As the US Presidential election draws closer the international media has given more attention than ever before to the personal faith positions of the candidates. Democrat Barack Obama is a Liberal Protestant Christian, while Republican Mitt Romney is a Mormon.

The term “evangelical” is thrown around by the American media, often in a pejorative sense, to describe a highly influential, conservative right-wing group or “voting bloc”.

In Australia, many committed church-going Christians only know of the term with the prefix “Sydney” attached. But we also do not all agree on what this term means. Its definition has changed over time and is still dependent on whom you ask and where the ‘Evangelical Christian’ is situated. We decided to try and take the bull by the horns and define this broad, descriptive term. We spoke to two highly regarded international scholars, Dr Darrell Bock and Dr Carl Trueman, who were in Australia for a series of speaking engagements over the American summer break, including a mini-conference at Victoria’s interdenominational Bible college, Melbourne School of Theology. The theme was “Recapturing Evangelical Identity”.

Both scholars were clear on the meaning at the level of a basic definition: the term “evangelical” comes from “the evangel”, that is “the gospel”, meaning “good news”.

“Evangelicalism can be seen as a Christian movement that stresses the unique good news that comes from God through Jesus Christ. It has also stressed a fidelity to the Bible as God’s Word, important today in a world that often shies away from the things of God,” said Dr Bock, who is Executive Director of Cultural Engagement at the Centre for Christian Leadership, and Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary.

“The term, however, has become very flexible, and some in the media have used some of the worst examples to paint the entire movement. Yet many evangelicals are good people who simply seek to serve others and honour God with their lives,” Dr Bock said.

Dr Bock explained the two ways of defining something: the core-set and the boundary-set. He said that most people are agreed where the centre is—what all evangelicals agree on—but much time is wasted trying to define the boundary between who is, and who is not an evangelical.

On the other hand, Dr Trueman, Paul Woolley Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, believes that evangelicalism is no longer a single movement.

“When something is popular, there is more benefit being gained from identification with it, which means it will be attractive to people who do not really belong. Thus it becomes more diverse,” Trueman said. “However, we should not allow this incoherence to undermine our clarity on the gospel.”

For all their prominence in America, evangelicals make up only a small slice of the world. Slightly less than a third of the world identifies as Christian and of these, almost two-thirds are Catholic, Orthodox, or near-Catholic. Of the remaining Christians, barely 10 per cent of the world’s population, many would resist the evangelical label.

“I am relatively comfortable describing myself as evangelical in the UK and Australia, where it speaks of a basically orthodox Protestant Christianity with an evangelistic mindset,” Dr Trueman said.

“In the USA, however, I myself shy away from the term. There it tends to carry connotations of very conservative politics and activism in the so-called “culture wars”. It also refers to such a diverse set of churches and institutions that it does not reflect any stable understanding of the gospel,” he said.

Fifteen years ago, Dr Mark Noll, a historian of Christianity in the United States, warned in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, that evangelical Christians were in danger of becoming marginalised because they had abandoned the intellectual aspects of their faith. In a 2010 response, The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Dr Trueman argued that religious beliefs are more scandalous now than they have been for many years. “The real problem now is exactly the opposite of what Noll diagnosed—evangelicals don’t lack a mind, but rather an agreed upon ‘evangel’. Although known as gospel people, evangelicals no longer share any consensus on the gospel’s meaning,” Dr Trueman said.

Christian groups tend to define themselves in relation to other groupings, and two groups that evangelicals tend to define themselves against are fundamentalist and liberal Christians. Although it is not a popular term anymore in Australia, many conservative Christians in the USA still describe themselves as “fundamentalist”.

The term started out as a positive term among Christians in the early 20th century. The fundamentalist movement, which rejected liberal theology was focused on separation from the world. It was developed as a term by Baptist educator James Madison Pendleton, and referred to a Christian dedicated to the “the fundamentals” of the Bible.

Dr Bock believes the main difference between self-described evangelicals and fundamentalists is the willingness of evangelicals to be engaged in the world and participate in society, compared to the fundamentalist tendency to withdraw and be more separate.

“For the distinction between liberals and evangelicals, it is an issue of biblical authority,” Dr Bock said.“Many liberals would place more authority in modern science and newly-developed methods of critical textual analysis than on the Bible itself, as the revealed word of God.Therefore they would question the historical accuracy of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament and the Gospels,” he said.

Dr Bock, one of the leading global scholars of the historical study of Jesus, defends the Bible against claims of a liberal approach which he says are “grounded in scepticism”.

“The Gospel texts come from eyewitnesses and those who knew them. This means they put us in touch with Jesus as He was originally experienced, that is, the Jesus whose transforming presence has made an impact in history over the centuries in the lives of millions of people,” Dr Bock said.

Dr Trueman, a leading scholar on the Reformation, says many liberal Christians argue that the church has moved on since the Reformation, particularly since the Enlightenment and new scientific discoveries.

However, he argues that it is still worth holding to the key doctrines of the Reformation, such as “justification by faith alone” and the clarity of Scripture as being basic to the Bible’s own teaching.

When asked about the key differences between the evangelical church in the USA and in Australia, Bock offered some insights from his perspective.

“There is a lot of cooperation between evangelicals in the USA, such as the Lausanne Movement. There are many more self-described evangelicals, with estimates of 30% of the population, or roughly 80 million people, which allows them to speak in the culture,” Dr Bock said.

“Whereas Australia is much more secular and everything seems pretty fragmented, making the movement, a minority presence, seem even smaller,” Dr Bock said.

 

 

Dean Troth is a Melbourne-based writer who works in communications and community engagement for Melbourne School of Theology and also consults to a number of Christian mission and ministry organisations.