Leading Christian Resource for Avid Readers, Support New Schools with Every Purchase.

Evangelical Ethics: A Reader (Library of Theological Ethics)

by David P. Gushee , Isaac B. Sharp
Paperback |English |0664259596 | 9780664259594

Evangelical Ethics: A Reader (Library of Theological Ethics)

by David P. Gushee , Isaac B. Sharp
Paperback |English |0664259596 | 9780664259594
Overview

Introduction


WHO ARE THE EVANGELICALS?


Evangelicalism is notoriously difficult to define. Everything within the postmodern academy suffers from contestation ad nauseam, but evangelicalism has proven time and again a particularly thorny concept. Even if we choose to focus exclusively on evangelicalism within the United States, and almost entirely restrict the conversation to the post-World War II period, as we will do here, there is much to contest.


Due to the multiplicities of meaning associated with the descriptor and the attempts, time and again, to offer a concise definition for a group that defies easy categorization, some scholars have suggested that we jettison the term evangelical altogether.1 Feeling that the broader cultural association of the term with a particularly narrow political agenda--an anti-gay and anti-abortion agenda-- has left the label unredeemable, some within the evangelical community itself are today choosing to self-disassociate with evangelicalism and are using terms like "post-evangelical" or even "ex-evangelical."2 In this sense a particular social-political theological ethic within a sector of evangelicalism is undercutting evangelicalism itself. But that gets ahead of our story.


If no one can agree on anything else about evangelicalism there is, at least, a consensus among those who know it best that evangelicalism is a slippery term. Some scholars approach the study of evangelicalism through a sociological lens and then disagree about who counts as an evangelical. Others define the movement in terms of religious history and then disagree about when and from whence it came. Still others view evangelicalism in terms of theological beliefs: a lens most often chosen by those "on the inside" and frequently deployed in times of hottest disagreement in order to decide who is still in and, more importantly, who is now out. Evangelicals, in part due to a distinctive historical journey we are about to describe, do an awful lot of arguing about who counts as an evangelical and who does not.


In another attempt at enumerating evangelical theological characteristics, evangelical historian George Marsden includes the five following "essential evangelical beliefs": 1. Harkening ever back to the Protestant Reformation, evangelicals maintain the "final authority of the Bible"; 2. the belief that Scripture records the real historical narrative of "God's saving work"; 3. redemption through the salvific work of Jesus Christ and yielding eternal life; 4. "the importance of evangelism and missions"; 5. the necessity "of a spiritually transformed life."4


Union Seminary professor Gary Dorrien, contra Donald Dayton's suggestion that the term evangelical has lost its usefulness, instead agrees with Marsden and further quips about his "favorite definition of an evangelical, which is 'anyone who likes Billy Graham.'"5 This quip is revelatory of a sociological reality about evangelicalism; it has often produced hugely visible and charismatic figures ranging from Aimee Semple Macpherson to Billy Sunday to Billy Graham to Jerry Falwell to Rick Warren to John Piper to Jim Wallis to Rob Bell to . . . whoever comes next. An "evangelical" in this sense would be someone who knows who these evangelical icons are and who takes as authoritative one, some, or all of them.


Noting the importance of the denominational and confessional diversity of evangelicalism, evangelical church historian Timothy Weber sees evangelicalism as "a large extended family" with four main branches including: 1. classical: loyalists to the Reformation, with a tendency toward creedalism and away from the value of religious experience 2. pietistic: also within the Reformation stream but including an emphasis on religious experience and including both pietism and Puritanism; 3. fundamentalist: defined as opposing "liberal, critical, and evolutionary teaching" but also including "their 'neo-evangelical' offspring"; 4. progressive: including those who attempt to reconcile modernity with a variety of evangelical beliefs.6 This sophisticated and helpful definition points already at sociological diversities within evangelicalism.


Or we could just go back to the etymological origins of the word evangelical, which at least are clear. The English word evangelical and associated words like evangelism come from the Greek word (euangelion). Every definition of these terms must, therefore, reckon with their original meaning: "good news."7 (Evangelicals themselves will sometimes argue about which versions of our faith still represent "good news" to a suffering and unjust world and thus still merit the term "evangelical.") And as traced by Mark Noll--who is evangelicalism's foremost historian--the use of the term evangelical as an adjective dates back at least to the Middle Ages, when writers used it to describe the prophet Isaiah or the followers of St. Francis.8


More history helps us gain some clarity. The term evangelical began taking on its modern shape during the sixteenth century with the advent of the Protestant Reformation, at which point it began to be used as a synonym for Protestant--as is still the case in Germany today, where Evangelische means Protestant and especially Lutheran.9 The movement that would become what we are describing when we say evangelicalism, however, offers a particular fl of Christian faith that neither includes all Protestants nor is limited solely to Reformation-descended Protestantism. As we will see, though, the reformist impulse, implanted at its birth, continues to impact evangelicalism even now. This impulse has at times focused on doctrine and therefore on renewing theological seriousness or offering resistance to theological (or ethical) liberalism. Some of evangelicalism's greatest contributions to Christianity, however, have been about the renewal of passion in moribund Christianity and the drive to move people back toward devout "biblical" Christianity.


The first "modern" evangelicals were born when some newly minted Protestants were insultingly called "evangelicals" and chose to accept the label. The ensuing religious foment of sixteenththrough eighteenth-century Europe and the fledgling American colonies then gave rise to several more movements varyingly described as evangelical including Puritanism, Pietism, and the revival movements of the first American "Great Awakening." Formed for a variety of activist and evangelistic goals, evangelical "associations" then began taking root in the fertile, more disestablished religious soil of nineteenth-century North America.10 Evangelicalism as a movement was always multi-denominational and multi-confessional, including Calvinists (but also Arminians), Wesleyans, Anabaptists, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Holiness, and eventually charismatics, Pentecostals, and others. There are even evangelical Episcopalians, now often called Anglicans in the U.S. setting, and some speak of evangelical Catholics. The historic black churches are almost all evangelical by any theological definition, though they have often not been institutionally close to predominantly white evangelical bodies due to the tortured history of race in America. Evangelicalism has never been confined to official denominational structures--sometimes evangelicals are a minority within a broader denomination while at other times they dominate a particular denomination--thus there are self-identified evangelicals in the mainline Presbyterian and Methodist denominations while the Southern Baptist Convention as a whole is normally viewed as evangelical. Meanwhile, evangelicals have tended to produce a lush crop of parachurch organizations for various mission and activist purposes. So evangelicals include groups ranging from the Salvation Army to the Vineyard churches to the World Relief and World Vision social ministries. In some ways the leaders of these groups act as each era's current evangelical gatekeepers, an unofficial house of bishops for a decentralized evangelicalism attempting to retain its vitality and identity.


