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Still, the bulk of Campolo's criticisms are directed not at government policy but at Christians. Recently he criticized teens for replacing their W.W.J.D. pins with American flag pins, and likewise told some church leaders, "I contend that we have reached a stage of idolatry when, in any given church in America, you're going to run into more trouble if you remove the American flag than if you remove the cross."

"The Jesus of the Scripture transcends all nations and calls all nations into judgment," he told one congregation recently. "And if we think that they're the bad guys and we're the good guys, we aren't being Christian. There's goodness and there's badness on both sides of this struggle."

Despite his seemingly constant harangue and taking aim at Christians on both the left and right, Campolo still gets invited to speak more than 600 times a year. And in spite of his many left-leaning political views, he remains one of the most respected people in the largely conservative evangelical movement. Why?

One reason is that he is a consummate storyteller. He has so many stories that many rarely get told. Like how he studied under Albert Einstein. Or how he played one-on-one basketball against Wilt Chamberlain. Or why he stole from a police station as a boy. But one of the stories the 68-year-old American Baptist evangelist and sociologist is least likely to tell is how he is one of the only living evangelical leaders to undergo a heresy trial. The story helps explain why he sees himself as a church critic.

In 1985, a group of Evangelical Free Church pastors in Illinois convinced Bill Bright to cancel Campolo's appearance at Youth Congress '85, the first major joint rally by Bright's Campus Crusade and Youth for Christ. Specifically, they were upset that Campolo believed Christ was present in every person, Christian or not. "I do not mean that others represent Jesus for us," he wrote in A Reasonable Faith, a 1983 book aimed at secularists. "I mean that Jesus actually is present in each other person."

They were also upset with two other sentences in the book: "Jesus is the only Savior, but not everybody who is saved by Him is aware that He is the one who is doing the saving," and "Jesus is God because he is fully human." ("By human I mean a full expression of the image of God," he later explained.)

The pastors accused him of "semantic mysticism" and "spiritual adultery," while Campolo said he was a victim of "a wave of religious McCarthyism."

To resolve the debate, the Christian Legal Society called a four-member "reconciliation panel" together, and questioned the sociologist-evangelist for six hours. A week later, the panel, headed by theologian J. I. Packer, issued a statement calling Campolo's book "methodologically naïve and verbally incautious."

The panel rejected Campolo's more controversial arguments. Jesus is God, but not because he is fully human, they said: "True humanness is certainly God's moral image, but the Son is the Father's image ontologically, within the unity of the eternal Trinity, and no human creature can ever share that." Similarly, the panel decided, Campolo's argument that Christ is present in every human is unsupported by Scripture. "We ascribe this unbiblical faux pas to evangelical inadvertence," said the panel. But the inquisitors also defended Campolo against charges of heresy "since heresy implies a purpose of making novel notions normative for Christian thought."

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January 2003, Vol. 47, No. 1