Religion Universe: EVANGELICALS (Protestant)

Protestant, Religion Protestant, Protestant Religion. Christianity. EVANGELICALS:

EVANGELICALS

The terms “evangelical” and “evangelicalism” had scant use until Erasmus and others derisively aimed them at what they saw as Lutheran narrowness and fanaticism. Luther used the terms for all Christians who accepted the doctrine of sola gratia , which he saw as the heart of the gospel (evangelion) . The treaty of Westphalia (1648) denominated both the Lutheran and the Reformed churches “evangelical”. By 1700 the term seems to have become in Europe a simple synonym for “Protestant” or, in
German-speaking areas, “Lutheran”. In Protestant Britain, however, the religious awakening led by the Wesleys and George Whitefield seems to have been
called the evangelical revival from
around 1750. Slightly later, advocates of
revival in Britain, both in the Anglican
and Free churches, called themselves
evangelicals. Their trademarks were deep moral earnestness, commitment to strict personal piety, faithfulness in private and corporate devotion and vigorous philanthropic enterprise. Since the introduction of Protestantism in Latin America during the 1800s, its adherents have preferred to call their churches and themselves evangelicals (evangélicos) rather than Protestant.

In London, in 1846, some 800 Europeans and North Americans formed the Evangelical Alliance to counter the political and spiritual revival of Roman Catholicism then in progress and, more positively, to coordinate various Protestant enterprises in missions, publishing and social reform. Its nine conservative theological tenets summarize the contents of the historic Protestant confessions of faith, but its implicit understanding of Christianity in practice rested on the religious bases developed in early pietism and in the evangelical revival.

In British North America, the first great awakening (1730s and 1740s) had emphasized the necessity for a graciously given personal experience of redemption* in Christ, for personal piety, including social concern, and for confessional orthodoxy. The second great awakening (early 1800s) intensified the experiential element, reduced and simplified dogmatic requirements, slowly institutionalized social concern and made the
revivalistic mode normative for the 19th century. The formation of a branch of the alliance in the United States in 1867 simply reflected a context already practising the style of Christianity which the
alliance advocated.

Between about 1865 and 1900, however, many came gradually to understand the personal evangelical experience central to all evangelical thought and action as a personal moment of spiritual illumination. This understanding encouraged an internalizing of the evangelical experience. The old language remained, but by the 1920s social action and theological reflection were suffering benign neglect among Evangelicals. They sought only a “clean heart and right spirit”.

By about 1900, American Methodism had divided into three parties, each seeing itself as “evangelical”. The liberals, bent on social action and theological modernity, were evangelical but with the accents of the social sciences. The conservatives, including the Holiness movement,* were evangelical in the sense of the word before the civil war. The mainstream insisted on a highly individualistic and private faith,* which meant that traditional terms and doctrines might carry non-traditional connotations. Thus the Wesleyan tradition as a whole made the very idea of evangelical equivocal.

Calvin's progeny in the US had also divided into three major parties in the late 1800s. The conservative party, with its centre at Princeton, owed much to Charles Hodge and considered US evangelicalism, especially revivalism, theologically and culturally suspect. A mildly activist liberal party, rooted in the work of Nathaniel Taylor at Yale, spoke the language of Evangelicalism, but its deeper concern was to reconcile the Reformed tradition and modern thought and culture.* The revivalist party, which claimed the mantle of Charles Finney, Asa Mahan and William Boardman, was led at the end of the century by D.L. Moody, R.A. Torrey and J.W. Chapman. But these later revivalists, who now inherited the name “evangelical”, displaced the radical social concern and perfectionism of their predecessors with a very different agenda: “conversion”, understood first and last as an internal religious experience; maintaining the authority of the Bible as the inerrant divine revelation;* and restoring Evangelicalism as the normative form of Christianity.

From the late 1890s, increasing liberal critiques compelled these Evangelicals to explain their position theologically. Here, they found the methods and categories of the conservatives congenial, though they resisted the Calvinist dogmatism and rationalism of the conservatives' systems. A new coalition would soon produce a new definition of “evangelical” among the Reformed.

By the late 1910s, the Reformed tradition fell into civil war, and it drew other traditions in. On one side was the liberal tradition; on the other was the revivalist-confessional coalition, under the names “conservative”, “evangelical” and “fundamentalist”. The revivalist party became increasingly Reformed and less inclined to revivalism; the conservatives opened up to Evangelicalism.

Conservative Wesleyanism, still evangelical in the 19th-century sense, recognized that its theological method and understanding of the Bible had more in common with the spirit of liberalism than with that of the Reformed Evangelicals. But certain liberal theological conclusions contradicted their deepest commitments. Often, then, they rejected specific theological insistences of the Reformed Evangelicals but joined them in the war against the liberal secularizing of Christ, the Bible and the work of the church. And, little by little, they muted their commitment to social involvement, in part for fear of identification with the social gospel of the liberals. But most also rejected the name “fundamentalist”, especially as the theological bases and separatist ethos of fundamentalism became clear (see fundamentalists ).