Andrew Katay. Presented August 1997
We all know evangelical pains in the bum. They are Christian associates (I hesitate to use indiscriminately the term friend) about whom we are in various ways embarrassed. Whether it’s through their arrogance, their exclusiveness, or their blindness, I suspect that the evangelical nuisance is by no means a rare species - it may even have been you in a former life. It was certainly me, as for example when I urged a group of my girlfriend’s friends who were over for a video night not to watch the Blues Brothers, which I considered at the time worse than neutral, and instead spend the evening praying with me for missionaries imprisoned in Africa. It’s a wonder that she married me!
What’s more, it looks like evangelicals are only going to increase. By all accounts, whether its the secular statistics, the qualitative analysis of Hugh McKay, or the informal (and not necessarily enthusiastic) judgment of observers of the Christian scene, it’s evangelicals that seem to be doing best - numerically, financially, politically. Evangelicals are by far the largest groups among school and university students; evangelical theological colleges are at record sizes producing more candidates for ministry than ever; and evangelical churches buck the national trend of shrinking and in many cases are growing.
Now, I don’t know how this all makes you feel. Some I have heard say, shudder at the thought, regarding evangelicals as a curse sent to plague the church, unreformable and even sub-Christian. Perhaps that is you. If so, I hope that our discussion this morning will provide a way for you to temper that view, while at the same time not blinding yourself to the evident faults that characterise many evangelicals. Personally, I rejoice in this growth, not least because I am myself a convinced and happy evangelical, and one always likes to see more of one’s own type around More importantly, I have believed for some time, and remain convinced that evangelicalism is one of the truest expressions of the Christian faith, being at its roots a movement committed to the gospel, the euangellion, and hence its growth ought to be received with the same joy that the angels have in heaven. At the same time, even this week I have been personally burned by the narrowness, harshness of spirit and at times downright bigotry of which evangelicals are often accused, and so it is my purpose to attempt to understand evangelicals both at their best and their worst, at their most faithful and at their most sinful, and thereby begin to chart a course for being a realistic evangelical.
To that end, as you can see from the outline, in the first half of this paper, I propose to examine briefly the question of what is an evangelical from a variety of points of view, landing finally on a description which emphasises the theologically distinctives of evangelicalism, while at the same time, suggesting some dangers in focussing exclusively on these distinctive.
Definitions are useful, if troublesome things. Useful because at heart, they are our attempt to cut the world up along its seams, to understand things the way they are, to recognise similarities where they are there to be recognised, and distinctions where they are not. And once we have mentally cut the world up, with all its massive variety and complexity, that enables us to begin to get our bearings within it, to make plans, decisions and assessments. We see this most explicitly in the realm of science, where classification into species, families, genuses (or is the plural geniuses) and so on is a major enterprise, not least so that when you make the obvious decision to buy a Jack Russell Terrier as the ultimate family pet, you can know what you’re talking about and make sure you get it.
It’s the same when it comes to varieties of Christians, of which there surely are many, with their fair share of similarities and distinctions. A Roman Catholic really is a Roman Catholic and not a Baptist, and the differences are, or can be, significant to both, while at the same time what they have in common will surely be more than either has with a Buddhist. However, when is comes to Christians, since these are matters where there is a more significant element of personal commitment in the detached observation of similarities and differences, definitions can be abused as much as used.
The abuse, of course, comes by using the definition as a means to a dirty end. When for example ‘evangelical’ or ‘liberal’ becomes not so much a category to further understanding, but a slogan by which to identify and scorn ‘them’ over against ‘us’. The most fundamental category in which to put people is ‘human person’, people whom God has loved enough to send his Son to die for, evangelical and liberal, catholic and Protestant, black white etc, and any refusal to walk in the same basic commitment to love even those, perhaps especially those, who are different, is a betrayal of godliness of the first order. With these preliminary thoughts in mind, then, we will begin to look at that creature known as an evangelical from a number of perspectives, eventually tentatively settling on the third.
I have often thought that at heart, at least for those positively inclined to evangelicals, it simply means that place between on the one hand ‘fundamentalists’ who are those to the right, and on the other hand ‘liberals’ who are those to the left. If, however, the term is a pejorative one, then it usually means ‘more conservative than me’, in the same way as ‘fundamentalist’ did in the previous sentence.
This is moderately helpful at best, although it does explain a lot about why the terms can arouse such energy and emotion, since different ideologies often provoke fear. However, it leaves the term too slippery and merely relative to be useful.
