Reflecting on the Scandal of the Evangelical Memory

As I'm working on putting together interviews for the podcast, I've been working my way through the Missio Alliance "Writing Collectives", a great collection of blog posts that I think really hit the nail on the head when it comes to the state of the church today. I've been posting highlights and thoughts here. 

About four years ago Missio Alliance leader Geoff Holsclaw started a 5 part series of posts entitled "The Scandal of the Evangelical Memory". His idea was the following: 

Like Douglas Quaid in Total Recall, we have been given fake memories and don’t  know who we are.  Our lives are not our own. Our memories have been replaced. And most of us don’t even know it. 

Others have written on the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and the “Scandal of the Evangelical Heart”, but we need to ask about the Scandal of the Evangelical Memory.  Most of us have had our memories erased, and obviously, that’s a problem.

To be more specific, Holsclaw calls into question the collective memory that many Christians have that says that the rising and falling of Reformed theology is the definitive history of "true" evangelicalism. His argument is that, while there is certainly some overlap, evangelicalism in the sense of faithfulness to the gospel of Christ is a very different and much larger tent than that of Reformed theology. And his hope in writing this series of posts is that all those in the, as he calls it, "messy middle" of evangelicalism are really its true heirs. 

I find these posts just as, if not more, critical today as they were 4 years ago. The identity crisis facing the messy middle of evangelicalism has probably only worsened since Holsclaw wrote these posts. On the one hand disciples of Christ rightly see discipleship as something that cannot be done halfheartedly or with lightly held convictions. On the other hand these same disciples rightly view with suspicion the theological in-fighting that seems to be one of the hallmarks of the "evangelical" church. The messy middle, what I take to be those disciples of Christ who refuse to be labeled either fundamentalist or universalist, is suffering from an identity crisis, and it only seems to be getting worse. 

Holsclaw's response is to recast the narrative of evangelicalism/gospel faithfulness. He starts in his first 3 posts by bringing the story of evangelicalism out of the narrative that it is the pure strain of fundamentalist theology that survived the assault of modernist theology in the early 20th century. Instead he argues that the true story of evangelicalism begins in the 17th century with Pietism and Puritanism. This is important because both of those movements, and subsequent related movements in later centuries, were generally responses to the "mainlining" of Christianity and the over-institutionalizing of the church. In other words, Holsclaw's argument is that true evangelicalism is not a "conservative movement within a liberal society". Rather it was and is a movement of spiritual revival, theology and practice that is radical, not institutional, and oriented towards the reform/transformation of both church and the world. 

Or, to put it even more simply, the true story of evangelicalism is that of radical Christian discipleship versus institutional Christianity. 

The messy middle of evangelicalism of today does have an identity and a lineage. Those in the messy middle represent a long line of disciples who have endeavored to radically follow Christ in and for the world even though the Way of Jesus may not fit into a neat and tidy theological label. Those in the messy middle push back against theological rigidity, recognizing that too often humans turn to it out of fear or pride, and that theology (especially systematic theology) is always limited by human language and can never capture fully the whole truth of God. 

With this in mind, Holsclaw proposes that what the church needs to do next is form a broad evangelical consensus, one that affirms a "Whole Gospel" understanding of salvation (versus a "Soul Gospel" understanding), and one that affirms that each denomination and tradition must be open to learning from others, recognizing we all have our own dangerous blind spots. This broad consensus must also wholeheartedly reject the "Dream of a Christian America", a Tower of Babel that coopted the true radical and life-giving mission of Christ. 

His hope is that Missio Alliance would help facilitate the coming together of this broad evangelical consensus. It's been 4 years and there's a long, long way to go, but it seems like they're going in the right direction!