Global Evangelicalism

Theology, History & Culture in Regional Perspective

Donald M. Lewis, Richard V. Pierard, Donald M. Lewis, Richard V. Pierard

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830896622
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire du Christianisme

Evangelicalism is not merely a North American religiously charged ideology that dominates the popular mind. Over the last century, evangelicalism has taken on global proportions. It has spread from its northern heartlands and formed burgeoning new centers of vibrant life in the global South. Alongside Islam, it is now arguably the most important and dynamic religious movement in the world today. This tectonic shift has been closely watched by some scholars of religion, though it is merely a ghost in our international news stories. Now, in Global Evangelicalism a gathering of front-rank historians of evangelicalism offer conceptual and regional overviews of evangelicalism, as well as probings of its transdenominationalism and views of gender.

Part One

Theoretical Issues

1

Defining Evangelicalism

Mark A. Noll

At the start of the twenty-first century, evangelical Christianity constituted the second largest worldwide grouping of Christian believers. Only the Roman Catholic church enjoys more adherents in today’s world Christianity than the evangelical churches. By comparison with other world religions, evangelical Christians—taken only by themselves rather than as part of the world’s two billion Christians—are more numerous than all but Muslims and Hindus.

So, who are the evangelicals and where are they to be found? The need for a survey volume such as this is great because the twentieth century witnessed a nearly unprecedented globalization of distinctly evangelical movements and of movements that share many evangelical features. Not that long ago, evangelical Christianity was predominately restricted to Western Europe and North America. According to one estimate, in 1900 well over 90 percent of the world’s evangelical Christians lived in Europe or North America.1 For a number of reasons having to do with Western missionary activity, cooperative efforts at translating the Bible into local languages, the dedicated efforts of national Christians in many parts of the world, and developments in worldwide trade and communication, that earlier situation has been dramatically transformed. Today, the number of evangelicals in each of Africa, Latin America and Asia exceeds the total in Europe and North America combined.2 Increasingly, those people who most effectively contribute to the spread of evangelical Christianity are recruited from the southern rather than the Northern Hemisphere.

But, of course, before there can be a history of evangelicals and the evangelical presence as it exists on all the continents of the earth today, we must have a definition of evangelical Christianity. Providing a workable definition for a book with a worldwide perspective, however, is surprisingly complicated. Much of the complexity arises from the necessity to define evangelical alongside a number of other terms like Pentecostal, charismatic, fundamentalist, apostolic and indigenous that are often used in conjunction with the term (see the glossary at the end of the book).

After attempting definitions of these key terms, this chapter then goes on to several other necessary preliminary tasks. It sketches with very broad strokes the historical emergence and spread of evangelical Christianity, outlines where evangelical and evangelical-like Christian groups now exist in the world, and specifies the main Christian denominations and Christian movements that are the principal carriers of evangelical energy in the world today. But definitions are the place to begin.

Definitions

The word evangelical designates a set of beliefs, behaviors and characteristic emphases within the broad Christian tradition. That broad Christian tradition has itself appeared in many forms in many places throughout the nearly two thousand years of Christian history. Missiologists (those who study the transmission of Christianity from place to place and generation to generation) say it is possible to identify several characteristics shared by virtually all of the world’s Christian movements.3 First and foremost, Christians affirm that ultimate meaning is found in the person of Jesus Christ. They also turn to the sacred writings of the Bible for authoritative guidance on who Jesus was and what his person and work continue to mean for all the world. The Bible is important for both its New Testament, which speaks directly of Christ, and its Old Testament, which tells of the people of Israel from whom Jesus was born. Almost all Christians also think of themselves as joined with other believers through history back to the time of Christ. Most also practice water baptism as an initiation rite, and celebrate the Lord’s Supper (or communion, or the Eucharist) as a way of focusing attention on the death and resurrection of Jesus as key elements in the sacred story. Where Christian bodies have come to intellectual self-consciousness, they regularly affirm God as a Trinity, one supreme deity who exists in three persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).

