The recent splinters in evangelicalism arise more from tribal loyalties and political rhetoric than doctrinal differences.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Once when I was a youth pastor, a woman pleaded with me to let her rebellious son go to youth camp even though he missed the deadline to sign up.
“I just want him to get tired enough that he’s moved to walk down the aisle one time,” she said. “Then I’ll know that no matter what he does after that, at least he’ll be in heaven.”
I sighed at the cultural Christianity I’d come to know all too well—one that substituted a momentary repetition of words for the gospel. The problem was that I thought theology was the answer. Many of us did.
The folk religion and human-centeredness of much of American revivalism contrasts with a “big God” theology and a focus on fidelity to confessions of faith. This makes sense. A thorough-going pragmatism can lead quickly into a “whatever works” mindset. This kind of anticreedalism leads not to the absence of creeds but to the proliferation of unwritten and unspoken creeds.
At the same time, many of us thought the problem could be solved by connecting the rootlessness and overemphasis on novelty in American evangelicalism with an older theological tradition.
In one sense, I still think that’s valid. A church that learns from John Calvin or John Wesley is tied to a deeper stream, since Calvin and Wesley are themselves connected to Augustine, Irenaeus, and so on.
And yet, the quest for novelty and for narrowing parameters often turned out to be just as present in theologically focused evangelicals—and perhaps even more so. It’s easy, after all, to skip straight from the apostle John to John Calvin to Jonathan Edwards to the guy with …