Book review: Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction
Professor Emeritus, University of York.
J. G. Stackhouse New York: Oxford University Press (2022), 144pp, (£7.45 amazon.co.uk)
Denominational struggles by evangelical ministers and churches across the UK, and more widely, illustrate the demands of day-by-day endeavours to understand, defend and live out the Christian faith within the visible church. John Stackhouse is a Canadian scholar of religion. He tells us “I wrote this book as an evangelical, a faithful and critical member of a family that … has both blessed and wounded me.” He writes on the origins of evangelicalism, his understanding of how it should be defined, its international expansion and modern challenges, and closes by asking ‘the end of evangelicalism?’
Much of the time he keeps an authorial distance, as when he speaks of “the so-called evangelicals of the eighteenth-century revivals”, partly because he writes foran “outside” audience. Thus, we have expressions such as “the Bible is typically touted by evangelicals as their supreme authority”, and the observation that “(m)issiologists suggested that Christianity grew best when the gospel … came as a correction and completion to the extant religions, and especially tribal religions.” He gives us by and large a naturalistic history, as when he writes of Carey’s “record of failing to convert a single Indian through his preaching.”
In what perhaps many will see as the key chapter of the book, he considers the marks of evangelicalism. His first option “is to view evangelicalism the way that many evangelicals themselves see it, as denoting the true faith” – as representing, quoting the title of John Stott’s early book, simply Basic Christianity. He suggests that “This definition, however, is problematic for observers who want to avoid picking sides in ecclesiastical conflicts.”
His second option is to view evangelicalism as a movement, “as connected in a joint endeavor” – a position he wisely rejects on grounds that it gives no clear boundaries. His preferred position is to see evangelicalism as a style, “One might see Christianity in the modern era occurring in three main styles: a conscientious maintenance of the past, a determined freedom toward the present and future, and a way between the two.” The difficulty with this essentially social definition of evangelicalism is that it can potentially apply to all manner of social manifestations, of which the British Conservative Party is but one. But it does allow him to helpfully insists that “Conservative” should not be used…as a synonym for evangelical. Conservative churches are conservative. Evangelicals, by contrast, have been only selectively conservative, and are ready to be radical in certain areas.
Evangelicals are, he suggests “fully Trinitarian”, “biblicist”, “conversionist”, “missional”, “populist” and “pragmatic” – by which he means a concern to get things done. “Here is where the conversionist, the missional, and the populist qualities of evangelicalism combine into a driving pragmatic force that shows up particularly in two ways: transdenominationalism and adaptation.” He identifies modern challenges to evangelicalism as biblical criticism and liberal theology, science and secularism, and imperialism and social justice, but regards the main issue threatening evangelicalism as same sex marriage.
He is helpful in several ways. He brings a careful observation of historical detail, such that we encounter names and movements unfamiliar to most Christians, and he does not limit himself to the English-speaking church. He makes the persuasive suggestion, for example, that “The eruption of indigenous evangelicalism … came largely with the rise of a form of Protestantism that offered a distinct alternative … in some ways, to mainstream evangelicalism: Pentecostalism”, and gives a helpfully specific account of the forms of “holiness”, “second blessing”, and “Pentecostal” movements, that well repays reading.
He illuminates when he observes “it is Pietism as a renewal movement and Puritanism as a reform movement that provides the two main modes of evangelical life.” He is less helpful when he suggests “The Puritans agreed on what they did not want – a temporizing Church of England – but they did not agree on what they did want. And once they were in charge, their differences erupted into fractious competition.”
He is helpful when saying that one should not pick and choose, and that “Evangelicals are best discerned, therefore, as manifesting all of the defining emphases… The whole thrust of original evangelicalism was toward the heart and the hands as adding to correct doctrine in the head.” Or, as he sums it up, “evangelicalism is not a matter of merely agreeing with … a checklist. It is a matter of living consistently in accordance with it.” Thus, “the notion of a ‘non-observant’ or ‘nominal’ evangelical would be a contradiction in terms.”
The author is revealing for what he thinks of as “second order questions”:
Whether hell will be eternal torment or a limited time of punishment terminated by extinction; whether hell is actually a form of purgatory leading eventually to universal salvation; whether the unevangelized yet have access to Christ’s saving merit through whatever dim light of revelation they receive; whether Adam and Eve were literal direct creations of God or symbols of humankind’s hominid ancestors; and whether women could properly be ordained to pastoral ministry as full equals with men.
He sees the bible as containing “ambivalences” such as over “the emancipation of slaves and the full participation of women in society.” We can understand Stackhouse’s position by recognising his “biblical feminism” stance, which for him means, he tells us elsewhere, a doubleness in Scripture: simultaneously a patriarchalism that shows up from the Torah to Paul’s own ministry (including, controversially, Jesus’ ministry as well) and yet also an egalitarianism that is also evident throughout the Bible. He explains this as “Holy Spirit pragmatism”, whereby God works with people, including whole cultures, according to our capacity for change. Hence, while he usually remains detached in his observations about manifestations of evangelicalism, we may sense that he is not unsympathetic when for example, he says of the years following the turn of the century, “For increasing numbers of evangelicals, the Bible itself became less a window onto a divinely ordained reality to which one had to submit than a mirror of one’s own perceptions and preference… thus rendering evangelicals liberals in all but name.”
His historical detachment marks him off from, for example, J C Ryle – wholly absent from this book – who, when speaking about evangelicals within the Church of England, asked “Has Evangelical Religion any distinctive principles? I answer, it has. Are they worth contending for? I answer, they are.” Indeed, “without Protestant and Evangelical principles, a Church is as useless as a well without water.”
A “very short” history of evangelicalism leaves inevitable gaps, so the coverage needs to be judged by balance rather than completeness. The names that recur most often are John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, Billy Graham and, to a lesser extent, John Stott, and still less, Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Scotland and Wales are absent, as are key figures such as Jim Packer, despite Stackhouse having succeeded to the position Packer held at Regent College. The contribution of the people associated with Princeton is absent, apart from fleeting mentions of Warfield and Machen. Reliance on passing remarks risk caricature, as when we have Francis Schaeffer’s work dismissed as “mere tracts for the times, largely forgotten a single generation later.” Readers most likely to find it helpful are those who already know a fair amount about the history and character of evangelicalism and who count themselves as eclectic in regard to the issues covered in this book. It is likely to become a standard reference in accounts of evangelicals and evangelicalism, albeit one that evangelicals of the J C Ryle sort will find somewhat equivocal.
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