness. “But now we are new creatures in Christ Jesus.” There is a new excitement with the coming of the preaching of the gospel. Jesus announces the good news. Something has happened. It’s good news. Not this is the same old stuff being revisited one more time. You’re losing something of the Bible itself if you start treating the Bible comprehensively in that way. You start asking how much of Trinitarianism you have to have in there.

On the other hand, if you don’t think this through in terms of the norming norm of Scripture, then you can’t see how all of Scripture really does contribute to and anchor and ground and finally shape and define what the gospel is.

I think that finally, if you push hard enough, it’s hard even with this narrow definition, this right definition of the gospel that you find in 1 Corinthians, to make sense of it in Pauline terms unless you introduce Trinitarianism sooner or later, because there’s the work of the Spirit, the work of Christ, and the work of the Father in sending the Son, but all the doctrine of the Trinity is not itself the gospel.

You have to introduce that sort of level of perception of different degrees of sophistication in the grounding of things in the broader biblical narrative. That’s why they gave me three hours for this seminar. Otherwise, I could have just given you a shot or two and said, “That’s what it is. Go away in peace.” I don’t disagree with this statement of my colleague: “The good news of the completed work of Christ on the cross for the redemption of sinners.”

In fact, he and I talked about this just a few days ago. We shot back and forth in a couple of emails the advantages and disadvantages of being brief in a definition. There are some both ways. In certain contexts, this is a terrific definition. In other contexts, it’s potentially so open it’s hard to see exactly who’s excluded by this sort of understanding.

Here’s another one: “The glorious good news of God’s redeeming work in Jesus Christ to forgive, justify, heal, and reconcile an estranged people and created order to himself; an anticipation of the realization of the shalom of his eternal kingdom. It is the salvific good news for the whole person and the whole world.”

A little more comprehensive, but he has managed to rabbit on through all of those lines and not say a single thing about the cross or resurrection. Nasty. Flat-out liberalism could buy into that one. It’s just not very sophisticated. It’s longer and it has more things in than the first one, but at the same time, it has left out what Paul himself says is the matter of first importance.

I know this chap. That’s not what he thinks. He thinks he has all of that subsumed under the one little expression the redeeming work of Jesus Christ. The point is there are all kinds of other people who use redeeming work of Jesus Christ to be essentially a deist approach, which means that what Paul says in 1 Corinthians as the matter of first importance needs to be underlined.

Here’s another one: “God’s gracious invitation to join with people from all over the world in being rescued from sin through faith in Jesus Christ and remade through the power of God’s Spirit into those who bring glory to God and bring blessing to the world.” That’s a mouthful. I have problems with that one all over the place.

There are a lot of individual themes in there that aren’t bad. There’s a part of me that wants to say, “Amen. God bless you. Go in peace.” But as a definition of the gospel, it is deeply troubling from someone who really should know better. “It’s God’s gracious invitation.” Give me a break. The good news is not God’s gracious invitation. It’s news. It’s referring to event. Now from this good news comes the invitation and the command, but it is not itself the invitation.

“It’s God’s gracious invitation to join with people from all over the world in being rescued from sin.” So now we have, in the first instance, ecclesiology put over soteriology. There’s a sense in which it’s correct. It’s not formally wrong. It’s not logically wrong. It’s not absolutely wrong in the sense that we are to join the people of God. There’s a corporate dimension to all of this, and we must be rescued from sin, but in the first instance, the salvation is to be reconciled to God.

It has to be deeply theologically driven rather than ecclesiologically driven. The emphasis is on the wrong place again. And so on. You just keep going through these things, and you discover that there is today amongst evangelicals, God help us, a tremendous amount of really sloppy thinking.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: That’s a very good question. On the other hand, your objection itself is, in fact, implicitly reverting back to the first approach to the subject that I dismissed: essentially a social science approach in which people who call themselves evangelicals are permitted to define what evangelicalism is. I don’t think you can do that.

With each of these people.… I haven’t done it with all of them. I’ve done it with three or four of them. Long emails back and forth saying, “I see this definition you’ve made of evangelicalism. Have you considered this and this and this? What about Stott’s approach?” They’ve all backed down, because, in principle, they really do want to be shaped by the norming norm. I just don’t think they’re very sophisticated.

When they’re confronted with the norming norm and consider, “Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of that …” It’s not, therefore, that these are dyed-in-the-wool commitments for which they’re willing to live and die. It’s a reflection of the fact Christians are growing people and some are more sophisticated than others. Some are better teachers than others. Some are more biblically faithful than others.

If you begin, instead, from the recognition that at the end of the day the formal principle, the norming norm of Scripture, must be the first voice in thinking these things through, then it seems to me the kind of approach that begins with a passage like this one and then itself anchors this in Paul and in the whole New Testament, in the whole Canon, can correct these sorts of things. The point is that these people hadn’t thought this through. In a couple of instances, they had thought them through but had chosen to be brief for certain purposes. That’s all right too.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: But if they’re being defined from the outside, it is invariably a social science kind of definition, which is why, at the end of the day, however pragmatically useful those things may be.… Inevitably, we are going to be defined by the outside. We’re doing this all the time, and we’re defining other people from us being outside them. That’s part of conversation.

But if we are seeking self-understanding of evangelicalism as a movement that is nevertheless subject to the evangel, then the only way we’re going to have conversation that is useful and submissive to what the gospel is is by an attempt to be as biblically faithful as we can, and that is, in principle, always corrigible, always revisable in the light of Scripture.

Male: It’s like shining lights from something that is hidden, some agenda which is hidden. Especially from the pastoral point of view, how would you analyze those definitions, what the writers are talking about?

Don: Well, in this particular case I know the people, so I know where they’re coming from. Therefore, I can say more about them than I might be able to say if I didn’t know these writers. I know their psychology. I know their profile. I know what they think on broader issues. For example, the first one that was very brief.… He is a man of enormous biblical fidelity, a powerful preacher, known for his clipped succinctness.

