(By Phil Johnson)

Today's post is continued from yesterday ... and is taken from Phil's notes at the Shepherds' Conference on the question of "What is an evangelical?"

By the way, let me recommend a book for you. It's a small book—91 pages, and you can read it in a single evening. The title is the same as this seminar: What Is an Evangelical?, by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by the Banner of Truth Trust. (It's actually an excerpt from a longer book, Knowing the Times, so if you have that book, you already have "What is an Evangelical?") It's a lightly-edited transcript of three lectures Lloyd-Jones gave in 1971 at the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in Britain. He probes this question in detail, What Is an Evangelical? and for the most part it would be hard to improve on his analysis of the question.

In the providence of God (and totally unrelated to the fact that I'm doing this seminar today), Kevin Deyoung is summarizing the Lloyd-Jones lectures on his blog this week. Kevin DeYoung is Senior Pastor of University Reformed Church in East Lansing, MI, and he is half of the writing team that produced a great book titled Why We're Not Emergent (by Two Guys who Should Be). He summarized the first of Lloyd-Jones's lectures yesterday and posted the second of his three summaries today. If you can't read the book itself, be sure you read Kevin DeYoung's summaries at revkevindeyoung.com.

I don't know if there are copies of the Lloyd-Jones book in the bookstore, but I hope so. If not, order it. I'll try to quote from it a few times if the clock permits.

Now let me explain I mean when I speak of evangelical principles—the core and the bedrock of evangelical belief. As I said, I have in mind primarily two things: the authority of Scripture and the truth of the gospel. I think it really as simple as that.

Evangelicals, historically, have regarded the Bible itself as the very Word of God and therefore the highest of all authorities on earth; and they have regarded the gospel of salvation by grace through faith through the work of Christ on the cross as the non-negotiable center of everything we believe and teach.

If you affirm those truths in the evangelical sense, you will instantly understand that the implications of those two principles are very far-reaching and not superficial. For example, authentic evangelical belief has always stood firmly for the primacy of divine grace, the exclusivity of Christ, the substitutionary nature of the atonement, and faith alone as the sole instrument of our justification. I would also argue that evangelical conviction regarding the authority of Scripture has also always included the truth of biblical inerrancy. It's my personal conviction that someone who denies the inerrancy of Scripture places himself outside the mainstream of historic evangelical belief and doesn't really deserve to be called an evangelical. But inerrancy is not a truth I'm adding to the authority of Scripture; that's just what evangelicals mean when they affirm the authority of Scripture.

But at for simplicity's sake, I want to stress that all historic evangelical essentials are subsumed under those two heads: the authority of Scripture and the centrality of the true gospel. Or if you prefer Reformation terminology, sola Scriptura and sola fide. (If you're not clear on what the Reformers meant by sola Scriptura and sola fide, or if you're unfamiliar with the weight the Reformers placed on those two principles, I'll try to clarify those things when we get to that point on the timeline.)

But let's start with the apostles and the New Testament church. I've already said it's my conviction that evangelicalism dates back to the apostolic era, and in very simple terms, here's why: Survey the theology of the New Testament and you will discover that these two vital evangelical principles—the authority of Scripture and the importance of getting the gospel right—are repeatedly stressed. You will find no emphasis whatsoever on the things that are important to the institutional, hierarchical systems of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Apostolic succession, episcopal structures, liturgical formulae, and most of the other doctrines those traditions tend to stress most of all—including the veneration of Mary, the doctrine of purgatory, the confessional booth, and whatnot—you won't find any mention of those things in the New Testament at all.

On the other hand, most of the epistles in the New Testament were written precisely to defend those two evangelical essentials. Most of the epistles have a polemical thrust. It is clear as you read the New Testament epistles (as well as the book of Acts) that even in the very earliest apostolic churches, early gnostic influences were already attacking the authority of Scripture. These really were just embryonic forms of ideas that later developed into gnosticism—but they came against the church even before the canon of Scripture was complete. The apostle John dealt with them in the first two of his three epistles. He basically epitomizes the evangelical spirit in his second epistle, where in the midst of stressing the importance of love for the true brethren, he tells the elect lady that if someone comes to her with a message that's anything other than the teaching of Christ as proclaimed through the apostles and recorded in the New Testament, she was not even to give that person a formal greeting—which was a ceremonial show of respect and brotherhood. Such a person is not a brother at all, but a false teacher to be avoided, even if he calls himself a Christian. Second John 7-11:

7 For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.

8  Watch yourselves, so that you may not lose what we have worked for, but may win a full reward.

9  Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.

10  If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting,

11  for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works.

That kind of careful differentiation between truth and falsehood is classically evangelical. And don't miss the point that what John was defending there was the authority of revealed truth against the dreams and imaginations of these proto-gnostics.

