The Evangelicals

What They Believe, Where They Are, and Their Politics

Christopher Catherwood

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781433522819
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

In the changing political, social, and religious landscape of the West, the term evangelical is increasingly losing meaning and credibility. Although some people say there is no unity to what evangelicals believe, church historian Christopher Catherwood sets out to prove otherwise, stating, "We are a people defined by our beliefs, and that is what distinguishes us in our twenty-first century postmodern times." Catherwood delivers a succinct and organized review of the global evangelical movement, looking at its earliest days, current place in world Christianity, political and social influence, unifying theological doctrinal beliefs, and its view on eschatology.

Using the doctrinal basis of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students and the 1974 Lausanne Covenant, Catherwood summarizes evangelical beliefs before describing the scope of the global church and the shift of evangelicalism's center from the global North and West to the South and East. Catherwood demonstrates that the term evangelical is not only meaningful, but necessary. Anyone wanting to know about the past, present, and future of evangelicalism will find this book helpful.

One

Some Core Evangelical Beliefs

Let’s take what many Christians call a basis of faith to describe what specifically evangelical Christians believe. I have deliberately chosen to use an interdenominational statement of faith , since many such bases of faith are peculiar to a particular group. In other words, each denomination has its own individual sets of doctrine (as the Baptist joke goes, you can baptize people your way, and we will do it God’s way), whereas what follows is something believed in by evangelical Christians across all kinds of divergent groups: Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and many other Protestant groups.

I have chosen the doctrinal faith basis of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, a body which, as we shall see in chapter 3, has members in over 152 countries and is therefore multicultural and supranational; it has a presence on every continent, and is not restricted to just one country, as is the case with many Protestant denominations.¹

The central truths, as revealed in Scripture, include:

1. The unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the Godhead. This is what we call the doctrine of the Trinity, and it is one of the oldest and most distinctive Christian beliefs. It is vital because who Jesus is, what he came to do, and what he accomplished is at the heart of the Christian message—the evangel, or good news, from which the term evangelical, someone who both believes in and proclaims the evangel, gets its name. Jesus was no mere good man—he was and still is God the Son, part of the Trinity itself.

2. The sovereignty of God in creation, revelation, redemption, and final judgment. God is in charge, and we are all beholden to him. This is vital in all kinds of different ways; for example, it is why supporting the need for a clean environment is part and parcel of being a responsible Christian, since the Bible teaches that we are the stewards God mandated to look after his creation properly. In Britain Christians of all the different political persuasions support environmental responsibility, although, of course, there are diverse opinions on how this should best be implemented. The same is increasingly true in the United States as well as in what I will refer to in this book as the Two-thirds World, that is, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where most of the human race is living. This part of the statement is wide-ranging in its application.

But of course this part of the statement is also about that taboo word judgment. Our noncondemnatory, touchy-feely modern world doesn’t like such words. We cannot avoid it though—our natural condition is to be in rebellion against God, and this puts us under his condemnation. Thankfully, God provides a way of redemption, of someone else taking our just punishment, and this way, the Christian message says, is Jesus Christ, God the Son, taking the punishment we deserve on the cross. Needless to say, judgment is not a popular doctrine! Countless people have tried to water it down over the centuries and continue to do so today. But as the word sovereign implies, it is God who is King, not us. This goes inherently against the me-decade mentality of early twenty-first-century life. But while God is a God of justice, he is also a God of mercy—redemption and judgment are inexorably linked, as we shall see as this statement unfolds.

3. The divine inspiration and entire trustworthiness of Holy Scripture, as originally given, and its supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct. This doctrine, which goes back to the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura (Scripture alone) is what the twentieth-century writer and thinker Francis Schaeffer described in 1974 as the “watershed of evangelicalism.” It is, one might say, the doctrinal belief that separates evangelicals from other forms of Protestantism today in the same way that, historically speaking, it divided all Protestants after the sixteenth-century Reformation from the dogmas of the Catholic Church. This doctrine states simply that the Bible and not any subsequent tradition is the basis for what we as Christians should believe—that what we read in the Scriptures was inspired by God and is therefore theologically both true and unchangeable, what Schaeffer liked to describe as true truth. In other words, why do we believe what we believe? On what basis do we believe it? Or to use that well-worn university jargon phrase, what determines what is normative for Christian belief?

This is not a popular doctrine today either! It is perhaps the most provocative of specifically evangelical beliefs, since the Roman Catholic Church teaches that its own authority is equal to that of the Bible (one of the key disputes it had with the Protestant Reformers, who disagreed strongly) and post-nineteenth-century theological liberals in the Protestant churches think that human reason is either equal to or supersedes the ancient foundational texts of the Christian church, which is what the Bible claims to be.

