Have We Lost the Soul of Evangelicalism?

Feb 23, 2017 by

by Trevin Wax, The Gospel Coalition:

Recently, New Testament scholar Scot McKnight posted a lament of sorts for the evangelical movement. Scot is distressed by the tone of conversations he sees online, where “everybody’s a prophet because, so they think, they are speaking to truth to power,” when in reality “they’re yelling in a barrel full of self-appointed prophets.”

But his lament goes beyond the loss of online civility to certain signs that he says portend “evangelicalism’s demise.”

What is an evangelical?

(For a look at four ways of defining “evangelical,” check out my blog series on this question.) Scot lines up with David Bebbington’s famous description of evangelicalism as having four major emphases:

  • the authority of the Bible
  • the centrality of the cross
  • the necessity of personal conversion
  • Christian action in evangelism and social work.

According to Scot, these four pillars of evangelical identity are “crumbling.”

Contrary to what you may think, the pillars are not disintegrating due to our over-involvement in politics, but the reverse. The evangelical movement is “swamped” in political fervor because the four pillars have crumbled.

Read here

 

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