I was listening again this week to a presentation on the state of evangelicalism by a very prominent evangelical. I think this was delivered a year or two ago, I don’t remember exactly, just have the mp3 sitting on my hard drive.
The individual and the content of the address aren’t all that important for the purpose of this post. I was interested in how the speaker was describing various movements, in distinction with the evangelical movement.
My regular readers may remember how we have had some tussles over ‘disclaimers’ in the past few months. (Not that it is disclaimers I am after!!! I still protest that I am misunderstood.) But when fundamentalists talk about the need for disclaimers, it works this way:
The fundamentalist says something positive about some teacher/preacher outside “the camp”. The fundamentalist at the same time feels obligated to issue a disclaimer, making sure everyone knows that he knows that the guy he just said something nice about is bad in some way.
In evangelicalism, the opposite seems to be true. They use reverse disclaimers.
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