These evangelical institutions--some old and some new, including churches, colleges, publishing houses, and parachurch groups--continue to help define and shape the evangelical subculture. If you know Wheaton, Gordon, and Azusa Pacific universities; if you have heard of Books & Culture, Relevant, and Charisma magazines; if you read books published by Thomas Nelson, Baker, and Zondervan publishing houses; if you participated in Campus Crusade, RUF, or Intervarsity Christian Fellowship while in college; if you sang worship songs from Hillsong or have attended the Passion conference held in Atlanta each year--you probably are, or were, an evangelical. Each nation with a strong evangelical presence could tell its own version of the same story; meanwhile, there are institutions of global evangelicalism, such as the World Evangelical Fellowship and the Lausanne Movement.


AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM AND ITS SOCIAL ETHICS


But now let us focus more tightly on the trajectory of American evangelicalism and its social ethics. The waves of religious and cultural change cresting around the turn of the twentieth century left an indelible imprint on all aspects of American Christianity, including what became American evangelicalism. American Christian approaches to social-political theology and ethics were especially affected by the events during this period. For American evangelical social ethics and political theology, the most important and influential of these events was the advent of fundamentalism, which we understand here to be a particularly reactionary variant of older, less reactionary forms of evangelical Christianity in America.


Developing largely in reaction to the encroachment of European Protestant theological liberalism on American Christianity, fundamentalism and the "fundamentalist-modernist" controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century set much of the trajectory of what later became evangelical political theology.11 Fundamentalists, almost by definition, were those who opposed the encroachments of modernity, especially modern science, on traditional Christian faith. Their problem was not just biological and evolutionary science, which remains a site of conflict even today, but also the literary sciences, which cast doubt on many long-held Christian beliefs about the Bible and its contents. Fundamentalists held tightly to the divine inspiration, authority, and truthfulness of the Bible (sometimes heightening these claims to infallibility and inerrancy). They struggled to assimilate claims such as the four-source theory for the authorship of the Pentateuch (rather than sole Mosaic authorship) or the idea that Jesus' incarnation, miracles, and resurrection as described in the New Testament were perhaps something other than the kinds of factual observations one might read in a newspaper. When some of these ideas began to be integrated into the teachings of the major North American Christian denominations and their key scholarly leaders, fundamentalists recoiled in horror. Where possible they separated institutionally and certainly intellectually from these "modernist" or "liberal" groups, setting the groundwork for the long-standing split between what became known as "mainline Protestantism" on the more liberal side and fundamentalism on the conservative side.


This context also contributed to a tendency toward at least a selective anti-intellectualism in fundamentalism, because it fundamentalism that continues to this day, where religious leader-experts do not necessarily have or need much formal education. Yet some fundamentalists, at least, wanted to joust with their adversaries on equal terms, which required developing alternative, sometimes rigorous educational institutions and credentialing. Fundamentalists and their evangelical successors focused special intellectual effort on biblical/textual/language scholarship in keeping with their high view of the authority of the Bible. This remains with us to this day in both fundamentalism and evangelicalism, along with the tendency to believe that all theological and ethical questions for Christians can simply be resolved by more biblical study and expertise.


If Christian leaders and long-standing denominations could succumb to heretical liberalism (so it was thought), then the broader world was an even more threatening place. The fundamentalist posture toward the world became a hunkered-down separatism. The response to the question, "What does Christ have to do with culture?" became: "Not much." Fundamentalism's agenda became saving a few souls for heaven from a dying world while protecting their own doctrinal and moral purity.


Eschewing the culturally reformist and activist strands of previous generations of American evangelicals, which had motivated social crusades on issues ranging from abolition to Sabbath to urban poverty to temperance, the fundamentalists of that era began to see nothing redeemable in the broader American culture and were often led by this burgeoning cultural pessimism to a strictly sectarian understanding of the role of Christians in society. (This is to be distinguished from the more deeply rooted theological "sectarianism" found among the Anabaptists, which had European origins going back to the Reformation, so different as to hardly merit the same label.) Forming their own schools and publishing houses, organizations and denominations, fundamentalists saw cultural withdrawal as the only appropriate response for the American Christian in light of the increasingly evil and assuredly hell-bound broader society.


But after World War II, a new generation of leaders emerged with a very different approach. These leaders proclaimed themselves unsatisfied with the political theology of the culturally-declinist fundamentalists, some of whom had also picked up hysterical yet quasi-scientific apocalyptic end-times scenarios that reinforced their cultural withdrawal.12 Maintaining that they were in fact in agreement with fundamentalism's core theological commitments but drawing on an older wellspring of culturally engaged evangelicalism, leaders such as Carl


F. H. Henry began to challenge fundamentalism's separatism. Though most of these post-fundamentalists opted for (re)claiming the older label evangelical, some historians have chosen to use Harold Ockenga's designation of choice, neo-evangelical, to describe this culturally reengaging movement just after World War II.13 Either way, the shadow of these leaders and their influence on twentiethcentury postfundamentalist evangelicalism looms large and long, along with the flagship institutions they founded, such as Fuller Theological Seminary, Christianity Today magazine, and the National Association of Evangelicals--still major evangelical institutions today.


The initial message of Carl Henry can be found in his seminal work, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.14 Robust, confident, even somewhat arrogant in tone, Henry and other early neo-evangelicals sound certain not only that the world needs Jesus Christ but that soon the world itself will see that. Evangelism and personal conversion are the bottom line; biblical authority is unquestioned, and little allowance is made for others who do not share that theological presupposition. Evangelicals must not give an inch on their theological commitments but should in fact now join the broader global community as it works to rebuild the postwar world; such social reform partnerships are permissible as long as evangelicals always make clear that reforms of social and political structures alone will never be sufficient. People need personal conversion above all, from which most needed social changes will flow.


Though it must be reiterated that postwar American evangelicalism was not monolithic, the most prominent public presence of evangelicalism from 1945 until at least 2000 was represented by dynamic leaders such as Henry, emerging from this neo-evangelical stream--and sometimes from a stream more reminiscent of fundamentalism itself. The dominant and prototypical public face of evangelicalism during this period was theologically conservative if not fundamentalist, usually culturally engaged and/or reformist, and also predominantly white and male. Indeed, evangelicalism continued to put forward an almost exclusively conservative white male visage into the public arena long after other sectors of American culture and religion became less monochromatic.


The social revolutions of the 1960s evoked a fatefully bifurcated response among these white evangelicals, with effects lingering to this day in evangelical political theology. All evangelicals who stayed evangelicals rejected the "free love" version of the sexual revolution, and most later rejected abortion rights. Some, like the towering evangelical figure Francis Schaeffer, studied the 1960s radicals pretty closely and found ways to affirm some of what they were protesting but not how they were protesting or the solutions they were reaching.15 The 1960s Schaeffer was, well, kind of groovy; he was an evangelical who was not confined by a narrow fundamentalist reading list but instead attempted a broad intellectual/cultural critique of what had gone wrong in Western culture since the Enlightenment, not just since Kennedy. At this early stage Schaeffer did not treat the West as irredeemable. Schaeffer was one of several key neo-Calvinist evangelicals working on philosophical efforts to define and defend a "Christian worldand life-view" against secular and liberal alternatives. He was equipping evangelical Christians to meet the culture well armed for conversionist and intellectual engagements.


