Evangelical and ecumenical: re-forming a center - Cover Story

Christian Century, July 13, 1994 by Douglas Jacobsen, William Vance Trollinger, Jr.

DURING THE MIDDLE years of the 20th century, most Americans seemed to think of the Protestant world as divided neatly into two opposing parties. On the one side stood liberal, ecumenical Protestantism, which was institutionally embodied in the National Council of Churches; on the other side stood fundamentalism and its cousin, evangelicalism, the latter organized in the National Association of Evangelicals.

In this scheme, liberal Protestantism was defined by its commitment to cooperation across denominational lines, free academic inquiry regarding faith, and progressive social ethics. But liberal, ecumenical Protestants also defined themselves in negative terms. In particular, they were opposed to "obscurantist" fundamentalism, a form of Christianity that, as Willard Sperry of Harvard Divinity School put it in 1946, "lives an isolationist life, apart from the sober brain work of the land." Sperry's hope, and the hope of liberals in general, was that "the slow spread of decent education" would ultimately "discredit" fundamentalism as a viable form of modem Christian faith.

The primary theological agenda of fundamentalist evangelicalism included an emphasis on fundamental doctrines, biblical literalism and worldwide evangelism. Here too, however, there was a negative agenda. Evangelicals and fundamentalists believed in doctrinal purity as opposed to the watered-down beliefs of the ecumenical movement; they believed in the Bible as opposed to numerous "theories" of modern science; and they were committed to evangelism instead of a merely "social" gospel. In all these matters, fundamentalists and evangelicals understood their main foe to be the "liberalism" they saw in the NCC and its member churches. Speaking for the conservative party, Carl F. H. Henry declared that liberals were even worse than Catholics. Catholics, Hell said, only "perverted the central emphases of the biblical message," while liberals dissolved the central message of the gospel in a sea of common human religiousness.

This two-party picture of the American Protestant landscape at mid-century was more caricature than accurate reflection of religious reality. Numerous groups, including Lutherans, Mennonites and Wesleyans of various stripes, failed to fit in either. What is more, in those groups that could be classified as liberal or evangelical, one could identify individuals who expressed discomfort in wearing the colors of their particular side. Although the inadequacies of the two-party picture of Protestantism become more evident as we near the 21st century, its importance should not be underestimated. Wallace Stevens once noted that "we live in the description of the place and not in the place itself." We all live in worlds of symbol and metaphor that simplify the choices we have to make. Regardless of their correspondence to reality, symbols and metaphors profoundly shape the ways we think and act. The view of Protestantism as divided into two antagonistic camps has had enormous implications for American Protestantism, even if this view has not accurately reflected the more complicated realities of Protestant life.

This article is about our hope for a new evangelical identity. We are calling on self-declared evangelicals to rethink their identity, and to jettison their attachment to the two-party picture. Members of mainline churches need to do the same; indeed, it will be very difficult for evangelicals to get beyond the two-party caricature if "the other side" insists on holding onto it. Perhaps we should reveal our own sympathies. While both of us are members of mainline churches--the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), respectively--in important ways we claim the label "evangelical." We were both raised within the evangelical domain; we teach at one of the largest evangelical colleges in the country; and we share certain basically evangelical tenets of faith, including a bibliocentric theology and an emphasis on the importance of personal faith and piety, While in a more perfect world we would be content to call ourselves "Christian" without an adjective, we recognize that in this world that claim may not capture our particular commitments,

We are both convinced that evangelicalism stands at a crossroads. The rise of the Christian Right in politics has greatly heightened the sense of "us vs. them" within American Protestantism. For many evangelicals, liberals of any sort--religious or political--have become a demonized enemy; the best exidence of this was the vicious rhetoric employed by the Christian Right in the 1992 presidential campaign. In a sense, the rise of the Christian Right has refundamentalized the symbolic meaning of the term evangelical for many people (inside and outside evangelicalism). But we also think that a more humble and less strident understanding of what it means to be evangelical has always been present in the broader evangelical movement, is present today and is even gaining strength in certain quarters. It is this alternative and ecumenical sense of "evangelical" that we want to document and encourage.