He cannot think about anything without trying to think theologically, and he values brevity. So he’s trying to get to the heart of the issue, and his statement is not wrong. That’s why I insisted it’s not bad. It’s not very comprehensive, and it’s useful in certain contexts but not in other contexts. The second one I read that went on about the kingdom and the transformation of the cosmos but left out the cross and resurrection …

I know that particular fellow, and if you push him on all of the cardinal points of Christian doctrine, he comes out smelling like a rose. On the other hand, his actual interests are on the left wing of evangelicalism all the time, so he’s constantly shoving things in that direction. In my view, what he’s really doing is sort of assuming what is central but focusing on the margins. The trouble is if, as a teacher, you assume the central but focus on the margins, your students come to focus on the margins as well.

One of the most difficult things to be is prophetic from the center, but if you’re going to be faithful to the gospel, that’s what is necessary, and that is achieved by going back to Scripture again and again. The last one is done by a very lovely man. He has his PhD. He’s old enough to know better, but he’s one of these lovely, gentle, gracious men who’s entirely orthodox personally but is impressed by every statement that comes along. He’s a man without discernment.

He’s just a great big lovely teddy bear, and sometimes he preaches sermons and handles Scripture so well you think, “Boy, that’s wonderful. It’s really deep.” Other times it’s so screwball you wonder what planet he’s on, and he can’t tell the difference. This came out of one of those discussions he had. What can I do? I just don’t want to make him in charge of a committee looking into doctrinal formulation, bless his heart.

On the other hand, he has certain gifts of warmth and encouragement. He has no ego. He’s executive of a major institution. He’s terrific at encouraging the saints. God bless him. Go in peace. It’s another way of saying there are different gifts in the church. I just don’t want to trust his judgment when it comes to doctrinal formulation.

There are psychological and personal factors and gifts here and different degrees of maturity, different purposes of the statement. Yeah, join the human race. We’re a pretty damned brood, aren’t we? We can corrupt anything. Just give us a little effort.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: That’s not quite right. All I’m saying is that if an outsider defines us, inevitably he or she is going to.… It’s why I began by saying there are different entire methodological approaches to this business, some of which I think are valid for our purposes and some of which are not. One was the social science approach. Another was the historical approach. Another was the mixed bag approach of Bebbington, and I tried to go through their strengths and weaknesses.

All I’m saying is that if somebody defines us from the outside (and of course that’s going to happen; newspapers, reporters, journalists, and historians are doing it all the time), almost always they are going to be adopting the methodologies of one of these earlier threefold groupings. They’re going to look at all of the people who call themselves evangelicals and ask, “What are they like?” Of course they can define us that way. All I’m asking is if that’s the most useful way of understanding us.

When you read what they do and read what their analysis is of what evangelicalism is, inevitably we start saying, “Whoa! Just because some snake handlers in the Ozarks call themselves evangelicals, that’s not my understanding of evangelical, because it doesn’t inform the Scripture very well.” So we start having some conflicts with them, and we start having conversations with them and try to correct them.

They can define us. Of course they can, but that doesn’t mean the methodology is likely to be faithful to what the evangel is, because most of them are doing so without any grasp of the Bible whatsoever. It’s a social science definition or a historical track definition or somebody has given them a number of criteria and they’re trying to see if they meet the criteria. But when we say we’re defining ourselves, I don’t mean that to be self-referential.

Obviously, everybody.… I don’t care what group it is, whether you’re a Shiite Muslim or a Hindu from northern India of a really strict variety, or whether you’re an atheist. Of course you have some understanding of yourself. One of the characteristics of being human is that there is self-consciousness. Whether it’s thought through and sophisticated or not is another issue, but everybody has some sort of understanding of himself or herself and of the group to which he or she belongs. That’s just inevitable.

So I’m not talking even about that. I’m saying that if somebody self-consciously thinks about what it means to belong to evangelicalism in the light of Scripture, the reference point is what God has given in Scripture, so we are beholden by our own understanding of what evangelicalism is, with its formal and material principle, to go back to the formal principle of what God has objectively given and try to reform our thinking again and again and again by it.

Now the hard postmodernist at this point will always have the meaning in front of the text, but there’s a soft postmodernism that recognizes we can get in substantial measure to the truth. We can say some true things about what Scripture says. People may have different views of it at some point. For 10 years, I worked part time with the World Evangelical Fellowship, and part of my job was to bring together people from different continents, different races, different cultures, but all broadly evangelicals in the sense that they really did hold to a high view of Scripture.

We would choose some topic, and I would assign papers on all of these things. Then they’d come to me, I’d duplicate them, send them all out again, and then we’d all meet in some center (usually in England because London is a great air center) and we’d spend quite a few days going through one another’s papers line by line, paragraph by paragraph, criticizing from all of these different cultural perspectives.

One of the things that struck me was how diverse the papers were when we started and how much unanimity we could get by the end as we were self-correcting. There were some who couldn’t. Certain things have to be in place to do that. First, there had to be at least a pretty good quality of training. There had to be good readers.

The majority knew Greek and Hebrew. They had good training. It wasn’t all training in the West either. Some were trained in Africa or Asia. It wasn’t just that it was all stamped by Western training. But at the end of the day, some people just don’t know a good argument from a bad argument. These people had to be reasonably well trained in handling texts.

Second, they had to be willing to be corrected. We had one person from a country that will remain nameless who could never be wrong in anything. He came to the second of these meetings. I didn’t invite him back for the third, fourth, and fifth. He insisted on correcting everybody but could never be corrected. That doesn’t work. Third, you had to have a shared authority, but we did have the same formal principle. We were trying to find out what Scripture said.

Fourth, we had to have time. Where we disagreed with each other, we quickly discovered that some things could be resolved with time as you worked through what a text means, but some things in texts are themselves tied to other texts, which are tied to other texts, which are tied to entire structures of thought, which are tied to so many texts that even to begin to get agreement, there just isn’t time.

We’re not going to get together a committee of Baptists and paedo-baptists and resolve it in an afternoon. It’s not going to happen. The thing is tied to covenantal structures and how you put your whole Bible together. Just so many different things. Nevertheless, what pleased me and initially surprised me (and then I came to expect it after two or three cycles of this) is that where people have a formal principle and really do deeply want to be under the authority of the Word, they can reform each other.

Male: I’m not sure you answered my logical problem. I understand what you’re saying, but that group you were just talking about, their starting point was that they were all evangelicals. “We are a group. Now let’s see what defines us as a group.” It’s still self-defining. I need to go away and think about it some more.