Other contemporaries, however, slipped back into the old fundamentalist default setting of cultural reaction in a mood that again became increasingly apocalyptic by the 1970s and '80s--signaled by the resurfacing of the end-times scenarios in best-selling books by authors like Hal Lindsey. (The fear of nuclear war played a part in this, as did recurrent Middle East wars.) As their hope for mass Christian conversion, intellectual argument-winning, and consequent social transformation declined, evangelical cultural pessimism increased. Claims that the "barbarians are at the gate" with their pitchforks and flaming torches became more common--and ever more hysterical.16 Often evangelical voices waxed nostalgic over the supposed virtues of an earlier America--before the 1960s, before everything went off the rails. Now aging, Henry and Schaeffer aligned with and encouraged the voices we now think of as representing the (in) famous Christian right of the 1970s through the 1990s: Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, etc. In our view, this was a sad decline from their more creative work as younger men. As they aged, they became culture warriors, their books an increasingly dreary and repetitive set of jeremiads.


Even before the full-blown birth of the Christian right in the late 1970s there were already very different white evangelical voices. Consider John Howard Yoder, the sophisticated polymath Anabaptist (though, we now know, sadly guilty of sexual misconduct that hurt women and stained his reputation); Ron Sider, the Canadian Mennonite historian trained at Yale who settled in gritty urban Philadelphia and lamented "rich Christians in an age of hunger"; Jim Wallis, the most politically savvy of the bunch, who settled in Washington, first in a radical evangelical commune and still today serving as a kind of evangelical senator in Washington and around the world; and Glen Stassen, a progressive Baptist evangelical from Minnesota who became the leading peace theorist and peacemaker of the group. All represented some version of an Anabaptist position. Sider, Wallis, Stassen, and others in their camp clearly were affected by


U.S. developments (including the Vietnam War and the broader Cold War). But they also represented that earlier, less conservative, more nineteenth-century strand of evangelical social engagement, especially its non-Calvinist variants. Sider was particularly self-conscious about the effort to connect his own work to the nineteenth-century "holistic mission" approaches of people like evangelist and abolitionist Charles Finney.


Bitter American fi over racial justice and integration motivated the emergence of new black evangelical voices. These voices, like Bill Pannell, Tom Skinner, and John Perkins, simply could not join so many white conservatives in uncritically applauding the supposedly glorious Christian past of our slaveholding, Jim Crow, lynching, segregationist, quasi-apartheid white American heritage. And they were bitterly critical of evidence that white evangelical cultural pessimism was in part triggered by advances for black civil rights in America. These men were evangelicals, but they were black evangelicals, and they had something quite striking to say to their white counterparts--and to America.17


From the 1970s through today a split emerges between two types of evangelical political theology. One is the evangelical right, an overwhelmingly white evangelical political theology of cultural pessimism, periodically alternating between triumphalist take-back-America-now confidence and despairing America-is-going-to-hell apocalyptic, steadfastly opposed to almost all social changes since the 1960s, including the areas of gender, U.S. patriotism, sexuality, and sometimes race. The other is an evangelical left, a multihued alternative evangelicalism offering much internal critique of white reaction and its overidentification of Christianity/evangelicalism with the older white segregationist America, often emerging from Anabaptist, Wesleyan, and Holiness strands. Then there is perhaps an evangelical center drawn from many evangelical quadrants and not fully convinced by either right or left.


White male hegemony over the evangelical conversation began to collapse by the late 1990s if not before, not that you could always know that by the makeup of Christian right gatherings. Early evangelical feminists surfaced, critiquing evangelical patriarchalism and contributing to dramatic change in the churches while accepting dramatic changes in culture that their male counterparts often decried. More and more African American evangelical voices emerged as the deep bench of theologically conservative but politically progressive black evangelicals began to get a chance to take the field. Native American, Latino/a, Asian American, and other new nonwhite evangelical voices got a platform while critical evangelical voices from abroad helped in critiquing white American blind spots.


Along the way there were and still are scholarly voices working out of one or another deeper stream of political theology to offer an alternative perspective.23 These have provided more substance and ballast for evangelical political theology and social ethics and at times have actually had influence at the evangelical grassroots level as well. None could be described as right-wing, but neither do they fall easily into the left.


Evangelical social ethics during this period has been defined by its simultaneous convergences and divergences. The major convergence: the clearest recurring motif in evangelical Christian social ethics during this period has been a critical and conversionary stance toward culture, aimed both more broadly at American society and at times specifically at American Christians. Evangelicals continue to seek conversion! The major divergence: post-1960s ideological polarization drove a politically/ demographically familiar split in which a group consisting almost entirely of white (usually but not always male) evangelicals hypervalorized a mythic American Christian past and critiqued American culture in stark, sometimes apocalyptic terms for abandoning Christ and Christian morality and risking divine judgment, moral collapse, and barbarism. These leaders tended to offer reflexive opposition to all broader culturally progressive movements, beginning with those of the 1960s but continuing to the present day. This reactionary posture shut down much meaningful engagement with critiques either of America or evangelical religion in terms of race, gender, LGBT inclusion, and so on. After a while this essentially reactionary posture began to lose more and more credibility, first in American culture and eventually in evangelicalism itself. White evangelical hysterics over U.S. cultural decline began to be seen as thinly veiled fears of dwindling white straight male conservative religious cultural dominance. Meanwhile another group of evangelicals, much more diverse, saw the mottled grays of American Christian history and critiqued American culture for different things--racism, militarism, sexism, consumerism. This group offered a much more pointed critique of American Christianity itself. Far more often their critiques were directed at the evangelical subculture and its white male leadership.


This split clearly demonstrated that the diagnosis of what used to be called "the social problem" looks very different from the underside of social and religious power structures than it does from a position of dominance. Evangelicals cannot avoid the epistemological problem we all face: we all see through lenses provided by our social location even when we are claiming, as evangelicals so often do, to merely be reading the Bible and reporting what it says.


Despite their profound differences, just about all evangelical political theologians/social ethicists/activists/writers represent that evangelical impulse for renewal, even conversion, that goes back into evangelicalism's DNA, its very marrow. But the various parties within evangelical political and social ethics were seeking to reform dramatically different things. This remains the case today.


INTO THE FUTURE


There can be little doubt that self-identified evangelicals have exerted massive cultural influence in the United States, both in previous eras and in the past half century or so. Though numbers alone don't necessarily equate with size of influence, in a liberal democratic setting head-counts matter, and evangelicals continue to have the numbers:


The extensive Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" estimates that 26.3 percent of Americans belong to a Protestant evangelical church as opposed to the 18.1 percent of Americans who belong to a Protestant mainline church and the 23.9 percent who are Catholic.


