Despite their virtues, evangelicals have defects enough to drive them to their knees in quest of renewal
Evangelicals are doing some things pretty well. They have a firm hold on the saving truths of the Gospel and they teach them fervently. Wherever there is a faithful evangelical ministry, men are challenged to decide for Christ, and they are constantly warned against thinking that faith can ever be secondhand. This emphasis on individual commitment contrasts with the anonymity of much modern life. It is all too easy for men to find themselves lost in the mass—social, political, or even ecclesiastical. This evangelical virtue often goes unnoticed, for it is not spectacular. An individual’s commitment to Christ cannot be photographed (as can, for example, a clergy committee calling on congressmen or the President). But it is no less important for that.
Again, evangelical Christians, as Dr. Richard C. Halverson of International Christian Leadership notes, are supplying much of the most competent scholarship in both systematic and biblical theology. “At a time when Protestantism in general is retreating from biblical theology, many evangelicals are being renewed in it.” Their conviction that the Bible is the record of God’s revelation to men leads to a concern for biblical teaching that is not characteristic of the Church as a whole.
They have a zeal for orthodox Christianity that is needed in a day that puts little stress on right belief. Their stubborn adherence to biblical truth is valuable when men are inclined to base their beliefs on the conclusions of a secular world. Their call for conversion and commitment points to a necessity in the face of an easy-going readiness to let every man go his own way so long as he is well intentioned. Their demand that a Christian’s life show Christian virtues is never out of season, least of all now when it is the new fashion to scoff at old-fashioned virtues.
But there is no room for complacency. If it is true that evangelicals have certain virtues, it is equally true that they have the defects of those virtues. The place of the individual is important. But individualism can be pressed to the point of pride and divisiveness. Dr. Harold John Ockenga, minister of Park Street Church, Boston, can say, “I am convinced that the greatest weakness among evangelicals is their tendency to fragment and divide. There are too many ‘chiefs,’ not enough ‘Indians.’ There is too much proliferation in practical endeavor—in missions, humanitarian concern, or service agencies.”
This proliferation is, of course, not without its advantages. The competitive spirit has sometimes given rise to influential and powerful movements. But the other side of the coin can be disastrous. As Dr. Ockenga says, “The tragedy of our evangelical movement is that we have not been able to raise a banner of the necessary doctrines that rallies the various evangelical groups in full cooperative support of that banner.”
This charge must be taken with full seriousness. Dr. Clyde W. Taylor, general director of the National Association of Evangelicals, maintains that many evangelicals have “fallen into much the same trap that the World Council of Churches has. They have fellowship on an organizational level.” They ask, not, “Are you a twice-born follower of Christ?” but rather, “What movement do you belong to?” This leads to a pattern of isolation and an easy confusion of association with unsaved people and theological compromise. “Evangelicals need to distinguish friendship as a social relationship from fellowship as a spiritual relationship.”
“Keep the windows open,” pleads Dr. Wayne Dehoney, a Southern Baptist stalwart, “for fellowship with, understanding of, and cooperation with all other Christians who serve our common Lord.” Too often, he says, the attitude of exclusivism or indifference has kept conservatives from cooperating in a common cause. Too many chiefs lay down their own conditions for fellowship.
This hampers evangelical outreach. By concentrating on their own little circles, evangelicals have lost opportunities for doing two things: playing their full part in the community and reaching out in evangelism for the unsaved. Dr. Halverson thinks that “the greatest weakness of evangelical Christianity today is our tendency to think in conventional forms so far as church structure is concerned—both denominationally and locally. We seem to have great difficulty thinking of responsibility to the world outside the establishment of the Church as the place where Christ has put us to serve him. We tend to equate attendance at church meetings with spirituality; if the choice is between prayer meeting and PTA meeting, it is readily assumed that the saint will always forego the latter. But ‘the field is the world,’ as Jesus said, and our failure to learn this is our greatest area of weakness. Our involvement tends to be with the church establishment and Christians rather than with the ‘secular establishment’ outside the Church.”
When a man becomes a Christian, he does not cease to be a citizen. His Christian awareness ought to make him take civic responsibilities more rather than less seriously. There is a very real work to be done for God in those areas where the Church has no jurisdiction. And it can scarcely be said that evangelicals are doing this work with any real zest. The chiefs are plotting their own paths and ignoring the Bible’s directives about the community.
Another complaint of Dr. Taylor is that too many who are fundamentalist in doctrine are “often unloving, critical, and proud, and do not measure up to the standards which should be associated with evangelical personality.” This is all the more serious if what Russell Kirk, an incisive Roman Catholic spokesman, says is true: “Probably the most important and difficult problem plaguing Americans nowadays is the preservation of personality.” The evangelical emphasis on the new birth and supernatural virtues was never more relevant than it is amid the contemporary secular concern for “the cure of souls.”
Some who vigorously champion the inerrancy of the Bible make this belief (which NAE also holds) the test for eternal life—contrary to the example of the apostles—and consider all who disagree with them to be lost or damned. “What is most needed,” Dr. Taylor says, “is a baptism of love.” There would be a mighty revolution in some lives if men began to take seriously Paul’s words, “the greatest of these is love.”
Evangelicals have been alert to unmask the mainstream Protestant compromise of scriptural Christianity with secular culture and ideologies. They have rightly denounced the misuse of the Bible as a prop for independently formulated programs and the ready dismissal of biblical teaching that cuts across modernist views. But they have not been without compromises of their own. Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, points to an uncritical identification of extra-biblical cultural standards with God’s revealed will by extremists in various areas: the racist defense of segregation, for example, or the dismissal of all modern amusement as Satan’s precinct. And the fault is not confined to extremists. There is a widespread mood of “my country right or wrong” and, in reaction to attacks on patriotism and on free-market economics, a reluctance to criticize unrestrained capitalism, even when it seeks profit through harmful products.
There are abundant signs of the vitality of evangelicalism. Any movement that as a matter of principle subjects itself to the whole biblical message cannot but be renewed from age to age. But there is nothing automatic about the process. There is enough that is disquieting about modern evangelicalism to drive those who are concerned for it to their knees. Prayer and concern, not pride and complacency, must be our watchwords.
