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Theology

Bloesch on Recovering Evangelical Distinctives

For a contemporary evangelical theological perspective that is rooted in scripture and the great tradition but is not captive to modernism, it’s hard to do better than Donald Bloesch.  Recently I’ve been reading Bloesch’s Essentials of Evangelical Theology.  Maybe Bloesch is a little too harsh on human reason, but there are many gems like this one:

In calling for a rediscovery of evangelical distinctives, we need to be aware of heresies on the right:  perfectionism, dispensationalism, religious enthusiasm, and hyperfundamentalism.  The great evangelical doctrines of sola Scriptura, solus Christus, and sola gratia contradict the synergism and anthropocentrism in conservative Christianity as well as in liberalism.  Even the doctrine of sola Scriptura, understood in the Reformation sense, exists in tension with the current evangelical stress on personal religious experience as well as the fundamentalist appeal to arguments from reason and science is support of total biblical reliability.

Some “third way” folks won’t like Bloesch’s strong Calvinism (I happen to appreciate it, for the most part), but his effort to develop a method that is essentially pre-modern seems spot-on.