(By Phil Johnson)

These notes come from the other seminar Phil did at this year's Shepherds' Conference. They provide a helpful analysis of the contemporary evangelical confusion and how it is we got here.

What is an Evangelical? A survey of how the term has been used and abused.

My topic for this hour is technically a question: What is an evangelical?

That title was assigned to me, and I was given the assignment by e-mail sometime last fall. I'm absolutely thrilled to get a topic like this to deal with. The guys who plan these seminars usually give me wildly popular—but really lousy—books to review. Or they give me really controversial topics to analyze—usually dealing with whatever the latest evangelical fad happens to be—and I've been complaining for a few years that doing nothing but critiques makes me look mean-spirited. I always have to be negative.

So I think assigning me this topic was their attempt to give me a subject I could be more positive about. And I want to say that I greatly appreciate the effort. At least they didn't ask me to review The Shack.

So why did they pick this topic for me? I'm not sure.  I did a couple of seminars a few years ago dealing with the fundamentalist movement, and perhaps they were thinking this seminar could be the other side of that topic. (That's more or less my plan, by the way. If you've listened to those seminars on fundamentalism, I hope this will be a nice bookend to what I said there.)

But I don't know: maybe the guys who planned the conference schedule were confused themselves about how to answer the question What is an evangelical?—because frankly these days practically everyone is confused by that question. So perhaps they just wanted to see what I would do with it.

And I'll confess to you at the outset that in one sense, I find that question as confusing as anyone. I've seen all kinds of people trying to explain what an evangelical is—ranging from the political pundits on the cable news networks to clueless spokespeople from the Emerging Church. There are definitions of evangelicalism on the internet reflecting hundreds of different perspectives—from Anglican evangelicals such as Alistair McGrath and John Stott to Joseph Tkach. He is heir to the religious empire of Herbert W. Armstrong, and he has managed to convince no less than the Bible answer man that the former cult of Armstrongism is now thoroughly evangelical. And I have never heard any two experts completely agree on their definitions of evangelicalism.

So "What is an evangelical?" It's frankly one of those questions you can answer almost any way you want and defend your answer as articulately as you like, and most people are still going to tell you you've got it wrong. Because it seems these days everyone has his own personal idea of what constitutes an evangelical. Ask 100 evangelicals to define what they mean by the term and odds are you're probably going to get 100 different answers—some of them so wildly different as to be virtually contradictory.

Evangelicals have been trying hard to be all things to all men for at least two or three generations, and in this regard they have completely succeeded: The evangelical movement is now so broad and diverse that you can define it practically any way you want. In an article celebrating their 50th anniversary a couple of years ago, Christianity Today said they think diversity is in fact the dominant feature of evangelicalism.

And that's probably true if you are talking about the contemporary evangelical movement. If we can discern the contours of evangelicalism at the moment by looking at the constituency of Christianity Today magazine, I think it would be fair to say that it's one of the largest mixed multitudes ever known in the realm of human religion. And that's not a compliment. It's not a good thing. You'll find that expression "mixed multitude" three times in the King James Version of the Bible, and each time it is a disparaging expression used to describe the backslidden, spiritually eclectic, morally compromised majority of Israelites during the times of their worst apostasies.

Now, I know this is not a popular opinion, and in all likelihood some of you right here in this room will disagree with me when I say this, but in my assessment we are living in a time of apostasy not all that different from some of the eras described in the Old Testament, where the worship of Jehovah was so compromised that good men, including Elijah, sometimes wondered if there were any knees left that had not bowed to Baal.

There you go. I'm already starting to sound pretty negative despite everyone's best efforts to help me be positive. So let me say it this way: I'm positive that the broad evangelical movement today is abominable. The brand of Christianity (or should I say "the assorted brands of Christianity"?) represented by Christianity Today, The National Association of Evangelicals, and the Christian Coalition—the spiritual heirs of Billy Graham, Fuller Seminary, and the Urbana Conferences—that large movement that most of our spiritual parents identified with—that vast movement is now as utterly backslidden and spiritually degenerate as Israel was in her most backslidden state during the times of apostasy described in the book of Judges. We have reached that point where "Everyone [does] what [is] right in his own eyes." And lots of so-called evangelicals think that's just fine. The current editors of Christianity Today seem to think that's just fine. They never tire of celebrating their constituents' "diversity."

