{"id":749,"date":"2008-05-19T22:31:57","date_gmt":"2008-05-20T06:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2008\/05\/19\/an-evangelical-really-gets-it\/"},"modified":"2008-05-20T05:48:55","modified_gmt":"2008-05-20T13:48:55","slug":"an-evangelical-really-gets-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2008\/05\/19\/an-evangelical-really-gets-it\/","title":{"rendered":"an evangelical really gets it"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Mark Reynolds, professor at Biola, writes in response to the Evangelical Manifesto on the Washington Post On Faith<\/em> site I mentioned the other day. His article, Reasonable Evangelicals<\/a> contains a number of very interesting statements, but this one particularly caught my eye.<\/p>\n

An Evangelical is moderate, fundamentally opposed to fundamentalism.<\/strong> They believe in truth and that God has spoken to humankind, but know that understanding that truth is difficult. They are willing to walk the hard road of Socratic persuasion and of cultural engagement. Sometimes they do this badly, but modern American Evangelicals historically came into being through a rejection of any narrow intolerance that refuses to consider competing points of view.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would describe this as the Canadian approach to self-definition.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I have mentioned before how we in Canada define ourselves in terms of how we are not<\/em> like Americans. “We’re not loud like Americans.” “We’re not militaristic like Americans.” Etc, etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. We mostly have a sense of smug superiority based on a negative mindset – we are not<\/em><\/strong> everything that we think is bad about Americans.<\/p>\n

Well, isn’t this how evangelicals … all evangelicals … define their place in the theological spectrum? Isn’t this what the Evangelical Manifesto is all about? Isn’t this what the Togetherness Boys are all about? Yes, some of them are open to learning from fundamentalists, but their essential philosophy remains the same. They may be conservative theologically, but they are moderate philosophically.<\/p>\n

Wouldn’t they define themselves, however, in terms of their philosophy as ‘not extreme, not schismatic, not legalistic’ like ‘the fundamentalists’? They still maintain the new evangelical philosophy regardless of how conservative their theology seems to be.<\/p>\n

Their moderation is seen in the tolerance of open theism, semi-emergent\/emerging types, and cooperation with the grand-daddy of compromise himself. These men at heart are the moderates that most evangelicals really define themselves to be. They are together for lofty talk, for doctrinal proclamations, but when it comes right down to it, they simply aren’t into taking action on their doctrinal rhetoric. Their examples and actions to the contrary simply abound. It is astonishing that anyone thinks they mean what they say about doctrinal purity and loyalty to the gospel.<\/p>\n

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John Mark Reynolds, professor at Biola, writes in response to the Evangelical Manifesto on the Washington Post On Faith site I mentioned the other day. His article, Reasonable Evangelicals contains a number of very interesting statements, but this one particularly caught my eye. An Evangelical is moderate, fundamentally opposed to fundamentalism. They believe in truth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[37,71,77],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-c5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}