Specifically, that text affirms the importance of a sound christology (against a doctrine that clearly entailed a denial of some aspect of the incarnation). John says someone who denies the incarnation—the deity of Christ and His eternal preexistence—is not a Christian at all. All the fundamentals of trinitarian doctrine are of course implied in that.

But what's distinctive about evangelical conviction is summarized in the principle of sola Scriptura. We believe these things to be essential Christianity not because some pope or church council declares them to be so, but because that is what Scripture teaches. The basic doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation are so woven into the warp and woof of the New Testament that if you deny them and play games with your interpretation of Scripture in order to get around them, you have in effect thumbed your nose at the authority of Scripture. That is the point of 2 John, and that is one of the pillars of evangelical conviction.

Or to state the fact more simply, 2 John 7 expressly says that those who deny the incarnation—"those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh"—are deceivers and antichrists. Evangelicals accept that differentiation because they implicitly accept the authority of Scripture.

Or consider the book of Galatians. The entire message of that epistle is rooted in evangelical principles. At the very start, the apostle Paul makes this clear. Chapter 1, verses 8-9, he writes: "Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed." There's that classic evangelical differentiation again between authentic Christianity and all the false varieties. Paul states it twice for emphasis in the span of two verses. (As an editor, that's the kind of redundancy I would normally edit out.) But the repetition is deliberate and emphatic for a reason. Paul is purposely drawing a clear line in the sand. And here the focus is specifically on the gospel. There's one true Gospel, Paul says. It's "the one we preached to you" (v. 8). It's "the one you received" (v. 9). It's the gospel given to us in Scripture. There are lots of false gospels, but only one authentic gospel, and that is what defines and establishes the boundaries of authentic Christian faith. Paul could not be more emphatic: "even if we or an angel [or] anyone is preaching to you a [contrary] gospel . . . let him be accursed." The gospel is the central issue. And as Paul goes on to argue in Galatians, justification by grace alone through faith alone—apart from works—is the very heart of the gospel. The better you understand the doctrine of justification, the better you understand the gospel.

Now, if you wanted to boil the evangelical principle down to one and one only statement, that would be it: the core truth of the gospel is embodied in the doctrine of justification by faith.

In fact, I have a book in my library that makes the argument that there ultimately is only one true evangelical essential. In fact, That's the title of the book: The Evangelical Essential, by Philip Janowsky. And he argues, very convincingly, too, that a survey of historical theology would suggest that the one the belief that defines our doctrine as truly evangelical is the principle of sola fide. Justification by faith—and specifically the imputation of righteousness to the believer apart from any works or ceremonies.

Now Philip Janowsky is a United Methodist, and I don't normally recommend books by United Methodists, but this one is quite good. The book was published by Vision House in 1994, so I imagine it's out of print by now, but if you can get a copy, it's a helpful little book.

And I would agree with the stress Janowsky puts on justification by faith in this sense: of the two pillars of evangelical conviction I'm giving you—the authority of Scripture and a sound, biblical understanding of the gospel—the point about the gospel goes more to the heart of what defines an evangelical than anything else.

In fact, that's reflected in the word evangelical. Obviously, it's derived from the Greek word for gospel—the evangelion; the good news. So the name evangelical itself is a reference to the gospel. And the reason Janowsky says the heart of evangelical belief is summarized in that one distinctive truth (instead of the two I have given you) is this: While there are non-evangelicals and even some cults who might share our commitment to the authority of Scripture—or claim that they do—no one but evangelicals thoroughly and consistently grasp the principle of sola fide and all its implications. So doctrine of justification by faith is in fact both the defining doctrine of historic evangelicalism and the very heart of the gospel message.

And the reason I believe the true apostolic church was classically evangelical is that's precisely the argument Paul makes in the book of Galatians. It is also the theme of Romans, Hebrews, and Ephesians. It is likewise reflected to one degree or another in virtually every book in the New Testament.

Bishop NT Wright's so-called New Perspective on Paul notwithstanding, what you see in Paul's battle with the Judaizers is a classic defense of evangelical principles. What Paul was defending in Galatians and elsewhere was the gospel, not a postmodernized notion of racial and ethnic diversity. He was defending the evangelical simplicity of the true gospel against the legalizing influence of the Judaizers. (If you doubt that, I'm sorry. My advice would be to read a little less of what's currently in vogue in the academic community and a little more from the rich heritage of evangelical commentators.) But let's not get sidetracked.

Remember, the apostle John drew a line between evangelical truth and incipient forms of gnosticism. Paul was erecting a different boundary—between the true gospel and the false soteriology of the Judaizers. Both apostles embodied the evangelical spirit.