Michael Spencer, aka, the “Internet Monk,” writes about The Coming Evangelical Collapse in the Christian Science Monitor, in an article that’s making the rounds on blogs and email lists. Mark Galli interacts with Spencer in a Christianity Today post.
I think Spencer makes some good points. He’s right, I fear, that the religious and spiritual culture we are passing on to our children in “mainstream” evangelical churches often is shallow and banal. He’s also right that mainstream evangelical culture has too closely attached itself to “conservative” American politics.
I also think he’s probably right about the depth of theological roots among average evangelical church-goers. But here I think part of the problem isn’t, as Spencer suggests, that we lack orthodox foundations. If anything, I think it’s because a couple of generations of our leadership have been reared with a theological framework that is too narrow in its supposed orthodoxy. Our theology is often obscurantist because it lacks contact with the broader world of knowledge and scholarship. If we become a ghetto, I think it will be because we have made ourselves an into an intellectual ghetto.
At the same time, Galli is right: “Evangelical” is a term that describes a particular historical / sociological moment. That moment will surely pass, though not in ten years as Spencer predicts. Yet there will always be movements of people called by God to be “evangelical” in the sense of living the good news of the inauguration of God’s Kingdom in Jesus Christ.
