First of Two Parts
I should rather any day be a godly Roman Catholic than an ungodly Protestant—or, for that matter, a godly anything than an ungodly evangelical. I do not believe, moreover, that evangelicals have anywhere near a monopoly on devotion of Christ, love for the Bible, or spirituality. Indeed, I thank God for all expressions of such works of his Holy Spirit, wherever they may be found.
Still, conservative evangelicals today are undeniably confronted with a major problem in their relations with others. I hope that if I can give a positive picture of evangelical principles and practices as I know them, the problem will become clear. Certain evangelical characteristics and emphases, certain cardinal theological principles, are very closely linked with one another and together make a whole. I recognize that other schools of thought within the churches hold some of these things equally dear. And I hope and believe that most non-evangelicals will find much in common here.
Is there one root principle from which all these principles arise? I believe there is. Says one writer:
The Evangelical Christian in all his outlook seeks to be God-centered. He takes his start, with the aid of Divine Revelation, from God’s Throne. His great energising principle is God—the Sovereign Redeemer! He looks to God alone for the saving act of redemption, to Him alone for the initiative in man’s reconciliation, and to Him alone he attributes glory.… In the matter of redemption, God must be placed as high and man as low as possible. Our Lord’s prerogatives are not to be shared. In the presence of God, man has no place but as a deeply humbled guest. The Evangelical’s message is nowhere discerned more clearly than in his favourite hymns. In none is the authentic note more clearly heard than in the well-known lines: “Other refuge have I none, hangs my helpless soul on thee.” Here speaks—and triumphantly speaks—the very soul of Evangelicalism! [“Via Evangelica,” by Peregrinus, in a supplement to the Inter-Varsity Fellowship Graduates’ News Letter, No. 4 (1942)].
With that, then, as the root principle, let us turn to the four main emphases of evangelical Christianity, the first of which is the longest and has five subheadings.
This first emphasis is God’s way of salvation for sinners. If the question is asked in an interview on the radio, “What is Christianity?,” the kind of answer one expects from so-called exponents of the faith is “Christianity is a way of life.” An evangelical, however, could not be content with that. His answer would more likely be, “Christianity is God’s way of salvation for sinners.”
1. Christ the only Saviour. The action of God in Jesus Christ is unique. No one can come to the Father except through him. “There is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” Man is an enemy of God, Christ the only means of reconciliation. Man is guilty before God through sin; only Christ can cleanse him.
The evangelical emphasis on this point results in a godly jealousy for the name and glory and uniqueness of the Lord Jesus Christ. Some of the non-Christian religions no doubt contain some great truths. But it is not enough for those brought up in non-Christian religions to become sincere devotees of their religion. If an evangelical hears together the names “Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Confucius,” he bristles with jealousy at the implications of such an alignment. The same sense of jealousy explains why I was grieved when, at a meeting of Christian ministers, Jewish leaders, and a Member of Parliament, one of the Jewish leaders referred to “the denominations,” thereby in one breath linking the Christian churches with the Jewish synagogues and implying that there was no fundamental difference between Moses and the Lord Jesus. But it is not enough for a Jew to be a devotee of the Old Testament law, the Jewish ceremonial, and tradition. The Jew, like every Gentile, needs God’s salvation through Jesus Christ.
When I speak of jealousy, I mean intolerance of any rival. Whether jealousy is a virtue or a vice depends on whether the rival is lawful or not. When a shopkeeper is jealous of a competitor, jealousy is a vice. When a wife is jealous of another woman for seeking her husband’s affection, jealousy is a virtue.
This belief in Christ as the only Saviour is bound to raise the problems, Why are so few saved, and how will God judge those who have never heard the Gospel? The evangelical Christian normally leaves these things to the infinite wisdom and love of God, who has not seen fit to give us the answer fully. “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut. 29:29).
The strength of this belief and this jealousy largely explain evangelical zeal in personal witness and missionary endeavor, which has been such an outstanding feature of church history in the last 250 years.
2. The centrality of the Atonement. In all the work of Jesus Christ, his atoning sacrifice on the Cross is central to the evangelical. It was planned from the foundation of the world. The chief purpose of the Incarnation was that Christ should give his life a ransom for many. The chief value of the perfect life of Jesus was that, having lived it, he should voluntarily offer it to God as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. The Lord’s resurrection was God’s seal upon his atoning death and a prerequisite for his becoming an indwelling Saviour by giving his Spirit to the believer.
The atoning work of Christ on the Cross is all-sufficient for our salvation: nothing can be subtracted from it or added to it. In its legal aspect, nothing less would do, and nothing more is required, to bring the sinner to God. This was the outstanding emphasis in the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century. In hymns, in sermons, in worship, in writing, and in conversation, the theme of the precious blood of Christ was seldom missing. We might well ask ourselves what our reaction would be if, in passing a hall, we heard these words being sung inside:
Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned he stood;
Sealed my pardon with his blood.
Hallelujah! What a Saviour!
Such words would stir a response in the heart of any evangelical Christian.
3. Justification by faith, or justification by the grace of God in Christ through faith. The ground on which a sinner may become acceptable to God is the merit and work of Jesus Christ. Man neither can nor needs to contribute one iota to it. God’s pardon and acceptance of the sinner are utterly unearned and undeserved. If a man is to obtain God’s salvation at all, it must come to him as a free gift.
