Evangelicalism

People of the gospel

The name comes from euangelion (εὐαγγέλιον), ‘good news’, the gospel. At the Reformation ‘evangelical’ meant Protestant, as the German evangelisch still does. After the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield and John Wesley kindled revival on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, the word came to name a movement that crosses denominational lines. Its roots run back through the Pietists' religion of the heart and the Puritans' practical godliness to the Reformation and its five solas.

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, then to the Greek.

Romans 1:16

Historians commonly name four marks. The first is the Bible: because "All Scripture is God-breathed" (2 Timothy 3:16), it is the final authority for faith and life. The second is the cross: with Paul, evangelicals confess, "may I never boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Galatians 6:14), and set Christ's atonement at the centre of the gospel. The third is conversion: "no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again" (John 3:3), so each person must repent, believe and be made new. The fourth is active faith, in evangelism and in service to neighbours.

A wide family

In the nineteenth century this zeal sent evangelicals into world mission. In 1792 William Carey argued that the Great Commission still binds the church William Carey, An Enquiry, and in Britain the evangelical William Wilberforce and his friends fought to end the slave trade. Horace Underwood and Henry Appenzeller came to Korea in 1885 from the same stream, and many Korean churches stand on that inheritance.

Evangelicalism is not one denomination but a family across many churches, and so it carries old differences within it. Calvinists and Arminians; those who practise infant baptism and those who practise believers' baptism; different views of the Lord's Supper, the millennium and the gifts of the Spirit: in each case evangelicals appeal to Scripture and confess differently. Many have sought to honour these differences while keeping unity at the gospel's centre.

Tested, and today

When liberal theology questioned the Bible's authority, miracles and the atonement, evangelicals defended the inerrancy of Scripture and the resurrection of Christ. Through the controversies of the twentieth century many evangelicals held to the fundamentals of the faith while opening themselves to scholarship and social responsibility, and the Lausanne Congress of 1974 spoke of evangelism and social responsibility together. Catholics and Orthodox also proclaim the gospel of Christ; evangelicals differ from them in following the Reformation's confession of Scripture's final authority and of justification received by faith.

Evangelicalism has its shadows: a readiness to divide, a faith sometimes shrunk to a private decision, and at times a confusion of the gospel with a nation's politics or culture. People of the gospel must keep examining themselves by it. The history is told in the lessons Pietism and the Great Awakening and Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, missions and Korea; the gospel itself in What is the gospel?