The Evangelical Manifesto has hit Christian talk radio. Scot McKnight also blogged on it today. Jim West had earlier had some questions about some signatories.
I wanted to draw the attention of Wesleyan Church leaders to it since we have generally identified ourselves with evangelicalism these last 50 years, since the rise of the neo-evangelicals in the forties.
There are so many lists in this 20 page document that I've decided not to reproduce them. I find nothing in it that I can really object to, although I find so much in it that perhaps it does not identify well what an evangelical is (identity is almost always more a matter of what something is not than what it is). It even distinguishes evangelical from Protestant in a way that, perhaps, a Roman Catholic or Orthodox believer might consider themselves evangelical.
But all in all, I think this is a helpful document and timely. McKnight really has summed it all up for me--what I choose to take away from it. I'll rework his list with an order and content for my own circles:
These are groups who have of late wrongly restricted the boundaries of what an evangelical is:
1. Calvinists like John Piper, the President of Louisville Southern Baptist Seminary, power mongers in the Evangelical Theological Society and so forth have tried to make a strict Calvinism the true evangelicalism, with all others as deviants (like Arminians). Possibly one besetting sin of this group of evangelicals is a failure to move from creed to life, for Jonathan Edwards to be the ideal evangelical rather than people like George Whitefield or Billy Graham.
2. Political conservatives like the Dobson machine cannot limit true evangelicalism to those who would vote the Republican way, voting only in relation to the issue of abortion and gay rights. Possibly one besetting sin of this group of evangelicals is materialism and a reduction of the gospel to "the American way."
3. Progressives like Jim Wallis and Sojourners, who recognize the Christian anemia of those who don't respect all of God's creation, who flagrantly disregard the biblical mandate to take care of the poor and oppressed, run the risk of doing the same thing political conservatives do--to make their political issues the true Christianity, so that someone who doesn't vote Democrat or Green isn't Christian. This will be the temptation of the coming generation who is graduating from college right now.
What do you think?
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4 comments:
I was disappointed with the rather shallow theology of the document. It was more style than substance, but even the style was a little awkward in places. The opening paragraph sounded way too much like the "Theme from the Monkees."
Here we come,
walkin' down the street;
We get the funniest looks
from everyone we meet.
Hey, hey, we're the Evangelicals!
Spell it with a capital E!
We're the fastest growing sector
of Christianity!
Since my memory is fading, I may have remembered "wrong", but it seemed to me to separate too starkly Church and State...Church or faith is a "personal relationship" with a conversion experience with the "only way" of Jesus, as understood in the text of Scripture...while the State is understood to be completely universal...and pragmatic...and open to all views...
What our beliefs are have to be connected to how we live, that is what a world-view is... The problem is that evangelicals have understood it only in one demension....there are multiple demensions in how faith plays out in life...and how we understand faith cannot be separated with how we understand all of life...there is no separate domain of spirituality....versus the "secular". IN fact, there is no secular, because everything consists of the created order..irregardless of whether your believe that it was created or not...or how it was created...I don't think that this "manifesto" will have much impact on the "new atheists", but I'm no prognosticator of evangelicalism or anything else for that matter..
I had similar concerns. The document seems to be somewhat ahistorical, especially when it claims that being "evangelical" is pre-Protestant. This is true if you take "evangelical" as more of a hermeneutic than a historic movement...which I'm ok with by the way...but we should just announce our intention to do so.
I also wonder if the manifesto doesn't lend itself to category #3 that we are supposed to steer clear from. After all, Jim Wallis signed it. And while we're not guilty by association, I think he could have written the entire thing and Os Guinness could have taken the month off.
Most of the manifesto is spent on distancing "evangelicalism" from "fundamentalism." Which again, I think is a good thing, but could have said in one or two pages without the lowest common denominator approach of defining the term "evangelical."
Wallis is quite conspicuous by his presence, but the Manifesto was also signed by James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, not exactly Wallis' ideological soul mate.
Aside from the scholars who signed it, it would appear that most of the signatories are second stringers who know they are not as influential as Dobson, et al. Alienation loves company, as the saying goes. Hence, the odd alliance between a religious right wannabe (Tonkowich) and a "look-at-me" liberal (Wallis).
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