4. The universal sinfulness and guilt of all people since the fall, rendering them subject to God’s wrath and condemnation. People often think that Christians consider themselves better than others. But it should be the exact opposite: one of the key doctrines of evangelicalism has the wonderful—if slightly antique—name of total depravity. Absolutely all people are sinners, however nice and kind they may be, however often they help little old ladies across the road, remember to give to charity, and pay their taxes. As the Old Testament book of Isaiah reminds us, even our most righteous deeds are filth. One of the things that people often forget about Jesus is the regularity with which he clearly taught about hell and how we are all due to go there unless we repent of our sins before God. However good we are, all that goodness will and can never get us to heaven. Christians should be known for not thinking highly of themselves.

Needless to say, total depravity is not a doctrine that makes evangelicals at all popular, since we are those who proclaim it the most. It is not just the politically correct who dislike this facet of evangelical Christian faith, but also those whose Christianity is one of good works, friendliness, occasional attendance at church, and the belief that being English or a patriotic American is probably enough to convince God that we are splendid folk who deserve a place in heaven. However, there is no escaping it: it is the clear and plain teaching of Scripture and a repeated motif throughout the New Testament, from beginning to end.

For Scripture says is that we are innately sinful, regardless of how otherwise decent and honorable we might think ourselves to be. Not only that, we are by nature sinners and rebels against God himself. It is this, as much as any specific sin that we commit, that literally damns us if we are not redeemed. This is why the Ten Commandments start not with coveting our neighbor’s ox, but with our relationship with God himself. Without Jesus Christ true worship is impossible, since by nature we always put ourselves first and not God.

So all of us are sinners—it is part of our DNA. Evangelicals realize this about themselves: we know we are not good enough, that we ourselves are sinners, and that we need to daily thank God for our salvation in Jesus Christ.

5. Redemption from the guilt, penalty, dominion, and pollution of sin, solely through the sacrificial death (as our representative and substitute) of the Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. This too is a doctrine that in our age makes evangelical Christians far from popular, for if ever there were a teaching contrary to the pluralistic teachings of our secular, postmodern age, this is it! There is only one way to God, and that is through the sacrificial death of Jesus upon the cross.

Pluralism, and the absence of absolute truth, is intrinsic to our age, even among people who have never heard of postmodernism and would have no idea that they actually believed many of its core tenets. The notion that there are many paths to God, that we can all choose our own, and that all of them are valid is at the heart of the pluralistic twenty-first century. To reject this is to be seen as bigoted, prejudiced, narrow-minded, and many other unfavorable epithets besides. Believing that Jesus is the only way to God is deeply unfashionable in an era in which people think such beliefs went out with the Stone Age.

Many nonevangelical Christians also have pluralistic beliefs; the idea that Buddhism, Islam, and what one might describe as nonjudgmental Christianity are all equally valid options is a key tenet of faith in many churches, cathedrals, and divinity faculties around the world.

Yet time and time again the New Testament firmly rejects such notions, however attractive and nice-sounding they may be to the modern mind. Salvation—reconciliation with God, forgiveness of sins, eternal life—are available through Jesus and through Jesus alone. You can’t get saved through Buddha, Muhammad, being nice to your aged grandmother, or anything else that we might think of. And it goes without saying that the very notion that we need to be saved at all is also incompatible with the modern zeitgeist.

In fact, the very idea of salvation is based upon the notion of judgment—that we are objectively in the wrong and that we need to be saved from the just punishment for our rebellion against God. Judgment even in a secular sense of judging criminals is now increasingly passé, with perpetrators being seen as sick rather than bad and in many senses as much victims of their circumstances as those against whom the crimes have been committed. So the idea that all of us are guilty and deserving of punishment by a God entitled to judge us is even more incomprehensible to the twenty-first century secular mind than it was to those of our great-grandparents in another era. Yet as Jesus himself made clear, judgment is very real and facing each and every one of us!

So we evangelicals do not go out expecting to be popular!

But it is interesting, is it not, that of the different expressions of Christianity in Britain and the United States today, it is the evangelical version to which so many turn, even though what evangelicals teach and believe is so resolutely countercultural in the profound sense of that term? And globally, in the Two-thirds World where the vast majority of people live today, it is evangelical Christianity that is growing like never before, especially now that it is seen not as a Western product, but as a system of doctrine authentically multiethnic, multicultural, and genuinely global. Evangelical Christianity tells it as it is, biblically speaking, however unfashionable that might be in pluralistic circles today.