Don: Self-defining is a slightly mischievous expression in this context, because it’s defining in the light of an external mandate, an external given, an external text. It’s self in the sense that we are knowers who are trying to know what that text says, but it is still external. If you are entirely in the postmodern camp, it’s not external in any sense, because the meaning is always this side of the text.

But if you’re a soft postmodernist or a critical realist or a chastened modernist at all, then I would say you can be self-correcting in the light of the text. So there is an external standard that ultimately comes from God himself. Otherwise, at the end of the day, the hard postmodernists win, in which case you actually lose any value whatsoever to talk about a formal principle.

Now I had a whole lot of other stuff I was going to talk about here. It would be worthwhile at this juncture to think about the nexus of evangelicalism so understood with various denominational and other theological groupings: Reformed theology, Wesleyanism, the charismatic movement, Lutheranism, whatever. It becomes very interesting, because there are overlaps in all of these sorts of areas, although these movements themselves are often so astonishingly diverse you cannot make a simple appeal.

For example, Lutheranism embraces everything from the rawest form of liberalism to hyper-fundamentalism. So what is exactly the overlap between evangelicalism and Lutheranism? In North America, we have a denomination called the ELCA, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. It’s an amalgam of a number of groups, and it’s not dominantly evangelical. It is Lutheran and it’s of America, but it’s not evangelical.

They’ve preserved evangelical because of the German and other European roots that mean something like evangelisch, but the vast majority are not evangelical in any sense akin to what we’ve been doing here. There is a small evangelical wing. Then there are the Lutherans Missouri Synod, who are conservative and confessional. Then there are the Lutherans Wisconsin Synod, who are so far right culturally speaking you need field glasses to see them. Thus, they’re in a slightly different camp again.

So when you start asking about what is the overlap of this understanding of evangelicalism with Lutheranism, you have to start defining Lutheranism as well, but you can see that with any sort of sympathy you can nevertheless find many people amongst Lutherans who are evangelical in this theological sense, even if that’s not the way they think of themselves.

Likewise, you come to the charismatic movement. The charismatic movement, broadly conceived, has some Jesus-only people in it who don’t even have a Trinitarian doctrine. For some, the gospel is merely presupposed back down there somewhere, but everything is in terms of the experience. Others are basically evangelicals with a certain view of charismatic experience with or without a second blessing theology.

So there can be huge areas of overlap in some places where implicitly the gospel is at best being shunted aside and may even be denied. At the end of the day, by appealing to evangelicalism as being at the center, mandated by Scripture itself, what I’m really doing is coming back to a principle that has been part of the historic Christian confessionalism of all ages: the formal principle of Scripture, which is testable. You go back to Scripture again and again and again and again and again. You keep reforming yourself by the Word of God. Semper reformanda.

That doesn’t mean there are no mistakes made and that we can’t have our blind spots and all the rest. One of the things that was interesting, for example, about this group I mentioned that I chaired for the World Evangelical Fellowship (it’s now called the World Evangelical Alliance) … We had some papers done on Paul on certain matters that don’t matter for our purposes. Two in particular were very interesting.

One paper done by a Westerner had all of the applications for this particular doctrine and area worked out in individual terms. The corresponding paper done by Tite TiÈnou from Burkina Faso, a French West African scholar.… He had worked out very similar passages in entirely communitarian ways of thought. It was so culturally intrinsic to both of them.

What this gave us was the opportunity for each of them to tell the other he was wrong, and then because it was the nature of our group to submit to criticism, we started working through the text. Text after text after text. Could we decide? Both of them gave ground. “Oh yeah, in this case it really does have to be the individual.” “Oh yeah, I missed that. That really should be communitarian.”

It was surprising how much common ground they finally did achieve. There were some texts where they weren’t sure and it might have been both. You know, “I don’t want to give that one up.” Nevertheless, it was surprising how in a few hours we gained an awful lot of common ground because we were committed to the formal principle.

It is also a way of highlighting that when we approach the text from too narrow a cultural base we are likely to have a higher percentage of blinders on. We do need to learn from each other, and that is partly done by reading church history. It’s partly done by meetings such as this. It’s partly done by meeting with people who are more knowledgeable than we are or with wider experience.

You go back and correct yourself again and again and again by the Word of God, and when we get to glory, we’ll all find that we still have some things to be corrected. Nevertheless, in principle, we can be revised and corrected by the Word of God unless you are a hard-core postmodern. Thus, Scripture, the norming norm, becomes really critical for defining and working these things out.

I wanted to work these things through for Anglicanism and Baptists and lowest-common-denominator stuff and fundamentalists and then to sketch out some of the distribution of worldwide evangelicals and the principles of indigeneity, contextualization, and globalization as it affects our understanding of evangelicalism. You can see that there are a lot of things to think about to get this one right.

But I’m going to skip all of that, and several others as well, and come, instead, to a particular book by Mark Noll called Is the Reformation Over? Mark Noll is a historian of worldwide reputation. His primary field of specialization is American church history, but he writes with great crispness and clarity, so he has become essentially perhaps the premier popular evangelical theologian, at least in America. He’s sort of America’s parallel to Bebbington in the UK, only Noll has written far more books than Bebbington. Bebbington and Noll are, in fact, good friends.

He has done a lot of work for which I am profoundly grateful. He has been at Wheaton College for years, where he has held a chair. He has just resigned from there to go to Notre Dame, which may also tell you something. He’s an interesting man. His wife and my wife used to be in a Bible study together about 25 years ago in the northern suburbs of Chicago, so we’ve known each other for a long time.

He graduated at one point from Trinity Divinity School, and then taught in Trinity College, which is the undergraduate side of our operation, and then has moved on to other things. In my view, he has moved somewhat over the years but has also grown. What he is arguing is that both experientially and for justifiable theological reasons the debates of the Reformation are essentially over.

That ECT (Evangelicals and Catholics Together) and related things has basically won, and it is foolish to think in polarized terms anymore. The Reformation is over. In other words, the Christian category with essential transcendentalism, supernatural Christianity over against either secularism or liberalism is what is essential, and the debates of the Reformation, he argues, are essentially dead issues that we should now drop.

