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PART I
The History of âEvangelical Historyâ
Before the 1960s, many histories had been written about evangelical movements, denominations, institutions, publications, and more. But general histories of evangelicalism, understood as a transdenominational movement or series of connected movements, had not yet emerged. The documents in part 1 contain some of the most important reflections on how a kind of history that did not exist two generations ago became such a dynamic, but also contested, arena of productive historical inquiry.
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CHAPTER 1
The Evangelical Denomination
GEORGE MARSDEN
The following reflections on how to conceptualize evangelicalism are taken from an introduction to a book, Evangelicalism and Modern America (Eerdmans, 1984), and are reprinted here by permission of Eerdmans. The book grew out of a conference organized by Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch and held at Wheaton College in 1983. In the part of the introduction reprinted here, I addressed an essential issue that remains very relevant for trying to define evangelicalism today. If we are to talk about âevangelicalismâ as any sort of entity, what are the various ways in which we may think about the degree of unity involved? The answers to that question bear directly on an issue central to the current perceptions of crisis: What are the relationships of the parts of evangelicalism to the whole?
A bit of background may be helpful. Through the first half of the 1970s, âevangelicalismâ was not a widely used term in American parlance.1 The ânew evangelicalsâ associated with the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 had succeeded in reviving the term to a degree, especially among conservative Protestant leaders in various denominations and parachurch movements who were becoming uncomfortable with the term âfundamentalist.â The rise of Billy Graham to national prominence after 1949 gave wide visibility to this movement. By the 1960s, it was common for insiders in a large network of loosely connected revivalist-oriented Protestants to call themselves âevangelicalâ if they favored Grahamâs more open approach to sympathetic mainline Christians. âFundamentalist,â which had been the most common term for conservative conversion-oriented American Christians in the 1920s and 1930s, now became the term for a smaller group of more militant conservatives who typically demanded separation from churches and organizations that tolerated any degree of theological liberalism.
By the early 1970s, âevangelicalsâ were gaining increasing visibility in the United States. Mainline Protestants were beginning to decline in numbers and influence. Meanwhile, conservative churches were growing. Revivalist parachurch organizations, such as Campus Crusade for Christ, were flourishing, while mainline Protestant campus ministries were hauling in their sails. Conspicuous âyoung evangelicalsâ were pushing for more progressive stances on issues such as social justice, racism, and war.2 Those moves contrasted with the stance of Christianity Today, the flagship journal for âevangelicalsâ who used that name for themselves, where an old guard under the editorship of Harold Lindsell held the line for social and doctrinal conservatism. Meanwhile Billy Graham, who had as much success as a revivalist abroad as he did in the United States, was the catalyst for building self-conscious international alliances, most notably in the Lausanne movement growing out of the International Congress on World Evangelization held in 1974. At the same time, Pentecostal and charismatic groups, which were flourishing in America and around the world, had become the fastest-growing parts of world Christianity. Anyone who was paying attention could see a vast explosion of âevangelicalâ religion. Still, there were not that many people paying careful attention.
One of the characteristics of those who thought of themselves self-consciously as part of an evangelical movement was their deep concern for boundary maintenance. Who was in and who was out? Where were the lines to be drawn? Was the standard going to be âbiblical inerrancy,â as Harold Lindsell and his allies argued? Were the radical âyoung evangelicalsâ moving beyond the bounds? What about Pentecostals?
In the early 1970s, I had the privilege of contributing to a volume that was designed to explain evangelicalism to the world, The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Who They Are, Where They Are Changing (Nashville: Abingdon, 1975). It was edited by two young evangelical church historians at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge. Given the widespread concern to define the movement, it made sense for the editors, who brought together a diverse range of insiders and outsiders as contributors, to commission the lead essay, âTheological Boundaries of the Evangelical Faith.â Its author was John Gerstner, a theologian of a distinctly conservative Reformed bent who regarded any departure from the teachings of Jonathan Edwards as decline. But this treatment also left the volume with a conspicuous problem since evangelicalism obviously included many varieties beyond the Reformed, a point that Gerstner allowed, but only somewhat grudgingly. To the credit of the editors, they found an opportunity to correct this unfortunate one-sidedness by producing a second revised edition in 1977 (Grand Rapids: Baker Books). In this version Gerstnerâs lead article was entitled âTheological Boundaries: The Reformed Perspective,â but it was followed by a new essay from a notable author of books on Pentecostalism, Vinson Synon, âTheological Boundaries: The Arminian Perspective.â This article included attention to Methodist, Holiness, and Pentecostal movements. The presence of these articles, despite their differences, showed that evangelical insiders tended to think of themselves as a sort of club or perhaps even a denomination with contested rules for membership. A few years later, Lewis B. Smedes fantasized in the Reformed Journal about a group of grim theologians gathering as a sort of evangelical College of Cardinals near Wheaton, Illinois, and voting regarding each of that yearâs theologically suspect evangelical leaders, âtoleratedâ or âNon est tolerandus.â3
But even over the course of a very few years, the visibility of âevangelicalismâ on the American scene changed dramaticallyâespecially with Jimmy Carterâs declaration that he was âborn again,â with Newsweek announcing 1976 as âthe Year of the Evangelical,â and with Carterâs election as president. Suddenly evangelicals were in the news because they were seen as having political potential. The estimates of the numbers of American evangelicals were often something like forty million or more. Clearly this number of âborn-againâ Americans was vastly larger and more diverse than were the numbers of those I called in my article âcard-carrying evangelicals,â that is, the ones who identified with the networks of self-consciously evangelical movements and institutions.
