People are talking abt a 'post-evangelical' theology. But before we 'move beyond' something, it may be wise to first discover from what it is tat we've moved...
Today's trip to the past is Carl Henry...
If Billy Graham is the populariser of the evangelical movement, Henry is the professor and statesman who united an impressive squad of scholars - ie Bernard Ramm, Berkouwer, FF Bruce - in defense of historic Christianity.
He called Christians out of cultural ghettos to engage the world with the power of the gospel.
An Excerpt From Christianity Today
"But Carl almost missed his calling. Like many gifted people, he had to make hard choices.
Carl could have been an entertainer. In college, partly for enjoyment and partly to support himself, he pulled bunnies out of a hat and sawed pretty ladies in two…
Carl could have been a journalist. He has written over three dozen books and too many articles to count…
Carl could have become a politician. Carl used his political and journalistic skills to pull fundamentalists and evangelicals back from their half-century of isolationism to enter boldly into the public forum…
Carl did decide to be an educator... (he) dreamed of a great Christian university modeled after sixteenth-century Wittenberg or Geneva. He dreamed of drawing the best and brightest young minds, preparing them, and sending them out to win the minds and hearts of men and women to the gospel and an unequivocal evangelical faith.
Great ideas die hard, but it was not to be. Perhaps the idea was ill-advised. Augustine taught us a millennium-and-a-half ago that Christianity is best understood not high in an ivory tower, but in the roaring thoroughfares of real life. In the radical pluralism of the modern world, a thousand rays of light may penetrate better than a single beam from a lighthouse."
Amen.Ask For More: Confessions of a Theologian
Comments
http://www.challies.com/archives/000285.php
so that we can be faithful in the present.
"What distressed the growing evangelical mainstream about the fundamentalist far right were its personal legalisms, suspicion of advanced education, disdain for biblical criticism per se, polemical orientation of theological discussion, judgmental attitudes toward those in ecumenically related denominations, and an uncritical political conservatism often defined as 'Christian anticommunism' and 'Christian capitalism' that, while politicizing the Gospel on the right, deplored politicizing it on the left."
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/003/6.48.html