Gallup, between 1991 and 2005, conducted a poll asking Americans some version of the question, "Would you describe yourself as a 'born again' or evangelical?" Those who answered yes varied between the low of 35 percent in 1996 and the high of 47 percent in 2005.


Larry Eskridge of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College, while acknowledging the inherent difficulties associated with such surveys, draws on multiple sources to suggest:


In summary, when one lays a number of different studies side-by-side and considers the fact that many Americans could be described as "cultural evangelicals" (particularly within the African-American and Southern white populations), a general estimate of the nation's evangelicals could safely be said to range somewhere between 30-35% of the population, or about 90-100 million Americans.


So it is inarguable that a large slice of the American population fits somewhere under the larger taxonomic umbrella of evangelicalism. And as attested every time an election year rolls around, evangelicals have the numbers--so in the American context, evangelicals matter.


Therefore it really does matter whether evangelical public engagement and working social ethics look more like early Carl Henry or late Carl Henry, early Francis Schaeffer or late Francis Schaeffer; or more like Ron Sider and Jim Wallis or Jerry Falwell and Chuck Colson; or Soong Chan Rah or Helene Slessarev Jamir; or Gabriel Salguero or John Perkins. It matters whether evangelicalism defines its public witness as culturally reactionary, and white reactionary at that; or instead as culturally liberal; or as some hybrid that doesn't quite fit any of our contemporary political polarities. It matters whether evangelicalism stretches to include voices reflecting its full gender, linguistic, racial, and sexual orientation diversity or whether it remains dominated by (straight) white English-speaking American males. Where evangelicalism is simply white cultural reaction dressed up in religion, it fuels cultural division and white resentment of emerging multicultural America by turbocharging it with "biblical" fuel. Where evangelicalism leads with its love-based, soft-hearted "evangelical-like-Saint-Francis" compassion for those on the margins, it fuels countercultural campaigns for ending mass incarceration, feeding hungry kids, and advancing humane immigration reform--some of which involve creating strikingly broad evangelical coalitions that bring even our own warring tribes together.


At the moment of the composition of this essay, American evangelicalism is less confident than it was a generation ago. Numerical flattening, or decline, is hitting us too. Our own internal theological and ideological polarities are tearing us up. The LGBT issue is a new battlefront that looks likely to stay with us for the next generation as it has the mainline in the prior one, with polling revealing that many younger evangelicals are jumping ship over the issue. The Christian right is weaker than ever culturally, but ironically a sense of cultural embattlement is contributing to a stronger grip of that often-reactionary spirit, at least in much of mainstream evangelicalism. The latest battlefront is defined as preserving religious liberty for evangelicals in a hostile culture; adversaries view it as preserving space for faith-based discrimination. Voices of dissent within evangelicalism often get pushed out to the margins or out of evangelicalism in an oddly passive-aggressive, quasi-unofficial way, while some wash their hands of evangelicalism preemptively. The Christian right has made a generational succession while the evangelical left has only just begun to do so, leading perhaps to a modest change in tone on the right but little change in message--so far.


The journey continues. No one but God knows how it will end. But this much is sure--where there are evangelicals, they will be trying to convert somebody, maybe beginning with themselves. As demonstrated in this volume, this impulse is at the very heart of evangelical Christian social ethics.


CONCLUSION: ABOUT THE COLLECTION


We intend to let the authors contained herein speak for themselves. We have not edited them except for space and have sought and received appropriate consent for the edited version we present here. The choices about which authors and selections to include were sometimes agonizingly difficult. In the end we have sought to represent the breadth of evangelical thinking across confessional, gender, racial, and other lines. The collection is arrang

ISBN: 0664259596
ISBN13: 9780664259594
Author: David P. Gushee, Isaac B. Sharp
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Format: Paperback
PublicationDate: 2015-08-24
Language: English
PageCount: 208
Dimensions: 6.0 x 0.75 x 9.0 inches
Weight: 10.4 ounces

Just as it is impossible to understand the American religious landscape without some familiarity with evangelicalism, one cannot grasp the shape of contemporary Christian ethics without knowing the contributions of evangelical Protestants. This newest addition to the Library of Theological Ethics series begins by examining the core dynamic with which all evangelical ethics grapples: belief in an authoritative, inspired, and unchanging biblical text on the one hand, and engagement with a rapidly evolving and increasingly post-Christian culture on the other. It explores the different roles that scholars and popular figures have played in forming evangelicals' understandings of Christian ethics. And it draws together the contributions of both senior and emerging figures in painting a portrait of this diverse, vibrant, and challenging theological and ethical tradition. This book represents the breadth of evangelical ethical voices, demonstrating that evangelical ethics involves nuance and theological insight that far transcend any political agenda.

Contributors include David P. Gushee, Carl F. H. Henry, Jennifer McBride, Stephen Charles Mott, William E. Pannell, John Perkins, Soong-Chan Rah, Gabriel Salguero, Francis Schaeffer, Ron Sider, Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Glen H. Stassen, Eldin Villafañe, Allen Verhey, Jim Wallis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and John Howard Yoder.

The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important, and otherwise unavailable, texts--English-language texts and translations that have fallen out of print, new translations, and collections of significant statements about problems and themes of special importance--in an easily accessible form. This series enables sustained dialogue on new and classic works in the field.

Editorial Reviews


"Evangelical Ethics: A Reader offers an important window into the breadth and variety of evangelical voices speaking on a number of issues. For those who may think evangelicals are narrow and parochial in moral emphases, the chapters in this volume will be a delightful surprise. The contributors open up our moral horizons by addressing a variety of social ethical issues, such as race, nationalism, poverty, social justice, and immigration, informed by ways of reading Scripture, and engaging in theological reflection, with important implications for social ethical engagement for all Christians. This volume is a welcomed addition to the Library of Theological Ethics."
--Wyndy Corbin Reuschling, Professor of Ethics and Theology, Ashland Theological Seminary


Books - New and Used

The following guidelines apply to books:

  • New: A brand-new copy with cover and original protective wrapping intact. Books with markings of any kind on the cover or pages, books marked as "Bargain" or "Remainder," or with any other labels attached, may not be listed as New condition.
  • Used - Good: All pages and cover are intact (including the dust cover, if applicable). Spine may show signs of wear. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting. May include "From the library of" labels. Shrink wrap, dust covers, or boxed set case may be missing. Item may be missing bundled media.
  • Used - Acceptable: All pages and the cover are intact, but shrink wrap, dust covers, or boxed set case may be missing. Pages may include limited notes, highlighting, or minor water damage but the text is readable. Item may but the dust cover may be missing. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting, but the text cannot be obscured or unreadable.

Note: Some electronic material access codes are valid only for one user. For this reason, used books, including books listed in the Used – Like New condition, may not come with functional electronic material access codes.

Shipping Fees

  • Stevens Books offers FREE SHIPPING everywhere in the United States for ALL non-book orders, and $3.99 for each book.
  • Packages are shipped from Monday to Friday.
  • No additional fees and charges.

