Category Archives: Evangelicalism

The Post-Evangelical – 7

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Chapter 7 of Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical is entitled, ‘The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Something Quite Like the Truth’.  It’s about epistemology – how we come to know things.

Tomlinson suggests that what is going on is that many within evangelicalism begin with some vague feelings of discomforts about various aspects of their evangelical church.  They are bothered about the chorus-singing, perhaps, or the dogmatic tone of the preaching,  – and then develop deeper concerns about the credibility of the entire evangelical paradigm. …

The Post-Evangelical – 6

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The Post-Evangelical is entitled ‘Let Me Tell You a Story’.  This chapter deals with the failure of modern, and the rise of the postmodern, ‘stories’.

What is the new postmodern world that is emerging?

It is a world which understands itself through biological rather than mechanistic models; a world where people see themselves as belonging to the environment, rather than over it or apart from it; a world distrustful of institutions, hierarchies, centralized bureaucarcies and male dominated organizations. 

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The Post-Evangelical – 5

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In chapter 5 – ‘Woolly Liberals?’ – Dave Tomlinson informs us that he shares with evangelicals a rejection of theological liberalism.  But what he does not share are evangelicals’ reasons for opposing liberalism.

Indeed, he expresses amazement at ‘how paranoid evangelicals are about liberalism’.  Evangelicals are constantly patrolling their boundaries, lest one of their number should trespass into liberal territory.

This is not to suggest, says Tomlinson, that theology and doctrine are unimportant:

‘Far from it; but there is no evidence from the Bible that it is (sic) of ultimate importance. 

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The Post-Evangelical – 4

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Chapter 4 of Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical is entitled ‘Longing to Grow’.  In this chapter, an attempt is made to explain the evangelical ‘problem’ in terms of a couple of psychological models.  ‘The problem’ for Tomlinson, as is becoming increasingly clear as the book develops, is that evangelicals are way too sure of themselves and need to grow up and start doubting things.

A couple of stories are given of people who started off as evangelicals but (you guessed it) became disillusioned with evangelical certaintism and found no welcome for their doubts and questions. …

The Post-Evangelical – 3

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Why are many people irritated by certain aspects of ‘evangelical culture’?  This is the question addressed in chapter 3 of Dave Tomlinson’s book The Post-Evangelical.  A summary and a brief comment follow.

Even in New Testament times, people were arguing that Gentile believers must submit to the Jewish law in order to be real Christians.  Throughout the Christian era, the missionary enterprise has been dogged by similar problems – requiring indigenous peoples to adopt not only a change of heart but also a change of culture. …

The Post-Evangelical – 2

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Chapter 2 of The Post-Evangelical, by Dave Tomlinson, is entitled, ‘We’ve Never Had it so Good!’

Here, the author asks why, if evangelicalism has experienced such a resurgence over the past 30 years, many people have become dissatisfied with it.

Tomlinson notes a very considerable transformation that took place in British evangelicalism between 1980 and 1990.  This was due to a considerable extent to the ‘charismaticizing’ of mainstream evangelicalism.  Whereas the charismatic movement in its early days in the last 1960s and early 1970s was seen by many as a threat to evangelicalism, the former has been assimilated by the latter to a remarkable extent, so that much of the energy of current evangelical activity derives from charismatic believes and practices. …

The Post-Evangelical – 1

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My reading on the emerging church has taken me back to Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical.  First published in the UK 1995 (but not until 2003 in the US), this book is regarded as something of a seminal piece amongst a number of emerging church people.  It gave a voice to the disillusionment with evangelicalism that many felt.

You can read Dave Tomlinson’s own account of the writing of this book here.  You can see reviews here and here. …

The SCM Press A-Z of Evangelical Theology

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Just over 30 years ago, SCM Press published James Barr’s Fundamentalism.  It’s a bit of a rant, adopting a tone only slightly less dismissive and self-satisfied than that taken more recently by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion.  Barr maintained that ‘fundamentalism’ does not have a theology at all, it merely has doctrines.

What Barr meant by ‘fundamentalism’ was what you and I know as ‘evangelicalism’.  It is refreshing, then, that the good people at SCM Press have finally decided that not only there is such a thing as ‘evangelical theology’ after all, but that it would be worth their while getting someone to write an A to Z of it.…

Misreading Scripture

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N.T. Wright, in his recent book Scripture and the Authority of God, suggests some of the ways in which the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’ have misread Scripture.  Here are some of the items in Wright’s list:-

Misreadings of the ‘Right’

  • the openly dualistic ‘rapture’ reading of 1 Thessalonians 4
  • the explicitly materialist ‘prosperity gospel’ understanding of biblical promises
  • the support of slavery
  • the endemic racialism of much Western culture
  • undifferentiated reading of Old and New Testaments
  • unacknowledged and arbitrary pick-and-mix selection of an implicit canon-within-a-canon
  • support for the death penalty
  • discovery of ‘religious’ meanings and exclusion of ‘political’ ones, thus often tacitly supporting the social status quo
  • attempted ‘biblical’ support for the modern state of Israel as the fulfilment of scriptural prophecy
  • an overall failure to pay attention to context and hermeneutics

Misreadings of the ‘Left’

  • the claim to ‘objectivity’ or to a ‘neutral’ reading of the text
  • the claim that modern history or science has either ‘disproved the Bible’ or made some of its central claims redundant, undesirable, or unbelievable
  • the attempt to relativise biblical teaching by appealing to Enlightenment-generated ‘principles’ (e.g.
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Fundamentalism and evangelicalism

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The word ‘fundamentalism’ has gone through several metamorphoses in the course of its 100-year history.  Originally, it attached itself to the sentiments of a set of articles entitled, The Fundamentals: a Testimony to the Truth, which sought to affirm, in the light of ‘attacks’ from liberals and modernists, what were regarded as essential doctrines of the Christian faith.  Latterly, of course, the word has often been used to refer to militant extremists of any religious background. …