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What Is Evangelicalism?

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


There’s a sense in which this topic really isn’t all that important. Labels come and labels go, and I’m not quite ready to be crucified for a label. Yet behind this debate on what an evangelical is, stands an array of really important and fairly complex issues. So by teasing away at this topic, I hope it will help us to think through what the gospel is and how to present ourselves, likewise, to a broader world.

What is an evangelical? I’m going to begin with a survey of the diversity of approaches taken to answer that question since that’s part of the problem … there are different approaches taken to how you answer that question; then I will contrast evangelicalism, as I’ve then defined it, with a number of other movements; talk about this in terms of related issues such as contextualization, indigeneity, globalization, and things like that; and give some brief reflections on the relationship between evangelicalism and denominationalism.

If there’s a little time at the end I’ll throw in some reflections on the book by Noll, Is the Reformation Over? which has some bearing on this topic as well.

1. Different approaches to the question.

A lot of people try to answer the question, “What is evangelicalism?” by an approach through the social sciences. If evangelicalism is defined by the belief structures and practices of all people who call themselves evangelicals, then essentially you have a social science-historical approach. You try to find out who calls themselves evangelicals, then you analyze what they believe and survey how they do religion, and then you summarize this in some way.

If you do this, then, of course the degree of diversity is fantastic. It’s just unbelievably broad. As a result, those who take this approach end up by saying, “Evangelicalism really doesn’t have much of a doctrinal core,” or “It’s not really particularly confessional. It’s a sort of social movement that is activist in some fashion or the other.” Moreover, as soon as you take a social science approach, one of the things you discover is the term itself means different things in different parts of the world.

A few months ago I was in Medellin, Colombia, and there evangelical is often related to people who go door-to-door.… Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and people like that, then there are Catholics, and then there are Christians, whom I would tend to call evangelical. So I rather like the breakdown of terminology in Colombia, but on the other hand, it’s not exactly what is going on in the streets of Toronto.

Meanwhile, if I lived in New York City with my dear friend Tim Keller, I would never call myself an evangelical unless I were in a very friendly group, because by and large in Manhattan, evangelical means the Christianized version of the Taliban. It roughly means right-wing, stupid, ignorant, hate-filled, bomb-throwing people, and I don’t think of myself that way.

So I wouldn’t call myself an evangelical there unless I had an awful lot of time to explain some background terminology. That’s why when Tim Keller and I put together the organization The Gospel Coalition we didn’t call it “The Evangelical Coalition.” It’s carrying too much baggage in too many parts of the country.

I need to say this in passing; this is true with almost all labels. There are many, many contexts in which I would never call myself Reformed. In many parts of the Deep South, Reformed basically means you don’t like evangelism. I don’t think of myself quite like that either. You have to watch what overtones are connected with a term in a particular place. There’s no way of avoiding this sort of problem.

Social science approaches to the understanding of what evangelicalism is have not only a grounding in what people think of themselves, how they label themselves, but there’s also an historical rootage. Those who think in social science approaches, focusing now less on sociology and more on history, start looking for the historical rootage of movements. So are evangelicals those who come out of, let’s say, the Evangelical Awakening, an eighteenth-century movement? Clearly there’s some truth to that. Our movements do have certain kinds of historical rootage.

Others try to connect the term evangelicalism to the post-war period in the United States. Others try to connect it to the Reformation. The problem with all of those approaches, of course, is for those of us who really hold to the priority of Scripture in defining life and thought, we’re a little nervous about tying our movement to something that’s only a century old or three centuries old or five centuries old, when in one sense, you want to be tied to the New Testament itself … in fact, to the Bible.

So we realize once again there are problems in definition that are bound up with the approach you take to how you go about giving the definition in the first instance. Perhaps one of the most famous approaches to defining evangelicalism in recent decades has been that of Bebbington, a historian, in Britain. He says evangelicalism is a “quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of evangelicalism.” The quadrilateral parts are conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism.

Conversionism: There is some sort of emphasis on a crisis moment when you come to faith.

Activism: It has been aggressive, not only in good works but also in evangelism and things like that.

Biblicism: Epistemologically it gets tied to the authority of Scripture.

Crucicentrism: It’s focused on the centrality of the cross.

In generic terms, that’s not too bad. The trouble is the terms themselves are all pretty flexible. As a result, if you’re gentle with those terms and are not too tough and rigorous with them, there are many, many Catholics, for example, who can adopt the Bebbington quadrilateral. As a result, I’ve seen analyses, for example, of Catholicism in French Canada in which it is argued that 30 percent of Catholics in Quebec are evangelicals.

Then when you read all the fine print, those doing the analysis are saying they’re evangelicals because they do fit the Bebbington quadrilateral. Good grief! There’s a problem here. I’ve spent so much of my life in Quebec.… I was reared there. I go back lecturing there in French every year. Those figures are just massively distorted if people mean by evangelical anything like what I mean by it. You realize, suddenly, the Bebbington quadrilateral has the potential of huge misconceptions.

Then, of course, it’s possible to think through what evangelicalism is, not from an historical point of view or sociological analysis or an international attempt to see what different labels mean in different places but rather a purely theological analysis. That is, evangelicalism is that movement dominantly shaped by adhering to the evangel.

Now I like that a lot better. The trouble is then you really do have to explain what the evangel is. You cannot take for granted everybody has exactly the same grasp of what the evangel, what the gospel, really is. On the other hand, at least that is focusing the question on theological biblical issues. Then it is helpful to begin with some sort of exegetical biblical approach like that of Stott, who asks the question in one of his books, “What is the gospel?” He begins by looking at a passage like 1 Corinthians 15.

