What is an “evangelical”?

According to the classic definition, an “evangelical” is a person who believes in and acts upon the “gospel”—in New Testament Greek the euangelion. As understood by evangelicals, the gospel is a statement about the significance of Jesus’ death on the cross: by his “blood” he made atonement for the sins of all people. The gospel is a believable message because it has been communicated in the Bible, which is a body of universal, trustworthy, and authoritative truth revealed to humanity by God.

That gives us the concentric biblicist, Christocentrist, and crucicentrist spheres of evangelical theology: the Bible unerringly reveals to humanity Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word of God, who died for the sins of the world.

The appropriate response to this revelation is conversion followed by activism. The individual person believes that Jesus died for their/her/his sins, repents, and is reconciled to a holy God. The certainty of this radical change of heart and mind is then practically demonstrated in evangelism and social action.

A product of its age

Evangelicalism is not how Christianity has always been; it is a modern phenomenon. In its emphasis on the truth of scripture, it is a reaction against scientific rationalism and the broad assault of historical criticism on the credibility and authority of the Bible. In its emphasis on personal conversion, it is a response to the collapse of the religious consensus that underpinned western Christendom for fifteen hundred years. If faith is no longer sustained in the public realm by social convention, it must be sustained in the private realm by personal conviction.

Viewed in this way, evangelicalism is a product of its age. It has been an invaluable phase in the adaptation of the church to a harsh post-Christian environment—not least because it has kept the numbers up. In the West, however, it has become captive to a couple of damaging social trends: on the one hand, the self-obsessed, consumerist individualism of postmodernity; on the other, a political Right that has presented itself as an ally in the fight against moral relativism and the abandonment of traditional sexual values in particular.

The vulnerability of evangelicalism to these distorting forces has been exacerbated—perhaps enabled—by its reductionist approach to scripture. So I will attempt to outline here what I think is a better way to locate the euangelion in the biblical story.

The biblical story

The Bible is the canonical—that is, authorised—“witness” of historical communities, at least from the exilic period onwards. In simple terms, it is the story told by Israel and by an apocalyptically minded reform movement in Israel, inspired by the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.

There are two main strands to the story: the vocation of Israel and Israel’s clash with the surrounding nations. These large-scale themes need to be understood before we get to the gospel.

So first, Israel understood itself to be a new creation people, originating in the calling of Abraham, which was redeemed from slavery in Egypt and given the task of serving the living God as a royal priesthood for the sake of his glory and for the benefit of the surrounding nations. This arrangement was codified in the covenant with Moses. Whether or not things actually happened in that way, it is certainly the story that Israel came to tell about itself—as I say, at least from the exile onwards—and that is the ground of biblical faith.

Secondly, in the prophetic narratives, Israel comes into conflict with powerful, pagan empires: Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome. In different ways, these conflicts are typically attributed to Israel’s sin; and the devastating outcomes—war, slaughter, destruction, exile—are regarded as divine punishment of a stubborn, disobedient, unrighteous, and impious people.

The New Testament opens in the midst of just this sort of historical crisis. The point can be made very succinctly with reference to Jesus’ disruptive action in the temple. The temple, at the centre of Israel’s political-religious life, should have been a house of prayer for all nations in keeping with its core vocation. But it has been turned into a den of robbers. Therefore, the temple will be destroyed, with not one stone left standing on another (Mk. 11:15-18; 13:2; and parallels).

Put another way, the current wicked and adulterous generation of Israel was on a broad road leading to war, slaughter, destruction, and exile.

Jesus and the gospel

Only once we have got the particular national crisis firmly in view can we begin to understand the point of Jesus’ proclamation of “good news” to Israel.

The nation faced what was to all intents and purposes a final judgment. Jesus was the means by which the priestly vocation would be preserved from the impending catastrophe. The good news was that the God of Israel was about to “judge” this wayward generation and transfer the vocation to a righteous remnant, recruited for the most part from beyond the pale of mainstream and establishment Judaism.

Jesus’ death, therefore, has to be understood, in the first place, as a death because of the sins of his people. In a very real sense, his death on a Roman cross anticipated the immense suffering and slaughter that would be inflicted on the nation by Rome. It is a remarkable soteriological datum that the innocent Jesus suffered the punishment due to the insurrectionist Barabbas:

And Pilate again said to them, “Then what shall I do with the man you call the King of the Jews?” And they cried out again, “Crucify him.” And Pilate said to them, “Why, What evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him.” So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified. (Mk. 15:12-15)

In this way, Jesus gave his life as a ransom for many in Israel—though really, that many was only a few (Mk. 10:45; Lk. 13:23-24). But as report of these events began to circulate in the wider gentile world, it became increasingly clear that there was much more to this good news than appeared at first sight.

