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Wanted: Good Friends and a Worthy Enemy for a Faltering Evangelicalism

 

The 1st/2nd c. AD philosopher, Plutarch, wrote several essays on friendship and then one essay entitled How to Profit by One’s Enemies.  The writings balance one another in that they worked towards the common goal of exploring how relationships might make one better—or worse.  Therein lies a relevant lesson for Evangelicals in the 21st century.  What it needs, if it is still possible to rescue it, is good friends and a worthy enemy.  'Evangelical' means different things in different parts of the world, so the point made here applies primarily to the North American context.

On the ‘friendship’ side of the equation, one of the developments over the past fifty years has been the breakup of friendships between Evangelicals.  The ‘instruments of unity’ have either disappeared or become too weak.  It is difficult to find unity around a central figure—an evangelist like Billy Graham, a pastor like John Stott, or a scholar like Howard Marshall.  A few prominent names might come to mind, but they represent large, independent churches or agencies without an ecclesial affiliation.  It is also difficult to have larger scale cooperation the more the Evangelical churches choose independence from denominations.  And it is difficult for once multidenominational, Evangelical seminaries to play any role in unity in light of this disarray.  The result is, to a large extent, that 'Evangelical' denominations turn inward for their own relationships, and independent churches have little engagement with other churches.  A missionary, for example, might find funding from a collection of local churches, but the supporting churches have no connectivity with each other in a definable mission of the Church.  The independent church movement has, moreover, disconnected these churches from an historical understanding of the Church—‘friendships’ with the past are broken.

On the ‘enemies’ side, Plutarch’s point is that enemies can make us better people.  When someone identifies errors in an enemy, e.g., one might practice some self-awareness as well.  His point is rather like Jesus’ warning not to point out the speck in someone else’s eye when one has a log in one's own eye (Matthew 7.4), but he offers a lengthy essay on the profit one might gain from one’s enemies.  The fact is, Evangelicalism has lost a good enemy.  It did rather well when the mainline denominations thrived but needed a reforming, revivalist movement like Evangelicalism to keep them orthodox or pull them back to orthodoxy.  The threat to orthodoxy was liberalism, which opposed the belief that the Bible is God’s Word and treated it as just any other book, opposed the belief in miracles and endorsed ‘science’ in interpretation of Scripture and theology, questioned orthodox dogma, and replaced the details of doctrine with the most general affirmations (Christianity as simply the belief in God the Father, the brotherhood of mankind, and the infinite worth of the human soul, ala Adolph von Harnack).  The mainline denominations’ denial of orthodoxy over the past sixty years, their progressive decline in numbers, and Evangelicals withdrawal from them eventually meant that the ‘liberal’ enemy of Evangelicalism was no longer a worthy opponent.  (In a Plutarchian manner, ask Evangelicals in the Church of England if their opponents in the denomination in any way help to improve them.)  Evangelicals had developed particular tools to fight liberalism, but these are not quite the tools needed to fight the battle in a postmodern, post-Christian era.

Postmodernity’s challenge is not a challenge about what is true; it is a challenge of truth itself.  For them, truth is constructed and functional, not objective and authoritative ('my truth' is not necessarily 'your truth').  It is not so interested in debating theological doctrine as simply dismissing the importance of doctrine.  Instead, it makes ‘social justice’ and activism the major concerns, and in doing so Evangelicals have become confused.  Progressive Evangelicals (ones guided more by culture than Scripture--not really Evangelicals) have aligned themselves with this agenda.  Of course they are for social justice and believe in activism--who wouldn't be?  Evangelicals have always been activist in social justice, such as the Abolition movement of the 19th century or the Pro-Life movement of the 20th century.  

The problem, of course, is that ‘social justice’ means nothing until it is defined.  If it is not defined by Scripture and the Church's long history, it will be defined by the contemporary culture--and it has been. Progressives have allowed themselves to be moved from their concern for Scripture as the authority in Christian faith and practice by chasing after partnerships with those pursuing activist agendas in the public sphere.  They have also moved to a spirituality that is not centred on Christ and His forgiving and transforming grace.  They have become weak in their concern for evangelism, wanting to be more agreeable and inclusive than appear to be confrontational and exclusive.  And the details of social justice have turned out to be a radical change from what Christians have valued.  Evangelicals could fight the enemy of liberalism, an error in solid form.  But they are, of course, embarrassed to be defined as persons opposed to ‘social justice,' which is no justice at all in its particulars for the unborn, for children, for marriage, for family, for law and order, for equality, etc.  A ghostlike enemy cloaked in some undefined 'social justice' does not help to define Evangelicals, and they are even painted as unethical or needing to catch up to the alleged higher ethic that the culture offers.

Without good friendships and without a good enemy, Evangelicalism has been faltering.  It may not be possible to save it as a movement, although what it was historically is still something that can be promoted.  What it was, as historian David Bebbington famously determined, was a movement committed to the authority of Scripture, with Christ at the centre, the need for conversion and salvation in the cross of Christ, and an activism of believers engaging the world through the deep streams of  Christian faith and practice.  Let's hope that, even as Evangelicalism has been knocked on its heels through the loss of good friendships and the lack of a good enemy (!), it will nonetheless survive as a movement in this new era of postmodernity.  Those values identified by Bebbington are worth continuing, along with a clearer understanding of the Church's role (we need a better ecclesiology) in all of this.

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