I adapted that and expanded it considerably for my talk on What is the gospel? on The Gospel Coalition website. What is the gospel, the matters of first importance? The word gospel is used twice in those opening verses. “Once Christ died for our sins …” That needs unpacking. “… and then he rose again.”

It’s bound up with Christology but also the death of Christ, the resurrection of Christ. It’s the good news, then, that is biblically grounded, because we’re told again and again it’s according to the Scriptures. It has eschatological overtones. You can unpack those verses and give a succinct summary of what the gospel is.

Then, in all fairness, it is important to see how some of those categories have been used in church history, at every period of church history, not least the Reformation period with its five solas, then its impact in the Evangelical Awakening, then the confrontation with classic liberalism, and so forth.

There is, inevitably, a historical filter that does shape how we have come to understand how the gospel works out. One cannot do theology ahistorically. Postmodernism is right in this respect. We are all perspectivalists. That is, we look at things from a certain perspective. We are finite. The only non-perspectivalist is God, because only God is omniscient.

To be a non-perspectivalist, you must be omniscient. As far as I know, that means all the rest of us are perspectivalists. That does not mean that because we inevitably look at things from a certain perspective, therefore, what we are viewing is false. It means what we view is inevitably partial, because only omniscience can transcend the limitations of perspectivalism.

That means even when we’re confessing the gospel, working exegesis, and trying to understand the truth, inevitably, those things are shaped, in part, by whom we are, the language we work in, the culture and heritage we’ve received … if we’re children of the Evangelical Awakening, if we were converted out of Mormonism, or whatever.

These things, inevitably, filter how we emphasize things and put emphases in certain places. It’s not as if sociological and historical considerations have no place whatsoever. The trouble is, unless they have, as the determining shaping force, the Word of God as an attempt to understand what the evangel is, then it seems to me evangelicalism is in great danger of losing what it claims to be central in the first place.

In this respect then, inevitably, an array of related matters is also brought in. How does such confessionalism relate to ancient creeds like, for example, the Apostles’ Creed? There’s a recent book by Tom Oden called The Justification Reader that shows how much justification was an issue that was debated and frequently well-articulated and believed even in the patristic period, though not with all the sharpness that comes from later debates at the time of the Reformation.

You and I both know that sometimes we come to a deeper, sharper understanding of exactly what Scripture says on some point once the truth is denied. It’s sort of percolated through the church and widely believed, then you get some sort of denial, and it forces everybody to think a little more sharply about issues.

Inevitably, the fourth-century christological debates made thing a little clearer in the whole area of the deity of Christ, for example. Likewise, the Reformation made things clearer in the domain of justification, authority, and a number of other issues, but at the end of the day, the Reformation did not invent justification by grace alone through faith alone (see Oden’s book on the patristic period), and the Arian controversy did not invent the doctrine of the deity of Christ.

Even if it contributed to sharper thinking, it is really important to see evangelicalism cutting back a swath right through all of church history to the New Testament, so long as we don’t start some of these silly history books that try to make the Waldensians evangelicals and.… The broadband sort of approach to what an evangelical is.

If we have some such definition such that evangelical means something like genuine Christian, the trouble is there are all kinds of people who have genuinely been saved, genuinely been born again, genuinely do trust Christ, whose theological structure, at least at the initial stages of their conversion life, is so mucked up, so inconsistent, so broken, that in all fairness, their whole theological structure is not evangelical even though they have, in some genuine sense, truly trusted Christ.

Moreover, there are some people brought up in evangelical confessional circles who can tick off all the boxes quite nicely, thank you very much, but in all fairness it’s pretty difficult to see any conversion grace in their lives. So one wants to be very reluctant about saying evangelical equals true Christian. Besides, you then get to the place where you start saying, “Well, if somebody is not an evangelical they’re not a Christian.” That is a bit touchy too, isn’t it?

At the end of the day, I want to say something like this: evangelicalism at its best, defined by the evangel given in Scripture, is simply biblical confessionalism at its best. It is, thus, Christianity at its best. In other words, it’s sweepingly broad, but it’s narrowly focused on what Paul himself says are the matters of first importance. For that reason, I am not too eager to abandon the term entirely, because it does remind us of the central place of the evangel, of the gospel, of the place it plays in holding the whole Bible together.

2. Contrasts of evangelicalism over against other things.

That is, why these other things are not evangelicalisms.

A. Classic liberal theology.

Now liberal theology has many faces, of course, but at the end of the day, one of the effects is to make the authority of Scripture a pick-and-choose business. Scripture itself gets domesticated. I almost hesitate to use the expressions liberal theology and liberal Christianity. There is some sense in which, surely, you and I want to be liberals. Do you want to be thought of as being illiberal in your giving, for example?

Sometimes in theological education.… I insist that Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where I teach, is a far more liberal institution than Yale Divinity School. As soon as I say that, all my Yalie friends say, “What do you mean by that?” If you go to Yale and you have to read a New Testament introduction, you’ll be either given Ray Brown’s introduction or you’ll be given Bart Ehrman’s. You’re not going to be exposed to any historic confessional New Testament introduction.

If you come to Trinity, not only will you be forced to read Carson and Moo, you’ll also be forced to read Ray Brown and Bart Ehrman. Who’s getting a better liberal education? You can multiply that in many, many domains. There is a certain kind of liberal fundamentalism that is singularly illiberal. So I’m not quite ready to lose the term liberal either and say there is no sense in which I am quite prepared to be thought of as liberal.

