Definition of "Evangelical"

[Peter Kirby]

I would like definition(s) of the term "evangelical," as it is applied to Christian people in the sense of a philosophy or orientation.

Please give your definition of the word, even if you have seen other definitions posted to this thread.

thanks,
Peter Kirby

[Trinitarian]

Today @ 10:37 PM post located here
Peter Kirby:

I would like definition(s) of the term "evangelical," as it is applied to Christian people in the sense of a philosophy or orientation.

Please give your definition of the word, even if you have seen other definitions posted to this thread.

thanks,
Peter Kirby

Evangelical: A person committed to following the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, holding the Christian Scriptures as the norm of life and practice.

[Jaltus]

Evangelical: A movement within Christianity based on two major things:

1) Missions and evangelism as a focal point of the faith.

2) The inerrancy of scripture.

It also holds to the major early Christian councils.

[Andrew]

Committed to the preaching the evangel of Christ from the viewpoint of the understanding of the Reformation. This means that we give ourselves to gospel ministry to people and we place a high value on sound scholarship.

[Pilgrim]

I go with Jaltus' definition and add that it is a movement of the early 20th century which was a reaction to Fundamentalism.

[GrayPilgrim]

08-09-2003 @ 06:43 PM post located here
Jaltus:

Evangelical: A movement within Christianity based on two major things:

1) Missions and evangelism as a focal point of the faith.

2) The inerrancy of scripture.

It also holds to the major early Christian councils.

Historically it must be understood as coming out of and rejecting much of Fundamentalism. Fundamentalism had three major doctrines and praxis.

1. Inerrancy of Scripture
2. Dispensationalism
3. Double separation--this means not only do you not associate with sinners, you don't associate with those who associate with sinners

These three combined, especially the last, led to much ugliness. For as Francis Schaeffer, who was one of those who came out of fundyism and helped to form evangelicalism, said "Love without holiness is compromise and Holiness without love is harshness". The fundies were so afraid of the former that they adopeted the latter and hence the charicature that has developed (which is often not far from the mark).

Evangelicalism rejected 2 as a requirement, and categorically rejected three. So that when the Evangelical Theological Society was formed c. 1950 they only had one doctrinal stance, inerrancy. Since then they have added the Trinity as it was understood from the beginning.

That in a nutshell is the historical development of evangelicalism. Thus it is incorreect to see it as Fundamentalism, as some are wont to do, because it is a repudiation of the excesses of Fundyism.

GP

[Solly]

Evangelical:

Protestant grouping of Christians and churches committed to the Gospel of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ in the proclamation of his Gospel, and holiness of life, and his scriptures as the sure guide to such.

Historically, a group of Anglicans in the 18th century committed to the Articles of Religion of that church, and either it's Calvinism - throught the influence of Charles Simeon and JC Ryle, or Evangelical Arminianism - through Wesley and co. Subsequently those from all denominations who took sides against liberalism, modernism, and atheism - ie the Evangelical Alliance in Britain.
Subsequently to that, it referred to those who gathered around Martyn Lloyd-Jones & John Stott, until they split.
Now it is so general a term in the UK scene - inclusive of Charismatics, anabaptists, Open (Darby/Kelly) Brethren and other groups, that Reformed is coming back into vogue for wholly Calvinist congregations.

Note: this is a UK viewpoint, and not necessarily relevant to the US, since we did not have the "Fundamentals" input.

[Pilgrim]

Today @ 09:40 AM post located here
GrayPilgrim:



Historically it must be understood as coming out of and rejecting much of Fundamentalism. Fundamentalism had three major doctrines and praxis.

1. Inerrancy of Scripture
2. Dispensationalism
3. Double separation--this means not only do you not associate with sinners, you don't associate with those who associate with sinners

These three combined, especially the last, led to much ugliness. For as Francis Schaeffer, who was one of those who came out of fundyism and helped to form evangelicalism, said "Love without holiness is compromise and Holiness without love is harshness". The fundies were so afraid of the former that they adopeted the latter and hence the charicature that has developed (which is often not far from the mark).

Evangelicalism rejected 2 as a requirement, and categorically rejected three. So that when the Evangelical Theological Society was formed c. 1950 they only had one doctrinal stance, inerrancy. Since then they have added the Trinity as it was understood from the beginning.

That in a nutshell is the historical development of evangelicalism. Thus it is incorreect to see it as Fundamentalism, as some are wont to do, because it is a repudiation of the excesses of Fundyism.