An alternative way of approaching the issue is historically, which has become a significant field of academic research in its own right, with an increasing flow of books on the subject. Evangelicals can be traced back generally to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, and more specifically to the Great Awakening in North America and the Revival in Great Britain led by such luminaries as the Wesleys, George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. They were the definitive evangelicals, and those who trace their lineage to them are likewise evangelicals.
However, devolution can also mean evolution, and although a group or denomination has a firm historical connection, it is possible for it to have evolved into a quite different animal. A historical perspective is almost always important, but often not definitive.
No, a better methodology, and one which is more consistent with evangelical self perceptions, is to understand evangelicalism in terms of its theological commitments. Although the European reformation had a lot to do with emerging nationalism and the autonomy of city states, and the English reformation with the ever present need to distinguish herself from Europe, it was always the doctrinal aspect which was essential to evangelical identity. And the two, which lead to a third, key theological determinants were the authority of Scripture, and the uniqueness of Christ, which coalesced to form the third, namely justification by faith alone, which was a way of preserving the first two. In other words, the testimony of the Scriptures is that the only way to appropriate the unique Christ was by faith in him, and this to the exclusion of any human work or merit, ecclesiastical, sacramental or moral.
Now in its original context, these were the things held in common by the Protestant wing against the catholic and Eastern branches of the church; of course, there were many things not in dispute, such as the trinitarian nature of God or the divinity of Christ, and so these were not the fronts along which the battles were fought. The trouble comes when these distinctives are taken to be definitive.
This then is the first main issue I want to develope: although these three points might be the distinctive features of evangelicalism, separating it clearly from Catholicism and liberal Protestantism, they are by no means exhaustive. There are many other doctrines, some of them crucial, which receive no particular evangelical expression, and this can lead to a problem. For when what is distinctive is taken to be all that needs to be said, these other common areas are forgotten to the great detriment, and lopsidedness of evangelicalism. At best they are inoperative; at worst they are forgotten.
I came upon this point in a provocative essay entitled "Is Evangelicalism Christian?", by Robert Letham and Donald Macleod, challenging evangelicals that they, by marginalising the effective confession of the historic creeds, and in particular the Trinitarian God of creation and redemption, and the church, have "marched off at a tangent from the trajectory of the historic church" and as such "is a variant form of Christianity … now in danger of losing its grasp on the faith it seemingly holds dear."
In other words, their point is that structure of historic Christianity has if you like three tiers; the top tier is the confession of God as trinity, of Jesus as the Son of God, fully divine and fully human. The middle tier derives from the activity of this Trinitarian God, namely that he has acted for our salvation, the Father sending the Son, who was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and whose work consists of his life, death, resurrection and ascension, and the third tier is the consequence of that salvation, namely the church and its ministry, which preserves the hope of the world to come. The charge then is that evangelicalism is so exclusively focussed on the second tier, that it has let go of the first and third, with a human centred gospel rather than the God-centredness of the creeds, and a docetic or floating church, never really grounded in the earthy stuff of real day to day life.
Although rejecting their conclusions, I think the warning is worth hearing. It is possible for evangelicals, in all our concern to be soteriologically energetic, to lose sight of the prior question as regards salvation - who is this that saves by grace through faith? and also the consequent question - into what are we saved. And the only Biblical answers to these is that it is God, Father Son and Holy Spirit who saves us, and that he saves us into Christ and therefore the body of Christ, the church, in all its messiness and humanity.
In one sense then we have an answer to the question with which we started: Is being evangelical enough? If evangelical is understood only in terms of its distinctives, to the exclusion of the effective confession of the other 2 tiers, then the answer must be no. What is enough is an orthodox evangelical something; orthodox on the trinity, Christ and creation, and a grounded doctrine of the church, perhaps presbyterion, or in my case, Anglican.
What I want to do then, in the remainder of my time is to outline a proposal to re-fashion these evangelical distinctives, to give them a shape which is not forgetful of the other tiers within the creed. And in order to do that, I will both critique less encompassing formulations, as well as outline some of the consequences of that truncatedness, and then offer some suggestions as to how trinitarian theology in particular provides a way forward in some of these problems, a way of theologising which has been far too neglected by evangelicals. Finally, I will conclude by offering some personal reflections on being an evangelical, including what might be called the evangelical style, which I will propose derives fairly straightforwardly from the evangelical distinctives, along with some suggestions for reform.
So refashioning evangelical distinctives. What I am after here is a related distinctiveness; that is a recognition that the distinctives of evangelicalism stand in the context of other equally crucial doctrines, and take their meaning and significance, at least in part, from that context.
Let’s then look at the two issues we have focussed on so far, and see how that might be done.