I’m suspicious of those forms of confessionalism in which the aim of the exercise seems to be to say, on every topic and in every situation, “I’m more conservative than you are,” because on all kinds of axes, I don’t want to be conservative, thank you. All kinds of them. One must be careful how these labels get used.

Nevertheless, in classic liberal theology, there is a self-distancing from submission, whole-hearted submission, to what Scripture says that finally undermines just about everything. The only question is the degree. You can find, then, in an older line of liberals, enormous piety. The C.H. Dodds, all the way down to the C.F.D. Moules. That whole line of liberals is dying out today.

Today’s liberals tend to be really in-your-face rebellious against Scripture, but the older line I was still studying under when I was doing doctoral work were a remarkable group of pious people. It wasn’t their piety one wanted to criticize. Charlie Moule, who became a really dear friend, would have his devotions out of the Greek text in the morning and out of the Hebrew text in the evening. He was a churchman through and through.

If your wife had a baby, he’d pump up to your home on his bicycle and deliver flowers. He was a wonderful old man. I heard him defend the deity of Christ in the presence of Jews, for example. In many ways, he was a remarkable man, but he couldn’t stand the doctrine of Scripture. He was very suspicious about any notion of substitutionary atonement and the like.

We had long lengthy correspondence at one point on how the doctrine of Scripture is formed. It’s a stunning pile of letters that.… I don’t know what I’ll ever do with them. He’s gone to his reward in the last few months. Maybe at some point they’re worth putting into print. It was a stunning correspondence back and forth. But there’s no sense in which he would have called himself an evangelical, and I wouldn’t have called him an evangelical. No, no, no.

What distinguished him, first and foremost, as belonging to a more liberal camp was his self-admitted self-distancing from anything that made Scripture finally authoritative in his life, even though his knowledge of Scripture was formidable. On many, many fronts, he did align his personal beliefs with a great deal of Scripture.

When I was just beginning doctoral studies in Cambridge, a long time ago now, C.H. Dodd was in his 90s, long retired but still sometimes speaking on the radio somehow. That was marvelous. His last big book was written when he was 84. At this juncture, he was being interviewed on the BBC, and the interviewer asked him, “Professor Dodd, if by some unimaginable fluke every Greek printed New Testament and every Greek New Testament manuscript were destroyed, how much of it could you recreate from memory?”

He said, “All of it.” The reviewer said, “Professor Dodd, all of it?” He said, “Well, yes, of course. It’s only a little book.” You realize there are qualities of knowing text that most of us have not even attempted in English, let alone in Greek. Some of these old-line liberals often had a knowledge of text, and in some ways an academic submission to text, that was really quite marvelous, highly commendable. They were not merely derivative scholars.

At the same time there was, nevertheless, a self-acknowledged self-distancing from the authority of Scripture. Today’s liberals, by and large, are much, much farther out than that and take a great delight in criticizing Scripture again and again and again.

B. Liberation theology.

Liberation theology, which one finds most notably in Latin America but in many other parts of the world as well, is fascinating because of its genuine concern for people’s well-being, people who are living in destitution, sometimes economic slavery, under political regimes that are extremely harsh, and so on. Do we really want to be completely self-distanced from those kinds of problems? Don’t we want to address them as well? Don’t we care for human beings in all of the miserable circumstances of life?

Liberation theology, then, tends to take the exodus as the paradigm. God uses Moses to lead the people out of slavery into newfound freedom and worship of God. So, thus, the proper freedom and worship of God brings about this liberation from all kinds of totalitarianisms and evil regimes. At the level of caring for ordinary people, liberation theology put out a pretty strong face.

On the other hand, the question you have to ask liberation theologians is, “Why do you adopt the exodus as the controlling typology? Why not adopt, say.… I’m not recommending it; I’m just asking on a theoretical basis why you adopt one versus another. Why not adopt, say, the message of Jeremiah, which is ‘Don’t you dare rebel against a superpower, and if you do, God will squash you.’ What is it, precisely, that authorizes the exodus over Jeremiah?”

Most of the people who worked at a theoretical and theological level in liberation theology recognized the problem and addressed it. Their answer was praxis. In other words, the thing that forces you to choose one typology versus another typology from the myriad of typologies found in Scripture is your own existential situation. Praxis: how you work out the theology in practice to confront the particular situation in which you find yourself.

That means, at the end of the day, the aim is not to find out what the whole of the counsel of God says, how the Bible fits together, how there is unity to Scripture that finally focuses on the things Scripture itself makes sensationally crucially important such as the cross, the resurrection of Christ, reconciliation to the God who stand over against us not only in sovereign love but also in wrath and judgment.… Instead of seeking those central things, you pick and choose the elements in Scripture that seem, to you, to be most helpful to your political theme.

What that means, again then, is the Scripture gets domesticated to our agenda. It’s hard to imagine anybody wanting to make the Sermon on the Mount quite the crucial point in all of life. It’s hard find anybody who’s making Roland’s tree the crucial center point in all of life. We choose those bits that enable us to get on with our political agenda.

Now in some ways, liberation theology is weakening for all kinds of reasons. Many of the initial liberation theologians were Catholic Marxists in Latin America. Some wag has said the Catholics urged liberation theology on the poor, and the poor chose evangelicalism. There’s some truth to that too. Life is complicated.

Then one could go through movements like openness theology, the new perspective on Paul, or Catholicism, and so on, and try to show why evangelicalism, in the sweeping but nevertheless focused sense I’ve been trying to urge upon you, is different from those sorts of movements. Perhaps we can pick up a few more of them a little later on.