6. The bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead and his ascension to the right hand of God the Father. Christianity is based upon facts rather than fantasies and fairy tales. This is something that the writers of the different parts of the New Testament wanted their readers to understand(just look, for example, at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel).

A few years back I was at a talk for Christians in Science, a body of evangelical Christians working in science faculties throughout the universities of Britain. The speaker reminded the Cambridge audience that people regarded belief in the resurrection as weird even back in the first century, and that to claim that a proof of Christianity was that, as Paul argued in his epistles, Jesus rose from the dead would be regarded as eccentric by a first-century Roman audience just as it would be by a secular one in the twenty-first. We tend to think that folk two thousand years ago believed all sorts of strange things, but in fact—and certainly in sophisticated circles—their lack of belief in such things was as strong as it is now.

Christianity, the Bible and the early church proclaimed, was not based upon fables but upon facts. It is a fact that we are all sinners in need of reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ, and it is a fact that God accepted the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf by raising him from the dead—just as the New Testament describes.

What we call apologetics, the defense of a reasonable and authentic Christian faith, is, in today’s touchy-feely society, sadly no longer fashionable. But evangelicals are those who believe our faith is founded on reality and not upon warm-fuzzies, however glowing inside such things might make us. Remember, Christianity is true truth.

7. The presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the work of regeneration. The Holy Spirit is the third member of the Trinity, and, evangelicals believe, plays a key role in someone becoming a Christian, which is what is meant by the technical term regeneration (literally rebirth, or, to use the more well-known phrase, “born-again”). The key Christian distinctive, and one that evangelicals stress, especially those in the Reformed tradition, is that God takes the initiative. The Holy Spirit works in us to convict us that we are sinners who need the salvation that only Jesus Christ can provide, and this in turn leads us to be open to God’s offer of salvation through the cross. We do not become Christians unaided, since naturally speaking we are against God and all his demands upon us. And, when we are converted—born again—the Holy Spirit continues to dwell in us, helping us to pray, to understand things from a spiritual perspective, and to live lives in accordance with the will of God.

8. The justification of the sinner by the grace of God through faith alone. This is the great Reformation doctrine known in the sixteenth century to Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, and Thomas Cranmer as sola fide, by faith alone. It is at the heart of what makes Protestants of all descriptions, not just evangelicals, quite different from both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. This is a critical evangelical perspective, since it is not just Catholic teaching that emphasizes the importance of works, to use the technical term, or good deeds, but much of mainstream society and what we might call nominal Protestantism (of the “I am a decent Briton/American whose kind deeds will get me to heaven” variety). No, we only get to heaven and are reconciled with God through faith in the finished and complete work of Christ on our behalf, since nothing that we can ever do or say for ourselves is good enough to get us there. Only Jesus saves, and only our faith in that saving action justifies us, or declares sinners like us righteous in the eyes of God. Jesus has taken the punishment that is our due, and without that we are judicially guilty and lost.

9. The indwelling and work of the Holy Spirit in the believer. All evangelicals hold to this regardless of their views on much-debated issues such as the continued existence of the so-called “sign gifts,” such as speaking in tongues, miraculous healing, prophecy, and issues of that nature. Note that the IFES basis of faith does not refer to matters such as “baptism with the Holy Spirit,” which evangelical charismatics in mainstream denominations and Pentecostal evangelicals believe is a special experience of the Holy Spirit that takes place after conversion, and is usually indicated by speaking in what they regard as a heavenly language, or “tongues.” Some sociologists of religion prefer, for this reason, to separate Pentecostals from evangelicals both in the United States and the United Kingdom and, above all, in the Two-thirds World, where Pentecostalism is the form of Christianity growing by far the largest in terms of sheer numbers. But IFES does not do this nor, I think, should we. For the core faith and beliefs of many Pentecostal denominations are thoroughly evangelical in their nature, and millions of Pentecostal students worldwide would most emphatically identify themselves as evangelical and as some of the most active members today of IFES.

While there is huge scope for divergence on some issues, I would agree with one of the founders of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, Martin Luther, who felt that there were matters essential to the faith—the kind of things we are looking at in this chapter—and what he described as matters indifferent, issues upon which there are legitimate differences of opinion, but which are, so to speak, within the family. In his day one of the hot potato issues was the nature of the communion service (still a bone of contention today) and that of the way in which the church should be run, again an issue as resonant in the twenty-first century as in...