Every now and then I get a question about what it means to be an Evangelical. Always makes me think of a post that I read about five years ago titled Why I am (still) an Evangelical. Here are a few excerpts from that post at Addison Road:
I commend the whole post to you as it further speaks to what it means to be included in the multicolored Evangelical Tent.. not that the tent is all that small. ツI am (still) an Evangelical, even though I have to parry and dodge assumptions whenever I use that term. I am (still) an Evangelical, because of the great hope to which the movement aspired at it’s founding. I am (still) an Evangelical, because, at it’s root, Evangelicalism is an ecumenical movement: an attempt to erect a large tent in the ground between the cultural withdrawal of fundamentalism, and the withering incredulity of theological liberalism.
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Evangelicalism is a way of reading and understanding the bible, and I (still) believe that it is as close as we can come to a neutral hermeneutic, one that allows the text to breathe out its stories without being unduly constrained by our expectations of it. The evangelical hermeneutic rests on this assumption – that if God is omnipotent, present, and interested in revealing things about himself, we can expect His revelation to have certain basic characteristics. Things like:
The second and third stakes in the Evangelical tent are, to me, the most interesting. It is the 2nd stake, infallibility, that marks out the left most boundary of the evangelical hermeneutic – it is the essential difference between Marcus Borg (the Jesus Seminar) and Ben Witherington or Scot McKnight.
- Inspiration – God was involved in the production of the texts.
- Infallibility – the texts do not err in their purposes.
- Historicity – the texts were written at a place and time in history, by people situated in history, and as such, they are products of their historical/cultural perspective.
- Textuality – text as text: the normal tools for interpreting meaning in any text are the appropriate tools for interpreting meaning in biblical texts. ...
Likewise, the third stake marks out the right boundary. It’s the third stake in the Evangelical tent that we have a tendency to to forget, to our detriment, because it is the third stake that separates Evangelicalism from Fundamentalism.
Just a brief thanks. I very much appreciated this list. I have bookmarked the blog you sited.
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