From the Press

The three challenges for evangelicals today

By Martin Davie

Reproduced from the Church of England Newspaper, Thursday 1 May 2003

The words of St Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:21-25 take us to the heart of the three theme of Bible, Cross and Mission which are the focus for the fourth National Evangelical Anglican Congress (NEAC4) this coming September.

First they explain why the cross lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It is because it is in the apparent folly of the cross that we find God's wisdom and God's power. In the words of Michael Green in his book To Corinth with Love:

What could be more ludicrous than to maintain in sophisticated Greek circles that God's wisdom and salvation lay in a despised and executed criminal? What could be more blasphemous to Jewish hearers than the suggestion that God's promised deliverance lay in a crucified man exposed in shame on his cross? Yet those who believed found that cross to both the wisdom and the power of God: God's wisdom in humbling pride and rescuing the hopeless, and God's power in breaking through the barrier of guilt and alienation which kept Jews and Greeks alike from God.

Secondly, they explain why we have to base our theology on the Bible. Although, as St Paul makes clear in Rom 1:19-20, the natural order objectively reveals God to us, in our fallen state we are unable to profit from this revelation. Our own natural wisdom only serves to lead us astray. It is through the divine wisdom manifested to us in the crucified Christ that we can know God rightly and the God given witness to Christ is found in the prophetic and apostolic witness in the Old and New Testaments.

Thirdly, they make clear what should lie at the heart of Christian mission. In recent decades it has rightly been emphasised that mission has to be about more than simply the conversion of individuals to the Christian faith. It has an inescapable social and political dimension as well. However, this having been said, we always have to remember that the primary calling of the Christian church is not to proclaim some programme for social and political change but to point to the crucified Christ as the sole answer to the deepest needs of the human race, to know what God is like and how our alienation from him may be overcome.

These verses also address the strengths and weaknesses of the three streams of evangelicalism that were explored at the recent Eclectics day conference at St Mary's, Islington.

The first stream, Conservative Evangelicalism, has rightly emphasised the importance of a cross-centred theology rooted in the teaching of the Bible, and it has also rightly emphasised the ever present danger of this theology being watered down by other forms of teaching that are rooted in human wisdom rather than in the wisdom of God.

All this is good. However, the weakness of conservative Evangelicalism lies in the fact that it can be tempted to ignore the fact that the message of the cross rules out all human boasting (1 Cor 1:29-31) including boasting about our own theological rectitude. That is to say, while it is vital to be concerned about theological correctness we must accept the fact that this should not be used as an excuse to sit in judgement on other people or avoid re-examining cherished formulations of the Christian message, and sometimes I think conservative Evangelicalism can fall into both these errors.

The second stream, open Evangelicalism, has rightly emphasised that if we are to preach the message of the cross effectively, we have to make connections between this message and the audience to whom we are preaching. That is why it has sought ways of re-expressing the evangelical message in ways that address current concerns and forms of thought. It has also rightly emphasised that the kind of disunity addressed by St Paul in 1 Cor 1:10-17 is incompatible with the reconciliation brought about by the cross, which is why open Evangelicals have worked to maintain the unity of the Church of England, and to foster wider ecumenical unity.

All this is good. However, I suggest that the weakness of open Evangelicalism lies in the fact that it can be tempted to water down the folly of the gospel message in order to make it more compatible with currently fashionable ways of thinking, and can be tempted to so emphasise the importance of unity that questions of theological truth are overlooked or set aside. To put it another way, if the temptation of conservative Evangelicalism is to say 'No' too loudly and too frequently, the temptation facing open Evangelicalism is to be too open and to say 'Yes' too much even when a clear 'No' is what is called for.

The third stream, Charismatic Evangelicalism, has rightly emphasised that in the New Testament the preaching of the crucified Christ was accompanied by acts of supernatural power wrought by the working of the Holy Spirit, and that we need to be open to these acts of power being performed in our day as well. It also reminds us that just as in New Testament times so also in our day such acts of power can often be very effective in creating an opening for the preaching of the cross.

All this is good. However, like the other two streams of Evangelicalism, Charismatic Evangelicalism also has its weakness, which is a temptation to an unrealistic triumphalism which can forget the fact that the message of the cross is about power manifested in weakness, and that often God's most important work is performed when there are no apparent acts of supernatural power and our prayers for God to act appear to go unanswered. As St Paul heard God telling him in precisely this situation: 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness' (2 Cor 12:9).

In summary, I suggest that if NEAC 4 is to succeed in taking Anglican evangelicals towards the future that God wants for them then there needs to be a concentration on the themes highlighted by St Paul in 1 Cor 1:18-2:5, and evangelicals need to have an honest conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three streams of evangelicalism so that they can learn from each other and go forward together, strengthened with a greater unity, to proclaim the message of the crucified Christ to a needy world.

Dr Martin Davie is a member of the Eclectics committee