Consequently, the evangelical decries all man’s attempts to gain acceptance with God by something within himself—his character and his moral or religious works. Earnest endeavors to cultivate the virtues; regular churchgoing; Bible reading and prayers; baptism and confirmation; being a regular communicant or server at the Lord’s Table; all acts of penance; almsgiving; turning over a new leaf; singing “Abide with me”; a purely emotional or mental and physical response to an evangelist’s invitation to confess Christ openly; promising on your honor to do your best to do your duty to God—none of these contributes anything to justification in the sight of God. A man may do all these things—even be ordained into the ministry—and yet remain under the condemnation of God. A Christian is one who believes that Jesus Christ is God’s gracious provision for his eternal salvation, without which he must perish, and who has trusted Him as such. This giving up of trust in all else and casting oneself on the unmerited love and mercy of God offered in the Gospel constitutes the faith that justifies a sinner.
Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to thy cross I cling;
Naked, come to thee for dress,
Helpless, look to thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Saviour, or I die.
I do not believe that a man must understand these matters as fully as I have stated them before he can have God’s salvation. But the clearer his understanding of them the better, and it is our duty to teach them plainly.
If, moreover, a professing Christian is thinking of himself as probably good enough for heaven, or as not good enough for heaven, he is still blind to the Gospel. The doctrine of justification by grace through faith is a vital part of the glorious Christian Gospel—indeed, the heart of it. Even in the earliest decades of the Christian Church, there were Judaizing missionaries who taught another so-called Gospel. They did not explicitly deny faith in Christ; rather, they taught faith in Christ plus the works of the law as the ground of justification with God—faith in Christ plus moral and religious deeds. Paul’s attitude toward their doctrine is clear:
Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed [Gal. 1:8, 9].
Anyone speaking half as strongly today would be regarded by many as intolerant and arrogant. But the evangelical would reply that this so-called arrogance is actually an earnest contending for the truth of the Gospel. As for the intolerance: in this context, intolerance is a virtue, just as jealousy may be a virtue. Because the Gospel is God’s revealed way of salvation for sinners, faithfulness to it involves a denial of all rivals.
CAPTIVE
In a dungeon place in me
is a thumbscrew of theology,
And it is difficult to speak
of something as a dull antique
That still wrings truth, in the old way,
out of cold, conniving clay.
GLORIA MAXSON
If it were Paul alone who had gone on record as preaching this Gospel, the evangelical would still be bound to accept it, because Paul was recognized as an inspired apostle. Actually, however, the next chapter of Galatians shows that Peter agreed with Paul, though Peter was slow in one instance to act on its implications. And if any further evidence is required to show that the other apostles agreed with Paul, it is provided in the Epistles of Peter and John, and in the account of the church council in Jerusalem given in the fifteenth chapter of Acts. With James in the chair, there was a long debate, after which Peter made the following defense of salvation by grace through faith:
“My friends,” he said, “in the early days, as you yourselves know, God made his choice among you and ordained that from my lips the Gentiles should hear and believe the message of the Gospel. And God, who can read men’s minds, showed his approval of them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, as he did to us. He made no difference between them and us; for he purified their hearts by faith. Then why do you now provoke God by laying on the shoulders of these converts a yoke which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear? No, we believe that it is by the grace of the Lord Jesus that we are saved, and so are they” [Acts 15:7–11].
Should anyone protest that we must get back to Christological theology for our authority, it would make no difference. The main theme of Christ’s teaching as recorded in John’s Gospel is salvation through faith in himself. “What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?” “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.”
4. Regeneration by the Holy Spirit. Evangelicals regard and teach the new birth as a personal, essential, miraculous, and mysterious experience. It is brought about not by any act of the human will, but by the Holy Spirit; the sinner can only look to God in faith to work it in him. By this miracle, the person receives eternal spiritual life, becomes a child of God, and partakes of the divine nature. By this miracle, the process of being made righteous begins, by which a believer may pass from spiritual infancy to childhood, young manhood, maturity, and, in the world to come, perfection. The means by which the Holy Spirit works the miracle in the human heart and mind is God’s word. The word must fall like good seed into good soil. The means of grace by which the Spirit maintains this process of sanctification are many: the word and sacrament, prayer, Christian fellowship, suffering, and a heavenly Father’s chastening.
Evangelicals differ on the connection between baptism and regeneration. Some think of baptism as the believer’s confession of faith in Christ; others, like myself, view it as God’s official sign and seal of regeneration, like the state’s official seal and recognition of a marriage in the signing of the register. Evangelicals would agree that it is possible to be regenerate without being baptized, and that, all too often, people are baptized without ever becoming regenerate, though either is anomalous. This leads us on to:
5. The witness of the Spirit to a believer’s regeneration and possession of eternal life. The First Epistle of John was written for a specific purpose: that believers might know they have eternal life. This is a further work of the indwelling Spirit, by which in various ways, suddenly or gradually, he witnesses in the heart to what he has done, thereby giving the believer the joy and peace and gratitude that come from the assurance of pardon, justification, and heaven. It is because the Holy Spirit teaches the believer to pin his faith in the merits of Christ alone, and not in anything in himself, that this assurance can exist without presumption.
