Foreword - Carl F.H.
Henry
The term "evangelical" has taken on conflicting nuances in the twentieth century. Wittingly or unwittingly, evangelical constituencies no less than their critics have contributed to this confusion and misunderstanding. Nothing could be more timely therefore than to define what is primary and what is secondary in personifying an evangelical Christian.
At the beginning of our century the term "evangelical Christianity" represented supernatural miraculous theism as taught by the Old and New Testaments. It affirmed the triune God known in his self-revelation both in nature and history, and in human reason and conscience, and known as well in the authoritative, inspired and fully trustworthy Scriptures. To be an evangelical was to enunciate among life's control-beliefs the singularly unique incarnation of God in Jesus Christ; his virgin birth, sinless life, substitutionary death and bodily resurrection; his Saviorhood of penitent sinners, and his end-time return to vindicate good and subjugate evil. Evangelical orthodoxy, in a word, exulted in the once-for-all Hebrew-Christian revelation of the Living God supremely manifest in the crucified and risen and returning Redeemer.
Protestant Modernism challenged the very heart of evangelical orthodoxy, namely its insistence on miraculous revelation and redemption. Modernism championed instead scientific empirical method as the supreme way of identifying truth. Since scientific observation and verification in principle exclude once-for-all events, Modernism
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declared evangelical Christianity to be prescientific, unscientific, and therefore outmoded. Given this context, those who considered themselves paragons of modern thought wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from evangelicalism. Modernism presumed to do the Christian religion a great service by reprobating evangelicalism. It took over evangelically-founded and evangelically-funded schools and agencies, and replaced biblically-orthodox professors with its own proponents.
The fact is, however, that Modernism itself rested on an unstable philosophical compromise and soon found itself challenged by religious humanism on the left and by neo-orthodoxy as well as evangelical orthodoxy on the right. Especially in America, evangelical orthodoxy experienced a remarkable resurgence that began in the early 1940s. Noteworthy contributory developments to this change were the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, the reemergence of mass evangelism under the leadership of Billy Graham, who promoted spiritual renewal in mainline Protestant denominations, the formation in 1947 of Fuller Theological Seminary in California as a center of evangelical orthodoxy, and the founding in 1956 of Christianity Today magazine as an interdenominational voice of evangelical scholarship. From many lands and different denominations, Christianity Today enlisted competent conservative scholars as theological and literary contributors. In 1966, it sponsored the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. Through Key '73, it gave domestic stimulus for nationwide evangelistic outreach.
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In 1976, the cover story of Newsweek — titled "The Year of the Evangelical" — attested to the cresting influence of the evangelical movement. Newsweek reported that 50 million Americans professed to be "born again." Theologically conservative churches, it noted, enjoyed noteworthy spiritual growth and channeled unprecedented numbers of students into America's evangelical colleges and divinity schools.
The term "evangelical," which nearly a half century earlier an intellectual elite viewed with disdain, now became so popular at grassroots that quite diverse groups — Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, Pentecostal, charismatic, and so on — found it useful and desirable.
A remarkable aspect of the evangelical resurgence was the emergence of national and even international religious radio and television programs. A major stimulus in establishing the National Association of Evangelicals had been the fact that during the 1930s modernist dominated ecumenical churches preempted free public service time for religious broadcasting. Ecumenical leaders not only excluded evangelical churches from public media benefits but also opposed the sale of network time to evangelicals. The commercial value of Sunday network radio time soared because of evangelical eagerness to purchase it. Approval by the Federal Communications Commission of the network sale of such time to religious groups, in time, opened a vast new window of evangelical access to the masses. Evangelists in turn brought the newest technology to their network programming of religion.
National Religious Broadcasters' annual convention of conservative radio and televangelist celebrities as a media event
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surpassed gatherings of the parent National Association of Evangelicals. Because of the commitment of televangelists to traditional values and to conservative political agendas, N.R.B. conventions attracted leading public figures, including even presidents.
By an ironic turn of events, the very electronic visibility that had given prominence and public support to religious personalities suddenly became as much of a liability for the evangelical movement as it had been an asset. Financial and/or sexual transgressions by a small number of religious televangelists thrust a gloom of suspicion over the entire evangelical enterprise. The secular city, and not least of all the secular media, now perceived evangelical Christianity in terms of Elmer Gantry manipulation and exploitation. Financial contributions declined for some enterprises aggressively engaged in evangelism, humanitarian relief, and other evangelical activities. But for long entrenched works whose ministries were beyond criticism, the main body of support remained in place. Now, however, all organizations that appealed for public funds faced the need to make annual audits available to their constituencies, an already established policy of most reputable ministries.
