Archive: What is Evangelicalism?

PART TWO

By Bruce R. Shelley
Condensed by permission from “Evangelicalism in America,” published by
Wm. B. Eerdmans Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan

“One major theme runs through that type of Christianity called evangelicalism: the necessity of personal salvation.” -1st installment. 

Look, evangelicals cry, at our whirling world! Notice the frustration, the self-centeredness, the barbarity, and the carnality. How can we account for man’s own misery and his inhumanity to other men? By one overwhelming fact! he is a sinner, a rebel against God and against society.

This pessimistic view of man’s powers explains the popularity of premillennialism among American evangelicals. Beyond man’s innate curiosity about the future, the doctrine of premillennialism accents history’s frustration apart from divine aid. What every man finds personally-emptiness, futility, and purposelessness-history without God also discloses: life has no meaning. It begins at no beginning; it ends with no end.

But, evangelicals insist, add God and all is changed. If man transgresses, he must be under Law. If he sins, he must have a norm. If he rebels, he must have a Lord. Man cannot now be understood apart from what he once was. Man is made in the image of his Creator. His unique freedom granted by God is the presupposition of his misery. Do, know no guilt; ants dread no death. Only man can sin because only man is made for God.

Conversion, then, is the interior turning to God through faith in Jesus Christ. It is the clue to the mystery of man. No greater humanitarian labor can be spent than the energy expended in bringing straying sinners to a glorious God.

If the presupposition of the evangelical experience is the sinfulness of man, the means to its achievement is a revelatory Bibie.  Evangelicalism was brought into being by the Bible; it has sustained itself by the Bible. Unlike scholastic Protestantism, however, evangelicalism, when it has lived up to its own best principles, has not considered the Scriptures as a mere code for conduct or as a series of divine decrees. On the contrary, the Scriptures are life-giving because they are life endowed.

One immediate consequence of Whitefield’s conversion was the priority he gave to the Word of God. The Bible leaped to life for Whereas before it seemed obscure and hard to understand, now it was as clear as the sun at noon. “When God was pleased to shine with power on my soul,” he said, “I could no longer be contented to feed on husks or what the swine did eat; the Bible then was my food; there, and there only I took delight.” He read the Scripture as it should be read—upon his knees. He endeavored to pray over every line and word. “I got more true knowledge from reading the Book of God in one month,” he claimed, “than I could ever have acquired from all the writings of men!”

Wesley reflected a similar reverence for the Scriptures when He wrote: “I want to know one thing—the way to heaven; how to land safe on the happy shore.  God himself has condescended to teach the way; for this very end He came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God! I have it:  here is knowledge enough for me.  Let me be homo unius libri (a man of one book).”

This instrumental use of the Bible never led the eighteenth-century evangelicals to mere subjectivity.  We might suppose that their emphasis upon the Spirit’s revealing divine truth, as well as imparting moral power, would have resulted in the surrender of external authority in religion.  But this never happened. Their distrust of man was so great, and their hostility to the rationalism of the age so pervasive, that they took exactly the opposite course.  They made more of the authority of the Bible than their predecessors had for a long time before.  In opposition to the idea of the sufficiency of human reason, they delighted to belittle it, and to denounce its claims as presumptuous.  In resisting it, they appealed, not to the Spirit in the hearts of all believers, as the Quakers did, but to the written and infallible Word. Evangelical influence, and not scholasticism or the Protestantism of the Reformation period, carried the authority of the Scriptures to modern English and American Christians.

It is in this light that fundamentalism can best be understood.  Any informed evangelical realizes how often Protestant orthodoxy has degenerated into a rabid sectarianism.  Individual fundamentalists have not always avoided this danger. “But if America is not adequately represented by the conduct of some irresponsible tourists,” writes Vernon Grounds, president of the Conservative Baptist Seminary, “neither is evangelicalism adequately represented by every snake handler, every holy roller, every bigoted fanatic.”

Aside from its excess—which every doctrinally-oriented movement has difficulty suppressing—fundamentalism sought a genuinely Biblical witness, a witness for the Bible’s unique message of God’s redemptive love in Jesus Christ and a witness against the humanized and secularized gospel of liberalism. In this sense, though perhaps only in this sense, fundamentalism was a genuine expression of evangelicalism.

Two predominant consequences have issued from evangelicalism’s commitment to a redemptive Gospel: first, a controlling and continuing passion to preach the Gospel where it has not been heard. And second, a remarkable stimulus to personal and social betterment. Evangelicalism, in short, has greatly furthered missionary activity and Christian ethics.

