What’s
An Evangelical?
The
Cruciality of the Cross
What’s
an evangelical? Better, who
is an evangelical? Simply
put, evangelicals are those who glory in the cross of Christ.
Our faith arises from it; our thinking converges on it; our life
radiates from it.
Evangelicals are aware that the cross has
made atonement for all humankind as God made “at one” with Himself
disobedient, defiled sinners who were otherwise hopelessly separated
from Him by a gaping chasm they were never going to be able to bridge.
Evangelicals know that while God is
love [1st John
4:8 ] and can therefore do nothing but love, when God’s love
encounters human sin his love “burns hot”, as Luther liked to say.
God’s anger or wrath, then, is never the contradiction or
denial of his love. (Indifference
is always the antithesis of love. After
all, the people with whom we are angry we at least take seriously; the
people to whom we are indifferent we’ve already dismissed as
insignificant.) God’s
anger “heats up” only because He loves us so very much and so very
relentlessly that He can’t remain indifferent to us and won’t
abandon us. Profoundly He
loves sinners more (or at least more truly, more realistically) than we
love ourselves, since our self-love, perverted by sin, issues only in
self-destruction. And as the
cross on which He “did not spare his own Son but gave Him up for us
all” [Romans
8:32
] makes plain, He longs to spare us torment more than He longs to spare
Himself.
We
must make no mistake. Because
God is holy, sin breaks His heart. More
than merely break His heart, however, sin also mobilizes His anger and
provokes His revulsion. Then
what is God to do with women and men whose ingratitude and insolence
have grieved Him, angered Him and disgusted Him?
One option is to resign them to what they deserve – except that
it’s no option at all, since love is all God is and therefore all He
can do. For this reason He
sets about recovering and restoring those who were created in His image.
Meant to mirror his glory, they now glorify themselves, therein
rendering His image unrecognizable.
If the predicament of sinners is to be
relieved, then those living in the “far country”, so very far from
the Father as to be pronounced “dead, lost” [Luke
15: 24 ] have to be reconciled to Him.
Since they are currently in the far country, why don’t they
just get up and “go home”? There’s
more to it than this. In
point of fact they are where they are not
on account of their sin (a misunderstanding heard too often) but on
account of God’s judgement. Our
foreparents, we should recall, didn’t cavalierly sashay out of the
Garden of Eden or confusedly stumble out or defiantly parade themselves
out. They were driven
out. Who drove them out?
God did. He expelled
them by a judicious act. Sin,
contrary to much popular thought, does not estrange us from God. Sin
mobilizes God’s judgement, and God’s judgement ensures our
alienation from Him. Therefore
the invitation to be reconciled to Him can’t be issued until His
judgement has been dealt with. The
cross is that love-fashioned deed of mercy wherein the just Judge
absorbs His righteous judgement upon sinners, thereby allowing them to
“come home” without in any way “fudging” His holiness or
compromising His integrity or submerging His truth.
Only because “in Christ God was reconciling the world to
Himself” can the apostle urge, “We beseech you on behalf of Christ,
be reconciled to God.” [2nd
Corinthians 5:19, 20]
God’s tireless pursuit of people who
persist in fleeing Him culminates in the cross, wherein He finally
overtakes them and wraps them in the arms of the crucified.
But of course the cross doesn’t appear out of nowhere and
insert itself in the year 27 C.E. It
was anticipated through the God-appointed sacrificial system of the
Older Testament. For
centuries God had been schooling a people,
Israel
, in the necessity, meaning and ethos of sacrifice, always preparing for
the Advent of Israel’s greater Son.
Reflecting the outlook of the Older
Testament, the Newer reflects the priority of the cross on every page.
One-half of the written gospels is given over to one week of
Jesus’ life, the last week wherein His cruciform earthly ministry
(John Calvin maintained that the shadow of the cross fell on Jesus’
life and ministry from the day He was born) crescendos to the climax of
the cross. The first half of
the epistles announces the gospel of the cross; the second half unfolds
the nature and pattern and rigour of Christian discipleship in the light
of the cross. All
evangelical understanding, then, emanates from the cross, as do all
evangelical faith and obedience.
