The Shortcomings of American Evangelicalism, Part I: Introduction

Part I: Introduction



I confess to being a little hard on evangelicals on this blog, but that is only because I grew up as one. To paraphrase Paul:

Are they Christians? So am I. Are they evangelicals? So am I. Are they descendents of the radical Reformation? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? (I am out of my mind to talk like this.) I am more. I have worked much harder, argued more frequently, been ridiculed more severely, and been exposed to the ideas of Catholics, mainline Protestants, and liberal politics again and again. ... I have labored and toiled and have often gone without finishing my papers ... Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches.

And as Paul also states:

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from conservative American evangelicalism, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.

It is in light of my own evangelical heritage that I feel a sense of responsibility to speak prophetically against the current state of evangelicalism in America today. The word "evangelical" once meant exactly what the word means: "according to the teaching of the gospel." The German word for evangelical is what identifies Protestants, whereas "evangelical" in the United States designates a subgroup of Protestants. In fact, nowadays it designates its own subculture and a powerful voting bloc that pursues governmental control more actively with each passing day. We are a long ways from the Reformation here in America. In fact, to be more precise, we are a long ways from the gospel.



What I wish to do in this post is outline the major heresies of contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of these have been documented by other scholars and online commentators, but I have not seen all of them addressed at one time. I will address them in the following order:

A less-than-fully triune doctrine of God—often modalistic or binitarian;

a docetic christology;

a pelagian soteriology;

a docetic-dictated-propositional Bible;

a gnostic eschatology;

and a Constantinian doctrine of church-state relations