So Paul includes in his “gospel” the fact that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3), by which he means that Christ died for the sins of an Israel into which a significant number of gentiles have been incorporated. Jesus did not die for individual sinners like you and me, he died for corporate Israel.

But the really good news for the gentiles was not that some of them were being forgiven their idolatry and becoming part of this transitional community of eschatological witness. It was that in due course the nations—at least of the Greek-Roman world—would as nations acclaim him as their supreme Lord or King (Rom. 15:12).

To my mind, the fact that this actually happened is the most compelling apologetic for the New Testament gospel.

One good news story after another

Ironically, therefore, the modern evangelical gospel of personal salvation has been a necessary but contingent response to the collapse of the historical situation heralded by Paul’s gospel.

It was good news that Jesus would rule over the peoples of Europe formerly governed by pagan Rome. It has been good news that there is still transformative power for individuals in the story about Jesus, even if Christianity has failed as a social force. But the success of modern evangelicalism has been had at the expense of an understanding of the Bible as a whole.

The evangelical biblicist-christocentrist-crucicentrist theological paradigm (if you’ll excuse the bloated jargon) focuses certain personal requirements very effectively, but it has blinded us to the one thing that makes the ancient witness of scripture so powerful—the sense of the dynamic presence of God on the stage of human history.

So it is good news today that the church is slowly and fitfully reconstructing the larger narrative framework from which the redemptive death of Jesus gets its meaning.

My five marks of an authentic evangelicalism

In the classic definition I referenced earlier, evangelicalism is biblicist, Christocentrist, crucicentrist, conversionist, and activist. If the term “evangelical” is to retain its usefulness, we need to move beyond this reductionist account of the ideal purpose of the church, without being sidetracked by consumerist, nationalist, or progressivist agendas. So for evangelicalism to engage with the present critical moment in history, in legitimate continuity with the biblical narrative, I propose adopting something like the following five marks of authenticity.

Communitarian. The principle actor—acting and acted upon—in the biblical story, apart from God, is a people whose existence is plotted over a long period of time. The experience of the community, in times both of stasis and of crisis, makes sense of everything, including the death, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus. And what was true then is also true now. A evangelical statement of what centrally matters must begin not with the individual but with the church.

Vocational. This people came into existence as a new creation in microcosm, but it found its chief vocation in the invitation to function as a nation of priests in service of the God who made the heavens and the earth, in the midst of the surrounding nations. Mission, therefore, is priestly mediation. “Evangelism” happens when the vocation breaks down.

Historical. The Bible is a canonical witness to the tumultuous historical experience of this people. Although it climaxes in a new heaven and new earth, theologically meaningful history does not end with the creation of the church, or the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, or the overthrow of pagan Rome. Biblical-scale events are still happening.

Messianic. The defining witness of the New Testament is that Jesus Christ has been made judge and ruler both of Israel and the nations. The direct historical embodiment of the rule of Christ over the nations has gone with the collapse of European Christendom, but the rule of Israel’s crucified Messiah over the historical priestly community which calls on his name continues. He is still seated at the right hand of the Father for the sake of his body, which is the church (cf. Eph. 1:20-23). What that will mean for the world in the coming age remains to be seen. Possibly not very much.

Prophetic. The gospel is not a singular and absolute thing. In any time of crisis, the prophet or the prophetic community discerns and proclaims the coming intervention of God: he will bring his people back from exile, he will punish unrighteousness, he will forgive the sins of those who turn to him, he will renew the covenant, he will overthrow oppressive regimes, he will bring the long age of classical paganism to an end, he will give his Son the nations as his inheritance. These things have counted as good news, in the way of history, in the first place for Israel, then for the peoples of the Greek-Roman oikoumenē.

So before we proclaim good news today, we “evangelicals” should first recognise the converging crises facing the church and humanity, and then ask how we as a prophetic community perceive the present and impending intervention of God on behalf of his people and for the sake of his “glory” among the nations and cultures of the world. In this respect, evangelism should be impersonal, not personal; social action should be prophetic.

When we have learned what the God whom we serve is up to, we will know what we are asking people to convert to and in what ways they should act.

So what is an “evangelical”?

Perhaps that’s the wrong question. There are not individual evangelicals. The term should rather define the community of the church insofar as it discerns, proclaims, and acts upon the dynamic destructive-creative intervention of God in the circumstances of his people. Individuals, both inside and outside the church, must decide how they want to respond to such signs of the rule of the God of history in their midst.