So his appeal is not only to pragmatic grounds in the light of the onslaught from secularization and consumerism and this sort of thing, but he also thinks there were some misunderstandings at the time of the Reformation that have now been rectified. I have to tell you right off the bat that I think this is a huge mistake. Although he proves to be a very competent historian with respect to American church history, I think he’s even a bad historian with respect to the Reformation documents. I’ll give you some concrete examples in a few moments.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to think through what the Reformation was about, at least as I understand it. With most of this, most Reformation scholars would agree. What I’m going to say now is not innovative or anything. There is a sense in which the precipitating cause of the Reformation, namely the indulgences sold by Tetzel, were not important enough to divide the church over.

You’d think that if the issue was simply one joker by the name of Tetzel doing something stupid like selling indulgences, you could handle this at an administrative level and get on with things. You don’t divide the church over something ridiculous. On the other hand, historically, that became the trigger that forced a rethinking of a wide variety of other issues, including where does authority really lie? How do you get reconciled to God? What is the nature of salvation? What is the cross work of Christ? What does it mean to be declared just before God?

Thus, you get tied into the authority of the pope versus the authority of Scripture if the two seem to come into conflict. With this were tied a vast bevy of moral, social, ecclesiastical issues, including simony, absenteeism, concubinage (with priests everywhere with women on the side), papal leadership and its derivations that was essentially monarchical rather than pastoral. There was a corruption of the system from within that was upsetting to Luther as well, but with it a penitential sacramental system that did not finally give assurance, and for Luther that was critical.

Tetzel’s indulgences were really the trigger that precipitated a rethink about everything. Out of that, then, came what came to be called the “five solas,” with sola scriptura perhaps being right at the very heart of everything, because it recaptured Scripture as the norming norm, but with it also solus Christus, which meant his cross work became absolutely central. It’s not Christ plus indulgences. It’s not Christ plus sufficient good works to finally satisfy the justice of God, and all of the rest.

So the conflict between Luther and the Catholic Church of his day, and then ultimately Calvin and the Catholic Church of his day and Ulrich Zwingli and then in the next generation.… It became immensely broad. To take a contemporary parallel.… This isn’t quite fair, but you’ll see what I mean.

There is a sense in which homosexuality today is the wrong issue. You have entire denominations that deny that Jesus rose from the dead, and they don’t do anything about those leaders. There are entire denominations that deny the deity of Jesus Christ or substitutionary atonement, and nothing is done about those people. And now we’re going to divide entire congregations and churches and denominations on the basis of homosexuality?

There is a sense in which it’s the wrong issue, yet there is another sense in which it becomes the precipitating issue, as indulgences were the precipitating issue in the sixteenth century. It becomes the issue that forces at last a whole lot of people to ask the question, “Will we live under the Bible or not?” But as soon as you ask the question that way, then you’re asking another whole array of questions.

Inevitably, that’s raising questions about authority, the nature of revelation, what the cross achieved, the nature of reconciliation to God, the nature of repentance, what sanctification looks like, and the nature of the church. All of the issues are precipitated. Thus, you must think of the Reformation not simply in terms of justification by grace alone through faith alone and that’s it. It’s much more comprehensive than that. It touches eventually the way you put together your entire theology under the Bible.

So although, on the one hand, you had a lot of fairly pragmatic issues that touched a lot of important moral points … the celibacy of priests versus concubinage; Communion of one kind (Can you only take the bread but not the wine?); indulgences; the whole doctrine of the treasury of merits, which simply cannot be grounded in Scripture at all; the superiority of the Vulgate translation, which was already being challenged by the Renaissance with its recovery of Greek and Hebrew; the papal bureaucracy with all of its corruptions; the lust for power …

All of those things were bound up with it, but also the whole notion of revelation itself. Was it tied finally and ultimately to Scripture or to a deposit given to the church that included Scripture but also oral tradition mediated exclusively through the interpretive teaching authority of the magisterium? Those are huge issues.

At that point, the Roman Church itself hardened, and in retaliation against Luther and his claims.… Eventually you have the Council of Trent, which is the high watermark of the counter-Reformation. In other words, the Council of Trent is after the Reformation as well and truly begun. It’s the high watermark, and there some of the doctrines that were inchoate in Catholicism before become rigidly structured.

I strongly urge you to do it, if you haven’t already done it. If you live in a Catholic country or you’re involved in these debates in a mixed country, buy the Catholic catechism. Just read section after section after section and see for yourself. Regardless of what is being said by this group or that group or the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue or the evangelical-Catholic dialogue, it’s not what the catechism says.

The catechism itself is astonishingly Tridentine, astonishingly in line with the Council of Trent at point after point. Then you are, whether you like it or not, butting up to the official doctrine of the church as opposed to what some priests and scholars and Catholic leaders actually say. I will give some examples of that in a moment.

Let me tell you one story, and then summarize Mark Noll’s book. I will try to summarize it as neutrally as I can. How many have read Noll’s book? How many of you have heard of Noll’s book? It’s one of those books everybody has heard of and nobody has read, so I will try to summarize the book for you as succinctly as I can, but let me tell you one story first.

The whole ECT (Evangelicals and Catholics Together) was not an intrinsically bad exercise. It’s important to remember that Calvin himself insisted it was important to keep talking. Even after Calvinism was well entrenched in Geneva in his second long ministry there, he made sure he had open connections in terms of discussion with Catholic scholars. He was not trying to suggest withdrawing.

But when this whole thing was set up, largely by Chuck Colson and John Neuhaus, the Catholics initially took it seriously and the evangelicals did not. The Catholics sent some of their finest theologians along to this thing, including people with very articulate and experienced scholarship behind them. Avery Dulles was there, now cardinal, and sometimes Joseph Fitzmyer, who is probably the premier Catholic New Testament scholar in the world, and others of very front rank.

We sent along good men who just weren’t equipped. Bill Bright, head of Campus Crusade, is a very courageous and farsighted man but just not a theologian. He has never taken a theological degree in his life, and he’s going to get snookered by the first statement that comes along. We just didn’t send along a lot of people. The only competent person we sent along was Jim Packer. Jim Packer is competent, all right. He’s very competent, and I’ve enjoyed his material for years.

He is also, in my view, from a certain brand of evangelical Anglicanism that is constantly looking for certain connections with Catholicism and is not, in my judgment, quite as farsighted in that area as in some others. That’s a personal judgment. You can make of that what you will. But eventually, when the first statements were being produced, some were viewing this as great breakthrough, and some of it was being viewed as compromise.

