The Increasingly Liberal Protestant Face of Evangelicalism
Friday, January 8, 2016 at 06:06PM
Embryo Parson in Anglo-Catholicism, Christian Culture, Evangelical and Catholic, Future of Protestantism, Neo-Anglicanism, The Problem of Anglican Identity, Traditional Anglicanism

I became a Christian through an "Evangelical" kind of conversion experience.  Subsequently, I received degrees in biblical studies and theology from two Evangelical institutions.  These days, however, I no longer consider myself an Evangelical, but rather a Catholic (of the Anglican variety), and this for two reasons.  

1)  Over the years I have managed to read myself into a Catholic mindset.  That eventally led to my being Eastern Orthodox for a time, and while I now am no longer Orthodox I retained much of its Catholic worldview.  So, you could say I was "pulled" into the Catholic faith through my reading, through which I discovered a much deeper theology than I found in Evangelical theology.  A number of writers - Evangelicals among them -  have opined in no uncertain terms that Evangelical theology has a shallowness problem;

2) Then there is the increasingly liberal Protestant face of evangelicalism, evidenced by this kind of stuff, emergentism (which unfortunately apparently has some "Anglican" expressions), a Jacobin-like rejection of traditonal Christian culture, ad nauseam.  So, you could say I was also "pushed" into a Catholic mindset by what appears to be in Evangelicalism the history of Protestantism repeating itself.

I know many Anglicans of a very anti-Anglo-Catholic variety who define themselves as staunch "Protestants."  Some of these are also stauch "Evangelicals."  But I believe those two words have failed and will continue to fail Anglicanism.  The only word left to describe what we really are is "Catholic", and by that I don't mean to suggest that Anglicans need to be Anglo-Catholics per se.  But we do need to defend the Faith once delivered, which faith even we Anglicans call "Catholic", and both mainline Protestantism and now Evangelicalism have developed track records which demonstrate that they are not worthy candidates in that defense.

 

Article originally appeared on theoldjamestownchurch (http://www.oldjamestownchurch.com/).
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