Who Are the Evangelicals?

Defining an “evangelical” is becoming no less difficult in America than defining a Jew in Israel. Americans have traditionally used the term in a more specific sense than many Europeans, for whom it early served to commend Reformation Christianity for its call to personal faith in contrast with the Romish emphasis on sacraments. Protestant churches thus became widely known as evangelical.

But many European “evangelical” churches compromised the ancient creeds and historical doctrinal affirmations of Christianity as modernistic theology—influenced by Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Troeltsch—captured the fancy of Protestant intellectuals. A generation ago in England the “liberal evangelicals” emerged with one foot insecurely in each of the rival options. More recently, Karl Barth, who anathematized modernism as heresy, used the title Evangelical Theology: An Introduction for an exposition of his own dialectical neo-orthodox alternative.

Ecumenical syncretists, eager for a world church whose unity they sought in social activism rather than in creedal consensus, chafed under what they considered an artificial American correlation of Christianity with the term evangelical. Some ecumenists popularized the designation conservative evangelical to depict the outlook of evangelist Billy Graham, the positions taken by CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and the stance of agencies like the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association or the National Association of Evangelicals. This label spared such enterprises the odious overtones that modernistic polemicists had attached to the term fundamentalism, while it enabled ecumenists in their other associations to retain the term evangelical for those whose doctrinal loyalties lay elsewhere.

The term conservative evangelical was minted after earlier efforts by some ecumenists to chide American evangelicals for having supposedly misappropriated a venerable religious term for partisan and factious purposes. This maneuver was remarkable for several reasons. In the thirties, before the emergence of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Federal Council of Churches was so predominantly non-evangelical in its theological sympathies that the term evangelical was hardly one it sought for itself. Moreover, the theological commitments and evangelistic emphases of the rising American evangelical movements were anticipated in Germany and England by evangelical alliances with similar concerns.

In contrast to the modernist versions of Christianity, or to liberal religion, the evangelicals emphasized their alignment with doctrinal positions recovered by the Protestant Reformers and their devotion to an authentic biblical faith. Theological syncretists who accused Bible-believing Christians of deforming the term evangelical seemed to be rewriting church history on modernistic presuppositions.

Evangelical has several notable advantages over fundamentalist as a description of New Testament commitments. Fundamentalism has been stigmatized by its modernistic foes until not even the devil would envy the label, and the mood and mentality of some fundamentalist polemicists has helped to fasten the caricature on the movement. In its beginnings early in this century, the fundamentalist vanguard emerged to challenge the Christian legitimacy of Protestant liberalism. The fivefold fundamentalist test swiftly exposed the semantic subtlety and evasiveness of many modernists; for example, “virgin birth” was more precise than “supernatural origin,” and “bodily resurrection” less ambiguous than “life after death.”

Although the fundamentalist credo served such polemical purposes well, when these distinctives became almost the sole provender of some pulpits, the laity became theologically undernourished. To the forefront of pulpit proclamation fundamentalists increasingly elevated emphases that, though they are significant in the total context of Christian faith, do not stand in the forefront of apostolic preaching. Here one thinks not only of the virgin birth but also of biblical inerrancy—themes that stress the how more than the what and why of the Incarnation and of the inspiration of the Word of God. The point is not that the New Testament lacks all basis for these emphases; indeed, the very first Gospel opens with a birth narrative. Nevertheless these emphases are not conspicuous in apostolic proclamation. Indeed, where dispensationalism left its mark upon fundamentalist circles, the millennium also gained kerygmatic prominence.

It may be said, of course, that the Bible has its insistent fundamentals no less than its central evangel; the kerygma is broadly identifiable as what the Bible teaches, and apostolic doctrine supplies its authoritative orientation. Yet the term evangelical has a firm basis in the language of the New Testament, and in his earliest writings the Apostle Paul succinctly states the core of “the evangel.” If Christian commentators have long regarded Romans 3:21–26 as the gist of the Gospel, in view of the noteworthy declaration of Christ’s propitiatory death for sinners, they have also emphasized that the Apostle in First Corinthians 15:3 and 4 transmits to his readers as the essence of the Christian evangel what he identifies as the earliest missionary preaching voiced in the Christian churches: “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.…”

There can hardly be any doubt about what Paul here considers central and indispensable to the evangel, and to authentic evangelical faith. He expressly states three considerations: first, the death of Jesus of Nazareth in the place of sinners; second, the bodily resurrection (on the third day) of the slain and buried Jesus; and finally, the teaching of the sacred Scriptures.

The most striking aspect of the Apostle’s declaration lies not in the uncompromising centrality he accords the resurrection of the Crucified One—decisively important as this historical development is—but rather in his twofold emphasis on the authoritative Scriptures. Repetitiously he affirms that the events of the crucifixion-resurrection weekend are to be biblically comprehended; he twice invokes the Scriptures to frame the single mention of Jesus’ substitutionary death for sinners and of his bodily resurrection.

In line with this New Testament representation, evangelical Christianity is distinguishable by its forefront proclamation of good news—forgiveness and new spiritual life available to sinners solely on the ground of Jesus’ death and resurrection—and distinguishable beyond that by the scripturally based and biblically controlled character of its message. Evangelical Christianity is properly suspicious of every effort to reconstruct the heritage of Christian faith that gives low visibility to the authority of Scripture. Its unabashed epistemic emphasis falls on what the Bible says. [To be continued.]

CARL F. H. HENRY

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