Let’s Stop Pretending Evangelicalism’s Crisis is New (part one)

Last updated on: November 20, 2019 at 12:43 pm By D. G. Hart

Doesn’t anyone remember Mark Noll, David Wells, George Marsden, Donald Dayton, or Douglas Sweeney? The history of evangelicalism in the United States was not supposed to turn out this way. What had been the Horatio Alger story of twentieth-century American religion by the year 2000 turned out to be equivalent of Humpty Dumpty. To be sure, the evangelical narrative did not put its best foot forward when it entered the twentieth century by splitting the American mainline denominations between fundamentalists... Read more

Why Scholars Rally to Popularizers (and when)

Last updated on: November 14, 2019 at 4:55 pm By D. G. Hart

I have already noticed the sort of odd phenomenon of progressive evangelical academics rallying to the side of a female Bible teacher who is anything but a scholar and not all that progressive. Here’s another example. Pete Enns makes some useful points about the nature of academic life and scholarly expertise. He does so in a way to counter critics of expertise: There’s nothing like spending a few years after college (for me it was 9) studying a field and... Read more

If You Don’t Want to be An Evangelical, Become a Protestant

Last updated on: November 8, 2019 at 12:01 pm By D. G. Hart

I am not sure if any form of Protestantism will satisfy #Exvangelicals, aside from mainline (read modernist) Protestantism. But a recent post about the German Reformed Church’s nineteenth-century is a good reminder that modern Protestantism bears little resemblance to original Protestantism. Back in the day, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Reformed Protestants were the main options for being Christian outside fellowship with the Bishop of Rome. Anabaptists did appeal to some, but their pacifism and rejection of the Christian magistrate meant that... Read more

Defining is not Belonging

Last updated on: November 5, 2019 at 6:03 pm By D. G. Hart

Surely if evangelicalism had an ecclesiology, that is a doctrine of the church, church membership would matter to any effort to understand what evangelical Protestantism is. But as is so often the case with studies of evangelicalism, Thomas Kidd’s new book, Who Is An Evangelical?, goes for definition over institutional ties. Here is his simple definition: Evangelicals are born-again Protestants who cherish the Bible as the Word of God and who emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the... Read more

Christian Freedom is Neither Blue nor Red

Last updated on: October 31, 2019 at 3:41 pm By D. G. Hart

On Reformation Day, mentions of Martin Luther are legion. This post is not about Luther per se but builds on his 1520 pamphlet, The Freedom of a Christian, to underscore the spiritual nature of the gospel and the liberty it promises. Luther distinguished between the inner man, which enjoyed complete freedom, and the outer man, which was servant to everyone and everything. Keeping that distinction between the spiritual and temporal is difficult because many Christians want faith to be relevant... Read more

Was John MacArthur Channeling His Inner Aimee Byrd?

Last updated on: October 30, 2019 at 8:05 am By D. G. Hart

John MacArthur is taking flack for disparaging remarks about Beth Moore. As Mark Galli observed recently, why are standards of decency applied to MacArthur for comments about a celebrity Bible teacher when social justice Christians receive praise for speaking truth to power, not always in delicate ways. MacArthur may have more status than Moore, but it’s not an easy call. Even odder is that evangelical academics would choose to stand with Moore who is not exactly the best example of... Read more

What Should Evangelicals Say about Independence for California (I mean Catalonia)?

Last updated on: October 25, 2019 at 11:46 am By D. G. Hart

And now for something completely different, evangelicals in Spain are not in the habit of taking political stands or pursuing social justice, at least as indicated by stories about reactions to the Spanish Supreme Court’s sentencing of Catalan officials who called for a referendum in 2017 (for Protestant supporters of Catalan independence, this Sunday is not only Reformation Sunday, but Catalan Independence Day). Here‘s a little background from the Brits who still cover the world as if the British Empire... Read more

Biblical Reparations are Deadly

Last updated on: October 24, 2019 at 7:18 am By D. G. Hart

Thabiti Anyabwile tries to persuade readers that reparations in the United States for slavery could be biblical. His own definition is straightforward: I would define reparations as “material and social repayment made as acknowledgement and restitution by an offending party to an aggrieved party for wrong(s) done in order to repair the injuries, losses and/or disadvantages caused by the wrong.” Though these are my own words, I have in mind the work of William “Sandy” Darity at Duke University, who... Read more

Baptize them All, Roman Empire, the United States, and Every Government in Between

Last updated on: October 17, 2019 at 1:58 pm By D. G. Hart

What follows is a review essay from 2011 of two books on religion and politics, with decidedly different subjects. Will it help Democrats pick Mayor Pete over Professor Warren? Will it inspire Republicans to abandon President Trump? Will it even offer guidance on health insurance premiums and gender-neutral bathrooms? Not really. But it may help Christians to avoid reading too much religious significance into what Augustine called the City of Man. Politics According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for... Read more

Remembering Witches is Fun?

Last updated on: October 16, 2019 at 4:31 pm By D. G. Hart

On the North Shore of Boston, visitors and residents have trouble not coming into contact with Salem and also with the city’s tourist industry that feeds off the Witch Trials from 1692. You walk through downtown Salem and you can’t avoid seeing a shop, museum, or food vendor that ties in to the theme of witches and the trial. Even the local newspaper, The Salem News, has a logo that features a witch riding a broom. Good clean fun, I... Read more