Evangelicals, then, are those who cherish the “word of the
cross”, grounded in the atonement, as the “word of truth, the gospel
of your salvation”. [1st
Corinthians
1:18
; Ephesians 1:13]
The
Place of Proclamation and the Necessity of Decision
Evangelicals
characteristically find themselves constrained to proclaim
this message just because the message itself is inherently missiological.
In other words, the proclamation isn’t an “add-on” or an
after-thought. Proclamation
remains an aspect of the message itself: “gospel” defines itself as
“gospel announced”.
So far from resembling proselytizing or even propaganda, the
proclamation of the gospel belongs to the logic of the gospel.
Evangelicals, then, are aware that mission is to God’s people
as burning is to fire. Burning
characterizes fire; apart from burning, fire has no existence.
Mission
establishes the church and characterizes it, for God’s people are
created by the revelation of the cross.
We cling to it. We
exist for the purpose of announcing a crucified and risen Lord who
“fills all things” [Ephesians
4:10; 1:23] Indeed, since
Christ “fills” every nook, crevice and corner of the universe; since
Christ therefore laps everyone’s life at all times, evangelicals
understandably continue to point to and point others to the One whose
coming to them spells only blessing.
Such proclamation, needless to say, isn’t
announced in a “Who cares?” attitude, as if the hearer’s response
were of no significance, or at least of no
eternal significance. What’s
at stake in any announcement of the gospel is always more than a
“response” that is little more than whim or preference or even
prejudice. What’s at stake
is nothing less than the hearer’s salvation.
For this reason the declaration of the gospel always elicits a
particular decision from the hearer, that “U-turn” which scripture
labels repentance. With
appropriate sobriety and suitable solemnity – yet also with
unrestrained joy – the decision the gospel elicits is an
“about-face” from darkness to light, from indifference or hostility
to love, from death to life. The
lattermost point must be given its full weight: the decision to which
the gospel summons the hearer has everything on earth and in heaven
hanging on it.
This decision, we should note, need not be made in an instant; in
fact more often than not it isn’t made in an instant.
The fact that the process of deciding is protracted in most cases
doesn’t detract in the slightest from its veracity.
Nevertheless, at some point the decision needs
to have been made as the rebel surrenders, the icy heart is thawed,
and the spiritually inert is resurrected and Love is loved.
Covenant
Faithfulness and Lifelong Repentance
The
God who has promised ever to be our God, God
for us, never rescinds His covenant with us.
In turn He longs for us ever to be His people as we own our
covenant with Him. Finding
us to be covenant-breakers with Him, however, He gives us His Son and
directs us to the Nazarene as the one instance of human covenant
faithfulness to the Father. For
this reason the decision of faith and obedience that we make, we must
make not once only; rather the decision has to be renewed every day.
Every morning we must recommit ourselves to our Lord, to His
truth, to His way, and – no less, even perhaps hardest of all – to
His people. In Luther’s
famous tract, The Ninety-Five Theses that he nailed to door of the
Wittenberg
church in 1517, the first thesis sets the tone for all that follows and
suffuses it. Luther’s
first thesis will ever remain the “bass note” for all of us: “The
Christian life consists of daily, lifelong repentance.” In
other words, every morning we have to re-orient ourselves to our Lord,
determined to identify ourselves with Him and follow Him
today amidst all dangers, deceptions and distractions.
Yet the decision we make, while it’s
unquestionably the inception of the Christian life, isn’t the
termination of that life. Much
arduous discipleship lies between commencement and completion.
More than a few trials will have to be resisted.
Barnabas and Paul, eager not to misrepresent the rigours of
discipleship, are found “strengthening the souls of the disciples,
exhorting them to continue in the faith …saying that through many
tribulations we must enter the
kingdom
of
God
.” [Acts
14:22
] If evangelicals uphold
justification by faith as the beginning of the Christian life and its
stable basis, no less ardently do they insist that sanctification,
holiness of heart and life, must be pursued at all times and in all
circumstances.
