Do people ever go from liberal to evangelical?

Last updated on: August 18, 2011 at 7:26 pm by Roger E. Olson

Do people ever go from liberal to evangelical? 2011-08-18T19:26:35-05:00 Roger E. Olson

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I’ve heard said many times that the movement between liberal and evangelical is one-way. Evangelicals move toward liberalism (unless held back), but liberals never move toward evangelicalism.

The point of that claim is that any step away from maximal conservatism (e.g., my postconservative evangelical approach to theology) puts one on a trajectory toward liberalism from which there is no return. Thus, so neo-fundamentalists say, it is always best to stick with traditional beliefs (as they define them, of course!).

Recently I received an encouraging note from a reader of my Reformed and Always Reforming book. I’m copying it here not for self-promotion or self-congratulation but to point out that a sane, sensible, open approach to evangelical theology can and does offer an alternative to neo-fundamentalism that can attract former evangelicals gone liberal back to the evangelical perspective.

My purpose in writing that book and How to Be Evangelical without Being Conservative was to draw people back to the evangelical tent who had drifted away because they thought they had to be fundamentalist to be evangelical. Apparently it worked for one person, at least!

Here is the gentleman’s testimony:

“Before I say thank you, I think I’d better give you some of my backstory: Back in 2007, I had a calling to go into the Anglican ministry (in the Church of England), which was odd (in particular in consideration that I am from a family of English and Welsh Pentecostal, Methodist and Baptist ministers, and that I had never been into an Anglican church other than as a tourist); I immediately began reading theology, though this increasingly came at the expense of my orthodoxy. By September 2008, after reading the Gospel of Matthew, I rejected the true divinity of Christ (though this was private; I could never tell anyone). After this, I began to read a lot of Liberal theology (Tillich, Bultmann, Hick), and by the time of April 2009, I (albeit very sadly) would have had to call myself a theological Liberal (this is despite attending my father’s Pentecostal church and a good Evangelical Anglican church throughout this time.)

I found this very difficult, personally: at the same time I was preparing to study theology at a Liberal Anglo-Catholic seminary (before I started my training in the ministry), and I felt that I was leaving everything I knew behind, as if God had called me into a ministry that seemed theologically richer, yet spiritually and emotionally poorer. It was quite a depressing point in my life.

Thankfully, God hadn’t let me go! Due to changes in government policy, I could not afford to take a second Bachelor degree, and thus could not go to college. It was after this I had a most marvellous evening at my cell group: the curate (who had always – if very mysteriously to me – called himself a ‘Postconservative Evangelical…you may have heard the term before…), introduced me to the work of two people who would go on to change my spiritual life, who I thank God for every day. The first was Rob Bell: in watching the Nooma DVD ‘Sunday’, I felt a strange sense of life, that there WAS hope for Evangelicalism still.

After talking to the curate about this video, about how impressed I was, he went into his study and brought out a semi-slim book: Reformed and Always Reforming. It was quite strange, because I had seen this book in one of my then recent trips to America (I have family in Missouri), and was quite curious about it. I read it (consumed would be the better word) in four hours. Well, if I’m TRULY honest, I thought it was a little conservative at the time (but remember: until that point in my life, I had been thinking that Rahner was pretty conservative!). Nonetheless, something stirred within me – it was as if I could be an Evangelical AND STILL be an imaginative thinker; I had a brief image of what it may be to truly be theologically Evangelical, and yet not ignore the insights of all the thinkers I was reading.

It’s been several years since then and only now am I going into seminary (this September) – God, I believe, is teaching me patience…! But since then, God has done such marvellous works in my life. I can truly now say alongside Thomas – with utter joy – ‘My Lord and my God’; I can truly now recite the Creed with my heart strangely warmed – without feeling I have to reinterpret half the lines!; I can truly now worship alongside my family – that my worship is not fake, that I’m loving the very same Jesus they are. I can truly say I’m a full-blooded, ‘God-fearing, Bible-believing, Jesus-loving’ Evangelical (quoted from your blog!) – even if some of my Jerry Falwell-supporting friends would disagree!

The reason why I’ve decided to write this now is because I have just read Tom Wright’s ‘Jesus and the Victory of God’ and reread Stan Grenz’s ‘Revisioning Evangelical Theology’, and – through reading these postconservative Evangelicals – was reminded of what my mother used to tell me as a little boy: ‘Remember always to say thank you for when somebody has given you a gift, no matter what the form that that gift comes in!’ And so, Prof. Olson, I want to thank you for the gift you gave me in writing your book, for having the courage to write it and yet also refusing to renounce your claim of being an Evangelical, for always being theologically open to the movement of the Holy Spirit: it’s stopped this guy here from ending up as a lifeless, washed-up Liberal theologian; I feel I can be a theologically imaginative, Jesus-loving Evangelical once again.”

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