Following up on my previous post, Can Texas Senate Candidate James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left? (New York Times): Dispatch Faith: The Real Difference Between Evangelicals and Liberal Protestants, by Daniel K. Williams (Ashland University; Author, Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship (2021)):
Evangelicals and liberal Protestants badly misunderstand each other.
I noticed that in the comments I received to my last post [The Larger Context of James Talarico’s Progressive, Pro-Choice Christian Theology] on James Talarico’s progressive Christianity. Many of the theologically conservative Christians who commented on the piece insisted that Talarico could not be a true Christian, so at one point, readers began arguing over what a real Christian was. One side in the debate said that a Christian was someone who trusted Jesus as savior; the other side said that it was someone who followed Jesus’ teachings. Neither side seemed able to understand the other, even as they condemned the other as a heretic.
“Gnostic” and “heretic” were two of the terms some readers used to describe Talarico’s theology. One even accused him of being a tool of Satan.
But liberal Protestants’ attitudes toward evangelicals is not much more charitable. One of the professors at the seminary Talarico attended has just cowritten a book titled Being Presbyterian in a Dysvangelical America. The catalog copy for the book begins with the line, “Dysvangelical names a theology that is distorted, dysfunctional, and dystopian, twisting the good news of God’s grace into a message of fear, partisanship, and exclusion.”
So much for any prospect of a charitable meeting of the minds between liberal Protestants and evangelicals.
From a theological perspective, it may well be that one side in this debate is heretical. After all, from the beginning of Christianity, followers of Jesus have insisted that there is an objective standard for orthodoxy—which means that not everyone who uses the self-moniker Christian is a genuine disciple.
As an elder in my church, I’m aware that there is a place for determining what is “sound doctrine” and speaking out against those who oppose it (Titus 1:9).
But as a historian of American Christian theology, I think there’s also a place for attempting a nonpartisan, historically objective, nuanced description of the intellectual categories of thinking that led to particular theological developments. I teach in a pluralistic, ecumenical environment that attracts students from a wide range of beliefs, and I write for pretty diverse audiences who need to know how to understand those with whom they disagree – even if they still find, at the end of the day, that they disagree with them.
So, for the rest of this post, I’m going to attempt to shed light on two very different approaches to Christianity in a way that I hope will lead to greater understanding, even if not greater agreement. My point in my last post was not that we have to agree with Talarico’s beliefs, but we need to understand the context that shaped his views. And that will be my aim in this post as well—except that in this post, I’m not talking about Talarico in particular, but instead about two broadly defined groups of Christians that collectively include nearly all Protestants today. …
Evangelicals. … Here’s my definition: Evangelicals are Protestant Christians who believe that the fundamental human problem is individual sin and the fundamental human need is individual justification or reconciliation with God. So, the test of whether a Protestant Christian is an evangelical is to ask whether they agree with these two statements:
If a Protestant Christian agrees with those two statements, they’re probably an evangelical. If they disagree, they may be a mainline or liberal Protestant or some other variety of Christian, but they are not likely to fit into evangelicalism, even if they might use the term “evangelical” to describe themselves. …
Liberal Protestants. … Mainline or liberal Protestants have a different theological orientation. The more theologically liberal a Protestant denomination is, the less likely it is to mention the need for individual justification; instead, the message is on bringing a message of love to society. Liberal Protestants, in short, believe that the primary problem the world faces is injustice and the primary solution to that problem is demonstrating God’s love by confronting injustice at the structural level and showing compassion to people at the individual level. …
For liberal Protestants, ethical considerations (usually with a strongly social dimension) are first-order concerns, because they define the essence of Christianity. For evangelicals, transformed ethics are a product of justification, but they are a secondary effect. For liberal Protestants, by contrast, Jesus’s ethic of love is the sine qua non of Christianity and the test of being a true Christian. And, just as there are Bible verses that support evangelicals’ emphasis on justification, there are other Bible passages—1 John 4:7-8, James 1:27, etc.—that coincide with liberal Protestants’ interpretation. …
But for most liberal Protestants, their ethical commitment to social justice is not based primarily on particular Bible verses, even though they do believe that the Bible supports their ethical vision. Instead, for more than a century, they have believed that God’s progressive revelation unfolds in human experience, which means that while the Bible is important, it is not the sole source of religious authority, as many conservative Protestants have argued. The Bible instead needs to be read through the lens of the insights that are gained from collective and personal experience and from human reason. It is thus perfectly appropriate to take ethical commitments that are gained from experience and self-evident reason and interpret the Bible through the lens of those commitments. Evangelicals, by contrast, insist that a commitment to biblical authority should be primary, and that experience should be interpreted in light of the Bible rather than the other way round—which is why they have often insisted on the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. …
Why does this matter? … Evangelicals are not primarily culture warriors, political conservatives, or social justice advocates—even though some evangelicals have been found in each of those camps. Evangelicals are primarily people who believe that the world needs the gospel and that the gospel is defined in terms of individual salvation from sin.
Most evangelicals have traditionally also believed in individual personal holiness (including moral living and an ethic of love, driven by grace). … [B]y seeing sin and salvation in individual terms, they have tended to focus primarily on individual vice (not structural evils) when campaigning for government regulation, and they have tended to be suspicious of the sort of programs for social betterment that have interested liberal Protestants. In short, their theology has inclined them to be suspicious of institutions—especially government institutions for social uplift—and that in turn has made it more likely that they’ll be political conservatives. There are plenty of exceptions to this tendency (especially among African Americans, among others), but in general, American evangelical theology tends to encourage ways of thinking that are more compatible with modern American conservatism than American liberalism. …
From the evangelical perspective, liberal Protestants are heretics because they don’t seem to care about individual justification, which for evangelicals is the sine qua non of being a Christian.
And for liberal Protestants, modern evangelicalism is a dangerous distortion of the faith because it stands in the way of the central ethic that they believe is the defining feature of Christianity: love, which they tend to define in social terms that are compatible with pluralism, justice, and equity. If Jesus came primarily to lift up the poor and marginalized—and if a majority of American evangelicals support a political ideology that according to liberal Protestants oppresses the poor and marginalized—evangelicals are opposed to Jesus.
No wonder the chasm between the two groups is so wide.
Indeed, it has been wide for the past hundred years. As liberal Protestantism developed out of the progressive and social gospel movements of the late 19th century, conservative Protestants reacted by forming the fundamentalist movement to resist liberal Protestantism.
Perhaps the foremost intellectual defender of conservative Protestantism was J. Gresham Machen, whose book Christianity and Liberalism (1923) argued that liberal theology was not even Christian. It deserved to be classified as another religion entirely, because it rejected conservative Protestants’ standard of authority and their conception of the gospel.
The evangelical heirs of Machen are making the same argument today, but this time, with a slightly different twist. Because mainline Protestantism has shrunk so dramatically in recent decades, many evangelicals are only dimly aware of liberal Protestant theology at all, so when they encounter it, they have no historical or theological category in which to place it. If they encounter a liberal Protestant, they imagine that they are dealing with an individual heretic, not realizing that the person ascribes to a theological tradition that is more than a century old and that has the support of many seminaries.
Such an understanding will not heal this theological divide, but it will give us the appropriate categories to understand how to dialogue across the chasm. We don’t have to agree with our doctrinal opponents, but we should at least have the charity and intellectual curiosity to attempt to understand their theological paradigm.
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