In several recent letters, I have been asked in one form or another, “What do you mean when you use the word ‘evangelical?’” This is a great question, and I’ll try to answer it here, albeit very briefly and in less than comprehensive form.

Of course, defining “evangelical” is a notoriously difficult project. I have found that among those who self-identify as evangelical, there is quite a bit of diversity. As one recent book admits, those who identify themselves as evangelicals are “a very amorphous group that find themselves in Catholic and Protestant churches, have high and low conceptions of the church, are loyal to denominations and advocate independency, come from charismatic and Reformed backgrounds, hold different conceptions of the end times, and work and worship within mainline and fundamentalist churches” (1). There we go! Clarity!

Among theologians and historians, too, there is no definitive meaning of the term “evangelical,” though there are certainly patterns of usage, patterns that inform the way I use the term. For quite a long time, the term “evangelical” simply meant “Protestant,” referring to those who embraced the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century as the rediscovery of the evangel – the Gospel of grace. Before being called Protestants, the reformers of the 16th century and their followers were simply called “evangelicals.” This is the meaning of the term, for instance, in the name of the mainline Lutheran denomination: The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). They are confessionally Protestant and uphold the biblical doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith alone.

We have, of course, come a long way since the Reformation! In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, revivalism significantly impacted the piety of American Protestants, and “evangelical” became the term commonly used to refer to the new style of Protestantism growing out of these revivals, a style which was the dominant form of Christianity in America for most of the nineteenth century. Building on the “experiential” (inward) piety of American Puritanism and European Pietism brought over by settlers to America, this evangelical piety was expressed by at least four distinct characteristics: a stress on the importance of experiencing the grace of God in conversion and new birth, when an individual comes to trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior; an insistence on the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, namely that the Word of God contained in the Bible is discernible and is the only infallible rule for the faith and life of the church; the conviction that every Christian should share his or her faith, being a witness to Jesus Christ, seeking to save the lost; and a belief in the centrality of the cross of Jesus Christ as the event by which our reconciliation with God was accomplished, through Christ’s vicarious sacrifice (2). As noted above, one interesting thing about these basic tenets is that many held them and were Reformed or Arminian; Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, or Baptist; and nowadays even Roman Catholic (the wild proliferation of small group Bible studies in America have made “evangelicals” out of many Catholic laypersons).

This pan-denominational evangelical movement, which was the dominant religious force in American culture in the nineteenth century, was divided at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The division was brought about by different responses to certain challenges posed by the modern era. Some were willing to question or decisively overturn several of the above evangelical characteristics, most notably convictions about the reliability and authority of the Bible, and whether or not the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross was really the only way in which God has chosen to save humanity. While this controversy raged – often called the “Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy” – at least three groups emerged: Fundamentalists, Evangelicals who were not “militant” or fundamentalist, and Liberals. The Fundamentalists typically left the major denominations in which the struggles were taking place, while other evangelicals maintained their traditional evangelical beliefs but did not leave those churches or their institutions, willing to minister faithfully and continue the struggle with integrity, which they were free to do. The Liberals, of course, were in the ascendancy in these denominations and have been until the last couple of decades, during which time their hegemony has been met by serious challenge and their wider influence over American culture has declined dramatically (reflected in the decline of mainline denominations generally). Please note, this paragraph is a serious oversimplification of a very complex process; if you have the inclination, check the footnote for some ideas for additional reading (3). More ink has been spilled on this controversy than on any other event in the history of the Presbyterian Church in America.

Moving along a few decades, in the 1940s and 50s certain segments of evangelicalism and fundamentalism underwent significant change, as figures like Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry fostered what is usually referred to as “Neo-Evangelicalism.” The leaders of this movement sought “a positive spirituality and an intellectual incisiveness that had become rare among militant fundamentalists” (4). They formed new institutions (e.g. Fuller Theological Seminary) and publications (e.g. Christianity Today), and with the help of British intellectuals and others from the (Dutch-American) Christian Reformed Church they began publishing intellectually rigorous works engaging the Bible, Theology, and the wider culture.

Of course, the “Neo-Evangelical” movement did not encompass all of evangelicalism, including many African-American Christians and Pentecostals, or the persistent fundamentalism that provided most of the energy to create the Religious Right in the 1970s and 80s (e.g. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson).

Evangelicals remain culturally, ethnically, and politically diverse. And, as noted above, they have different views on how the church should be structured, which spiritual gifts are normative for the church’s experience of God today, what worship styles are most appropriate on Sunday morning, and on what will happen at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ – or when it will happen. (But we do all believe that it will happen!)

This brief overview, which I hope is not too scattered, forms the background for how I use the term “evangelical.” We believe that we stand in need of God’s forgiveness, and that God has accomplished salvation for us through the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Golgotha, and that he brings the benefits of this sacrifice to individuals by calling them, through the Spirit, to trust in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. We base these beliefs on the Bible, which we believe communicates clearly on the essentials of faith and life, and we trust that what is communicated there is wholly trustworthy, because it is the Word of God, who is trustworthy. (I might add here that we believe church history testifies on our behalf!)

I have sometimes wondered how useful the term “evangelical” is in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). My own identity is shaped more by being “confessionally Reformed” and I would rather speak in the terms of our own Reformed tradition and experience than on the terms of a pan-denominational evangelical experience. Indeed, I am evangelical because I am Reformed. And I have some strong convictions about those things on which evangelicals disagree – the doctrine of election, proper church structure, manner of worship, the second coming of Christ – and those convictions are shaped by the Reformed tradition. In fact, it may be the case that the future of renewal in our own church will have as much to do with that which is distinctively Reformed as it will with what is common to American evangelicalism.

Yet using the term “evangelical” is appropriate in our own context because we unfortunately have many folks in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) who call themselves Reformed but honestly have no claim to the title except for the fact that they happen to belong to a church that has been historically Reformed. Indeed, to be “Reformed” is sometimes used so ambiguously as to designate a desire to be always reforming, semper reformanda, without reference to that according to which we are to be Reformed, that is “according to the Word of God,” secundum verbum dei. It is not “Reformed” to simply change. There are many sources by or according to which a person can be me morphed, some good and some not so good. The calling of God is for the church to be reformed, according to the Word of God. We must engage the culture, listen to its challenges, and take them to the Lord by discerning his will through prayer, reading the Holy Scriptures with integrity and submitting to his voice discerned there. The Word of God is inalienable. And the word “evangelical” still communicates that conviction clearly.

(1) D.G. Hart and R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Theological Education in the Evangelical Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 13.
(2) I am roughly following the four-fold pattern set out in David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Routledge, 1989).
(3) Three works are particularly helpful here, two of them by George Marsden. See his Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925 (Oxford Press, 1980), and his Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991). The third and somewhat more lengthy book is Brad Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (Oxford, 1993). As a general rule, it is beneficial to read anything by Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, or George Marsden on the subject of evangelicalism and/or the history of American Protestantism.
(4) Mark A. Noll, American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Oxford: 2001), 19.