A Liberal’s Take on Evangelicalism

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 10:38 pm by Scot McKnight

A Liberal’s Take on Evangelicalism 2015-03-13T22:38:15-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Kelvin Holdsworth offers his ideas of what evangelicalism is and at the link you can read his explanations.

Do you think this is fair? accurate? adequate? shallow?

I thought I might help Malcolm out with 10 things about Evangelicals that Evangelicals tend not to tell you when you first encounter them and when you first encounter an Evangelical church.

Evangelicals believe in hell.

Evangelicals claim to read the bible and claim to take it very seriously but curiously, they don’t read much of it in their churches.

Evangelicals tend to view only one theory of the atonement as valid.

Many Evangelicals believe the modern State of Israel to be a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

It is a common view amongst Evangelicals that it is only Evangelicals who are the real Christians.

Despite reading the bible and claiming to believe it, many evangelicals believe simony to be a legitimate way of getting what they want in the church.

Evangelicals form the core of the opposition to lesbian and gay people in many denominations.

Evangelicalism tends to follow the cultural trends of society 30 years later than other types of Christianity.

Evangelicals tend to think that the personal is more important than God’s good news for society.

Evangelicals are a modern phenomenon.

I hope this is helpful to Malcolm and to others who wonder what Evangelicalism is all about. Sometimes you can’t see things clearly whilst you are very close to them. That’s certainly my experience of Evangelicalism. Notwithstanding all the things above, Evangelicalism remains the place where I learned to love Jesus and where I met a God who loves me still. It also feeds many other churches – we’ve lots of people at St Mary’s who have been touched greatly by Evangelicalism but who now need to find somewhere to work out what bits of the Christian faith are true because they know that what they’ve learned so far is inadequate for them at the moment. I have much for which to be thankful to Evangelicalism.

Evangelicalism

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