An Insight on what "Evangelicalism" Is

Before I go back to sleep, I thought I'd share an insight I just had on defining evangelicalism today. I'm a Biblehead by trade and so I've only become engaged in definitions of fundamentalism and evangelicalism because of my social location. I have a hard enough time reading the books I'm interested in let alone books like Marsden's, Fundamentalism, or Bebbington's, The Dominance of Evangelicalism.

However, this can be an advantage too. Because of my interests as a Biblehead, I know a few things both about hermeneutics and history.  So I have come into conflict from time to time with the Marsden-Noll paradigm concerning fundamentalism, as well as with my sense that evangelicalism is a movement that arose in the 1940s. I haven't had the time to engage these pillars on a scholarly level but as I have encountered their paradigm I have tried to map it to my own.

The insight I just had is that a key difference in my way of looking at such things is that I believe (i.e., it is my impression that) the Noll-Bebbington series focuses overly on continuity in what it calls evangelicalism. Bebbington thus helpfully identifies four features: 1) focus on the Bible, 2) focus on the cross, 3) focus on conversion, and 4) focus on activism. The problem is that the ideological challenges of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in my opinion, make the neo-evangelicalism of the 1940s something that should be treated more as a new entity than one in continuity with Edwards.

This is, I believe, a persistent problem with historical perspective.  What, for example, is the real impact of pre-revolutionary America on us today?  It is interesting to be sure.  It may have great local significance in some places. But the impact of so much pre-US history is a mediated impact. It impacts us indirectly because it impacted something else that has impacted us more directly.

We can find inspiration from Jefferson or Madison. We can make them directly relevant to us if we want. But that is us making them relevant.  Their real relevance is in the institutions they established that have continued to today.

So evangelicalism today must be defined not in terms of Edwards or its history--this is the etymological fallacy, the fallacy that mistakenly thinks that what something has meant in the past somehow affects directly its meaning in the present.  This is a clear fallacy of meaning.  The meaning of words and actions is a function of their use and significance today, plain and simple. The past has led up to that use and so can provide insight. But it cannot control or dictate what words or actions mean today.

So the evangelical movement that arose in the 1940s was a unique cocktail in the history of the world. It must be defined socio-culturally as much as ideologically. It was, as all such movements are, a response to the circumstances of its day. It no doubt involved continuity with some language and identity from the past.  But it must be understood primarily as a reaction to both modernism and fundamentalism in the post-WW2 era, not as the heir to Edwards or Spurgeon.

What is an Evangelical?

Kevin Wright and I were having a good discussion of what an evangelical is under my Thursday post. He has already listed several important resources on the subject, one of the most important of which is David Bebbington's Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s and more recently The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody. You can see his full treatment now on his blog, where he engages with the key literature.

Bebbington gives four basic characteristics of an evangelical: 1) biblicism, 2) activism, 3) conversionism, and 4) cruciformism (or something like that--I'm doing it from memory). Obviously this is not my area, so I welcome some help on some questions I have.

First, I know that the German word for Protestant is evangelisch (which in Germany basically means Lutheran). German universities until recent time had sharply divided theology faculties--katholisch and evangelisch. In that sense, I strongly suspect that English-speaking Christianity that strongly identified with the Reformation might have considered itself "evangelical."

Here are some questions I don't know the answers to:

1. Did Jonathan Edwards ever refer to himself as an evangelical? In what context? How central a self-description was it?
2. Did George Whitfield ever refer to himself as an evangelical? In what context? How central a self-description was it?
3. Did John Wesley ever refer to himself as an evangelical? In what context? How central a self-description was it?
4. Did Phoebe Palmer, Luther Lee, Orange Scott, William Booth, Phineas Bresee, B. T. Roberts, Seth C. Reese, Martin Wells Knapp, or any of the holiness "fathers and mothers" ever refer to themselves as evangelicals? In what context? How central a self-description was it?

Obviously evangelisch cannot be translated evangelical, for we wouldn't consider all Protestants or even all Lutherans to be "evangelical" in the sense of the word today. In fact, if memory serves, the Wesleyan Theological Society has engaged in serious debate in the past as to whether Wesleyan-Arminians should consider themselves evangelical at all. Certainly most mainstream "evangelical" writing looks at Arminian theology as less than truly evangelical.

In fact, wasn't this part of the reason for the founding and existence of the Wesleyan Theological Society, because the Evangelical Theological Society tends to define evangelical as Calvinist? Some Wesleyans (e.g., Gary Cockerill) feel very comfortable in ETS. My sense is that most Wesleyan theologians (e.g., Randy Maddox, Don Thorson) don't or feel marginalized.

Note: I recognize neither of these individuals are Wesleyans (UM and FM respectively), but the Wesleyan Church doesn't yet have a recognized theologian (John Drury is our best candidate currently).

In the end, I think the discomfort I feel with measuring the present by the past "evangelical" measuring rod is that the meaning of a word is how it is used. When I describe someone today as an evangelical, I personally mean a neo-evangelical, someone in continuity with the rise of evangelicalism in the 40's among people like C. F. H. Henry and Ockenga. It was an attempt to find a middle way between the fundamentalists of the early 1900's and the liberals of the same period.

Perhaps we might date it to the time the National Association of Evangelicals was founded. While the popular media today is tending to lump evangelicals and fundamentalists together, they are not the same sociological group, despite some similarities. When the president of the NAE had to resign a few years back, Jerry Falwell told a puzzled interviewer from the media that he had nothing to do with this group. He was a fundamentalist, not an evangelical.

In biblical studies, I think of people like F. F. Bruce as the first generation of evangelical biblical scholars. Others like I. Howard Marshall and Gordon Fee (the token Pentecostal) are the retiring second generation. Would people like N. T. Wright, Doug Moo, and Simon Gathercole be the third generation?

I sit in relation to these people a little like I perceive James Dunn to. They are some of his principal dialog partners, but he doesn't let theology set the boundaries for interpretation in the way I feel they all have to one extent or another.

I would say that the Wesleyan Church is evangelical in much the same way it holds to inerrancy--these are very general terms without much serious reflection attached to it. We are conservative, we belong to the NAE. But most Wesleyans don't know the history, or why this group was started to distinguish itself from the fundamentalism of the time, while not being liberal. So in terms of recent times, to call oneself evangelical has been to distinguish oneself from being a fundamentalist.

In this light, I strongly object to Noll's description of fundamentalists as revivalists, Pentecostals, and dispensationalists. J. Greshem Machen was a fundamentalist, my gold standard in fact for that era. He was no revivalist or Pentecostal. I doubt seriously that he was a dispensationalist (in fact wasn't there a massive split between Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and Dallas Theological Seminary over dispensationalism?). I strongly object to Noll's characterization of revivalists and Pentecostals as fundamentalists.

If I were competent to write on this subject and had been in play 10 years ago, I would have skewered him for this sloppy history writing. It serves his purposes to distance ideal evangelicalism from fundamentalism and to lump in more affective and pietist traditions in with it. But they don't go together--especially not as defective evangelicals.