Rachel Held Evans -
The Real ‘Evangelical Disaster’
When Republican Governor Mitt Romney lost the presidential election earlier this month to incumbent Barack Obama, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary classified the election as “an evangelical disaster.”
Concerned also by state measures legalizing gay marriage, Mohler said that, aside from the 79 percent of white evangelicals who voted as they should, the “[evangelical] message was rejected by millions of Americans who went to the polls and voted according to a contrary worldview”...
As a young evangelical myself, I confess I have grown tired…no, weary…of responding to comments like these with some honest suggestions for how my fellow evangelicals might avoid said retirement, only to be discounted and disparaged for believing the earth is more than 6,000 years old, for voting for Democrats from time to time, and for daring to serve communion to gays and lesbians. The fact that I can affirm the Nicene and Apostle’s creeds, that I am an imperfect but devoted follower of Jesus Christ, that I am passionate about spreading the gospel, and I believe the Bible is the inspired and authoritative Word of God, and still my evangelical credentials are constantly being questioned and debated reveals just how narrow evangelicalism has become.
I really do not have a problem with the content of this article except to say I think it as shallow as the folks that she is criticizing in it. The question that she (and all Protestants) need to be asking is the one that Frank Schaeffer asked many years ago - Is Protestantism the engine of secularization? If the answer is yes than one must abandon the sinking ship which has caused the mess that we are now in here in the West. Is it even possible to
reweave the sacramental tapestry that late Medieval Catholics and Protestants ripped apart as
Dr. Hans Boersma so accurately described in his book? If not than we must return the Great Tradition and Holy Mother Church which still protects and preserves it in the same condition which Christ gave it to us in.
3 comments:
The hardest thing for me to stomach is the undeniable fact that real homosexuality is a part of our existence. But I do not know how we can deny rights to a marriage to anyone. Did God deny it? Show me please where He denies it.
The engine of secularization is the abandoning of God's Word, and the reliance upon the 'self'...all or in part, for making one right with God.
This can happen in Protestant churches and in the Catholic Church.
We really ought resist those temptations and remain steadfast in faith, to what He has done, is doing, and will yet do, for us sinners.
Thanks.
In article linked in the post below the author is not dealing with the root causes of secularization, liberalism, relativism, and our culture of death. (Read Rachel Held Evans's article in its entirety.) Politics alone are not going to solve these problems. Evans goes deeper than that but not deep enough. It is an ontological problem, it is a sacramental problem. Until we recognize that we are not going to solve it. Read Hans Boersma who sits in the J.I. Packer Chair of Theology at Regent College. He gets it as do other Protestant scholar friends of mine who are in the Haerwasian, Radical Orthodoxy, and Communio camps...
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