Earlier I posted a message here about what I see as a watershed among evangelicals. Some, to all appearances, have faith in the Bible even over Jesus Christ. They are determined to believe whatever they think the Bible says because their highest loyalty (unconsciously in most cases) is to it. In other words, IF some hitherto undiscovered verse declared that God hates everyone without exception or qualification (i.e., not just their sins) they would believe it just because one verse seems unequivocally to teach it.
Other evangelicals follow the hermeneutic of Luther and the Anabaptists (strange bedfellows but true in this case!) who regarded the Bible as the divinely inspired cradle that brings us the Christ. Scripture, in other words, is not God. It is the divinely inspired instrument of God’s Word. (Donald G. Bloesch is an excellent example of this approach among recent evangelicals.) Jesus is the Word of God.
The first view feels compelled to harmonize everything in Scripture and to put every verse on the same level of authority and value for faith as every other verse. Thus, a verse that says God hated someone becomes just as much “God’s Word” (taken in its literal sense) as Jesus Christ who in person revealed the loving compassion of God for all people. For many of these people John 3:16 cannot stand against Romans 9 because Romans 9 has more words!
This difference is being played out here–on my blog.
This is a reason why I increasingly view evangelicalism as two movements rather than one. We are like ships passing in the night even though we both call ourselves evangelicals and stand in that movement’s historical trajectory. Wesley and Whitefield have been pitted against each other. Indeed. Thank God they could both serve as catalysts for the Great Awakening, but their profoundly different views of God largely kept them apart. Wesley’s hermeneutic was captivated by God’s love revealed above all else in Jesus Christ. Whitefield’s hermeneutic was captivated by God’s glory revealed above all else in God’s sovereign election of individuals to heaven or hell.
How can these two evangelicalisms work together for the greater glory of God? Well, they probably cannot–especially so long as either side casts aspersions of “idolatry” at the other one. It always starts as a vigorous disagreement about God’s sovereignty and human free will. Next comes the caricaturing of views. Then follows the angry epithets of philosophical reasoning over biblical faithfulness followed by charges of heresy and idolatry.
While I acknowledge that some Arminians have been guilty of such, overall and in general it is representatives of the “new Calvinism” (or sometimes just plain old decretal theology Calvinism) that engage in the most vitriolic rhetoric against other people who are allegedly (so one might have thought) their fellow evangelical Christians. (Many people in the world wide Reformed fellowship are not guilty of this at all.)
When I argue that we are actually two evangelicals and not one I am simply conceding to them–those who seem intent on tarring everyone who does not think like them with the brush of heresy if not apostasy. This is the mentality I learned to call “fundamentalism” when I was growing up and they wanted nothing to do with us and we couldn’t please them no matter what we did. Neither could Billy Graham!
But not many of them have managed to take ownership of the label “conservative evangelical” and speak as if they represent true evangelical Christianity and everyone who disagrees with them represents something else–liberal theology or philosophy or “negotiated Christianity” (read “culturally accommodated Christianity”), etc., etc.
Why don’t we just call it as amicable a divorce as possible and go our separate ways? After all, isn’t it better to have two separate tent meetings than one in which attendees and supporting pastors are constantly brawling with each other? I think so.
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