As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
Amazon Affiliate LinkThe Advent of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities is a compendium of essays written in response to David Bebbington’s Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). A key tenet of Bebbington’s work is that the evangelical movement was a product of the Enlightenment, beginning in the 1730s with the revivals of John Wesley and George Whitefield.
The second annual Elephant Room event is over and the blogosphere is already lit with responses. I had the opportunity to attend a simulcast of the event in Lansing, MI at Riverview Church, one of Mark Driscoll’s Acts29 church plants. During the event, I tweeted around 100 quotes from the participants using the SharperIron Twitter account and took 4 pages of personal notes.
What follows will not be a summary of each of the seven conversations. That would be an exercise in vain repetition since Trevin Wax masterfully transcribed (and very accurately, might I add) on his blog what each person said, pretty much word for word. You can read it at Kingdom People.
What I do want to do is offer some personal reflections and observations about the event as someone who was able to not merely read what was said but see it said. As is the trouble with properly interpreting emails, so it is with properly interpreting the words of others in a setting like this when you cannot see the facial expressions and body language that sometimes enhance or say more than the person’s words.
There is no doubt that the invitation of Bishop T. D. Jakes sparked a huge controversy and was the focal point of the event leading up to Wednesday. Immediately before The Elephant Room 2 blog announced that Jakes was being invited, it announced that Mark Dever was going to join the event. Then, immediately after the Jakes announcement, the Dever announcement was removed. To my knowledge, no explanation was ever published, from either MacDonald or Dever, as to why Dever withdrew his presence from ER2, but it does not take a seminary class in theology to figure it out.
… even as 80 percent of young unmarried evangelicals are sexually active, 76 percent of evangelicals still believe sex outside of marriage is wrong. Even worse, 65 percent of women who abort their children identify as Catholic or Protestant Christian — that’s 650,000 Christian abortions per year. …This is of a piece with the larger American evangelical culture, which — despite the “Jesusland” stigma of the secular Left — is only slightly countercultural.
[amazon 0310293162 thumbnail]The new Four Views on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism is being discussed in various venues such as Mark Snoeberger’s blog and by Kevin Mungons at Sharper Iron. In a few days, ETS will host a discussion on the book and its theme at the 2011 Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Carl Trueman will be there serving as moderator along with coauthors Kevin Bauder and Al Mohler, both of whom I know and respect. Too bad Roger Olsen and John Stackhouse Jr. won’t make it, but they have their reasons.
I fear that a similar thing is occurring today among true evangelical believers. As with other seasons of church history when preaching was slowly stripped of its precision, clarity, and doctrinal depth, many contemporary congregations have slowly been robbed of the same.
The problem is: they don’t know it. The erosion has been too subtle.
Discussion