…but the rose itself can mutate
I watched a video, by a YouTuber I’d not encountered before, with some hesitation. It is entitled Why I’m no longer evangelical, and I can live without another apostasy story, or even another defection to Rome or Constantinople. But given that the provider goes by the name “Reformed Pastor,” the contradiction intrigued me.
In fact, his case – with which I find I fully agree – is that in effect he is still Evangelical, but Evangelicalism is no longer Evangelical. He deals with three points at which he feels modern Evangelicalism (as a generalisation) falls short of the biblical gospel: it preaches a limited soteriology, it undervalues the sacraments, and it is vague on confessional truth. I won’t unpack his arguments, which you can watch yourself, but give a broader historical context to show that the label “Evangelical” is now even woollier than he concludes, and why it matters.
It seems that the label was first applied to William Tyndale in England, whose early Protestant theology was, I gather, largely in the tradition of John Wyclif. But the adjective was adopted by the Lutherans, and more broadly by the Reformation as a whole, to mean the doctrines derived from the Bible alone, and particularly the gospel of salvation by repentance and faith alone through divine grace.
Thus it was from the start an ecumenical word, expressing the solidarity of the magisterial Reformers despite their disagreements on particulars. So Lutherans were Evangelical, as were Zwinglians and Calvinists. And as the similarity of their various Confessions of Faith shows, when some Anglicans rejected bishops for the Presbytery, or Independents opted to govern their own congregations, or when some in Southwark adopted believers’ baptism through conscience, they remained Evangelical in the original sense. All could be represented, for example, at the Westminster Assembly, agreeing on essential doctrine.
Whether the radical Reformers like the European Anabaptists, or the later Arminian “Remonstrants,” should come under the same umbrella is an interesting question. The contentious elements of their doctrine were so far afield from those of the aforementioned that they were considered heretical. For example, Luther’s rejection of the Zwickau prophets was based on their extravagantly zealous claims about new revelation, and John Owen’s treatise against Arminianism defended the doctrines of grace that had been at the heart of the early Protestant doctrine.
A label is just a label. After all, even my YouTuber’s “Reformed” label meant little when my then Congregational Church became “United Reformed” in 1972, despite being wishy-washy liberal and by no means Reformed in doctrine. But when differences are fundamental, applying the same label to both sides suggests that political games are being played, perhaps by innovators claiming spurious continuity with a respected tradition.
In Britain after the Restoration, “Evangelicalism” became buried under ejections and Nonconformity. During the eighteenth century, the Nonconformists tended to lapse into beliefs that even Catholics had long held to be heretical, such as Socianism and Arian Unitarianism. It was only with the Methodist Revival that the term “Evangelical” gained any real traction again.
But Wesley’s Methodism (unlike Whitefield’s, which was less prevalent on this side of the Atlantic) owed little to the original Reformers. Wesley was, and remained, an Arminian Anglican, and his big spiritual influence was Moravian Pietism, from Count Zinzendorf via Peter Bohler. As I discussed in a previous post, although Zinzendorf was nominally Lutheran, his interest in doctrine was shallow, and he was far more concerned (like the Anabaptists) with the immediate experience of the Holy Spirit producing, in one go, conversion, justification and sanctification.
Wesley, sensing himself converted but not holy after his Fetter Lane experience, introduced the idea of a second blessing. Accordingly as this new “Evangelicalism” grew in Methodist chapels, within other Nonconformist denominations, and in the Anglican church, to become dominant in Victorian times, it had little connection with the “Evangelical” doctrines of Luther or Calvin that had liberated the Church.
Through the academic exclusion of Nonconformists, it tended to be theologically weak. And in any case the emphasis on emotional experience over doctrine (which led to the Holiness movements, to Irvingism and ultimately to Pentecostalism) meant that undue emphasis was placed on the parts of the Bible relating to divine wrath, conversion and the Spirit. This seems to correspond to the weaknesses described in Reformed Pastor’s video. Victorian and 20th century Evangelicalism was less denominationally-minded than before, but perhaps this was not so much because of an agreed core of “mere Christianity,” but because of a failure to think through important doctrine, which is to say, to teach “the whole counsel of God.” This mattered as capitulation to “Higher Criticism” in the 19th century gave way to Christian collapse in the 20th.
When folks like John Stott and Martyn Lloyd-Jones sought to restore Evangelicalism’s theological heritage after Word War II, it was to the Reformers and the Puritans that they turned, who had done the leg-work centuries before but had been largely forgotten. And so thanks to books like Stott’s Basic Christianity, even in my inter-denominational Crusader Class in the 1960s, the leaders were less myopically focused on “winning souls” than previous generations. And at University I was introduced not only to the Puritans, Derek Kidner and Alec Motyer, but to early Church History and the Fathers establishing doctrine in the past, and to Francis Schaeffer and L’Abri seeking to apply biblical teaching to all areas of life, in the present.
But meanwhile other forces were at work, notably in the form of the apogee of pietistic revivalism, the Charismatic movement. I’ve written too much on that to need to say much, but suffice it to say that Martin Luther’s response to much of what has become mainstream Evangelicalism would be as scathing as his reply to the Zwickau prophets. The widespread adoption of commercial worship music from the NAR, and many of its non-biblical practices, are the acceptance of authorities that are barely, if at all, Christian, let alone historically Evangelical.
At the same time, Evangelical churches adopt minimal, if any, statements of faith, and still less do they consult their historical Confessions, such as (in my own case) the 1689 Baptist Confession to which one of our own original elders was an actual signatory. The Baptist Union’s own “Declaration of Principle” of 1873 ignores the Downgrade Controversy the following decade, and remains so vague that, in effect, everything is Evangelical as long as it’s immersed in water.
It’s not only Pentecostalism that gets a free pass as Evangelical. When I frequented the BioLogos forum, its predominantly “Evangelical” membership turned out to be mainly progressive and often Open Theist. The Bible was an authority secondary to science. Throughout Evangelical denominations (eg the US Southern Baptists) Critical Theory has been proclaimed to be “a gospel issue” (that is, CRT, LGBTQ+ etc are “Evangelical”). Once again the UK Baptist Union’s 2016 “Vision and Culture Declaration” is almost doctrine-free, but resonates with Marxist wokism (for example, in making “Celebrating Diversity” the first of its four headings).
This means that new Christians, or even those of more experience, are pretty much dependant on their own initiative to discover the mind of Christ. They may get sound teaching from their pastor, or in their Bible Study group, but it’s entirely pot luck. If he starts teaching gnosticism or positive confession, there is unlikely to be any standard against which to check it, either at the local level or even within the denomination. To confront him with Scripture, when he has the theological degree, is a daunting challenge.
Conversely, “Evangelical” covers such a wide variety of contradictory teaching that a diligent pastor has little but his own authority to silence false ideas coming into his fellowship through new arrivals or, as must be common, through leading members reading the latest best-selling heresy, or watching it on a video. Still less does a faithful member have any convenient basis to challenge any such view with which the pastor acquiesces. especially if the whole church is already going along with the thing.
Everything is Evangelical – except confronting error from Scripture. That, like anyone blowing the whistle on social evils nowadays is, to quote Keir Starmer, “sowing division.” So a bit like the Evangelical Reformers, really.