3. Some reflections about the worldwide movement that is sometimes called evangelicalism.

We are certainly living in interesting times, aren’t we? It’s fascinating, partly because our communications are so much better, and not only in the political arena. A few shots could be fired anywhere in the world and it’s on the CBC News. You find out a lot of things about most places in the world. We become so used to that we forget how many of them are manipulated too.

For example, what part of the world today is seeing the greatest number of deaths per month that are not natural? What country? It’s the Congo. There are 45,000 deaths a month either due to ongoing military struggle or, as often as not, the poverty and disease that come out of this ongoing military struggle. There are 45,000 deaths a month, and the media is saying almost nothing about it.

Sometimes the availability of the media to communicate everything blinds us to the fact that we ourselves may not be getting the whole truth, because they’re making choices in what they decide to present to you. Having said that, the fact remains that we do have access to remarkably good information if we take a bit of trouble to go after it.

We discover then, for example, that there are more Christians today in Iran than at any time in the last 1,000 years. I would love to give you lots and lots of stories of things going on in the Muslim world or things going on in China but, precisely because this is being taped, I won’t say a word.

Because of Trinity’s connections, we have access to remarkably good information in many parts of the world. There are interesting things going on around the world. There is reason to rejoice at the movement; I would call it evangelical. In many parts of the world, of course, there has been such growth that the level of teaching is thin. That’s a problem.

Sometimes the growth has turned on people movements. I know in North America we’re afflicted with a kind of heavy individualism, but sometimes the communitarianism you get in other parts of the world means that whole people movements swing across.… Then it comes a little later that you may not have a lot of genuine individual conversions in all of that. A whole tribe is moved across, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve all had the work of grace done in their hearts so that they are truly changed.

I am persuaded that is part of what’s gone on, for example, in the Rwanda massacres when Hutus and Tutsis took it out on each other, both of whom were nominally Christian. The trouble is nominal is the word. So there are all kinds of dangers of this sort and huge numbers (people estimate 90 to 100 million) of Christians, the majority of whom are in underground churches as opposed to the Three-Self Patriotic Movement in China.

The availability of quality instruction and biblical training is so thin that there are problems with many of these movements. Nevertheless, if you were to ask me the question, “Is the world getting better because of the multiplication of Christians or worse because the Christian church is losing ground?” worldwide, I would say, “Both.” Which, it seems to me, is entirely in line with what Jesus himself says in the parable of the wheat and the tares. “Let both grow until the end.”

Although I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, let me tell you what’s going to happen in the twenty-first century. If the Lord doesn’t come back first, there will be massive movements of turning to Christ. There will be spectacular conversions, huge numbers in surprising places, and there will be bloody mayhem, persecution, and terrible violence.

We’ve just come through the most violent century in the human race, in all of history. I can’t think of a single reason why the twenty-first century shouldn’t be bloodier. It may not be, but it wouldn’t surprise me. “Let both grow until the end.” So we are living in times when we should not, in any sense, be discouraged or despairing. We still serve one who says, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

The outworking of that in many, many corners of the world is spectacular. Toronto, of course, used to be pretty monolithic. It’s now one of the most, if not the most, multicultural cities, per capita basis, in the entire world. Most of you folks have come across, for example, Iranian converts, Persian converts. They’re in little nests all over the world.

Almost everywhere I have come across them and had anything to do with them, I’ve discovered 90 or 95 percent of them have had spectacular visions of the exalted risen Christ as part of their conversion. Now just stick that in your theological pipe and smoke it. It’s what the Lord is doing now; he’s not going to be put in a little box here. It is what is going on, and they are genuinely converted.

This is a big God who does surprising things, and just when we think we have him all taped and analyzed, then he bursts out and does something spectacular again. For this we ought to thank him. Hang onto your seat; who knows what God is going to do next. Try to be faithful in our own small corners and still wait to see what is going on. Worldwide, the challenges are huge. The diversity is pretty remarkable.

At the same time, there is much to confessional historical evangelicalism that is in rising strength around the world, for which we ought to thank God. Which is merely another way of saying the historic biblical gospel is in rising strength in many places around the world, for which we ought to thank God.

4. Brief reflections on the relationship between evangelicalism as a movement and some denominations.

We could begin anywhere, but let’s begin with …

A. Anglicanism.

If you live in Canada and your understanding of Anglicanism is basically the Anglican Church of Canada, and if you live in North America and your understanding of it is American Episcopalianism, it’s not too surprising if you think of Anglicanism as pretty well a dead horse to be buried. Although there are some remarkable exceptions, aren’t there? One thinks of David Short in Vancouver and some of the things he is doing and confronting. One thinks, in the United States, of some people like John Yates in Virginia, some remarkably good gospel-centered pastors.

Then you look worldwide at Peter Akinola, for example, the archbishop of Nigeria, and you suddenly realize the overwhelming majority of Anglicans now are not in the Western world. They’re in the so-called Two-Thirds World. They’re in the majority world, and most of them are evangelicals of some stripe or another. That’s the truth. It’s remarkable.

It is why the Anglican Communion is breaking up. As far as I can see, Lambeth, which is scheduled for this year, is going to be the determining point. If the Canadians and the Americans go, then Uganda is not going, Nigeria is not going, Singapore is probably not going. Sydney, Australia is not going. So you have a de facto breakup.

Meanwhile, many of these confessional evangelical Anglicans are going to be meeting before Lambeth in Israel to have their own convention. Which means that, in effect, you have a kind of new Lambeth Lambeth, a non-Lambeth Lambeth, and you have a de facto breakup of the entire Anglican Communion. Some of us who are not Anglicans are inclined to say, precisely because we’re committed to the gospel, “Not a moment too soon,” because at the end of the day, the denomination is not the crucial thing, is it? It’s still the gospel and its outworking in churches.

