Diversity among evangelicals
In one basic sense, an evangelical Christian is a Christian who evangelizes--that is, whose commitment to Christianity manifests itself in, as M. E. Marty put it, "efforts to witness to and share the faith." But to evangelicals, "sharing the faith" means, of course, sharing an evangelical version of the faith, and these versions vary widely. To give one example, many evangelicals see the Bible as the infallible word of God. But, as D. W. Dayton notes, this anticritical view of the Bible is more evident among fundamentalist evangelicals and their progeny, the post-World War II neoevangelicals, than among evangelicals in the Pentecostal and holiness movements. And Martin Luther, to whom evangelical Lutherans owe their name, dismissed James, the twentieth book of the Christian New Testament, as "an epistle of straw, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel in it."
In fact, Max Weber described four distinct, yet overlapping, subgroups within evangelicalism: classical evangelicals loyal to the principles of the Protestant Reformation; pietistic evangelicals who augment Reformation thought with an emphasis on a "born-again," personal conversion experience and holy living; fundamentalist evangelicals defined chiefly by cultural separation and opposition to a critical view of the Bible; and progressive evangelicals intent on adapting evangelicalism to an increasingly pluralistic culture. Employing appreciably more color, Cullen Murphy likened evangelicalism to a multi-ring circus featuring simultaneous, ongoing acts by performers with little in common other than the sprawling tent over their heads. |
