I oscillate between despair and hope over the future prospect of evangelicalism. My reservation about it is driven by my perception of the movement’s fraught historical past and trends in its present. The evangelical past has been connected to various sorts of oppression—including exploitation and displacement of Natives, participation and preservation of chattel slavery, and perpetuation of patriarchy. Evangelicals in the present are culpable for the ghastly continuation of white male supremacy for the sake of a Christian Nationalist vision.
On the other hand, I would like to retain a cautious hope for evangelicalism. From its inception, evangelicalism has been a renewal movement, and its history includes the spiritual renewal of Natives and the enslaved, inspiring vibrant spiritual traditions among both indigenous peoples and planting the seeds for an emerging African-American Church. Native and African-American Christian heirs to this tradition have been vital in advocating for civil rights and peacefully protesting for those rights, over the course of United States history. Furthermore, residing within evangelicalism’s democratizing impulse includes all the essential components for a vision that elevates the role of women in society and the Church. Thus, essential elements that characterize evangelicalism have supplied counter-forces to overcome the evils for which evangelicals have been complicit.
One might then ask, can the good fruits of evangelicalism outweigh the evils associated with it, delivering it unto salvation? This proposition quickly unravels, for a works-based approach is not an evangelical view of deliverance and does not fit with its disposition.
Perhaps we need to dole out a heavy dose of grace upon the idea of evangelicalism, looking away from its evils, by amplifying a revised, unblemished past and casting a beautiful vision for a reconstructed future? Sadly, the idea of reconstruction, in the history of the United States, has not had a fantastic track-record, and I still hold to the concept that it is imperative to recount the past “just as it were,” a notion that pairs well with the ninth commandment.
Like the eminent historian Mark Noll, I, too, am a nominalist. The symbol “evangelical” has had fluid meaning across the course of time and around the numerous geographies of the globe this idea has been carried. The idea of evangelicalism has had a nimble meaning, for the missiological purposes that have suited its needs, while also remaining outside the realm of domestication, despite many pundits recent efforts to tame it.
Nonetheless, the brand of evangelicalism, in the United States, has suffered dearly, and its stock has plummeted. Those familiar with the movement know how much evangelicals have leaned on the currency of its brand. Decades after H. L. Mencken and others successfully devalued the brand of fundamentalism, Carl F. H. Henry distanced and differentiated classical Christianity from fundamentalism. He did so while admitting that J. Gresham Machen and other fundamentalists put too much stock on non-essential doctrines and not enough stock in the essential sine qua nons of classical Christianity.
Henry championed a vision for neo-evangelicals to build their movement around the ancient symbol of the faith, The Apostles Creed, and those beliefs, enshrined and codified in it, to which all Christians, in every place, at every time have agreed. Essentially, this was a Vincentian hope. The Gallic monk, Vincent of Lérins, cast this vision in his Commonitorium (c. AD 434):
Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense “Catholic,” which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors. (Lérins, Commonitorium, 2.6)
Henry revitalized the evangelical brand by reigniting the Vincentian vision of classical Christianity. He rallied Christians to value universality, antiquity, and consensus, but he did so by repackaging these ideas into modern language. He’s not the only evangelical to hearken to this kind of vision.
Mark Noll professes that his favorite publication to author was Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. I understand why. In that work, he revisited the premises of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, asserting that “first-rate Christian Scholarship” and fostering “the life of the mind” required “considering Jesus Christ.” He devoted this publication to reflect on the person and work of Christ, as delivered once and all to the saints, contending:
But if evangelicals are to make a genuinely Christian contribution to intellectual life, they must ground faith in the great traditions of classical Christian theology, for these are the traditions that reveal the heights and depths of Jesus Christ. Intellectually, there is no other way. (Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, 22)
A lasting evangelical hope overcomes its marred past by locating its vision of universality, antiquity, and consensus around the person and work of Jesus Christ. Perhaps this is why John G. Stackhouse’s recent account of evangelicalism argues:
Evangelicalism’s identity is that of “basic Christianity,” so evangelicals deviate from the past only in the name of what they understand to be the best principles of the past. They attempt to construe and to practice Christianity in the creative tension between the heritage they inherit and the challenges they now face. This style of modern Christianity has a distinctive shape that proceeds from the eighteenth century until now. (Stackhouse, Evangelicalism, 24)
The trouble with some prominent evangelical figures today is that they have drifted away from the evangelical essentials of Christian beliefs. These aberrant evangelicals peddle a variety of evangelicalism, which trades on non-essentials, rather than relying on the immovable essentials that make up the ballast of evangelicalism. They have committed the same transgression that early twentieth century fundamentalists committed. While culture warring over non-essentials garners attention and gathers an audience, it leads people down a broad road towards destruction. I believe there is a better path, a narrow path, that begins with Jesus and ends with Jesus. If evangelicalism is to have staying power throughout the twenty-first century, then it must rekindle the Vincentian vision of classical Christianity and maintain an unwavering fixation on that vision of Jesus Christ.
Joey Cochran is guest faculty at Wheaton College, coordinates social media for the Conference on Faith and History, and is the editor and a regular contributor to the Anxious Bench. Follow him on Twitter. He is a member of the St. Augustine Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