At this point, one needs to gain a certain kind of historical perspective, too, and say, “In a sense, the issue over which the Anglican Communion is breaking up is the wrong one.” There is a sense in which, at the time of the Reformation, the matter of Tetzel and his indulgences was the wrong issue. Do you really break up the worldwide communion over some goofball selling indulgences? It seems like the wrong issue.

Nevertheless, the Ninety-five Theses had the result of forcing a rethink about everything. It’s not just indulgences. Suddenly the nature of what is salvation is brought into play, what justification is, where authority lies, the nature of grace, what was achieved by the cross. Suddenly, it becomes the trigger that forces a rethink about absolutely everything.

In the providence of God.… Well, you really wouldn’t want to say Tetzel was the cause of the Reformation. He was the kind of trigger that blew it all up. It brought it all out in the open, in the providence of God. So now we have a denomination where you have a bishop denying the resurrection of Christ, denying substitutionary atonement, sneering at the deity of Christ, and nobody does a blessed thing!

Then along comes homosexuality, and we blow up the church? In one hand you see it’s the wrong issue. It’s not nearly important enough, and yet it has become, in the providence of God, the trigger under which we are all forced to ask, “Do we live under the authority of Scripture or do we not?” That touches everything.

Suddenly, it’s the trigger that touches everything, and it’s bringing us back to a fundamental confessional stance. Where does the authority lie? Has God spoken or has God not? Do we live under Scripture or do we not? That changes everything. Suddenly you realize we are honor bound, then, to help our brothers and sisters in those sorts of frames of reference, too, to think things through, to pray for them, to care for them, because they’re asking about fundamental evangelical issues.

B. Lutheranism.

Worldwide there are a lot of Lutherans around. There are not a huge number of them anymore here in Toronto, but there are pockets of them in many, many parts of the United States. For example, in the Midwest, almost everybody is of either Lutheran or Catholic background. There are pockets in the western parts of Canada and elsewhere as well.

In Europe, of course, there are still some countries with state churches that are nominally Lutheran. The Scandinavian countries, for example. Germany confesses two state churches, Catholic and Lutheran. There are still Lutheran mission residues in huge parts of East Africa and elsewhere. They’re not small numbers.

Now much of contemporary Lutheranism is just plain flat-out liberal. It’s so far left you need field glasses to see it. I’ve already talked about liberalism; I’m not going to talk about it anymore. There are many, many confessional Lutherans as well. We might not have exactly the same idea about consubstantiation or the Lord’s Supper and exactly the same idea about exactly what baptism achieves or does not achieve. Fair enough.

What is interesting, however, is there are many Lutherans who would never call themselves evangelical because their perception of what evangelical means is shaped by American religious television. Now if that’s what shapes your understanding of evangelical, I don’t want to be an evangelical either.

There are many, many people, like some Reformed types, many Lutherans, some Anglicans, who would never call themselves evangelical who are evangelical by the kind of approach to evangelicalism I’ve just given, even as there are many self-defined evangelicals who are not evangelicals by any sort of theological approach like the kind I have just given.

That reminds us again that labels are tricky, and they have overtones and connections in different parts of the world that we need to come to grips with when we are involved in dialogue with other people. Something similar could be said about Baptists, fundamentalists, the charismatic movement. Let me just say something about fundamentalists.

c. Fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism is changing. It’s changing, as far as I can see, a little less quickly in Canada. Canada is coming along about 10 or 15 years behind on this one. Fundamentalists in the US are changing, in many respects. Most of them are Baptistic, but not all of them. Most of them have some theory of second- or third-degree separation, and most of them are hermeneutically dispensational and pretty strongly so. That rules out most of us, I suspect, from aligning with them personally.

Nevertheless, we often have a perspective on fundamentalism that is sociologically no longer quite valid: fundamentalists are ignorant, bad-tempered, hate-filled, they know more what they’re against than what they’re for, and so on. For whatever reason (I don’t know why), in recent years we’ve had, at Trinity, quite a lot of graduates out of Bob Jones Seminary and other schools who come to Trinity to do a PhD or further advanced studies.

We’re probably as sort of liberal as they can get, and so some of them come up to a school like ours, which has a very high confessional stance on inerrancy and things like that. Do you know what I’ve discovered? This new generation is amongst the most gentle, thoughtful, quiet, personally loving group of students we’ve got on our campus. What can I say?

On all kinds of issues, they are trying to be discerning and wise. Even when I disagree with them on this or that or the other.… And some of them don’t end up in quite the same place when they leave us as when they came in. Nevertheless, in terms of personal demeanor and so on, to think of fundamentalists as being hate-filled, bomb-throwing types just isn’t my experience.

Do you know some of the toughest customers we have to handle on our campus? Some brands of Reformed Baptist, because for some of them, every issue is a matter of conscience. Then it’s very difficult to recognize there are different degrees of importance within the Scripture itself. Otherwise, why should the apostle Paul say, “As a matter of first importance …”? Everything becomes an issue over which you divide.

So, sociologically, our stereotypes are changing. The fundamentalist movement in the United States is declining in numbers, and the elders are worried. The younger ones are exploring options. It seems to me that for many of us with a high view of confessionalism, we ought to be entering into discussion with these folk. Many of them are trying to be faithful to Scripture.