The first is that of authority. As we noted previously, authority is vested in the Scriptures, and in this, the pattern of Jesus, in his regard for his the Old Testament and his bearing toward his own words, as well as his promise to the disciples that the Spirit would lead them into all truth, is our guide. However, there is authority and authority; in particular, in upholding the final or supreme authority of the Scriptures, it is not necessary to pose them as the only contributing factor to matters of faith, which brings us to the funny quadrilateral.
You may have seen this diagram, representing the supposed four sources of authority. You can see how it works. In the top right hand corner are those who ultimately take Tradition as their authority; sure they might dress it up as Scripture as interpreted by the church, but essentially it is the interpretation rather then the Scriptures which rules. Of course it is the Catholics that are in view here.
The bottom left targets the liberals, who take reason, the assured results of scientific and philosophical progress, as their guide; hence, to pick a current if controversial issue, evangelicals would say that those who would ordain practising homosexuals on the grounds that contemporary morality has advanced from the primitive oppressiveness of the 1st century reflected in the New Testament have placed reason and human reflection above the Scriptures.
Finally, those who base arguments on their experience, as charismatics and Pentecostals are accused of doing, adjusting their understanding of God and Christian maturity to fit their experience demonstrate the authority structure in so doing.
Now there is much in this that is of value. Whether or not the specific accusations are true, at one level, it is clearly true that it is possible to subordinate the teaching of the Bible to either of the three options set out, or some combination, and that this has happened and is happening.
However, I wonder if in the rejection of the other sources of authority there is a failure adequately to appropriate the doctrine of creation, that the rational powers we have are not only fallen, in fact not primarily fallen, but first of all a good gift of God, to be received with thanksgiving, as indeed is our tradition and experience.
Second, if there is anything that we have rightly learnt from that most slippery of intellectual movements, post-modernism, it is that hermeneutics is a much bigger issue than has previously been recognised. That is, in some ways, the quadrilateral compares, apples, oranges, pears and the activity eating. It simply is impossible to separate oneself from one’s history or tradition; human reason is not really an authority, it is a tool, which can be used honestly or corruptly, to search out truth or justify conclusions reached on other grounds; and experience just is, and it is nonsense to speak as though one could seek to submit to the Bible apart from your experience.
No, the point is that in the hermeneutical spiral, as conclusions are formed and subjected to scrutiny, by means of the use of our reason, drawing on our tradition and experience, the goal should always be to allow Scripture to have a critiqueing word, to allow Scripture to assert itself where it finds contradiction, and this a matter of humility before God. In other words, it is foolish to claim that Scripture is the only authority, if that is taken to mean that all other sources and means of knowledge are to be eliminated; they can’t be. However, the response to this is not to discard the Bible as authoritative, to throw out the baby of the Scriptures with the bathwater of some excessive evangelical claims made for those Scriptures. Rather, Scripture is to be seen as the supreme, although not the only authority, and what’s more, far from brittle of nervous in that status.
Perhaps a useful paper for a future SIFT conference would be on how the Bible functions as authoritative in a postmodern world, starting with some of the lines of inquiry suggested by Darren Mitchell in his paper in May.
The second issue is that of the exclusiveness of Christ as the one in whom we are reconciled to God, and the related doctrine that Christ is only obtained through faith. With that, there can hardly be any argument, at least there won’t be from me. Again, a useful paper might be on how to hold a strong doctrine of the exclusieveness of Christ in a pluralist and multi-cultural, multi-faith society. However, the point I want to explore here is the usem or mis-use to which this right understanding is sometimes put, and in this connection, there are two issues.
The first is that, without a balancing understanding of God as creator as well as redeemer, that is when the distinctive is taken to be decisive, a downplaying of the ongoing significance of the doctrine of creation can easily take place. This manifests itself in a number of ways, as for example when a kind of neo-clericalism reasserts itself, implying that only time and resources spent in the pursuit of salvation, for oneself or others, is of any value, or when evangelism is opposed to societal or cultural endeavours.
The second is that when too close identification between the person and the structure of their theology is made, it can lead to some ugly results. What I mean is this; I suspect that behind the often observed evangelical arrogance, especially toward other kinds of Christians, is the transferral, perhaps unwittingly, of the authority of the Scriptures and the exclusiveness of Christ to the authority and the exclusiveness of themselves. The Scriptures are the supreme authority - yes! Christ is the exclusive name given under heaven by which people can be saved - yes. But that therefore I and my gang are invested with that same authority and exclusiveness - no way! Once again, that is to forget that before you were a Christian you were, and still are, a creature, finite, limited and what’s more fallen, and these remain true of you even after you have received the revelation of God in the gospel, and in your appropriation of it. Only such a perspective can prevent the hubris of seeing yourself in position of always standing at God’s side, and never under his judgment. What is needed is evangelical confidence in Christ and his Scriptures, together with an epistemic humility that acknowledges that I am not God.
