Today’s Quote 1/28/09

Faith is saying Yes to God’s marriage proposal.  Peter Kreedt

The Future of Evangelicalism

iMonk hits it out of the park again. I hve been an evangelical all my life, and one thing I know for sure, today’s evangelicalism is not the evangelicalism of the middle part of the 20th century. It often descends into goofiness, theological carelessness, fads, and an innate suspicion of reason and the life of the mind.

Here are the words that are iMonk’s money shot: “Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people the evangelical Christian faith in an orthodox form that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. In what must be the most ironic of all possible factors, an evangelical culture that has spent billions of youth ministers, Christian music, Christian publishing and Christian media has produced an entire burgeoning culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures that they will endure. Do not be deceived by conferences or movements that are theological in nature. These are a tiny minority of evangelicalism. A strong core of evangelical beliefs is not present in most of our young people, and will be less present in the future. This loss of “the core” has been at work for some time, and the fruit of this vacancy is about to become obvious.”

Often evangelicalism is like kindling put on a dying fire. You will find a spurt of flame here and there (a Rick Warren or a Bill Hybelsor whoever), but the it is the fire itself that is in danger. It is a movement that is exhausting itself. It can’t come up with enough programs and campaigns to keep the center strong.  Theological conviction and Bible-centered piety are not strong enough values to overcome the centrifugal forces and pieces of us are flying out all over the place. Some see hope in a resurgent Calvinism. I have been at the center of Calvinism and have seen why in three generations white-hot Calvinism ends up in cold unitarianism. I do not put my confidence there, though I am largely Calinistical.

I think that the center of evangelicalism is the shift toward the state of the sentiments rather than the objective realities of the spiritual world. We have much more confidence in the power of the emotions than man as a rational being, the spiritual as objective reality and virtue as essential to human happiness. We have become strings on a violin that must always be plucked to feel alive. We are experience junkies who cannot take comfort in truth and ultimate