I frankly don't like to identify with the contemporary evangelical movement. I'm strongly tempted simply to stop calling myself an evangelical altogether, just to keep from being associated with every infamous religious scoundrel from Ted Haggard to Joel Osteen. What does it actually mean to say we're evangelical when the menagerie of heretics and charlatans appearing nightly on TBN all insist they are evangelical, too? Tony Campolo, who has renounced practically everything that's distinctively evangelical, insists on calling himself an evangelical. Lots of Roman Catholics call themselves evangelical. Lately even Mormons have begun arguing that they have a right to the label as well. None of them would agree on what the term means, of course, but they all want to wear it, because it gives them an artificial connection with the rich heritage of evangelical history.

And that's precisely the problem for me. That's why I'm not quite ready to relinquish the term yet. I do affirm historic evangelical principles. The original evangelicals are my spiritual ancestors. I believe what they believed, and I'm passionate about the things they were passionate about. We share a common faith, and I happen to believe it is the same faith proclaimed by apostles and the early church. But in the broad sweep of church history, the set of convictions I hold is best known by the name evangelicalism. And I'm not ready yet to concede that label to people who in fact have no spiritual connection—and nothing whatsoever in common—with historic evangelical beliefs.

Incidentally, there are some who would try to tell you everything wrong with the visible evangelical movement today is rooted in the original set of beliefs that gave birth to evangelicalism. The pope would head the list of those who would make that argument. He'd say that evangelicalism today is diverse and doctrinally chaotic precisely because the original Protestant evangelicals departed from the magisterium of Rome. He'd say that without an infallible interpreter of Scripture and a bishop who can speak with absolute ex-cathedra authority, it was predictable that evangelicalism would disintegrate into a jumble of contradictory teaching.

For whatever reasons, a lot of erstwhile evangelicals have found that argument compelling. A couple of years ago, Frances Beckwith, who was president of the Evangelical Theological Society at the time, announced that he was converting (or de-converting) to Roman Catholicism. And this was one of his arguments: He had concluded that Evangelicalism lacked any compelling tradition. Looking at evangelicalism in the big picture of church history, he had decided that it was an anomaly, and a dangerous set of ideas to boot.

Oddly enough, that did not keep Beckwith from continuing to insist that he was in fact still entitled to call himself "evangelical," and he originally seemed to think there was no reason he shouldn't be able to retain his post as president of the Evangelical Theological Society.

I have been amazed and appalled over the past decade or so to see a number of young men follow paths similar to Francis Beckwith's. Rightly fed up with the superficiality and doctrinal confusion that dominates the modern and postmodern evangelical movement, they wrongly conclude that evangelical principles are to blame. So they abandon evangelicalism altogether—not just the evangelical movement (which frankly deserves to be abandoned) but also the core beliefs of historic evangelical conviction. Some of them (like Beckwith) run to Rome; others (like Franky Schaeffer and Peter Gillquist) have gone to Eastern Orthodoxy; many more have run after various strains of the Emerging Church Movement—buying into the lie that because emerging churches burn candles and talk about contemplative spirituality, they somehow have a stronger tie to historic Christianity than their parents had in seeker-sensitive churches—where the only liturgy they knew was trivial choruses led by bad rock bands and sermons based on references to pop culture. Frankly, the liturgy of the average Emergent gathering is ten times worse than that—but still, lots of young people are abandoning evangelical beliefs because they think those beliefs are what made the evangelical movement of today as wacky and embarrassing as it is.

Now, I'm convinced that the evangelical movement went astray not because they followed historic evangelical principles, but because they abandoned them. Frankly, contemporary evangelicalism has no right to the label. For the most part, the evangelical movement is not evangelical at all, and it hasn't been since the 1950s.

I want to use our time in this session to explain why that's my point of view—by surveying the history of evangelicalism. I have no outline, really—just a very long timeline, which we have to move through very quickly. But I'll try to move in a straight line without jumping around, and I'll do my best to make it easy for you to stay with me.

(To be continued tomorrow)