That doesn’t mean we’re going to agree on everything, but they’re trying to be faithful to Scripture as they understand Scripture. That counts hugely with me. I may not agree with them on every point, and they certainly don’t agree with me on every point. Nevertheless, that is pretty important, isn’t it? Out of that framework, then, to see what things …

There’s a new generation of young intellectual Christian leaders/thinkers who are coming out of the fundamentalist movement, many of whom are sliding toward a more Reformed theology, a more Catholic theology, in the best sense of Catholic, and are not giving up on the firmness with which they hold to allegiance to Scripture. My hat is off to them. If there are ways in which we can mutually benefit one another by thinking through what Scripture says on many, many issues, then we ought to be trying to do that sort of thing.

D. The charismatic movement.

The charismatic movement, of course, is just so incredibly diverse nowadays that it’s hard to say many generalist things. For some, conversion with a genuine grasp of the gospel is important, but it’s not as important as some second blessing. That’s not true for all of them.

For some today, still only in the minority, there is a rising number who have essentially bought into a Reformed grasp of soteriology, such as the Sovereign Grace bunch, for example, connected with C.J. Mahaney and others, who have a place for non-cessationism. They have a place for the so-called sign gifts, but it’s not connected with second blessing-theology.

E. Other groups.

On the other hand, there is a more esoteric bunch, and they’re a much bigger bunch connected with health, wealth, and prosperity gospel, name-it and claim-it type things. They are so far out, it’s hard to see any gospel in them at all, to be quite frank. I don’t consider them a branch of evangelicalism. They don’t consider themselves that, either. It is really scary stuff.

So we’re discovering that even as there are debates going on, for example, amongst us as to what evangelicalism means, so there are debates amongst us as to what charismatic means or Pentecostal means or Catholic means or Reformed means. Reformed is another label that is, today, astonishingly slippery. What is meant in Reformed circles by Reformed is not the same at Calvin Theological Seminary as it is in Banner of Truth. It just isn’t. These are things we have to come to grips with as we talk about them with one another.

There are a rising number of voices that are recommending what is sometimes called the great tradition. By the great tradition is meant the sweep that encompasses Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, evangelicalism, and so on, the sweep that can sign on to the great early confessions of the church, the seven great ecumenical councils and corresponding confessions: the Apostles’ Creed, Chalcedon, Nicaea, and so on.

If we can lock onto that degree of agreement, then it is argued, together we can stand as a kind of bulwark against the pressures of secularization, anti-supernaturalism, anti-God reductionism, and so on. We constitute a kind of Christianized bulwark against the whole. This emphasis is found sometimes in some of the folks, not all, connected with ECT (Evangelicals and Catholics Together).

It’s also found, increasingly, in a number of historians, prominent amongst them Mark Noll, from whom most of us have often benefited a great deal. I certainly have benefited a great deal from him. In fact, his wife and my wife used to be in a Bible study together when we lived in the same place. I’ve known him a long time.

Nevertheless, his book Is the Reformation Over? (I hope you read it) is, I would want to argue, a singularly bad book. It’s bad, in the first instance, not for its theological conclusion.… That’s in the second instance where it’s bad. In its first instance, it’s bad history, and it needs to be acknowledged. It needs to be thought through on that front.

There is a very important evaluative essay on that book by Scott Manetsch. It’s a review article, article length, and it’s superb since it lays out what the book says very, very carefully and faithfully, and then gently takes Brother Noll to the woodshed. It was published in The Trinity Journal a few issues back. I don’t know if it’s been published in reformation 21, the online journal. It’s supposed to be. If you haven’t got it online, look up Scott Manetsch and his review.

It’s important to remember some of the chief factors that led to the Protestant Reformation in the first place: the failure of papal leadership, monarchs rather than pastors or even priests, the failure of pastoral care, simony (paying for offices), absenteeism, concubinage, moral decay in the monasteries. It was a very broad set of corruptions.

There was also the penitential system that offered no assurance and finally made salvation dependent upon the choices of individual priests, and then there were corresponding matters of indulgences and the like. Undergirding all of this was a priesthood that was often biblically illiterate and that was not, in any sense, locked into a biblically faithful grasp of the message of Scripture.

The Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation turned on calling people back to Scripture but also insisted that the best voices in the entire first half-millennium of the church were equally lined up on the same sort of side. So they worked through Ignatius, they worked through Irenaeus, they worked through Tertullian, they worked through Saint Augustine, and so on, to show how frequently their grasp of what Scripture said was a lot more faithful than what was being practiced in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.

So it became an issue of Scripture. Then it became an issue of sacraments, justification, soteriology, the place of priests, and so on. Then there was a reaction against these movements, Lutheranism and so forth, so that the Council of Trent, which was part of the Counter-Reformation, established as dogma (it hadn’t been established before) seven sacraments of the church, crystalizing things that had been assumed but not actually made dogma, affirming that they are the means by which God infuses saving grace into the lives of his people.

Trent reaffirmed the doctrine of transubstantiation and the practice of the veneration of the host, for example. Trent, likewise, condemned the Protestant doctrine of the bondage of the will and justification by faith alone.

If you want to ask the question whether the official voice of Catholicism has changed, do not read ECT documents; read the catechism of the Catholic Church. Read it. Look up in the index, for example, everything it says about justification. If it doesn’t curl your hair, it’s probably because you don’t have any, because otherwise your hair will be curled if you have any sort of historic grasp of these matters.

Let me take a three minute pause here and make a suggestion. One of the hardest things for ordinary pastors to do is to keep up with things. The volume of literature is so great; how do you handle it all? Don’t you feel that is a problem perennially? It’s made worse today by the fact that we have access to so much information on the Net that we tend to pick up little squibbles and pieces on the Net and not read anything in a sustained way.