Holiness
Holiness
is simply the believer’s conformity to the will and way of the Master.
Holiness is God’s purpose for His people.
While the word-group in scripture referring to election or
predestination occurs approximately fifteen times, the word-group
pertaining to holiness occurs 833 times.
Plainly the category of holiness dominates scripture and should
therefore be the Christian’s preoccupation.
Cherishing the Great Commandment (“You shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength....” [ Mark
12:30
]) as well as the Great Commission (“Go therefore and make disciples
of all nations….” [Matthew 28:19]), evangelicals remain convinced of
the “Root” Commandment: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your
God am holy.” [Leviticus
19:2] This “root”
commandment reverberates like a bell throughout the length and breadth
of the bible. Like all
commandments, however, the predominant commandment is at the same time
the predominant promise: not only must
God’s people be holy; God will see to it that His people are
holy. God will guarantee for
people consecrated to Him everything that He requires of them.
Then God’s people may and must obey Him in matters great and
small as they are conformed to that “… holiness without which no one
will see the Lord.” [Hebrews
14:12]
Such holiness, John Wesley liked to say,
pertains to “heart and life”. Holiness
of heart (i.e., a supposedly grace-wrought disposition) not giving rise
to holiness of life is no more than a religious self-indulgence, a
pietistic trip “inward” that sceptics rightly see to be rationalized
selfism. Holiness of life
not grounded in holiness of heart, on the other hand, is no more than
self-righteous legalism, and exhausting as well.
Holiness of heart and life together
attest a simple yet glorious truth that evangelicals will never
surrender: God can do something with sin beyond forgiving it.
What can He do?
Not only can He relieve us of sin’s guilt; He can also release
us from sin’s grip. Deliverance
from both the guilt and the power of sin remains a vivid conviction in
the evangelical consciousness.
Constant
Conversion
The
decision for faith, then, with concomitant inner and outer holiness,
might appear to be an end in itself.
In truth it is and it isn’t.
It’s an end in itself in that faith binds us to Jesus Christ,
and our union with Him is an end in itself.
Any utilitarian consideration or motive here merely attempts to
use Him, rendering Him a means to end, a tool we can exploit for some
“goody” apart from Him. He
is our greatest good, our eternal good.
He gives us His unique gifts only in the course of giving us Himself.
Therefore He can never be a means to anyone’s end.
At the same time, the decision for faith invariably binds us not
only to Jesus Christ but also to that body of which He is head; namely,
the church. Since believers
are bound to Jesus Christ, head and body, we must daily renew our commitment to Christ’s people
even as we admit with our Puritan ancestors that the church is a “fair
face with an ugly scar”. And
since in Christ God has “so loved the world” [John
3:16
] as never to abandon it, the conversion of which evangelicals speak
must be a daily-renewed conversion to Christ, His people and the world.
Kingdom
of
God
To
say we must love the world as Christ loves us it is to say that we
shan’t adulate it uncritically or fawn over it or seek to profit from
it; rather we shall long for the full manifestation of its redemption.
To this end Christians understand that they have been
commissioned to render visible that kingdom which Jesus Christ brought
with Him in His resurrection from the dead.
When we pray “Thy kingdom come…” we are praying for the
coming manifestation of a kingdom that has
to be in our midst just because the King is in our midst.
A king – anywhere – without a kingdom is no king at all.
Jesus Christ, risen from the dead and present with His people,
meets us again and again, not infrequently startling us as He acquaints
us with Himself afresh. Since
He has promised to abide with us until history is concluded, His kingdom
has to have arrived. While
it is discerned through the eyes of faith to be sure, it remains
invisible to all others. Then
one of the church’s tasks is to render indisputable and undeniable
that kingdom which is simply the entire creation of God healed.