Delivery Times

The usual time for processing an order is 24 hours (1 business day), but may vary depending on the availability of products ordered. This period excludes delivery times, which depend on your geographic location.

Estimated delivery times:

  • Standard Shipping: 5-8 business days
  • Expedited Shipping: 3-5 business days

Shipping method varies depending on what is being shipped.  

Tracking
All orders are shipped with a tracking number. Once your order has left our warehouse, a confirmation e-mail with a tracking number will be sent to you. You will be able to track your package at all times. 

Damaged Parcel
If your package has been delivered in a PO Box, please note that we are not responsible for any damage that may result (consequences of extreme temperatures, theft, etc.). 

If you have any questions regarding shipping or want to know about the status of an order, please contact us or email to support@stevensbooks.com.

You may return most items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund.

To be eligible for a return, your item must be unused and in the same condition that you received it. It must also be in the original packaging.

Several types of goods are exempt from being returned. Perishable goods such as food, flowers, newspapers or magazines cannot be returned. We also do not accept products that are intimate or sanitary goods, hazardous materials, or flammable liquids or gases.

Additional non-returnable items:

  • Gift cards
  • Downloadable software products
  • Some health and personal care items

To complete your return, we require a tracking number, which shows the items which you already returned to us.
There are certain situations where only partial refunds are granted (if applicable)

  • Book with obvious signs of use
  • CD, DVD, VHS tape, software, video game, cassette tape, or vinyl record that has been opened
  • Any item not in its original condition, is damaged or missing parts for reasons not due to our error
  • Any item that is returned more than 30 days after delivery

Items returned to us as a result of our error will receive a full refund,some returns may be subject to a restocking fee of 7% of the total item price, please contact a customer care team member to see if your return is subject. Returns that arrived on time and were as described are subject to a restocking fee.

Items returned to us that were not the result of our error, including items returned to us due to an invalid or incomplete address, will be refunded the original item price less our standard restocking fees.

If the item is returned to us for any of the following reasons, a 15% restocking fee will be applied to your refund total and you will be asked to pay for return shipping:

  • Item(s) no longer needed or wanted.
  • Item(s) returned to us due to an invalid or incomplete address.
  • Item(s) returned to us that were not a result of our error.

You should expect to receive your refund within four weeks of giving your package to the return shipper, however, in many cases you will receive a refund more quickly. This time period includes the transit time for us to receive your return from the shipper (5 to 10 business days), the time it takes us to process your return once we receive it (3 to 5 business days), and the time it takes your bank to process our refund request (5 to 10 business days).

If you need to return an item, please Contact Us with your order number and details about the product you would like to return. We will respond quickly with instructions for how to return items from your order.


Shipping Cost


We'll pay the return shipping costs if the return is a result of our error (you received an incorrect or defective item, etc.). In other cases, you will be responsible for paying for your own shipping costs for returning your item. Shipping costs are non-refundable. If you receive a refund, the cost of return shipping will be deducted from your refund.

Depending on where you live, the time it may take for your exchanged product to reach you, may vary.

If you are shipping an item over $75, you should consider using a trackable shipping service or purchasing shipping insurance. We don’t guarantee that we will receive your returned item.

Categories
$23.09
    Condition
Arrives: -
Free 30 days return & refund.
In Stock

Secure transaction.

Overview

Introduction


WHO ARE THE EVANGELICALS?


Evangelicalism is notoriously difficult to define. Everything within the postmodern academy suffers from contestation ad nauseam, but evangelicalism has proven time and again a particularly thorny concept. Even if we choose to focus exclusively on evangelicalism within the United States, and almost entirely restrict the conversation to the post-World War II period, as we will do here, there is much to contest.


Due to the multiplicities of meaning associated with the descriptor and the attempts, time and again, to offer a concise definition for a group that defies easy categorization, some scholars have suggested that we jettison the term evangelical altogether.1 Feeling that the broader cultural association of the term with a particularly narrow political agenda--an anti-gay and anti-abortion agenda-- has left the label unredeemable, some within the evangelical community itself are today choosing to self-disassociate with evangelicalism and are using terms like "post-evangelical" or even "ex-evangelical."2 In this sense a particular social-political theological ethic within a sector of evangelicalism is undercutting evangelicalism itself. But that gets ahead of our story.


If no one can agree on anything else about evangelicalism there is, at least, a consensus among those who know it best that evangelicalism is a slippery term. Some scholars approach the study of evangelicalism through a sociological lens and then disagree about who counts as an evangelical. Others define the movement in terms of religious history and then disagree about when and from whence it came. Still others view evangelicalism in terms of theological beliefs: a lens most often chosen by those "on the inside" and frequently deployed in times of hottest disagreement in order to decide who is still in and, more importantly, who is now out. Evangelicals, in part due to a distinctive historical journey we are about to describe, do an awful lot of arguing about who counts as an evangelical and who does not.


In another attempt at enumerating evangelical theological characteristics, evangelical historian George Marsden includes the five following "essential evangelical beliefs": 1. Harkening ever back to the Protestant Reformation, evangelicals maintain the "final authority of the Bible"; 2. the belief that Scripture records the real historical narrative of "God's saving work"; 3. redemption through the salvific work of Jesus Christ and yielding eternal life; 4. "the importance of evangelism and missions"; 5. the necessity "of a spiritually transformed life."4


Union Seminary professor Gary Dorrien, contra Donald Dayton's suggestion that the term evangelical has lost its usefulness, instead agrees with Marsden and further quips about his "favorite definition of an evangelical, which is 'anyone who likes Billy Graham.'"5 This quip is revelatory of a sociological reality about evangelicalism; it has often produced hugely visible and charismatic figures ranging from Aimee Semple Macpherson to Billy Sunday to Billy Graham to Jerry Falwell to Rick Warren to John Piper to Jim Wallis to Rob Bell to . . . whoever comes next. An "evangelical" in this sense would be someone who knows who these evangelical icons are and who takes as authoritative one, some, or all of them.


Noting the importance of the denominational and confessional diversity of evangelicalism, evangelical church historian Timothy Weber sees evangelicalism as "a large extended family" with four main branches including: 1. classical: loyalists to the Reformation, with a tendency toward creedalism and away from the value of religious experience 2. pietistic: also within the Reformation stream but including an emphasis on religious experience and including both pietism and Puritanism; 3. fundamentalist: defined as opposing "liberal, critical, and evolutionary teaching" but also including "their 'neo-evangelical' offspring"; 4. progressive: including those who attempt to reconcile modernity with a variety of evangelical beliefs.6 This sophisticated and helpful definition points already at sociological diversities within evangelicalism.