Nevertheless, in less than a single decade, the public perception of evangelical Christianity had suffered a costly change. Its respectable reputation as a constructive national spiritual movement fell into open caricature and ridicule encouraged by the misdeeds of a small but prominent group of mostly Pentecostal and charismatic televangelists who, worse yet, emphasized that workings of the Holy Spirit can render one virtually immune to temptation. Interestingly enough, almost from its beginnings the
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National Association of Evangelicals had pursued membership by Pentecostal churches more energetically than by evangelical churches in ecumenically-affiliated denominations. Inroads of a deteriorating social morality left their mark on many strands of evangelical engagement as the quest for secular self-fulfillment, materialistic greed and sexual hedonism permeated the culture. Even while some entrepreneurial evangelicals heralded the inevitability of an evangelical awakening, other leaders raised questions about the normative nature and identity of evangelicals.
To be sure, the evangelical movement retained considerable momentum. Even if they increasingly outpaced the "mainline churches" — which are now frequently called "old line" — American evangelical churches as a whole nevertheless exhibited less initiative and less of the joy of God's good news than did Christians in the third-world countries like Korea, Nigeria and Kenya.
The energies of American evangelicals were being siphoned into somewhat competing activities. About the same time that Newsweek heralded "The Year of the Evangelical," they plummeted, for example, into internal disagreement over the reliability of the Bible. This debate concerning scriptural truthfulness soon deteriorated into a sad conflict over true and so-called false evangelicals.
Evangelical campuses were rocked by charges that only a handful of institutions any longer aggressively defended scriptural inerrancy. Reconciled to pluralistic theology, ecumenical seminaries, by contrast, seemed little dismayed that their epistemological foundations lay in shambles. Church historians and sociologists sought to identify normative evangelical positions by observing historical phenomena, rather than by appealing to
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Scriptural teaching, as if the theological "ought" could be established by analysis of the empirical "is."
At about the same time, the evangelical enterprise was parrying also the relationships of evangelicalism and social action, an issue raised to prominence but not resolved by the Lausanne Conference on Evangelism. Church historians left little doubt that the many humanitarian movements of the West originated through the evangelical theology of the Cross, that is, in a divinely engendered compassionate response to the needy and afflicted. The question remained, however, whether social action is evangelism, and whether concern for the whole man and for social justice is integral to evangelism.
There were other evangelical concerns. The mainline evangelical movement, no less than the ecumenical movement, had assumed for several decades that American fundamentalism was terminally ill. Numerous large churches, Sunday schools and numerous day-schools notwithstanding, fundamentalists were committed to double separation — separation from world culture and separation from crusade evangelism, the latter in reaction to Billy Graham's cooperation with ecumenically-affiliated churches. But Jerry Falwell's leadership of the Moral Majority managed, nonetheless, to pull much of fundamentalism out of its social isolation. This was achieved by widespread political protest against federal intrusion into the area of religious values such as prohibiting of public prayer in public schools, for example, and government funding and legalization of abortion.
Moral Majority shaped no evangelical overall public philosophy but concentrated rather on a constellation of single issues. For a time, the movement was perceived as seeking to legislate
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Christian values on a pluralistic society. But its enlistment of conservative Catholics, Jews, Mormons and others soon established a heightened political morality and not theology to be its objective while it placed ethical concerns firmly on the national agenda. Moral Majority achieved none of the legislative specifics it endorsed. It therefore raised new questions over whether politically active fundamentalists were now expecting too much from politics in an era when secular humanism has ensnared Western society and is itself deteriorating into raw paganism. Yet the absence of an evangelical public philosophy is evident and paves the way, as some see it, for Protestant-Catholic political cobelligerency.
These prefatory comments are intended to be but a gateway to the major papers presented at the 1989 Evangelical Affirmations conference. Those of us who first spoke of the need for such dialogue and declaration amid the present confusion and misperceptions of evangelicalism hardly expected to be involved as platform participants. We sincerely hope that the papers and the responses will help fellow Christians, and will help others as well, to identify what is essential and inessential to an evangelical spiritual testimony in our era of woeful cognitive and ethical confusion.