In particular, I suspect that it is the making decisive of the distinctive that is the root problem, and that as I have suggested, a more mature and complete theology can solve several of these problems, and it is at this point that I lay my own theological cards on the table, as we move into a case study in trinitarian theology.
You see, it’s not as though the middle tier issues are unrelated to the top tier ones. Behind the issue of redemption is the question, who is this who redeems? Who is this saviour? And that of course takes you directly into the questions of the divinity of Christ, for if it was not God who saved us, but only another creature, then we can have little confidence that he would do a better job than ourselves; and therefore the nature of God, since that word must consequently refer to the Father, Son and Spirit of whom the Son spoke and was incarnate.
What I want to do then is to briefly examine how trinitarian theology, which is intimately connected with our evangelical distinctives, might provide some resources to plug gaps which might otherwise be left gaping.
First however, let me introduce trinitarian theology.
Trinitarian theology proceeds from the principle that we must start our theologising from the story of the gospel, in which we are initially presented with three agents - Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Christ, the Son of God and who came to worshipped as God himself; the Father of that Son, whose kingdom Jesus claimed to be bringing into effect; and the Spirit, given by the Father through the Son, who was immediate in the experience of the church. If the Christian conviction is that in the gospel God reveals himself so that we have to do with God as he is, not merely with another prophet or an angel, then the threeness of God stands as prominently at the centre of the reality of God as his oneness. Yet these three are not three gods, they are one God, in fact they are God. In other words, there is no God behind the members of the trinity; rather God is constituted by the relations of the three members of the trinity, he is that matrix of relationships, their perichoretic union in technical language, and that further they are each constituted as who they are by their relations to each other.
What’s more, these three are three persons. Once again, this is the outcome of the New Testament witness and the early church’s experience. There simply is no other way to do justice to activity of the Father in the Son through the Spirit than to recognise that they are persons. In the cases of the Father and the Son, this was of course never in doubt; however, uncertainty has from time to time been expressed about the full personhood of the Spirit, and the recovery of trinitarian theology has as one its goals the reappropriation of this truth, so important for the life of faith.
What follows from this is nothing less than a new ontology, a new understanding of being. Since God stands at ‘the heart of the universe’, and therefore is definitive of what constitutes ‘being’, and the threeness of God and the oneness of God are not contradictory but rather are related, then a new ontological option opens up. No longer is being either the random flux of unrelated particulars, or the monism of a single unifying principle; rather God, and therefore being, is constituted by three who are one, being is relational, being is communion. What’s more, being is personal, since the communion that is God is a communion of three persons. And this is the crux of the issue, for as Colin Gunton highlights, "one, perhaps the, point of trinitarian theology is that it enables us to develop an ontology of the personal, or better, an understanding of God as the personal creator and redeemer of the world, and so the basis of the priority of the personal elsewhere, too." In particular, Gunton argues repeatedly throughout his work that this is in contrast to the deleterious effects of the implicit priority of an impersonal monism in Augustine’s theology, which has exercised a profound influence throughout the history of Western thought, including modernism.
This then is the task of trinitarian theology, to apply these insights into the nature of God and therefore all reality to various fields of thought. And as I have suggested throughout, a strong doctrine of creation is one that is often lacking among evangelicals, and it is this which leads us to some of the problems we have observed. How then might a trinitarian doctrine of creation assist us?
A Biblical view of creation, which has come to be expressed in terms of creation ex nihilo, carries with it a number of crucial implications:
a) that God is the source of all that is, and hence is utterly sovereign over a radically contingent world;
b) that creatures are dependent, yet real and good, not either illusory or evil;
and c) that God creates in freedom and with purpose.
Such a doctrine of creation has always been trinitarian in shape, from its conception in the opening chapter of the Bible. Athanasius put it: "The Father creates all things through the Word in the Spirit".The implications of this specifically trinitarian shape with respect to each of the three aspects outlined above are significant. First, without an alternative, the inevitable tendency is to see the created universe as either a flux of unrelated particulars at war with one another and without unity, or as an essentially unchanging singly reality, contrary to appearances, which will eventually return to its proper unity; that is to exalt the many at the expense of the one, or vice versa. The social expressions of this apparently abstract conceptualisation are individualism and collectivism, the massively destructive results of which are regularly seen and discussed. A trinitarian doctrine of creation suggests a way forward, conceiving of created particularity not as individualism and therefore at the expense of unity but as otherness; and similarly, of unity not as uniformity and therefore at the expense of particularity, but as perichoretic relatedness.