What was really interesting is what happened in Latin America. The Catholic Church published these things in the millions in Latin America, where evangelicalism is growing very strongly, and circulated them so as to get across the point that there was no point trying to convert to evangelicalism because we’re all on the same page. We’re all in agreement.

Then the evangelicals down there were damning the North American evangelicals. “Norteamericanos. They’re betraying us one more time, because they’re writing these stupid documents. Don’t they understand what Catholicism looks like down here to us?” It was, in one sense, a document that produced worldwide negative effects and was not very sophisticated in any case from the point of view of any sort of confessional evangelicalism.

That’s when a number of us got involved, Harold O.J. Brown, John Woodbridge, myself, and others. Even if we weren’t Avery Cardinal Dulles, we’d done at least some reading and thinking in the area, and we might have a few things to say. I only went once or twice. Somebody like John Woodbridge went quite a few times. Some of the forms of document he would sign and some of it he just wouldn’t, but at least you were getting reasonably competent scholarship on both sides.

One that I went to in New York City.… Tom Oden and I were tasked with writing two papers on justification for discussion in this group. That’s when Tom wrote the paper that ultimately expanded into his book The Justification Reader, where he tracks out how justification is taught even in the patristic period. It doesn’t have to wait until the Reformers thought it up. I surveyed some of the distinctives of justification and what we understood to be confessionalism from the Bible.

Now Joe Fitzmyer was there. I used his commentary on Romans quite a bit, because Joe Fitzmyer, Catholic that he is, nevertheless in his commentary on Romans is by and large terrific stuff. His exegesis is really, really good. Calvin could have signed off on much of it. So could Luther. In my view, he really did understand the heart of the message of Romans.

As part of this paper, therefore, I read substantial extracts from Joe Fitzmyer’s book and thanked him for it. I was grateful for it. Then I read all of the relevant sections from the catechism on justification. You must understand that these are extremely Tridentine. Justification is never God’s forensic declaration that we are just but always involves the transformation of the individual. It’s just very remarkable. It’s Tridentine through and through.

So I read all of that stuff, and I said, “Okay, Joe, which one do you believe? Your commentary on Romans or the Catholic catechism?” You have to understand that in Catholic thought, to be a Catholic in good standing you have to subscribe to the catechism. You might be ignorant of the catechism and still be a good Catholic, but if you understand what the catechism says and you disagree with it, you are in danger of committing a mortal sin.

So to ask that question, I confess, was a bit rude. Nevertheless, it seems to me that was exactly what was called for. “This is what you’ve written. This is what your catechism says. Which one do you believe?” Now Joe is an honest man, and he was embarrassed. I didn’t mean to be the bad guy to the extent it turned out I was, but he’s sort of shuffling his papers around and looking around, and he didn’t answer.

Finally, Richard John Neuhaus spoke up. He said, “Well, Don, he’s a Catholic. Of course he believes the catechism.” I said, “Do you see the problem I have here? For us this is so central we’re prepared to die for this. We think this is right at the heart of the gospel, and you guys are talking out of both sides of your mouth. You want us to sign papers with you?” You suddenly realize these things are complicated.

Moreover, you have to ask the question, “Does Joe, who is a brilliant scholar …” As I said, he’s perhaps the premier New Testament scholar from the Catholic camp in the world. He’s a brilliant man. In many areas, he knows far more than I do. He’s a very competent man. He’s a master of the Aramaic field. Yet at the end of the day, does he represent official Catholicism?

I think you have to say, “Not a chance on God’s green earth,” no matter how bright he is, if you look at the Catholic catechism itself, which is supposed to be the binding authority for teaching in the Catholic Church. That introduces another whole level of discussion as well. Is this an official document that is coming out between the Vatican and dominant evangelical voices or is it a private document of a few evangelical scholars and a few Catholic scholars who may or may not be representing what their own constituency is saying?

The issues become very complex even at that level before we all jump on the bandwagon and say we have a meeting of minds here. To argue, therefore, that the ECT proves the death of the divide between Catholicism and confessional evangelicalism raises a lot of methodological issues. So let me outline the book by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, Is the Reformation Over?

Its central argument is that although there are some relatively important theological differences that still exist between Catholics and evangelicals, especially with respect to details concerning the doctrine of the church, nevertheless there’s now so much rapprochement between the two sides that this rapprochement represents a historic reversal that should be enthusiastically welcomed and, in effect, the debates of division at the time of the Reformation are over and the Reformation is no longer necessary. So, my summary of the book …

In chapter one there is, first and foremost, a kind of historic summary, mostly from a North American point of view but not exclusively. For example, the role of Billy Graham with respect to Catholics. Billy Graham first had Catholics on his platform participating and leading in prayer as early as 1957.

The Alpha Course and some of its leaders has been accepted by the Vatican, and then such things as public declarations by the Vatican that represent a change of direction. With respect to Luther, a lot of Catholics publicly say Luther was just trying to clean up the church, and if we had only listened.… There’s a little less antagonism from that side as well.

In chapter two there is a kind of survey of historic suspicions between Catholics and evangelicals, and there are some wonderful quotations here, mostly against fundamentalists. One of the remarkable things about this book is that all the nasty criticisms are against evangelical fundamentalists. There’s almost nothing against fundamentalist Catholicism. In that sense, the book is pretty biased. Here’s Carl McIntyre writing in 1945. “One would be much better off in a communistic society than in a Roman Catholic fascist setup.” It’s a wonderful text, isn’t it?

Then, chapter 3 tries to ask why things change, and here he argues that the dominant factor in making things change was Vatican II. In other words, it’s changes he sees within the Catholic Church itself. In North America, the Kennedy presidency, the first Catholic president, and the charismatic movement, which transcends evangelicalism and Catholicism from a social perspective.

Then what Timothy George calls “ecumenism in the trenches.” On certain social issues, a lot of evangelicals and Catholics begin to have a common front on, let’s say, abortion, but on other social issues they don’t. Most evangelicals in North America are against the multiplied gambling that goes on everywhere, whereas Catholics don’t have any moral objection to it to speak of. So on some social issues we’re apart, but on some social issues we’re together. We sort of form a common co-belligerency, and that has brought us together. It’s that kind of survey.

