What is an Evangelical? In this manifesto, Evangelicals tell you. It’s 20 pages. You can probably skim some of them, but most of them should be read carefully.
I went with a couple of my students. One of them is Catholic, the other interested in Catholicism, though like me it looks as if he’s taking the Anglican “detour”! I have to say that as I rather expected George more or less had the better of the debate. Beckwith’s heart really isn’t in debating Catholic/Protestant issues, which is to his credit in many ways but makes him look a bit vague in that kind of discussion. However, George not only made an articulate case for Protestantism but also was more ecumenical than the setup of the debate had led me to think (I knew he was quite ecumenical, but I expected him to say straightforwardly that you couldn’t be a Catholic and an evangelical, and had an argument all ready for him which his nuancing of the question rendered useless). His position appeared to be that evangelicals proclaimed the Gospel more purely and clearly but that anyone who proclaimed the Gospel could in some sense call themselves an evangelical.
Some of George’s arguments were highly dubious–his claim that Augustine taught sola fide in his comments on Psalm 51 is totally untenable in my opinion, and his “geyser” theory is basically a more sophisticated reworking of the bogus “Trail of Blood.” So I don’t mean to say that I was impressed by everything he said. But he was clearly more in command of the historical and theological issues involved than Beckwith, who is more at home with general Christian apologetics and natural-law ethics. That being said, the gentleness and Christian charity showed by both of them sets a good example to the rest of us. And Beckwith made some excellent points, such as his response to the loaded question about whether he would have gone to hell if he’d died while a Protestant (his response was basically that the fixation on the question of individual salvation is one of the problems with evangelicalism, though he put it more gently). Even there, though, he could have made the point more clearly that in Catholicism you need full knowledge and deliberate consent in order to commit a mortal sin.
What is an Evangelical? In this manifesto, Evangelicals tell you. It’s 20 pages. You can probably skim some of them, but most of them should be read carefully.
While I am generally in agreement with this document insofar as I’ve read it (I admit that I have not read it carefully), it should be noted that this represents one faction within evangelicalism and is not a good general definition of evangelicalism.
What is an Evangelical? In this manifesto, Evangelicals tell you. It’s 20 pages. You can probably skim some of them, but most of them should be read carefully.
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