[As I note at the end of this post, it is very speculative, and I am mostly just interested to see what others have to contribute either in the poll or in comments.] Since their origins in the Protestant Reformation, evangelicals have focused on the importance of the Gospel above almost anything else. If neo-evangelicalism [...]
“[A] group of positive fundamentalist intellectuals began organizing a move away from dispensationalist emphases. …they recognized that it would be necessary to build on fundamentalism’s claim to stand in the broad tradition of Augustinian orthodoxy, rather than to promote the more narrow dispensationalist teachings of recent invention. They also deplored fundamentalism’s emphasis on personal ethical [...]
There was a time when I was instructed to mistrust anyone who called herself a Christian but did not attend the right kind of church; that is, our kind of church. The kind of church where more than sixty members was nearly unheard of, where the mourner’s bench was the most important facet of the [...]
Recently, Brett McCracken has offered an insightful Wall Street Journal opinion piece (found via First Thoughts). After laying out the dire situation that evangelicalism faces among its younger generation (“70% of young Protestant adults between 18-22 stop attending church regularly”), he rightly ridicules the tendency to try to seem cool or use shock tactics such [...]
In a recent interview by Scot McKnight (via Robert E. Sagers), Brian McLaren says probably hundreds of things with which I disagree. In particular, though, at about 7:00 in the interview he talks about rejecting the Greco-Roman history of Christianity in favor of liberation and queer theologies. Although there are dozens of holes that one [...]
Even in academic circles, the terms “evangelicalism” and “pentecostalism” are used almost interchangeably at times. (For example, see the way the esteemed sociologist of religion Peter Berger does so here.) While this is defensible in some contexts (e.g., many African contexts in which practically all Christians are pentecostals), in the US it is not entirely [...]
In a recent interview with Timothy Dalrymple (found via Joe Carter), historian Rodney Stark (an interesting fellow, but odd if only in that he has a book called The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success) makes some pretty astonishing claims about American evangelicalism, claiming that it has replaced the [...]
I never considered converting to Catholicism until my second year at Flagship Evangelical College. Sure, late-adolescent identity formation was partly to blame. But evangelicalism’s syncretistic streak did trouble me. To my mind, evangelicals’ piecemeal rejection of this or that “worldly” aspect of mainstream American culture served only to mask their wholesale adoption of the underlying [...]
Right now this blog has three contributors; to get things going, each will present his assessment of the current state of Evangelicalism. Here’s Stephen’s take: Like Nietzsche’s “God” (a fill-in for ontological stability, social cohesion, and moral structure), evangelicalism was a fragile thing; we really didn’t know that it was going to leave so quickly, [...]
Right now this blog has three contributors; to get things going, each will present his assessment of the current state of Evangelicalism. Here’s James’ take: I remember, in my first weekend at Flagship Evangelical College, assessing potential friends by their criticisms of the typically Evangelical Sunday service at the local Bible church. This one didn’t [...]