Then chapter 4 surveys ecumenical dialogues in the wake of Vatican II. Catholics and Anglicans, the ARCIC series, if you’re an Anglican or lived in Britain for a while, and then the Lutheran-Catholic statements, most recently the Lutheran-Catholic joint declaration on the doctrine of salvation, October 31, 1999. These things have been going on for years and years. Here is that document. This is Lutherans-Catholics, but you must understand that most of the Lutherans who participated are not in the evangelical camp of Lutheranism. That’s part of the complication too. Who is a Lutheran? It’s complicated.

“Together we confess: by grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.” “The teaching of the Lutheran churches presented in this declaration does not fall under the condemnations from the Council of Trent.” Very interesting. When you look at that language very closely, there are a lot of slippery categories in there I don’t have time to go into now.

So there are still points of difference: the precise understanding of papal infallibility, the relative weight of Scripture and tradition, the precise understanding of the sacraments, especially with respect to transubstantiation, and then an array of slightly lesser but pretty important issues: the understanding of Mary, clerical celibacy, saints, and that sort of thing. Some of these operate at two levels. One is the level of formal doctrine.

Mary in the Catholic Church.… The last dogmatic statement on Mary was 1950 when the doctrine of the bodily assumption of Mary was promulgated. By promulgating a doctrine in the Catholic Church, that means you must believe it to be a good Catholic. Many Catholics taught it before that, but I was brought up in French Canada. We actually had a couple of monasteries there that claimed they had some small fragments of Mary’s bones, believe it or not. They were relics.

They disappeared after 1950, needless to say, but the doctrine of the bodily assumption of Mary, that she was transported like Enoch or the resurrected Christ to heaven without any physical remains, is a doctrine you must believe in to be a Catholic. I don’t know any Protestant who believes that. I don’t know many Catholics who believe it either, but nevertheless, it is one of the things that has been promulgated in fairly recent times. So those sorts of things still divide us. Nevertheless, Noll and Nystrom have a pretty positive view of how much we’ve come to grips with.

Then with respect to the Catholic catechism (published in 1993; English version 1994), this is what Noll says about it: “If, however, both groups can agree (as they appear to) that salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, evangelicals and Catholics can welcome each other as brothers and sisters of the family created by God’s grace, regardless of whatever else either may want to say.”

I can’t quite decide whether Noll is being naÔve or perverse, because anybody who knows the history of the dispute knows full well it’s not a question of whether one side and the other believes in salvation by grace through faith. The dispute is by grace alone through faith alone. Just read the catechism. Read it for yourself, and you’ll see what the issue is. This is not something I’m making up as a knee-jerk reactionary.

To paper over the differences by using slogans that leave out the precise point where all of the debates were in the first instance is, at best, naÔve and, at worst, something a little uglier. On page 150, they ask the question, “Is the Reformation over? Maybe a better question we evangelicals should ask ourselves is why do we not possess such a thorough, clear, and God-centered account of our faith as the catechism offers to Roman Catholics?”

Whoa! What I want to ask is, “Is this biblical?” God-centered covers a multitude of sins. Islam is God-centered too. Meanwhile, if you talk about detailed doctrines and statements of faith, haven’t they read the Westminster Confession and catechism? This is such slanted rhetoric it makes my blood a little warmer than it should be to read these things.

Chapter 6 is devoted entirely to the various steps of ECT (Evangelicals and Catholics Together). There were four documents ultimately published, and there are discussions ongoing. ECT I, II, III, and IV. I’m not going to go into all of that. That’s a long chapter, and it’s complicated. Chapter 7 surveys various responses to Roman Catholicism from right-wing hatemongers to people who won’t work with them, all the way to partners like Colson and Packer with Richard John Neuhaus and converts like Peter Kreeft and John Michael Talbot who have moved to the Catholic camp.

Of course, they don’t talk about any converts of Catholics to Protestantism. It’s all looked at one way. Noll acknowledges that at the beginning of his book. He acknowledges that he’s looking at it from that point of view. On the other hand, after acknowledging it, you have to start saying there’s something perverse in not doing something about it too. Then chapter 8, Catholicism in America, which surveys more historical things, and then chapter 9 is the conclusion.

Part of my assessment here springs from some very good work that was put together by Scott Manetsch, who is on our faculty and who is an expert on the Reformation. He has written a major tome on Beza, for example, for Brill. He’s working on a major research volume on Calvin’s church in Geneva after Calvin dies from working through all the church minutes, how they handled things like church discipline and disputes. Some of what I’m going to say now comes from his notes with some other bits and pieces I’ll throw in.

There’s a lot in the book that’s quite useful. His survey of Vatican II and its changes and categorizing ECT I, II, III, and IV.… If you don’t know anything about these disputes, it gives you a lot of information and grist for the mill. It’s very helpful in all kinds of ways. One can argue, however, as I’ve already indicated, whether it’s very fair to slant things always in terms of ostensible evangelical weaknesses, evangelical right-wing fundamentalist hatemongering, but not talk about worldwide persecution.

When I was a boy in French Canada, Baptist ministers alone between ‘50 and ‘52 spent eight years in jail because of the Catholic Church. The charge was always disturbing the peace or inciting to violence. When I was a boy, I was regularly beaten up because I was a maudits Protestant, a damned Protestant. In other words, there is a whole track record there as well. There are still occasionally martyrs in Latin America. Not very often anymore, but it still happens. There’s another whole side of this that is not being fairly handled here and should be expanded upon to give a feel of evenhandedness.

Second, there are some historical missteps. I told you that he’s a very good historian of American Christianity, but the three I’m going to mention here were all picked up by Manetsch, and I could list some more too. Here is page 147: “It is why Ignatius, who died in 110 …” Some people dispute exactly that date, but let’s leave it right. “… could say that only priests in connection with a bishop, in connection with the pope, can offer valid sacraments.”

Ignatius does not say that. He makes the connection with the bishops. He does not make any connection with the pope. The very notion of pope in 110 wasn’t really there. Already you’re beginning to get the beginning of a slight primacy of the See of Rome, but that’s about it. This is just historical anachronism. Here is page 225: “Historically considered, celibate monks, nuns, and priests kept the Christian faith alive, almost by themselves, for more than one thousand years (roughly 500 to 1500).”

Well, there’s some truth to that in terms of the role of these people, although they were not always exactly what priests became by 1500. There was progression of things across that millennium. On the other hand, there’s part of it that’s just plain wrong. Celibacy was mandated by the church only about 1100, so to speak of the role of celibate priests and monks from 500 to 1500 is just historically ridiculous.