Or we could just go back to the etymological origins of the word evangelical, which at least are clear. The English word evangelical and associated words like evangelism come from the Greek word (euangelion). Every definition of these terms must, therefore, reckon with their original meaning: "good news."7 (Evangelicals themselves will sometimes argue about which versions of our faith still represent "good news" to a suffering and unjust world and thus still merit the term "evangelical.") And as traced by Mark Noll--who is evangelicalism's foremost historian--the use of the term evangelical as an adjective dates back at least to the Middle Ages, when writers used it to describe the prophet Isaiah or the followers of St. Francis.8


More history helps us gain some clarity. The term evangelical began taking on its modern shape during the sixteenth century with the advent of the Protestant Reformation, at which point it began to be used as a synonym for Protestant--as is still the case in Germany today, where Evangelische means Protestant and especially Lutheran.9 The movement that would become what we are describing when we say evangelicalism, however, offers a particular fl of Christian faith that neither includes all Protestants nor is limited solely to Reformation-descended Protestantism. As we will see, though, the reformist impulse, implanted at its birth, continues to impact evangelicalism even now. This impulse has at times focused on doctrine and therefore on renewing theological seriousness or offering resistance to theological (or ethical) liberalism. Some of evangelicalism's greatest contributions to Christianity, however, have been about the renewal of passion in moribund Christianity and the drive to move people back toward devout "biblical" Christianity.


The first "modern" evangelicals were born when some newly minted Protestants were insultingly called "evangelicals" and chose to accept the label. The ensuing religious foment of sixteenththrough eighteenth-century Europe and the fledgling American colonies then gave rise to several more movements varyingly described as evangelical including Puritanism, Pietism, and the revival movements of the first American "Great Awakening." Formed for a variety of activist and evangelistic goals, evangelical "associations" then began taking root in the fertile, more disestablished religious soil of nineteenth-century North America.10 Evangelicalism as a movement was always multi-denominational and multi-confessional, including Calvinists (but also Arminians), Wesleyans, Anabaptists, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Holiness, and eventually charismatics, Pentecostals, and others. There are even evangelical Episcopalians, now often called Anglicans in the U.S. setting, and some speak of evangelical Catholics. The historic black churches are almost all evangelical by any theological definition, though they have often not been institutionally close to predominantly white evangelical bodies due to the tortured history of race in America. Evangelicalism has never been confined to official denominational structures--sometimes evangelicals are a minority within a broader denomination while at other times they dominate a particular denomination--thus there are self-identified evangelicals in the mainline Presbyterian and Methodist denominations while the Southern Baptist Convention as a whole is normally viewed as evangelical. Meanwhile, evangelicals have tended to produce a lush crop of parachurch organizations for various mission and activist purposes. So evangelicals include groups ranging from the Salvation Army to the Vineyard churches to the World Relief and World Vision social ministries. In some ways the leaders of these groups act as each era's current evangelical gatekeepers, an unofficial house of bishops for a decentralized evangelicalism attempting to retain its vitality and identity.


These evangelical institutions--some old and some new, including churches, colleges, publishing houses, and parachurch groups--continue to help define and shape the evangelical subculture. If you know Wheaton, Gordon, and Azusa Pacific universities; if you have heard of Books & Culture, Relevant, and Charisma magazines; if you read books published by Thomas Nelson, Baker, and Zondervan publishing houses; if you participated in Campus Crusade, RUF, or Intervarsity Christian Fellowship while in college; if you sang worship songs from Hillsong or have attended the Passion conference held in Atlanta each year--you probably are, or were, an evangelical. Each nation with a strong evangelical presence could tell its own version of the same story; meanwhile, there are institutions of global evangelicalism, such as the World Evangelical Fellowship and the Lausanne Movement.


AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM AND ITS SOCIAL ETHICS


But now let us focus more tightly on the trajectory of American evangelicalism and its social ethics. The waves of religious and cultural change cresting around the turn of the twentieth century left an indelible imprint on all aspects of American Christianity, including what became American evangelicalism. American Christian approaches to social-political theology and ethics were especially affected by the events during this period. For American evangelical social ethics and political theology, the most important and influential of these events was the advent of fundamentalism, which we understand here to be a particularly reactionary variant of older, less reactionary forms of evangelical Christianity in America.


Developing largely in reaction to the encroachment of European Protestant theological liberalism on American Christianity, fundamentalism and the "fundamentalist-modernist" controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century set much of the trajectory of what later became evangelical political theology.11 Fundamentalists, almost by definition, were those who opposed the encroachments of modernity, especially modern science, on traditional Christian faith. Their problem was not just biological and evolutionary science, which remains a site of conflict even today, but also the literary sciences, which cast doubt on many long-held Christian beliefs about the Bible and its contents. Fundamentalists held tightly to the divine inspiration, authority, and truthfulness of the Bible (sometimes heightening these claims to infallibility and inerrancy). They struggled to assimilate claims such as the four-source theory for the authorship of the Pentateuch (rather than sole Mosaic authorship) or the idea that Jesus' incarnation, miracles, and resurrection as described in the New Testament were perhaps something other than the kinds of factual observations one might read in a newspaper. When some of these ideas began to be integrated into the teachings of the major North American Christian denominations and their key scholarly leaders, fundamentalists recoiled in horror. Where possible they separated institutionally and certainly intellectually from these "modernist" or "liberal" groups, setting the groundwork for the long-standing split between what became known as "mainline Protestantism" on the more liberal side and fundamentalism on the conservative side.


This context also contributed to a tendency toward at least a selective anti-intellectualism in fundamentalism, because it fundamentalism that continues to this day, where religious leader-experts do not necessarily have or need much formal education. Yet some fundamentalists, at least, wanted to joust with their adversaries on equal terms, which required developing alternative, sometimes rigorous educational institutions and credentialing. Fundamentalists and their evangelical successors focused special intellectual effort on biblical/textual/language scholarship in keeping with their high view of the authority of the Bible. This remains with us to this day in both fundamentalism and evangelicalism, along with the tendency to believe that all theological and ethical questions for Christians can simply be resolved by more biblical study and expertise.


If Christian leaders and long-standing denominations could succumb to heretical liberalism (so it was thought), then the broader world was an even more threatening place. The fundamentalist posture toward the world became a hunkered-down separatism. The response to the question, "What does Christ have to do with culture?" became: "Not much." Fundamentalism's agenda became saving a few souls for heaven from a dying world while protecting their own doctrinal and moral purity.


Eschewing the culturally reformist and activist strands of previous generations of American evangelicals, which had motivated social crusades on issues ranging from abolition to Sabbath to urban poverty to temperance, the fundamentalists of that era began to see nothing redeemable in the broader American culture and were often led by this burgeoning cultural pessimism to a strictly sectarian understanding of the role of Christians in society. (This is to be distinguished from the more deeply rooted theological "sectarianism" found among the Anabaptists, which had European origins going back to the Reformation, so different as to hardly merit the same label.) Forming their own schools and publishing houses, organizations and denominations, fundamentalists saw cultural withdrawal as the only appropriate response for the American Christian in light of the increasingly evil and assuredly hell-bound broader society.