Second, the incarnation of the Son, by which the second member of the Godhead took creation to himself, and the bodily resurrection of the incarnate one, together indicate that there is a continuity between creation and redemption. The one through whom creation was created has himself taken creation to himself in his work of redemption; what’s more, the incarnation and resurrection, as signs that God has "stood by his created order imply that this order, with mankind in its proper place within it, is to be totally restored at the last." In other words, redemption is not from creation but of creation.
Third, in contrast to Hegel’s conception, and indeed that of process theology in general, of the created order as itself constituting God’s being, and therefore necessary, a trinitarian understanding of creation recognises that "God is, ‘before’ creation took place, already a being-in-relation" and therefore had no need to create. Thus the free act of creation of the triune God both establishes the ontological distinction between God and creation, and thereby grounds the personal relatedness (and thus neither necessary or logical relatedness) of God and creation.
Final in our trinitarian explorations is the church. At this point, it is worth noting the order in which we have proceeded. We began by thinking of the implication of trinitarian theology for creation in part in order to establish the proper bounds within which to deploy the theological concepts with which we are dealing, and to prevent us from "playing with abstract and mathematically determined concepts and exercising no theological control over their employment". In particular, the ecclesiological conclusion to be drawn from this is that the church, being part of creation, is similarly finite and contingent. This contrasts with some doctrines of church which draw the analogy between heaven and earth too directly, or emphasis the divine nature of Christ and therefore his body/church as over against the human, created nature.
We then explored what trinitarian theology would tell us about created human existence, and saw the importance of the category ‘person’, and in particular, the essentially relational nature of persons, who mutually constitute one another in their relatedness and otherness.
Drawing these threads together, then, the church can be understood as the community of God’s redeemed people in Christ through the Spirit, which constitutes itself in its relatedness. There are a number of points to note here. First, it gets beyond the impasse of an understanding of church simply as gathering (is the church still the church when it’s not meeting?), by recognising that the key feature is the community of persons, of which gathering is an expression, not the other way round.
Second, although conclusions are drawn in the Bible regarding the relation of women and men in the church on the basis of the relation of Christ and the Father, such as the headship of a husband with respect to his wife, this is never at the expense of an equally fundamental unity. Both the orderedness of the trinitarian relationships and the essential equality of the persons are affirmed. Subordinationism was always regarded as a heresy (essentially it is Arianism). Thus, in all our concern to reflect biblical truth in our homogenising culture which flattens out gender differences, we must not fall into an implicit subordinationism, by stressing only one side of the story (orderedness), to the exclusion of the other (equality).
Let me conclude with some personal reflections on being an evangelical and living the life of faith among evangelicals, for better and for worse.
As I said at the start of this paper, I remain convinced that evangelicalism at its best is among the truest expressions of the Christian faith, and by now it is clear that what I mean by ‘at its best’ is that it doesn’t fall into the trap of seeing its distinctives, crucial as they are, as decisive, to the exclusion of other, commonly held, but critical doctrines. When it does succumb to that temptation, I have suggested that deep theological and personal consequences arise. And what I have attempted to do is to outline a positive response to such an impoverished evangelicalism, which consists not in rejecting what is clearly good there, but redeeming it by better placing it in its theological context, and it is that which I have attempted to do with my brief case study in trinitarian theology as applied to creation and the church.
What I am suggesting then is that the best response to the perceived deficiencies in some evangelicals and some evangelicalism is to out-evengelicalise the evangelicals; to be people who more faithfully uphold and implement the authority of the Scriptures, in their fullness, without needing to buttress them up by denying the legitimate place of other sources of knowledge and insight; and to more passionately cling only to Christ as the rock of our salvation, a salvation which is not out from creation, but which is of creation, for its ultimate fulfilment.
So, is being evangelical enough? Well of course, it all depends on what you mean by evangelical, and enough for what. Perhaps another way to come at the question is to ask whether it would be good enough for Jesus. Would he be an evangelical. In one sense the answer is of course no - he is far to radical to be confined to one segment or group. But, if you ask would he uphold the authority of the Scriptures, of course he would! And if you ask would he stress the exclusive sufficiency of his death and resurrection, then the answer is again yes, as the one who set his face to go to Jerusalem. And so I say, if that in that sense, if it would be good enough for Jesus, then it’s enough for me, and for that matter, for you.
This online version is Copyright 1997. Society for the Integration of Faith and Thought.