Or the consensus at Regensburg, 1541. This is where some Lutherans and some popes tried to form a joint statement on justification the way ECT did. In ECT I there was an attempt to get a joint statement on justification. At the consensus of Regensburg, these Lutherans and Catholics actually did form a document that reached a consensus between these two groups, but Noll and Nystrom do not mention that the document was then repudiated both by Luther himself on the one side and by the pope on the other.

So again, what you are having is some people agreeing at the popular level, but in terms of the dominant voices from the two sides, still massive disagreement, which is why I asked my such perverse question to Joe Fitzmyer. At the end of the day, what I was really after was, “Is the voice of Joe Fitzmyer the voice of the Catholic Church?” I don’t think so, even though he is such an important scholarly Catholic. That’s why I asked the perverse question. It’s Regensburg all over again.

Here on page 113 … This is not so much a historical issue as a theological issue. “Catholics and Protestants agree that it was the church exercising its authority that defined the present canon of Scripture.” Whoa! We don’t want to say that at all. We want to say that the church recognized the canon of Scripture. It’s not just a small issue either. It’s a fundamental issue of who has authority over what or what has authority over whom.

To pretend we have agreement on that one is just ridiculous. To word it that way is to support implicitly the notion of sacred deposit of authority in the church, which then defines the Canon and has a certain role in maintaining an additional tradition through the magisterial authority of the Holy See. This is really quite bad.

There is frequent confusion of concepts of justification by faith versus justification by faith alone. I’ve already indicated one or two of those in there. Historically, it’s important to recognize that Catholicism never, ever condemned justification by faith, so to argue that now that we have agreement on justification by faith the Reformation is over is historical rubbish of the very first water, because that was never the dispute. Not ever.

There are further minimalist readings of the differences between evangelicals and Catholics. Page 237: “The central difference that continues to separate evangelicals and Catholics is not Scripture, justification by faith, the pope, Mary, the sacraments, or clerical celibacy, though the central difference is related in differences on these matters, but the nature of the church.” Whoa! That is a mouthful and a half.

It’s not Scripture? It’s not justification by faith? It’s not the pope? It’s not Mary? It’s not the sacraments? It’s just ecclesiology, papal authority and the structures that come from it? My dear Mark. It is true that ecclesiology is astonishingly important, if we understand by ecclesiology that in Catholicism the Catholic Church defines the valid church by the descent of authority through the bishops all the way back to the apostles. That is a defining thing, and it has some huge implications.

It has the effect of raising ecclesiology above soteriology again, raising the doctrine of the church above the doctrine of salvation, whereas historically, confessional evangelicalism, like the Reformation itself and, I would argue, the early church, goes the other way around. The crucial issue is who is saved and who are the people of God? How are you reconciled to God? That defines the church rather than the other way around.

If, instead, you begin with the church and the descent of the bishops, then you end up with a pretty different structure. So the ecclesiology issue really does touch a lot of things. It is huge. On the other hand, it’s difficult for me to think that any less important is sola fide, justification by faith alone, and justification by grace alone, sola gratia. Likewise, the doctrine of Scripture, not only its authority, which all sides acknowledge, but its sufficiency, perspicuity, and normative status. That, I would argue, is absolutely foundational for everything else.

Let me give you some examples from the Catholic catechism on, for example, justification. “The first work of the grace of the Holy Spirit is conversion, effecting justification.… Moved by grace, man turns toward God and away from sin, thus accepting forgiveness and righteousness from on high. Justification is not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man.” That’s from the Catholic catechism, paragraph 1989.

Here’s paragraph 1991: “Justification is at the same time acceptance of God’s righteousness through faith in Jesus Christ. Righteousness (or justice) here means the rectitude of divine love. With justification, faith, hope, and charity are poured into our hearts, and obedience to the divine will is granted to us.”

Here’s paragraph 2025: “We can have merit in God’s sight only because of God’s free plan to associate man with the work of his grace. Merit is to be ascribed in the first place to the grace of God, and secondly to man’s collaboration.” Paragraph 2027: “No man can merit the initial grace, which is at the origin of conversion. Moved by the Holy Spirit, we can merit for ourselves and for others all the graces needed to attain eternal life, as well as necessary temporal goods.”

That’s Tridentine. That’s Council of Trent. Yet ECT II says, “We understand that what we here affirm is in agreement with what the Reformation traditions have meant by justification by faith alone.” Whoa! So the ECT II is claiming justification by faith alone. There’s an agreement in that little group of people, but the official doctrine of the Catholic Church says these sorts of things I’ve just spelled out. What are you going to believe?

Here’s Scripture and tradition. These are not ancient disputes from the sixteenth century. This is what the 1993 official statement of the Catholic Church is. From Dei Verbum, Second Vatican Council. “Therefore, both sacred tradition and sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence.” Page 165.

Here’s from the Catholic catechism, paragraph 82: “As a result the church, to whom the transmission and interpretation of revelation is entrusted, does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone. Both Scripture and tradition must be accepted and honored with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence.”

Meanwhile, ECT III says, “Tradition is not a second source of revelation alongside the Bible, but must ever be corrected and informed by it, and Scripture itself is not understood in a vacuum apart from the historical existence and life of the community of faith.” Well, I could sign ECT III, but it’s simply not what the Catholic Church teaches when you read the actual catechism.

In other words, you begin with the kind of evangelical definitions we started with in Scripture, acknowledging they’re tied into a bigger web of theological and biblical frameworks, but when we start dealing with these things worldwide, there are further discussions about what’s being said officially and what’s being said at pop levels, what’s being actually practiced on the street, and pretty soon you discover there are some pretty big gospel issues involved in these cross-denominational debates between the best of historical confessional Protestantism and the best of historic Catholicism. Final question or two?

Male: My question may sound terrible, but did not Mark Noll help us in some way to show the Catholics should be the ones who should respond that there’s discrepancy between their leading scholars and their official teaching?

Don: Except it’s not Mark who’s showing that. Mark does not set together the Catholic catechism and these various statements. It’s Scott Manetsch’s notes and my digging that has done that sort of thing.

Male: But he got them to spell out these things, which now are written black and white.

