getting over evangelicalism

I don't seem to have blogged much lately. And when I do, it often seems to be a quote from elsewhere. I guess that's in the spirit of some blogs, but not something I want to do too much of. However, this article rather struck a chord (h/t Tony Jones, who gave a h/t to Rick Bennett).

The medium is Patrol Magazine. The article starts like this:

Get Over It

The current obsession with definition is too late to save evangelicalism.

HOWEVER LONG it may take to relinquish its hold on American culture, evangelicalism in the United States—still probably best defined by the British historian David Bebbington as a movement whose members adhere to conversionism, Biblicism, activism and crucicentrism—faces near-certain extinction. It has been blinded by its symbiotic relationship with the Enlightenment, and has perpetually failed to see beyond its hopelessly Western perceptions. Confined to the paramaters of liberal rationalism, it has mounted no challenge to the present political order and offered no intellectually acceptable explanation for how one is to live and think in the postmodern world. As this magazine has chronicled, its brightest children are throwing up their hands in record numbers, defecting heavy-heartedly to less temporal churches, or to no church at all.

The angry tone continues through the article. I can't really speak to the American situation - though if American Evangelicalism is in terminal decline, it still looks quite healthy from the outside, in many places. Nor am I sure that I have a particularly good overview of British Evangelicalism: but the centre of gravity of the Evangelical Alliance doesn't seem all that unhealthy, nor as dogmatic as that described above.

And yet this way of thinking does chime with some impressions I share.

The fight to define evangelicalism in its latter days also operates on the mistaken premise that an imagined theological purity or conformance to a “lost” orthodoxy, rather than an emphasis on ethics, spiritual discipline and mystery, will revive the power of the Christian church. It is astonishing that so many intelligent Christians seem to believe there is a deficit in emphasis on evangelism and scriptural literalism, and that, if the hatches are just battened down on a more solid “worldview,” evangelicalism can resume explaining the universe to new generations of believers.

I can empathize with senior members of our local church who bemoan a lost era when things were different. But that era is lost. And we're not going back there. If we pray for the Holy Spirit to bring revival, we must know that it will be unsettling, challenging, firey. I don't want to revive the 1950s - or the 1850s or the 1750s. Rationalist enlightenment values just don't stack up today. And that, I think, means that what we have understood to be evangelicalism is over.