The story of modern missions is almost exclusively an evangelical saga. From the landing of Pietists, Ziengenbalg and Plutschau, on the beach at Tranquebar in 1706, to William Carey and his colleagues at Serampore, to the host of voluntary societies circling the globe in the nineteenth century, to the Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission in 1966, evangelicals have shouldered a major share of the heavy burden for a non-Christian world. The achievement of evangelical missionaries between the French Revolution and War I is nothing less than a phenomenal. Kenneth Scott Latourette, the foremost American authority on the expansion of Christianity, has written, “Never had any other set of ideas, religious or secular, been propagated over so wide an area by so many prof agents maintained by the unconstrained donations of so many millions of individuals … For sheer magnitude it has been without parallel in human history.”

The motivation behind this surge of foreign mission interest was varied. Unquestionably Biblical imperatives were not always separated from a sense of Western superiority. But, genuine Scriptural motives more often than not impelled these ambassadors of Christ. Perhaps the dominant impulse was found in the authority of the Bible itself. Had not Jesus commanded His apostles, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel every creature” (Mark 16:15)?   

Wesley, for example, was a man of far horizons. He looked beyond the confines of his little group to the conversion of his native land. He looked beyond the confines of his native land to the winning of a world for Christ. The Gospel that was for all must be taken to all, irrespective of color or clime. Early in his ministry He uttered his now celebrated Manifesto: “I look upon all the World as my parish; thus far I Mean, that in whatever part of It I am, I judge it meet, right and My bounden duty to declare unto all that are willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation.”

Another belief that appears time and again in the missionary movement is the conviction that the preaching of the Gospel throughout the world is linked to the return of Christ. Many of the early pietists held the idea that a great conversion of Jews and non-Christians was to be among the signs preceding the coming again of the Lord in glory. Similarly, Similarly, A. T. Pierson and A. J. Gordon were among the nineteenth- century premillennialists who believed that global evangelization was a prerequisite to the second coming of Christ. They pointed to Jesus Himself who said, “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come” (Matthew 24:14).

This link between preaching the Gospel and the return of  Christ was evident in one of the popular hymns of the nineteenth century: 

Waft, waft, ye winds, his story, 

And you, ye waters, roll, 

Till, like a sea of glory, 

It spreads from pole to pole: 

Till o’er our ransomed nature, 

The Lamb for sinners slain, 

Redeemer, King, Creator, 

In bliss returns to reign.   

Joined with this missionary fervor has been the evangelical view of Christian living and morality.  Doubtlessly, in evangelicalism the Christian life leans toward the otherworldly. Whether in German pietism, English evangelicalism, or American fundamentalism one can detect an ascetic tendency. The evangelical ideal calls for a Christian life set constantly upon the future.  Natural human interest in the present world is often condemned as irreligious. Friendship with the world,” Wesley said, is spiritual adultery.” (James 4:4)

This is not to suggest that evangelicals have consistently followed medieval monasticism. They have not, for example, advocated retirement from the world and seclusion in a monastery. But they have denounced many of the ordinary pursuits and pleasures of society, commonly looked upon as indifferent matters. Card-playing, dancing, smoking, horse-racing. Theater-going elaborate dressing, and frivolity of all kinds have come in for vigorous condemnation. To be a Christian has frequently meant to turn one’s back upon “the world.”

But this ethic of self-denial was not the result of any delicious morbidity. It was due, rather, to the conviction that conversion was but the beginning of the Christian life, and salvation to be complete must include the power to overcome sin. That is to say that justification must be followed by sanctification. This, evangelicals believe, is the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer.

Many of the more vigorous evangelicals felt that genuine faith must be active in love. “A true faith in Christ Jesus will not suffer us to be idle,” Whitefield once said. And then in a passage reminiscent of Luther’s classic definition of faith, he added, “No: it is an active, lively, restless principle; it fills the heart so that it cannot be easy till it is doing something for Jesus Christ.”

When this mood merged with the American frontiersman’s innate optimism and vigor a whole nation … was energized to repent and reform.

New life in Christ, then, was never intended as a deterrent to social action. The leadership of evangelicals in freeing England of the stigma of slavery and in the scores upon scores of reform movements in nineteenth-century America is abundant evidence that evangelicalism need not be socially sterile.

One of the features of the great missionary movement was the wide variety of humanitarian activities. Evangelical missionaries established schools, built hospitals, trained nurses, reduced complex languages to writing, introduced health measures, taught agricultural techniques, and translated literature into the dialects of the people.

While fundamentalism’s reaction to “the social gospel” may be advanced as evidence to the contrary, even there, social awareness was not entirely lost. For example, the confession of the Fundamentalist Fellowship of the Northern Baptist Convention affirmed firmed that “human betterment and social improvement” are “inevitable by-products” of the Gospel.

No, the testimony from history contradicts the common charge that evangelicalism’s morality is solely individualistic. It is true that its ethic begins with a personal redemptive experience of God’s grace. But evangelicals   have often argued that morality—even social morality—necessarily flows out of a heart touched by divine grace. They knew their Bible well enough to recall that Jesus twice over said of those who profess His name, “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7: 16, 20).