The word “evangelical,” as the bishop notes, is in danger of being lost to us because of its almost daily use in the media to denote fundamentalists and others on the Christian Right who insist on “born-again” experiences as the hallmark of the true believer. These Christians are typically identified with three issues above all others””abortion, same-sex marriage, stem-cell research””and vote Republican in overwhelming numbers.
The word is also used within the historic Protestant (mainline) denominations to identify parties within the church, usually in a political context with regard to hotly debated issues such as same-sex marriage. Rarely are the deeper theological issues addressed or even acknowledged. Part of the frustration of being evangelical in the Episcopal Church today is the near-impossibility of getting a discussion going about foundational issues””Christology, Scriptural interpretation, the doctrine of revelation, the divine agency. The last is the most important of all, as F. F. Bruce clearly outlines in the quotation above, which is taken from a 1989 interview with W. Ward Gasque, a professor at Regent College.
This is what I think about this:
Seems to me that we need to spend a great deal less time worrying about what our public image is and a great deal MORE time worrying about what Jesus asked us to do. Last time I checked, Jesus said the world WOULD hate us – so why is Fleming real amazed that they do?
I have doubts about judging the world as we are told NOT too, so I don’t know what our responsibilities are in the gay marriage debate, etc, etc, but I DO know that when Paul preached the gospel people didn’t stand up and praise him for how politically correct and non-offensive he was.
Instead of whipping fellow sheep, perhaps we would best be served in striving to be better ones ourselves.
It is a great article by Fleming Rutledge – no real surprise there. ‘Evangelical’ is fundamentally a theological, soteriological and doxological category – a statement of the agency of God in Christ in human salvation. There is a problem when the term becomes synomomous with a set of social, political, and church-based positions. The gospel is that God justifies the ungodly through faith in Christ. That’s it. Abortion, sexuality, church order – none of them are the gospel, none of them are ‘evangelical’.
But, and it is a big ‘but,’ the gospel is not an end in itself. It has a goal, it ushers us into new life. [i]And that new life has a concrete shape to it[/i]. There are things we do in the light of grace (live by faith in Christ and by love in our neighbour) and there are things we do [i]not[/i] do. The gospel is not morality, but morality should be the fruit of a group of ungodly sinners being justified by the grace of God.
That means that the gospel can’t be held aloof from the ‘culture wars’ – it has a face to the actual world we live in, and does not just offer a salvation extracted from human life. The problem is that as we move to those implications of an ‘evangelical life’, those particulars take sides in the debates of the day – for or aganst slavery, for or against educating the lower orders, for or against the unborn, for or against women’s rights to control their own body, for or against the right to end one’s own life and the like.
And from the Reformation on (you can see it in the ministry of Luther and Calvin in Geneva as well as many other parts of sixteenth century Europe), people have generally responded to the gospel’s liberation from oppressive slavery to false gods (Catholic piety in the 16th century), but resisted taking up the yoke of Christ (Protestant attempts to create godly communities). They want the freedom, but not the freedom to do good.
What I would love to see is someone of Fleming Rutledge’s calibre addressing [i]that[/i] issue. How do we say, in the context of polarising culture wars, “Issue x is bigger than life or death and this is the only right position to take on it” and yet still communicate it as a [i]gracious[/i] word, one that flows from the gospel, and that does not come across as the gospel itself (and hence a new Law).
That’s a not a dig – I really would like to see it, because I think it is so important in our context.