GP

And the A+ goes to....Gray Pilgrim. Well said Gray. Too often these days Evangelical is confused with Fundamental. In fact, most people I know who claim to be Evangelicals are actually closer to Fundamentalists.

[RevSteve45]

Some excerpts from this article:

http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us:8080/tserve...o/nevansoc.htm

Evangelicalism as a Social Movement
Donald Scott
Queens College / City University of New York
©National Humanities Center

Historians have usually looked to political parties, reform societies like temperance organizations, or fraternal associations like the Masons for the origins of this new associational order. In fact, evangelicals were its earliest and most energetic inventors. Indeed, as historian Donald Mathews has pointed out, the Second Great Awakening was an innovative and highly effective organizing process. Religious recruitment was intensely local, a species of grass-roots organizing designed to draw people into local congregations. But recruitment into a local Baptist, Methodist, or Universalist church also inducted people into a national organization and affiliational network that they could participate in wherever they moved. Moreover, adherence to a particular evangelical denomination also inducted them into the broader evangelical campaign. Conversion thus not only brought communicants into a new relationship to God, it also brought them into a new and powerful institutional fabric that provided them with personal discipline, a sense of fellowship, and channeled their benevolent obligations in appropriate directions. Aggressively exploiting a wide variety of new print media, evangelicals launched their own newspapers and periodicals and distributed millions of devotional and reform tracts. (By 1835, the cross-denominational American Tract Society and the American Sunday School Union alone distributed more than 75 million pages of religious material and were capable of delivering a new tract each month to every household in New York City.) They deployed home missionaries, circuit-riding preachers, and agents from town to town preaching revivals, organizing new churches and religious reform societies, and distributing Bibles and other religious materials. By the l830s, these devices, in conjunction with the aggressive revivalism that was the hallmark of the new evangelicalism, had assembled a huge new evangelical public. Not for nothing did evangelicals and nonevangelicals alike dub this new religious phalanx the "Evangelical Empire."

For many, evangelicalism provided a counterworld to the chaos and isolation of American life and an antidote to its insecurities and anxieties. Just as had Puritanism, evangelicalism held out a vision of order, direction, and discipline and provided its adherents with the sense of security that came with the salvational promise. As they enlisted themselves in God's plan for history, "the world" lost its hold over them. But whereas Puritanism had involved a kind of breaking of the penitents' will, the practical Arminianism of evangelicalism actually strengthened its communicants' sense of the power of their own will. Evangelical conversion did not break the will of sinners, but energized and redirected it, giving them a powerful sense of control in their lives. People came out of conversion not with a sense of the incapacity of the human will, but as Christian activists imbued with a strong sense of the power of their own individual will. In this sense, in fact, evangelical activism can be seen not simply as a response to the new individualism but as an expression of it. Indeed, though cast in a different idiom, the moral perfectionism within much of evangelicalism was not very far from the ethic of self-reliance preached by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Finally, evangelicalism inducted its communicants into an institutional setting that was in many ways the direct opposite of the chaotic, competitive, isolated, and lonely world of everyday life. Evangelical churches were essentially affectional communities, gatherings of the like-minded and like-feeling that were organized around ideas of mutual concern, love, and obligation. Church membership was not simply a matter of going to church on Sunday. It involved participation in prayer meetings, other worship sessions like the Methodist "class meetings" and "love feasts," and in various allied charitable societies, all of which reinforced a sense of fellowship and obligation. Devotional forms were often highly communal. Sunday worship services deployed various forms of collective participation including the increased singing of hymns. In addition, enlistment in an evangelical church involved accepting rules for behaving towards each other that were designed to counter the conflict of the outside world. For example, church members were forbidden from bringing lawsuits against each other, and many churches set up mechanisms for adjudicating conflicts between communicants. Church members, moreover, were charged to tend to the needs of the less fortunate among them and offer aid to other communicants who had suffered misfortune. People often sought employers or employees, business partners, and marriage partners from the ranks of their coreligionists. And when they moved on, often one of the first things they did when they entered a new town was to seek the fellowship of a comforting church.

In His Service,
Steve

[Da Lone-Warrior]

The following article is an interesting summary of how there is much
conflict over Christian theology and theological method should be.... It
has osme interesting parallels with a paper I've been working on.

http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-b...icle?item_id=6

For a non-evangelical's history of evangelical theology, I recommend Gary Dorrien's "The Remaking of Evangelical Theology"

dlw