Plague on both houses

An interesting look at liberal and conservative Christianity and the challenges that both face in the contemporary context.

As it becomes clear that the fates of liberal and conservative Christianities may not be as distinct as is commonly assumed, the time has arrived for a re-evaluation of liberal Christianity. For conservatives, the task is to stop interpreting the demise of liberal congregations as a victory for evangelical Christianity, and to explore what might be learned from the fact that liberal Christianity’s roots lie in the attempt to adapt and respond to cultural diversity and modern individualism. For liberals, the challenge involves far more than finding the courage to address the significant decline in church membership. Their task begins only after acknowledging that liberal Christianity has a real problem transmitting itself to subsequent generations. As Steve Bruce has observed, liberal churches generally appeal more to disaffected conservatives than they do to people with no previous background in Christianity. This fact suggests that liberals need to give greater attention to why the doctrines and traditions of Christianity should matter to someone not already familiar with them.

Olson: Evangelicalism is dead

Roger Olson spoke recently at George Fox Seminary about the future of evangelicalism. I found it an interesting history of American evangelicalism and some bold claims about its future.

He posted a copy of his talk on his blog but without any formatting. I took it and made a Google doc that is easier to read. Here it is.

Can we find a common foundation?

Perhaps because he was an evangelical striving to keep other evangelicals within the Church of England, I find John Stott to be one of the contemporary writers who most reminds me of John Wesley in tone and broader concerns. His little book Evangelical Truth: A Personal Plea for Unity, Integrity, and Faithfulness is a real gem.

Near the end of the book, he has this summary:

We have been preoccupied through much of this book with the trinitarian shape of the evangelical faith, that is, with the initiative of God in revealing himself, the love of Christ in dying for our sins, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in facilitating every aspect of our Christian discipleship. More simply, we have focused on the Word, the cross and the Spirit as three essential evangelical emphases. To be an evangelical Christian, however, is not just to subscribe to an orthodox trinitarian formula. The evangelical faith reaches beyond belief to behavior; it brings with it a multifaceted challenge to live accordingly.

Nothing Stott writes here is novel, which I imagine was his intention. His effort in the book was to identify the core essentials that can be the foundation for unity among the sometimes warring tribes of evangelicalism. Wesleyan Methodist, for instance, can agree with everything he writes even as we continue to hold some particular beliefs about entire sanctification.

It is not at all a new observation that liberals and evangelicals within United Methodism often have more in common with liberals and evangelicals in other denominations than they have with each other. As I was reading Stott’s book, it struck me that the things that liberal and evangelical United Methodists have most in common are mostly in the areas that Stott considers secondary.

Outside the core evangelicals emphases (summarized in the paragraph above), Stott describes things that good evangelicals can disagree about and still regard each other as good evangelicals. His list includes things such as: sacramental theology, polity, the role of women in ministry, liturgy, and the meaning of mission.

My hypothesis is that most of the things that hold us together as United Methodists come from Stott’s list of secondary or indifferent issues. While liberals and evangelicals would agree on the Trinity as crucial and share some language about behavior being an important outgrowth of belief, we are often deeply divided on issues regarding the inspiration and authority of scripture and centrality of the cross — things that Stott argues are essential to evangelical Christianity. At the same time, we find common identity in things like our form of polity and a set of vocabulary words that come from Wesley, although we often differ on the meaning of these words.

Is it possible for United Methodists to find common ground on the core trinitarian affirmations of our faith, or are we doomed to ground our unity on the less certain ground of bishops and infant baptism and the hymns of Charles Wesley?

Another definition of ‘evangelical’

A theme starts to develop today.

I was reading this post about why there aren’t any good evangelical writers and stumbled upon this definition of the term ‘evangelical’:

For myself, I would define an Evangelical as a person committed to Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, to a high view of the authority of Scripture, to the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, and to the necessity of personal faith in Christ (and therefore the importance for most people of a personal conversion experience, as long as we do not stereotype it) for salvation.

I have been informally collecting such things over the last few years because everyone says the term is hard to define, and yet nearly every definition I’ve ever read covers the same material. I think the use of the term in the media and popular culture causes evangelicals to feel like they need to explain themselves or risk being crammed into a stereotype.

Mainline or evangelical

Methoblogger Morgan Guyton offers a pair of descriptions of mainliners and evangelicals.

There is one type of Christianity that says my faith works for me; it’s what I grew up with; other people have equally valid views based on their cultural contexts; I’m gonna do my thing, other people can do theirs, and I’ll live together with them in peace by not bothering them with my beliefs. That’s how I would tend to describe the “mainline” response to the gospel (correct me if I’ve got it wrong). My denomination (United Methodism) is mostly made up of mainliners, but I can’t say I’m one of them. Another type of Christianity says what Jesus taught, what He did for us on the cross, and how He was brought back from the grave really is the best thing that’s ever happened to the world since it provides the basis for human beings to be reconciled with God and each other in perfect community; therefore we should share this good news with everybody. This second kind is what I would call “evangelical” Christianity, with which I would identify. I would argue that the definitive feature of being evangelical is that your chief desire is to share the euangelion (good news) of Jesus Christ with the world.

The point of Guyton’s post is actually to draw a further distinction between two sub-groups of evangelicals. You can read about that on his blog.

I suspect people who fall in the category Guyton call “mainline” will find his description inaccurate. It does resonate with me on one level. The answer to the questions “Why are you a Christian?” or “Why are you a United Methodist?” does lead many folks to answer by saying things such as “I grew up this way” or “Because I live in such and such a place.” The answers are cultural or sociological.

That may not be a fair description of what it means to be “mainline.”

It does reflect how I fell into the mainline. My answer goes this way: “I started dating this woman who attended a United Methodist Church.”

If being mainline is more than being a part of cultural Christianity, what is it?

What evangelicals have

A writer at the progressive portal at Patheos looks at the progressive and mainline church and asks this question: “What Do Evangelicals Have That We Don’t?“

His list goes like this:

• Evangelicals believe something
• Evangelicals are actively committed to what they believe
• Evangelicals also think that thinking about what they believe is important

You can get a sense of his argument from the headers, but the post obviously has more detail.

It is easy, of course, to go off the rails with such thinking. The key is not to believe “something” but to believe, be committed to, and think deeply about the right things. Of course, in most of the mainline, and the United Methodist Church is certainly part of it, to say we believe anything is something of an accomplishment. Even using the pronoun “we” is deeply questioned.

In a video Steve Manskar pointed out to me, missional church guru Alan Hirsch raises the very good question whether a church that cannot fulfill the function of a church – connecting people to Jesus Christ in ways that bear fruit – should be called a church at all.

We in the mainline have struggled – to put it mildly – to be the church in recent decades. I’m not convinced looking to “the evangelicals” is a road back to the narrow way of Jesus, but it is certainly worth our time to try to discern where they have something right that we do not.