Scot McKnight has started working through David Fitch’s massively titled book The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission: Towards an Evangelical Political Theology (Theopolitical Visions). I strongly recommend following him if you’re interested in the future of modern American evangelicalism.

My own feeling is that an evangelicalism that understands itself according to the standard definition of Bebbington and Noll, which Scot cites, does not have much of a future. On the one hand, I agree that evangelicalism has become largely “an empty politic”. On the other, the standard definition provides us with, at best, a severely emaciated account of how the idea of “gospel” or euangelion works within the biblical narrative. The two failings, of course, are not unrelated.

I have been trying for a few weeks to write a response to some difficult questions, put to me by a friend, about the Canaanite genocide, hell, election, and the “ludicrous contortions that a Calvinist needed to make in order to explain how God was fair to judge the non elect”. I have come to the conclusion that this whole issue of “election”, which is so badly represented by neo-Reformed writers and preachers today, needs to be addressed properly. Well, quasi-properly—this is only a blog, after all; it is meant to provoke thought, shake assumptions, imagine alternatives, not provide definitive answers. My plan is to examine the major New Testament passages that have a bearing on the theme in some detail, starting today with Romans 9, and then to write a summary Lexicon piece.

Roger Olson quotes what seems to me to be a not fully comprehensive definition of the category “postconservative evangelical” from a book by Steven B. Sherman called Revitalizing Theological Epistemology: Holistic Approaches to the Knowledge of God:

Basically, they [postconservative evangelicals] compose a loose coalition of thinkers who are seeking to facilitate a number of ‘beyond’ moves, theologically: beyond the agenda of the modernist/fundamentalist dichotomy toward what they see as a more holistic theology; beyond classical foundationalist epistemology toward alternative concepts of knowledge; beyond concentration on rationalism toward incorporating additional ways of knowing; beyond inerrancy debates and concerns toward an instrumental use of scripture; beyond academy-centered theologizing toward ecclesial and community-oriented thinking; beyond gatekeeping on boundary-setting doctrinalism toward a generous orthodoxy with pietistic emphasis; and finally, beyond what they view as a fixation on the concerns of modernity often motivated by a fear of liberalism, toward a more positive view and selective appropriation of postmodern insights. (9-10)