Evangelicalism: then and now.

For awhile, I have been thinking about what exactly evangecalism is, and the other day I was directed to David Bebbington’s Quadrilateral definition:

• biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible (e.g. all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages)
• crucicentrism, a focus on the atoning work of Christ on the cross
• converionism, the belief that human beings need to be converted
• activism, the belief that the gospel needs to be expressed in effort

Those are great ideals to strive for, and they make sense, at a macro-level, within Protestant Christianity (I say Protestant Christianity, because I just don’t know about Roman Catholicism or Orthodox Streams to speak into them.) Sadly, I think North-American Evangelicalism has narrowed these ideals into the following:

• biblicism, a particular regard for an ahistorical, context-free reading of the Bible (e.g. read what you want to read)
• crucicentrism, a focus on the atoning work of Christ on the cross as fire-insurance.
• converionism, the belief that human beings need to be converted to a very particular ideology
• activism, the belief that the gospel needs to be expressed in effort to make Christianity the predominant Culture, ridding the evils of any one else’s point-of-view.

As our culture changes (and seriously, people, it is changing), Evangelicals need to re-assess the quadrilateral and expand it from being 4 points for person-centered judgement to 4 points for spirit-led love. To help people think about these, I think I’m going to break this up and talk about each one of these points in a pattern of origin, fall, and redemption. This means some research on my part, so they’ll show up eventually.  Until then, think about the 4 points and what you think about my subversion of the definition.

WK

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This entry was written by Will, posted on October 26, 2008 at 12:33 pm, filed under Christianity, Church and tagged Bebbington, Christianity, Culture, definition, Evangelical. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.