Comments on: evangelical revisionism

By: ox

ox — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:54:43 +0000

Hi Andy

Yes, I agree. Common roots, but not common cause. The whole agenda is entirely different.

There remain distinctions between fundamentalists and even the most conservative evangelicals. The attempts to deny those distinctions are suspect.

However, that is not to say that I am closed to the notion of evangelical repentance and a real rapprochement in the cause of a faithful Christian witness. Some might come to see that separation is Biblical and that loyalty to God is greater than loyalty to men. Of course, for fundamentalists to enter such a realignment would require grace and humility on our part also.

Nevertheless, it isn’t sufficient for evangelicals simply to make conservative sounds. There does need to be some repudiation of the evangelical compromise and an embrace of separatistic principles.

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

By: Andy Efting

Andy Efting — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:03:13 +0000

Here is how I would put it. In the 1800’s you had what one author termed, the dominance of evangelicalism, where Biblical Christianity dominated the religious scene in America. Everybody was basically an evangelical at that time. That era came to a close as modernism and other forms of unbelief took center stage in the halls of theological and scientific academia. Those who fought against and eventually separated from that unbelief were our fundamentalist forbearers. At that time, I would say that fundamentalism was a fairly large subset of evangelicalism. Later, the new-evangelicals separated from fundamentalism and took most of evangelicalism with them. So, I think we have a common heritage of evangelicalism but most of what we know of evangelicalism today is the offspring of the new evangelical movement that separated from us. That is probably what you and Duncan are getting at but historically we come from the same root, I think.

By: Duncan

Duncan — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:42:06 +0000

Fundamentalism is certainly not a subset of evangelicalism, something which even some evangelical scholars admit.

Marsden refers to the evangelicals as “former fundamentalists” in Reforming Fundamentalism. Of course he was criticized by peers for saying so, but defended that approach in the preface to his later paperback edition of the book.