Don: Yes, in theory, but the Catholic Church has always proved very flexible. Catholics often like us to think that the Protestants are divided all over the place but the Catholics are unified. Well, they’re unified in terms of organic structure in a succession of priestly descent, but in terms of belief, you compare what a Catholic priest thinks on the streets of Medellin, Colombia, with what a different one thinks in Holland, for example, and they’re farther apart than any polarity you can find in evangelicalism, by far.

So the Catholic Church tends to be astonishingly flexible and thus very syncretistic. Anybody who has worked in Catholic countries in Latin America, for example, knows how much native animism is often built into the Catholic Church. The church lives with all of that … no sweat … until you get to a place where it’s jeopardizing the authority of the church, and then something bad happens. Why would the Vatican want to take on Joe Fitzmyer? What does it have to gain from that? Joe himself wants to be a loyal son of the church.

Joe wouldn’t respond to my question. When push came to shove, Richard John Neuhaus said what he said about, “Hey, it’s the catechism. Of course he believes it.” What do they have to go against him on? They’re not going to. So he remains a loyal son of the church, even though he’s saying some stuff that is wildly different from the catechism, and everybody ducks and looks the wrong way and doesn’t say anything, because it keeps all of the members in and the coffers full in this big world of Catholicism.

On the other hand, it raises still some fundamental issues of what Catholicism is, and it seems to me most of us should begin not with Trent, not with medieval Catholicism, but with the most recent version of the catechism. That is what is coming out of the Vatican. Both this pope, Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, and the previous pope, John Paul, are essentially Tridentine in their thinking. They really are very conservative Catholics.

It’s not for nothing that John Paul comes from Poland, where the Black Madonna is just huge. I thought I knew Catholicism until I visited Poland. The role the Black Madonna plays in not only popular but pretty sophisticated Catholicism in a country like Poland is just unbelievable. Is anybody here from Poland? Is that a fair description? Yeah.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: And it can be looked at another way. Let me tell you one more story. About 20 years ago, when I was living in Cambridge, England, there were quite a lot of university students, undergraduates and graduates, who came to a genuine evangelical grasp of the faith in Ireland, and this at a time when the Catholic Church was really quite Tridentine. It was very conservative. These people came to a real understanding of the faith.

I was asked to go over and talk to them, so I went over and spent quite a few days with them, about 80 of them. These were bright young people. I had a whale of a time. I really enjoyed myself no end. They wanted me to teach the Bible on passage after passage, which I did, but then there was a lot of time for discussion. I pushed them hard on their understanding of all kinds of issues, and if they were wrong somewhere, all they wanted to be was corrected by Scripture.

These were genuinely converted people who understood classic, I would argue Pauline understanding, New Testament understanding of what the gospel is about. They were, in fact, creedally, evangelicals, and I didn’t push them at all on church allegiance. I just avoided that like the plague. I wanted to see what they would do with it. By the end of the week, they trusted me enough that we would sit around and have these long Q&A sessions, 80 of them asking these questions.

Eventually, all of these issues came up, and they were arguing, in effect, “You know, in Ireland, to be Irish is to be Catholic. Not to be Catholic is not to be Irish. Why should we leave? For most Catholics in Ireland it’s a cultural thing. To leave the Catholic Church is to insult Ireland, to insult our parents, to hurt our family. How is that a Christian witness? We don’t believe all those kinds of things, but after all, didn’t Luther himself try to reform things? So why can’t we stay in and try to reform things? In that sense, we can be evangelical Catholics, can’t we?”

I said, “Go ahead. God bless you.” They said, “Yeah, but is that right? Do you mind if we do that? Is this permitted by Scripture?”

“Well, do you want my frank opinion?”

“Yeah, tell us your frank opinion.”

I said, “It’ll never work. Just have a few more birthdays. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. You people are all single students now. You’re going to start pairing up. You’re going to fall in love. You’re going to make babies, and then you’re going to start asking questions. ‘What do we do with our kids? Do we get them baptized according to Catholic understanding? Do we send them to Catholic school? Do we put them through the Catholic catechism?’

Somewhere along the line, you’re going to start facing some hard decisions as to how you’re going to bring up your own families, and you’re going to divide. Some of you are going to split off and go to this church or start another church, or there are some Protestant evangelical churches in Dublin. That’s what’s going to happen.” “Oh no, we’re going to be faithful to the Catholic Church and renovate things from within.”

Well, I didn’t go back for about 10 years, and since then I’ve been back pretty often. Now almost every time I go back to any church in Dublin, I get one or the other of these people coming up and saying, “Do you remember when you were here 20 years ago? You told us that.” Now virtually all of them are in strong evangelical churches, and many of them are leaders, but there are a lot of things that have happened since then.

Today the Catholic Church is very weak in Ireland. It has faced scandals and secularism. Almost all of these people began to make these sorts of changes. You must understand that when you see an expression like evangelical Catholic, if evangelical is defined theologically and Catholic is defined theologically, it’s an oxymoron. It doesn’t make sense. If by evangelical Catholic, evangelical is defined theologically and Catholic is defined by where you choose to exist, defined socially, then of course there can be evangelical Catholics.

On the other hand, that doesn’t really say anything about ecumenism or agreement. It says something about social location of this particular person. In fact, it is a bit non-descriptive. Sooner or later, if you follow the norming norm, the norming norm is going to demand some changes in your ecclesiology. You’re going to start asking questions about what the church is and how you build the church, and the norming norm is going to start reforming you in more than soteriology. It’s going to start reforming you in ecclesiology.

It is true that you can have reforming movements like Wesley in the Anglican church, who gets booted out in some respects, although he maintains his orders, and still sees himself as an Anglican but, nevertheless, Methodism is formed from that, but in that case, Whitefield and Wesley could still claim that the foundation documents of their church, of Anglicanism, the Thirty-Nine Articles and the 1662 prayer book, are evangelical to their core, so they can still claim they’re reforming the church in line with their foundation documents.

The trouble is that devout pious Catholics can’t do that. They can’t claim that they are trying to reform the church in line with their documents. So what tends to happen in time when people try to do that.… Sooner or later they get booted out or they just think it’s wise to leave so they can align their ecclesiological and teaching structures a little more with Holy Scripture. Well, I know some of you have to catch a bus. To quote Billy Graham, may the Lord bless y’all real good.