Fernando Gros

Manifest Evangelicalism

The recent Evan­gel­ical Mani­festo is an inter­est­ing window into the prob­lems that evan­gel­ic­als face today and a worth­while state­ment of the theo­lo­gical issues they need to address going into the future. If you are an evan­gel­ical, or have con­sidered your­self an evan­gel­ical at some stage in your jour­ney, you will prob­ably find it to be an “edi­fy­ing” read. (Also, Wess at Gath­eringIn­Light has writ­ten a great review)

I was hoping the state­ment would inspire me more than it did. Truth is, the lack of diversity in it’s author­ship and the US-centric focus in its intel­lec­tual frame­work were a major stum­bling block. Part of the ten­sion within evan­gel­ic­al­ism today stems from the fact that in many ways the move­ment is thor­oughly global and cos­mo­pol­itan, but in many local instances it is paro­chial and inward-looking.

The US-centric focus of the doc­u­ment glosses this ten­sion in a most unfor­tu­nate way. The prob­lem­atic at the heart of the doc­u­ment is the hoary old con­tro­versy between lib­er­al­ism and fundamentalism/conservatism. In my view, any attempt to draw evan­gel­ic­al­ism as being in con­clus­ive sup­port of one side or the other in this debate is not going to cla­rify the import­ant issues we face today. This is a war about the US polit­ical land­scape that does not map out in most of the rest of the world.

For the rest of us, the core issue in terms of lib­er­al­ism and fun­da­ment­al­ism is the ques­tion of public policy — how we speak about the key moral and eth­ical issues of our day. The post-Locke lib­eral pos­i­tion is that we should seek a common lan­guage, to find a shared vocab­u­lary for address­ing the major prob­lems of our day. The fun­da­ment­al­ist response sug­gests that any such pro­ject is flawed and that we can only really speak from within our own theo­lo­gical lan­guage, else we water down our message.

The theo­lo­gical col­lege where I trained was right in the flux of this debate. It con­sidered itself as both evan­gel­ical and con­ser­vat­ive (which in many ways it was), but, was accused by some other groups as being lib­eral (which it also was) and non-evangelical (which was false). Some years back I wrote an unpub­lished paper sug­gest­ing the col­lege was lib­eral (and evan­gel­ical) and that it didn’t matter.

Remem­ber that we are talk­ing about dis­tinc­tions in terms of public speech and in par­tic­u­lar public policy. We are not draw­ing dis­tinc­tions about doc­trine, creed or even ideas like inspir­a­tion of scrip­ture. Part of the prob­lem with the US-centric defin­i­tions of the debate is that it forces us into a sin­gu­lar view of what lib­er­al­ism means. So lib­er­al­ism as an idea in polit­ical philo­sophy is elided with lib­er­al­ism as a theo­lo­gical pro­ject. A lib­eral is always a lib­eral all the way down.

Of course, life is not always so simple!

Going back to my old theo­lo­gical col­lege, their doc­trinal teach­ing was fun­da­mental in the sense that they strove to present the Scrip­tures as divinely inspired doc­u­ments, they taught a creedal and his­tor­ical under­stand­ing of the Chris­tian faith and they did not shirk from present­ing Chris­tian­ity as a unique theo­lo­gical idea in the com­pet­ing realm of faith options. But, they were also lib­eral in that they examined ways the faith could be com­mu­nic­ated in the common lan­guage of that cul­ture, they looked for res­on­ances with the Chris­tian mes­sage in pop­u­lar spir­itu­al­it­ies and they sought to address eth­ical issues in a lan­guage that could be under­stood by those unschooled in Chris­tian theology.

I still think that, in prin­ciple, that is a good model.

I also think it is the best that evan­gel­ic­al­ism can aim for in our times. The prob­lem I have with the evan­gel­ical mani­festo is that every time fun­da­ment­al­ism is impugned we are moved fur­ther away from this goal.

The big prob­lem today is not fun­da­ment­al­ism in all forms, but in spe­cific forms. It’s the fun­da­ment­al­ism that opposes cos­mo­pol­it­an­ism and glob­al­ism, that seeks only local solu­tions and local foci that is the real prob­lem. BY fail­ing to draw a dis­tinc­tion between the fun­da­ment­al­ism of narrow-mindedness and the fun­da­ment­al­ism of authen­ti­city, the doc­u­ment is as guilty of over­sim­pli­fic­a­tion as those who cannot see dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the lib­er­al­ism of public-speech and the lib­er­al­ism of no theo­lo­gical sta­bil­ity. It’s Onto­lo­gical fun­da­ment­al­ism that we must resist today and the mani­festo fails to draw in suf­fi­ciently sharp and detailed ways.

I don’t believe we can advance this debate far when the prob­lem is stated in the terms of the US defin­i­tions of lib­er­al­ism and fun­da­ment­al­ism. The whole issue gets blurred by the imme­di­ate polit­ical and cul­tural clashes that dom­in­ate the US media. In fact, the best way to address the prob­lem is to be inten­tion­ally global and diverse; to be cos­mo­pol­itan. The irony is that evan­gel­ic­al­ism is, in fact, incred­ibly well posi­tioned to speak with this kind of voice.

But, as with so many issues that face the church today, maybe it isn’t just a prob­lem of speak­ing, but also a prob­lem of listening?

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 11:30 am. It is filed under Education, Globalisation, Theology and Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.