I read a recent statistic.… I don’t know if it’s true, but if it is true, it scares me witless. I read a recent statistic that the average university graduate in the United States, before he or she dies, reads two books right through. I don’t know why I’m writing them. You see the problem just the same, don’t you? This does not mean nobody’s reading; it means that today they’re reading things increasingly on the Net too. Practices are changing.

Many, many journals have gone belly up because the generation that’s reading them is over. The younger generation.… There’s a journal in Britain that has just gone belly up, Themelios, which was designed for religious theological students in Europe. What they discovered is the people who are reading them are former students who are now pastors and still like the journal so they keep reading it, but almost none of the students are reading it.

I’m not sure it’s because the students aren’t reading; it’s because they’re not reading anything unless it’s published on the Net. In fact, some of us hope to take the thing over and make it into a free Net-based journal, but that means we’ve got to change the whole financial structure of everything because then there are no subscriptions. Everything changes because of these things.

One of the things you can do with a group of pastors.… I’ve seen it done in big churches with multiple pastoral staffs. I mean big churches … 4,000 or 5,000 … where you have quite a lot of pastors. You assign each pastor or each pair of pastors, a domain where they are responsible to keep up on the literature. So you have one pastor who’s responsible to keep up on the literature on homosexuality, maybe two of them on the justification debates, another one on debates over the nature of pastoral counseling, another one on Christology, and so on.

Then as the pastoral teams come together, you rotate so that each has his turn to comment, to review two or three books, talk about them, answer questions, and so on, and thus everybody keeps informed. Now my guess is a group like this could do something like that or break yourselves up into regions. With a little bit of organization you could find ways of keeping yourselves up-to-date more than one individual can. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

If you haven’t read the book Is the Reformation Over? by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, let me say at least a little bit about it. Chapter 1 of the book describes recent changes between Catholics and evangelicals, starting with Billy Graham in the 1957 New York Crusade; leaders of the Alpha Course being accepted at the Vatican; Catholics, sometimes, in the academic arena saying very positive things about Luther; the JESUS film being shown at the Catholic World Youth Day in Rome in 2000; about 10 to 15 percent of American Catholics now calling themselves evangelicals; and so on.

Chapter 2 outlines the historic suspicions between Catholics and evangelicals, focusing on such people as Carl McIntire, Loraine Boettner, and so forth. Chapter 3 begins to ask why things have changed, and there a lot of credit is given to Vatican II, which was 1962 to 1965, which Noll argues rendered a lot of Protestant analysis of Catholic doctrine obsolete. So it is argued.

Vatican II, for example, approves religious freedom and separation of church and state in clearer ways. It affirms Protestants as at least separated brothers. It shares some blame for the rupture of the Reformation, and so on. Then you throw in the Kennedy presidency and the charismatic movement, which crosses a lot of denominations, and you begin to see why some of these things did change.

Chapter 4 details ecumenical dialogues in the wake of Vatican II: Catholics and Anglicans, Catholics and Methodists, Catholics and Pentecostals, Catholics and Lutherans, Catholics and Reformed, Catholics and Baptists, Catholics and Disciples of Christ, Catholics and evangelicals. Catholics have been talking with everybody.

The Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration, which was a very high-level thing published in 1999, comes out with this conclusion, paragraph 3.15: “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.” Could you sign that or not? Catholics are signing that. I could sign it, but I don’t think it’s adequate. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

Paragraph 5.41: “The teaching of the Lutheran Church presented in this Declaration does not fall under the condemnations from the Council of Trent.” You have to have doublethink on that one to believe it; nevertheless, that’s what Catholics themselves are signing onto.

The chief points of difference that remain between Catholics and these Protestant groups, these big ecumenical discussion papers, are ecclesial authority in the church, not least the issue of papal infallibility; the relative authorities of Scripture and tradition, still hugely debated; exactly what the sacraments are for and achieve; and an array of so-called smaller differences: devotion to Mary, clerical celibacy, birth control, marriage and divorce, ordination of women, the place of saints, and so on.

Then in the Catholic catechism, published in 1994 in English (a year earlier, if I recall, in Latin), you find statements like this (page 142 of Noll’s book): “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.”

Chapter 6 goes through Evangelicals and Catholics Together, ECT I, II, III, and IV. Chapter 7 analyzes various responses to Roman Catholicism, all the way from the Jack Chick cartoons (they’re remarkable documents, indeed) to high-level critics, often from the Reform camp (R.C. Sproul and people like that) and the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (in the interest of full disclosure, I’m on their council); to partners, people like Chuck Colson and Jim Packer; to converts, people like Tom Howard, Peter Kreeft, John Michael Talbot, and more recently, of course, Francis Beckwith.

Then there is a survey of Catholicism in America in chapter 9. The conclusion.… Let me read page 230. “Differences on basic Christian convictions between Catholics and evangelicals fade away as if to nothing when compared to secular affirmations about the nature of humanity and the world. The growing recognition of how deep and firm such common doctrinal affirmations are represents a great historical reversal.”

Page 232, “If it is true, as once was repeated frequently by Protestants conscious of their anchorage in Martin Luther or John Calvin that iustificatio articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae (justification is the article on which the church stands or falls), then the Reformation is over.”

Now what do we do with this? This book is widely read, and it’s circulated in many corners. It’s helpful in all kinds of ways. The book does clarify quite a number of issues. It’s certainly worth reading, but let me summarize some criticisms I have of it. This is really repeating, in large measures, Scott Manetsch. Scott and I work together in a spiritual formation group on the campus. We have about 30 students in our care, and we’re constantly in each other’s homes. Scott’s a great brother.

