{"id":711,"date":"2008-12-18T10:53:34","date_gmt":"2008-12-18T17:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=711"},"modified":"2008-12-18T10:53:34","modified_gmt":"2008-12-18T17:53:34","slug":"evangelicals-the-reformed-and-the-north-american-context","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2008\/12\/18\/evangelicals-the-reformed-and-the-north-american-context\/","title":{"rendered":"Evangelicals, the Reformed, and the North American Context"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Bird<\/a> at Euangelion<\/a> (fast becoming one of my favorite lunchtime blog breaks!) offers a long post on Evangelicals, the Reformed, and evangelicalism inside and outside of North America.<\/p>\n

On some folks in the Reformed wing of North American evangelicalism today, Bird says \u00a0[correction: \u00a0I realized after I posted this that it is offensive out of context. \u00a0I myself am “Reformed” in theology, generally speaking. \u00a0Bird is referring, I think, to a very narrow sub-set of folks who are probably better regarded as hyper-Calvinist rather than “Reformed”. \u00a0Apologies for any offense]:<\/strong><\/p>\n

(1) They are more excited about all the things that they are against than anything that they are for; (2) They preach justification by faith, but in actuality practice justification by polemics; (3) They appear to believe in the inerrancy of a confession over the suffiency of the gospel; (4) They believe in the doctrines of grace, but do not treat others with grace; (5) They believe that unity is overrated; (6) They like doctrines about Jesus more than Jesus himself (and always defer to the Epistles over the Gospels); (7) mission means importing their debates and factions to other churches; and (8) The word “adiaphora” is considered an almost expletive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Preach it Mike! \u00a0Concerning North American evangelicals in general, he says:<\/p>\n

my dear friends in North America have to learn that outside of North America the things that they regard as badges of evangelicalism may not necessarily be badges elsewhere. For example, nowhere outside of the USA is “inerrancy” the single defining issue for evangelicals. The UCCF statement of faith in the UK refers to the Scriptures as “infallible” not inerrant. At the GAFCON meeting in Jerusalem where an international group of Evangelical Anglicans met together, their statement of faith referred to the “sufficiency” of the Scriptures, but there was no reference to inerrancy or infallibility. Ironically, these are people who are besieged by real liberals (not N.T. Wright, Peter Enns, Norman Shepherd, or those Federal Vision chaps, I mean real liberals!) and they do not associate an orthodox view of Scripture with pledging one’s allegiance to the Chicago Statement or to B.B. Warfield.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And further he notes:<\/p>\n

there are also some things about North American evangelicals that Christians outside of North American cannot comprehend: 1. Only north american evangelicals oppose measures to stem global warming, 2. Only north american evangelicals oppose universal health care, and 3. Only north american evangelicals support the Iraq War. Now, to Christians in the rest of the world this is somewhere between strange, funny, and frightening. Why is it that only north american evangelicals support these things? Are the rest of us stupid? It makes many of us suspicious that our North American evangelical friends have merged their theology with GOP economic policy, raised patriotism to an almost idolatrous level, and have a naive belief in the divinely given right of American hegemony. North Americans would do well to take the North-Americanism out of their evangelicalism and try to see Jesus through the eyes of Christians in other lands.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Amen brother!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Bird at Euangelion (fast becoming one of my favorite lunchtime blog breaks!) offers a long post on Evangelicals, the Reformed, and evangelicalism inside and outside of North America. On some folks in the Reformed wing of North American evangelicalism today, Bird says \u00a0[correction: \u00a0I realized after I posted this that it is offensive out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecclesiology","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-bt","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}