But after World War II, a new generation of leaders emerged with a very different approach. These leaders proclaimed themselves unsatisfied with the political theology of the culturally-declinist fundamentalists, some of whom had also picked up hysterical yet quasi-scientific apocalyptic end-times scenarios that reinforced their cultural withdrawal.12 Maintaining that they were in fact in agreement with fundamentalism's core theological commitments but drawing on an older wellspring of culturally engaged evangelicalism, leaders such as Carl


F. H. Henry began to challenge fundamentalism's separatism. Though most of these post-fundamentalists opted for (re)claiming the older label evangelical, some historians have chosen to use Harold Ockenga's designation of choice, neo-evangelical, to describe this culturally reengaging movement just after World War II.13 Either way, the shadow of these leaders and their influence on twentiethcentury postfundamentalist evangelicalism looms large and long, along with the flagship institutions they founded, such as Fuller Theological Seminary, Christianity Today magazine, and the National Association of Evangelicals--still major evangelical institutions today.


The initial message of Carl Henry can be found in his seminal work, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.14 Robust, confident, even somewhat arrogant in tone, Henry and other early neo-evangelicals sound certain not only that the world needs Jesus Christ but that soon the world itself will see that. Evangelism and personal conversion are the bottom line; biblical authority is unquestioned, and little allowance is made for others who do not share that theological presupposition. Evangelicals must not give an inch on their theological commitments but should in fact now join the broader global community as it works to rebuild the postwar world; such social reform partnerships are permissible as long as evangelicals always make clear that reforms of social and political structures alone will never be sufficient. People need personal conversion above all, from which most needed social changes will flow.


Though it must be reiterated that postwar American evangelicalism was not monolithic, the most prominent public presence of evangelicalism from 1945 until at least 2000 was represented by dynamic leaders such as Henry, emerging from this neo-evangelical stream--and sometimes from a stream more reminiscent of fundamentalism itself. The dominant and prototypical public face of evangelicalism during this period was theologically conservative if not fundamentalist, usually culturally engaged and/or reformist, and also predominantly white and male. Indeed, evangelicalism continued to put forward an almost exclusively conservative white male visage into the public arena long after other sectors of American culture and religion became less monochromatic.


The social revolutions of the 1960s evoked a fatefully bifurcated response among these white evangelicals, with effects lingering to this day in evangelical political theology. All evangelicals who stayed evangelicals rejected the "free love" version of the sexual revolution, and most later rejected abortion rights. Some, like the towering evangelical figure Francis Schaeffer, studied the 1960s radicals pretty closely and found ways to affirm some of what they were protesting but not how they were protesting or the solutions they were reaching.15 The 1960s Schaeffer was, well, kind of groovy; he was an evangelical who was not confined by a narrow fundamentalist reading list but instead attempted a broad intellectual/cultural critique of what had gone wrong in Western culture since the Enlightenment, not just since Kennedy. At this early stage Schaeffer did not treat the West as irredeemable. Schaeffer was one of several key neo-Calvinist evangelicals working on philosophical efforts to define and defend a "Christian worldand life-view" against secular and liberal alternatives. He was equipping evangelical Christians to meet the culture well armed for conversionist and intellectual engagements.


Other contemporaries, however, slipped back into the old fundamentalist default setting of cultural reaction in a mood that again became increasingly apocalyptic by the 1970s and '80s--signaled by the resurfacing of the end-times scenarios in best-selling books by authors like Hal Lindsey. (The fear of nuclear war played a part in this, as did recurrent Middle East wars.) As their hope for mass Christian conversion, intellectual argument-winning, and consequent social transformation declined, evangelical cultural pessimism increased. Claims that the "barbarians are at the gate" with their pitchforks and flaming torches became more common--and ever more hysterical.16 Often evangelical voices waxed nostalgic over the supposed virtues of an earlier America--before the 1960s, before everything went off the rails. Now aging, Henry and Schaeffer aligned with and encouraged the voices we now think of as representing the (in) famous Christian right of the 1970s through the 1990s: Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, etc. In our view, this was a sad decline from their more creative work as younger men. As they aged, they became culture warriors, their books an increasingly dreary and repetitive set of jeremiads.


Even before the full-blown birth of the Christian right in the late 1970s there were already very different white evangelical voices. Consider John Howard Yoder, the sophisticated polymath Anabaptist (though, we now know, sadly guilty of sexual misconduct that hurt women and stained his reputation); Ron Sider, the Canadian Mennonite historian trained at Yale who settled in gritty urban Philadelphia and lamented "rich Christians in an age of hunger"; Jim Wallis, the most politically savvy of the bunch, who settled in Washington, first in a radical evangelical commune and still today serving as a kind of evangelical senator in Washington and around the world; and Glen Stassen, a progressive Baptist evangelical from Minnesota who became the leading peace theorist and peacemaker of the group. All represented some version of an Anabaptist position. Sider, Wallis, Stassen, and others in their camp clearly were affected by


U.S. developments (including the Vietnam War and the broader Cold War). But they also represented that earlier, less conservative, more nineteenth-century strand of evangelical social engagement, especially its non-Calvinist variants. Sider was particularly self-conscious about the effort to connect his own work to the nineteenth-century "holistic mission" approaches of people like evangelist and abolitionist Charles Finney.


Bitter American fi over racial justice and integration motivated the emergence of new black evangelical voices. These voices, like Bill Pannell, Tom Skinner, and John Perkins, simply could not join so many white conservatives in uncritically applauding the supposedly glorious Christian past of our slaveholding, Jim Crow, lynching, segregationist, quasi-apartheid white American heritage. And they were bitterly critical of evidence that white evangelical cultural pessimism was in part triggered by advances for black civil rights in America. These men were evangelicals, but they were black evangelicals, and they had something quite striking to say to their white counterparts--and to America.17


From the 1970s through today a split emerges between two types of evangelical political theology. One is the evangelical right, an overwhelmingly white evangelical political theology of cultural pessimism, periodically alternating between triumphalist take-back-America-now confidence and despairing America-is-going-to-hell apocalyptic, steadfastly opposed to almost all social changes since the 1960s, including the areas of gender, U.S. patriotism, sexuality, and sometimes race. The other is an evangelical left, a multihued alternative evangelicalism offering much internal critique of white reaction and its overidentification of Christianity/evangelicalism with the older white segregationist America, often emerging from Anabaptist, Wesleyan, and Holiness strands. Then there is perhaps an evangelical center drawn from many evangelical quadrants and not fully convinced by either right or left.


White male hegemony over the evangelical conversation began to collapse by the late 1990s if not before, not that you could always know that by the makeup of Christian right gatherings. Early evangelical feminists surfaced, critiquing evangelical patriarchalism and contributing to dramatic change in the churches while accepting dramatic changes in culture that their male counterparts often decried. More and more African American evangelical voices emerged as the deep bench of theologically conservative but politically progressive black evangelicals began to get a chance to take the field. Native American, Latino/a, Asian American, and other new nonwhite evangelical voices got a platform while critical evangelical voices from abroad helped in critiquing white American blind spots.