First, there’s the question of fairness in the book. For example, Noll carefully surveys some of the most distinguished conversions of Protestant scholars to Catholicism. He carefully goes over them, but he doesn’t mention any Catholics who have become Protestants.… Doesn’t mention one, and statistically, about three times as many Catholics become Protestants as the other way around in the US, and none of that is mentioned.

Then there are a number of historical missteps. Some of them are very minor; nevertheless, they have a certain kind of freight connected with them. Page 147, “This is why Ignatius, who died in 110, could say that only priests in connection with a bishop, in connection with the pope, can offer valid sacraments.”

In 110, nobody spoke of the pope. The bishop of Rome didn’t have that kind of control or influence. This is a huge anachronism, but it’s an anachronism that gives a certain kind of weight to Catholic doctrine that there has always been a pope, and they can be traced all the way back to Peter. It’s a historically bad remark.

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).” But celibacy was not mandated in the Western church until 1100, and it was never mandated in the Eastern church. So again, you’re promoting a certain kind of line of historical continuity that, historically, just isn’t the truth.

In categories more of you will know about, the Conference of Regensburg, 1541. This was the agreement between Roman Catholics and Lutherans on a definition of justification, and so on. The Conference of Regensburg was really played up big time in the book, that Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans, could get together and did so, despite the Reformational documents, as early as 1541 in Regensburg. Well, some Catholics and some Lutherans.

The fact of the matter is, Regensburg was rejected both by Luther and the papacy, and that isn’t mentioned in the book, which is a bit alarming. He likes to mention Calvin’s use of Bernard de Clairvaux, for example. Well, yes. We still see sing some of de Clairvaux’s hymns, and so we ought to. We also sing “Faith of Our Fathers,” which was written by a Catholic, but probably we don’t mean exactly the same thing. Hymns become somewhat independent, after a while, from their historic context.

Looking at more serious theological missteps, it seems to me there is a need to distinguish between official Catholic statements and unofficial ecumenical discussions, such as ECT. ECT has no official Catholic status even though the odd cardinal has shown up at it. Archbishop George has shown up at it, and Cardinal Avery Dulles has shown up at it, who are great scholars. On the other hand, there’s no official sanction. From the point of view of the official Catholic Church, the best place to go to find the official view is still the catechism, 1994 in English.

Page 113, “Catholics and Protestants agree that it was the church exercising its authority that defined the present canon of Scripture.” Give me a break. That’s just historical nonsense. Protestants have never argued that. They have argued that they recognized what God had done, not that they defined it. Which is, again, elevating the church above revelation. It’s part of a great deposit given to the church vision of revelation rather than what, I would judge, is the historic reality.

There is frequent confusion of concepts of justification by faith versus justification by faith alone. The statement I gave you earlier where we could all sign on, the Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration.… Let me read it again. “Together we [Catholics and Lutherans] 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 …” and so on. Are you happy with that? Notice it says, “By grace alone.” It doesn’t say by grace alone, by faith alone.

In a most sophisticated Catholic theology, all our good works are, nevertheless, stimulated by grace. Of course. But “by faith alone” they will not say.… With the exception of a few brilliant Catholic theologians like Cardinal Avery Dulles, who, in a very sophisticated essay, argues that Catholics, too, can accept the formulation by faith alone, provided faith is understood to be something like faith working through love, so that it smuggles in works into the notion of faith already.

So unless you are familiar with those kinds of subtleties, these statements mean nothing. Meanwhile, for example, astonishingly, this Lutheran document says absolutely nothing (it’s astonishing because of the history of debate in Lutheranism) about, for example, imputation. It says absolutely nothing about it.

Then there is often a minimalist reading of substantial differences between evangelicals and Catholics. Catholicism never condemned justification by faith. It never did. It condemned justification by faith alone. So when authors make errors in historical and theological interpretation, when Noll and Nystrom do make these errors in historical theological interpretation, always, invariably, it’s on the side of minimalizing the differences between these two religious communities. In other words, there’s an agenda, even in the errors.

On page 237, the authors conclude, “In sum, 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 differences reflected in differences in these matters—but the nature of the church.” That’s rubbish. Historically, it’s just not true. “Difference in the understanding of the nature of the church.” Now that’s correct, but it’s impossible to separate that from your understanding of soteriology, what the cross achieves, and a whole lot of other things.

Here, the authors comment, ECT II “defines salvation as sola fide … and affirms (as does the Catholic Catechism and many of the ecumenical dialogues) that this is Catholic as well as evangelical doctrine.” Yes, yes. Read these from the Catholic catechism.

“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.’ ”

“Justification is at the same time the 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 us.”

“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.”

“No one 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.”

Now in all fairness, my dear friend Mark Noll, how do you say that’s the same thing as the Protestant view of justification by faith? Or ECT, on Scripture and tradition 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.” Catholics and Protestants both sign it.

Here’s 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.”

Here’s the Catholic catechism: “As a result, the church, to whom the transmission and interpretation of revelation is entrusted, ‘does not derive for 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.’ ” And so on.

This, in other words, is historically a bad book, a bad book at the very first water, but it tends to feed into biases in our culture that perennially are open-ended, and anybody who’s trying to say distinctions must be made is lacking in tolerance, pluralistic vision, or love for the matter.

It becomes important for us, nevertheless, to make sure we can talk to anybody, that our responses are characterized by love and courtesy, mutual respect, and so on. It becomes vitally important to do that, but at the same time, to blow the whistle on things that have so many historical and theological mistakes in them that they’re almost embarrassing.