Throughout history, the designation evangelical has been applied to many different movements within this broader Christian story. The word itself has several legitimate senses, but all are related to the original sense of “good news.” The English word comes from a transliteration of the Greek noun euangelion, which was used regularly by the writers of the New Testament to signify the glad tidings—the good news—of Jesus’ appearance on earth as the Son of God to accomplish God’s plan of salvation for needy humans. Translators of the New Testament usually used the word gospel (which meant “good news” or “glad tidings” in Old English) for euangelion, as in passages such as Romans 1:16:

I am not ashamed of the gospel (euangelion), because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. (NIV)

Thus, “evangelical” religion has always been “gospel” religion, or religion focusing on the “good news” of salvation brought to sinners by Jesus Christ. As “news” it implies the need for the message to be spread—indeed, evangelical Christianity takes the “speaking” and “Word” elements of the faith as definitional. An unspoken faith is no faith at all—and thus foundational to evangelicalism is the need to witness to the “good news” of Jesus Christ, to “go into all the world.” At its core, it is a faith with a global vision. This emphasis also creates some of the unique tensions in the movement—some expressions of evangelicalism (the Reformed or Calvinistic tradition, for example) emphasize the external and rational in ways that are foreign to evangelicals who place an emphasis on the heart and on the “evidence” of experience. As either “word spoken” or “word lived,” however, both forms have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to cross borders, to locate themselves in many places and within a wide variety of organizational forms, and yet, in adapting, to retain their essential character.

During the sixteenth century the word evangelical began to take on a more specific meaning associated with the Protestant Reformation. In this usage, “evangelicals” were those who protested against the corruptions of the late medieval Western church and who sought a Christ-centered and Bible-centered reform of the church. Because of these efforts, the word evangelical became a rough synonym for Protestant. To this day in many places around the world, Lutheran churches reflect this older sense of the term (for example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, or [in India] the Tamil Evangelical Lutheran Church).

Since the eighteenth century, however, the word has taken on an even more restricted usage, and it is this usage that refers to the movement this book takes for its subject. This usage refers not to Protestants in general but to those Protestants who, beginning about three hundred years ago, placed a heightened emphasis on experiencing the redeeming work of Christ personally and on spreading the good news of that message, whether to those with only a nominal attachment to Christianity or to those who had never heard the Christian gospel. In one of the most useful definitions, the British historian David Bebbington has identified four key ingredients of this kind of evangelicalism:4

• Conversion: Evangelicals stress the need for a definite turning away from self and sin in order to find God in Jesus Christ.
• The Bible or “Biblicism”: Evangelicals may respect church traditions in varying degrees and may use schooling, reason and science to assist in talking about Christianity, but the ultimate authority for all matters of faith and religious practice are the Christian Scriptures;
• Activism: Evangelicals have historically been moved to action—to works of charity, sometimes to works of social reform, but above all to the work of spreading the message of salvation in Christ—because of their own experience of God.
• The Cross or “Crucicentrism” (cross-centeredness): Evangelicals have also consistently stressed as the heart of Christian faith the death of Christ on the cross and then the resurrection of Christ as a triumphant seal for what was accomplished in that death. Evangelicals have regularly emphasized the substitutionary character of this atonement between God and sinful humans whereby Christ receives the punishment due to human sins and God gives spiritual life to those who stand “in Christ.”

While holding to such core essentials, evangelicals are often flexible about nonessentials, which has been a key to their spread around the world. So one sees not only revivalistic fervor (the religion of the heart) in South America, but also Reformed revivals in the Southern Baptist Convention in America, and among Anglicans in Sydney, Australia. In this sense, evangelicalism is compatible with global expansion, particular local emphases and strong denominational identities.