Not surprisingly, then, evangelicals have been at the forefront
of the abolition of the slave trade, the amelioration of working
conditions in factories and mines, the expansion of literacy, the
providing of medical assistance, ministries to the incarcerated, the
elevation of women, and the relief of human distress of every kind.
Believers’ holiness of heart and life lends visibility to a
world from which Christ’s victorious cross has already seen “Satan
fall like lightning from heaven”, heaven being the invisible dimension
of the creation. [Luke
10:18]
Evangelicalism’s
Vulnerability
Honesty
compels us to admit that evangelicalism is susceptible to distortion and
prone to unravel. Rightly
emphasizing Christian experience as the gospel “opens the heart” (as
happened with
Lydia
, Acts
16:13
], the evangelical consciousness is always in danger of confusing
experience of the Spirit with experience-in-general, especially where
experience-in-general is riddled with romanticism or nostalgia or
religious sentimentality. In
other words, despite evangelicalism’s insistence on orthodoxy
(correct thinking about God
and the proper glorifying of Him), evangelicalism remains susceptible to
heterodoxy (i.e., false belief
and erroneous glorifying of an other-than-Christ).
Evangelical zeal must always be balanced by the tested wisdom of
Christians who lived and learned, suffered and witnessed before us.
This great weight of Christian wisdom, found in the church’s
tradition, is commonly known as “catholicity”.
Evangelicalism
and Catholicity
Two
things are to be noted here. One,
the word “catholicity” is spelled with a lower case “c”.
Upper case “C” normally refers to Roman
Catholic. Roman Catholicism
is one denomination within the Christian family.
The catholicity of the church, however, is the accumulated wisdom
of Christian memory that is found in all denominations.
Catholicity preserves both identity and universality.[1]
Identity is that which distinguishes the church from
the world; universality, that which impels the church to give itself for
the world. Needless to say,
only that church which is self-consciously different from the world can
ever exist for the world.
The missionary enterprise of the early church attests its
catholicity. (We should note
here that the missionary thrust of the church isn’t the church’s
invention, the church somehow arriving at an insight that the church’s
Lord somehow lacked. While
Jesus told the Canaanite woman, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of
the house of
Israel
” [Matthew
15:24
], unquestionably the seeds of the Gentile mission are found in Jesus’
ministry, particularly in His appearances to His followers during the
“forty days” between His resurrection and His ascension.)
At first Peter opposed this expression of catholicity, Peter
maintaining that all Gentile Christians first had to become Jews.
Plainly Peter thought that the church’s universality threatened
its identity – and he had to be helped to a new perspective.
From a different angle of vision, it’s
evident that the unique message of the church guarantees its identity; the assorted converts to
the church guarantee its universality.
Both identity and universality have to be held in exquisitely
fine balance if the catholicity of the church is to be preserved.
Evangelicals who are properly catholic balance evangelism with
training in discipleship and Christian nurture.
We balance outreach with worship.
We balance contemplation of our reigning Lord and commitment to
the world’s grief.
Evangelicals who are aware of their
catholic heritage balance justification (a new standing before God) and
sanctification (a new nature from God); the decision for faith and
growth in faith; the call to repentance and the call to sainthood; the
Reformation (doctrinal restatement) and revival (the Spirit’s flooding
over large numbers of people who have not yet welcomed the gospel
offer). Evangelicals who
know the true meaning of “catholic” embrace both specially endowed
leaders and ordered ministry; both spontaneous exclamations of praise
and sacramental practice.
In all of this, theologians (including
those who amplify the doctrinal statements of such bodies as the
Evangelical Fellowship of Canada!) preserve catholicity by defining the faith so as to combat heresy arising from within the
church, and also by defending the
faith so as to combat misinterpretation arising from outside the church.
By defining the faith, theological statements preserve identity;
by defending the faith, theological statements preserve universality.
The first sentence of the Apostles’ Creed exemplifies both.
“I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and
earth” plainly speaks of universality; “and in Jesus Christ his only
Son our Lord…crucified under Pontius Pilate” speaks of identity.
Doctrine, adequately articulated, always fulfils both purposes.