With good reason, some American evangelicals not connected with the broadly Reformed types who dominated the self-consciously âevangelicalâ movement came to argue that their sorts of pietistic or revivalist Christians were being largely left out of the rising number of histories and interpretations of evangelicalism. My Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 1980) had focused on the Reformed and on dispensationalists in the fundamentalist controversies mostly in the northern United States. It nonetheless carried the expansive subtitle The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870â1925. Timothy L. Smith, the Nazarene pastor and leading historian of evangelicalism who is featured several times in this book, was particularly effective in making the point that a great number of genuine evangelicals did not identify with evangelicals shaped by the movements I described. Donald Dayton subsequently elaborated on this point, leading to very fruitful multisided discussions of the issue, some of which are treated in the article by Douglas Sweeney that is reprinted below.4
It was particularly with Timothy Smithâs concerns in mind that in the essay reprinted here I tried to sort out how evangelicalism, despite its bewildering diversitiesâand at the time I was thinking mostly of the American situationâmight still be considered something of a unity. Smith had suggested that evangelical diversity might be thought of as a kaleidoscope or a mosaic. I thought then that mosaic was the preferable image, since it suggested some overall pattern seen among the separate pieces rather than just a jumble thrown up on a screen.
My principal point was to concede that âevangelicalismâ applied to a much larger and more diverse population than to only those who identified as âcard-carrying evangelicalsââthat is, who used the term to think of themselves as part of a movement with clear boundaries. Yet I also wanted to point out the many historical connections among the various evangelical movements, even if only some of them saw themselves as closely linked to the âcard-carrying evangelicals.â And that common background did point to some common identifying traitsâas David Bebbington summarized more definitively in his later and now canonical quadrilateral.
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The greatest conceptual challenge in a discussion of this sort is to say what evangelicalism is. The issue can be clarified by asking whether evangelicalism is not a kind of denomination. Evangelicalism is certainly not a denomination in the usual sense of an organized religious structure. It is, however, a denomination in the sense of a name by which a religious grouping is denominated. This ambiguity leads to endless confusions in talking about evangelicalism. Because evangelicalism is a name for a religious groupingâand sometimes a name people use to describe themselvesâeveryone has a tendency to talk about it at times as though it were a single, more or less unified phenomenon. The outstanding evangelical historian Timothy L. Smith has been most effective at pointing out the dangers of this usage. Smith and his students have repeatedly remarked on how misleading it is to speak of evangelicalism as a whole, especially when one prominent aspect of evangelicalism is then usually taken to typify the whole. Evangelicalism, says Smith, is more like a mosaic or, suggesting even less of an overall pattern, a kaleidoscope.5 Most of the parts are not only disconnected, they are strikingly diverse.
So on one side of evangelicalism are black Pentecostals and on another are strict separatist fundamentalists, such as at Bob Jones University, who condemn Pentecostals and shun blacks. Peace churches, especially those in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, make up another discrete group of evangelicals. And their ethos differs sharply from that of the Southern Baptist Convention, some fourteen million strong and Americaâs largest Protestant body. Southern Baptists, in turn, have had experiences quite different from those of the evangelicals who have kept the traditional faith within the more liberal âmainlineâ northern churches. Each of these predominantly Anglo groups is, again, very different from basically immigrant church bodies like the Missouri Synod Lutheran or the Christian Reformed, who have carefully preserved Reformation confessional heritages. Other groups have held on to heritages less old but just as distinctive: German Pietists and several evangelical varieties among Methodists preserve traditions of eighteenth-century Pietism. The spiritual descendants of Alexander Campbell, especially in the Churches of Christ, continue to proclaim the nineteenth-century American ideal of restoring the practices of the New Testament church. Holiness and Pentecostal groups of many varieties stress similar emphases that developed slightly later and in somewhat differing contexts. Black Christians, responding to a cultural experience dominated by oppression, have developed their own varieties of most of the major American traditions especially the Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal. Not only do these and other evangelical denominations vary widely, but almost every one has carefully guarded its distinc...