Consequently, though evangelicals are marked out by Bebbington’s four commitments, important questions still remain concerning the use of other terms that often arise when considering the worldwide dimensions of evangelicalism:

Fundamentalism is a term that arose in the United States during the early years of the twentieth century to designate conservative evangelicals who protested against what they saw as the undermining of orthodoxy by ration­alist and modernist ideas (called “liberalization” or “liberalism”).5 Fundamentalists insisted on holding to traditional Christian teachings concerning the infallibility of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, the substitutionary nature of the atonement and the return of Christ at the end of history. In general, fundamentalists were strident in defense of the supernatural elements in the Christian Scriptures that were being questioned in some academic and church circles. In more recent decades, some groups have used the term fundamentalist with regard to themselves in order to demonstrate their separation from other forms of Christianity (including Roman Catholic, liberal Protestant and other varieties of evangelicalism) and to maintain a strict view of the Bible’s errorless character. In North America, fundamentalists have also contributed a moral urgency to politically conservative movements like the New Christian Right.6 Most evangelicals have not been fundamentalists, but many fundamentalists do fit within the traditional bounds of evangelicalism.

Pentecostalism is a term that arose about the same time as fundamentalism. It describes evangelical believers who placed fresh stress on the active work of the Holy Spirit and on the restoration of the direct experience of God commonly reported in the New Testament. In its classic form, Pentecostals taught that “the baptism of the Holy Spirit” would be marked by “speaking in tongues” (unlearned speech produced by the Spirit’s direct agency) and also by miracles of healing and prophecy. Around the end of the nineteenth century, Pentecostal-like expressions began to emerge among Christians in many parts of the globe, particularly those who had roots in Methodism or the Keswick “higher Christian life” circles in England. Revivals occurred in Australia, India, Wales and among indigenous peoples (giving rise, for instance, to the variegated African independent churches) who were coming to terms with modernization and rapid cultural change. In 1906, one of these outbreaks intersected with one of the more dynamic and globally open cultures in Los Angeles, in what is often referred to as the “Azusa Street Revival,” and from that point, Pentecostal beliefs and practices have spread like wildfire. Today Pentecostal and Pentecostal-like churches make up the fastest growing segment of world Christianity. Pentecostalism grew directly from historical evangelical emphases, and most Pentecostals fit securely into historic channels of evangelical Christianity.7

Charismatics are Christians not associated with Pentecostal churches who nonetheless adopt some Pentecostal practices.8 During the second half of the twentieth century, charismatic movements appeared in many of the older, more traditional Protestant denominations, and also in the Roman Catholic Church. Like Pentecostals, charismatics stress the direct presence of God through the activity of the Holy Spirit, but do not necessarily organize entire churches, denominations or agencies defined around this special work of the Holy Spirit. Theologically, charismatics have attempted to maintain the link between their personal experience and traditional Christian theology by deemphasizing the uniqueness of speaking in tongues as a sign of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Charismatic movements have been important in the shaping of recent evangelicalism, especially for making modified versions of historical Pentecostal practices much more common among evangelical churches in the Western and non-Western worlds alike.

Part of the genius of evangelicalism is its ability to adapt to local cultures, but this adaptability makes clear-cut definitions more difficult to maintain. The most difficult groups to categorize with respect to historic evangelicalism are the “Apostolic,” “Zionist” and other indigenous Christian movements that proliferated in the Southern Hemisphere over the course of the twentieth century. In Africa, these groups are sometimes known as “aladura” churches, from a Yoruba word meaning “owners of prayer,” or are called African independent (or initiated) churches (AICs). Examples from literally thousands of possibilities include the Zion Christian Church of Southern Africa and the Cherubim and Seraphim Society of West Africa. But churches and movements with many similarities have also proliferated in other parts of the world, such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil, the house church movements in China, and many other rapidly developing church networks in India, the Philippines, Pacific Islands, Africa and Latin America.9 Through missions and migration, many of the practices and emphases of these non-Western groups have spread back to First-World churches.

As the names suggest, these indigenous Christian movements usually exercise a high degree of inde...