Along the way there were and still are scholarly voices working out of one or another deeper stream of political theology to offer an alternative perspective.23 These have provided more substance and ballast for evangelical political theology and social ethics and at times have actually had influence at the evangelical grassroots level as well. None could be described as right-wing, but neither do they fall easily into the left.


Evangelical social ethics during this period has been defined by its simultaneous convergences and divergences. The major convergence: the clearest recurring motif in evangelical Christian social ethics during this period has been a critical and conversionary stance toward culture, aimed both more broadly at American society and at times specifically at American Christians. Evangelicals continue to seek conversion! The major divergence: post-1960s ideological polarization drove a politically/ demographically familiar split in which a group consisting almost entirely of white (usually but not always male) evangelicals hypervalorized a mythic American Christian past and critiqued American culture in stark, sometimes apocalyptic terms for abandoning Christ and Christian morality and risking divine judgment, moral collapse, and barbarism. These leaders tended to offer reflexive opposition to all broader culturally progressive movements, beginning with those of the 1960s but continuing to the present day. This reactionary posture shut down much meaningful engagement with critiques either of America or evangelical religion in terms of race, gender, LGBT inclusion, and so on. After a while this essentially reactionary posture began to lose more and more credibility, first in American culture and eventually in evangelicalism itself. White evangelical hysterics over U.S. cultural decline began to be seen as thinly veiled fears of dwindling white straight male conservative religious cultural dominance. Meanwhile another group of evangelicals, much more diverse, saw the mottled grays of American Christian history and critiqued American culture for different things--racism, militarism, sexism, consumerism. This group offered a much more pointed critique of American Christianity itself. Far more often their critiques were directed at the evangelical subculture and its white male leadership.


This split clearly demonstrated that the diagnosis of what used to be called "the social problem" looks very different from the underside of social and religious power structures than it does from a position of dominance. Evangelicals cannot avoid the epistemological problem we all face: we all see through lenses provided by our social location even when we are claiming, as evangelicals so often do, to merely be reading the Bible and reporting what it says.


Despite their profound differences, just about all evangelical political theologians/social ethicists/activists/writers represent that evangelical impulse for renewal, even conversion, that goes back into evangelicalism's DNA, its very marrow. But the various parties within evangelical political and social ethics were seeking to reform dramatically different things. This remains the case today.


INTO THE FUTURE


There can be little doubt that self-identified evangelicals have exerted massive cultural influence in the United States, both in previous eras and in the past half century or so. Though numbers alone don't necessarily equate with size of influence, in a liberal democratic setting head-counts matter, and evangelicals continue to have the numbers:


The extensive Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" estimates that 26.3 percent of Americans belong to a Protestant evangelical church as opposed to the 18.1 percent of Americans who belong to a Protestant mainline church and the 23.9 percent who are Catholic.


Gallup, between 1991 and 2005, conducted a poll asking Americans some version of the question, "Would you describe yourself as a 'born again' or evangelical?" Those who answered yes varied between the low of 35 percent in 1996 and the high of 47 percent in 2005.


Larry Eskridge of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College, while acknowledging the inherent difficulties associated with such surveys, draws on multiple sources to suggest:


In summary, when one lays a number of different studies side-by-side and considers the fact that many Americans could be described as "cultural evangelicals" (particularly within the African-American and Southern white populations), a general estimate of the nation's evangelicals could safely be said to range somewhere between 30-35% of the population, or about 90-100 million Americans.


So it is inarguable that a large slice of the American population fits somewhere under the larger taxonomic umbrella of evangelicalism. And as attested every time an election year rolls around, evangelicals have the numbers--so in the American context, evangelicals matter.


Therefore it really does matter whether evangelical public engagement and working social ethics look more like early Carl Henry or late Carl Henry, early Francis Schaeffer or late Francis Schaeffer; or more like Ron Sider and Jim Wallis or Jerry Falwell and Chuck Colson; or Soong Chan Rah or Helene Slessarev Jamir; or Gabriel Salguero or John Perkins. It matters whether evangelicalism defines its public witness as culturally reactionary, and white reactionary at that; or instead as culturally liberal; or as some hybrid that doesn't quite fit any of our contemporary political polarities. It matters whether evangelicalism stretches to include voices reflecting its full gender, linguistic, racial, and sexual orientation diversity or whether it remains dominated by (straight) white English-speaking American males. Where evangelicalism is simply white cultural reaction dressed up in religion, it fuels cultural division and white resentment of emerging multicultural America by turbocharging it with "biblical" fuel. Where evangelicalism leads with its love-based, soft-hearted "evangelical-like-Saint-Francis" compassion for those on the margins, it fuels countercultural campaigns for ending mass incarceration, feeding hungry kids, and advancing humane immigration reform--some of which involve creating strikingly broad evangelical coalitions that bring even our own warring tribes together.


At the moment of the composition of this essay, American evangelicalism is less confident than it was a generation ago. Numerical flattening, or decline, is hitting us too. Our own internal theological and ideological polarities are tearing us up. The LGBT issue is a new battlefront that looks likely to stay with us for the next generation as it has the mainline in the prior one, with polling revealing that many younger evangelicals are jumping ship over the issue. The Christian right is weaker than ever culturally, but ironically a sense of cultural embattlement is contributing to a stronger grip of that often-reactionary spirit, at least in much of mainstream evangelicalism. The latest battlefront is defined as preserving religious liberty for evangelicals in a hostile culture; adversaries view it as preserving space for faith-based discrimination. Voices of dissent within evangelicalism often get pushed out to the margins or out of evangelicalism in an oddly passive-aggressive, quasi-unofficial way, while some wash their hands of evangelicalism preemptively. The Christian right has made a generational succession while the evangelical left has only just begun to do so, leading perhaps to a modest change in tone on the right but little change in message--so far.


The journey continues. No one but God knows how it will end. But this much is sure--where there are evangelicals, they will be trying to convert somebody, maybe beginning with themselves. As demonstrated in this volume, this impulse is at the very heart of evangelical Christian social ethics.


CONCLUSION: ABOUT THE COLLECTION


We intend to let the authors contained herein speak for themselves. We have not edited them except for space and have sought and received appropriate consent for the edited version we present here. The choices about which authors and selections to include were sometimes agonizingly difficult. In the end we have sought to represent the breadth of evangelical thinking across confessional, gender, racial, and other lines. The collection is arrang

ISBN: 0664259596
ISBN13: 9780664259594
Author: David P. Gushee, Isaac B. Sharp
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Format: Paperback
PublicationDate: 2015-08-24
Language: English
PageCount: 208
Dimensions: 6.0 x 0.75 x 9.0 inches
Weight: 10.4 ounces

Just as it is impossible to understand the American religious landscape without some familiarity with evangelicalism, one cannot grasp the shape of contemporary Christian ethics without knowing the contributions of evangelical Protestants. This newest addition to the Library of Theological Ethics series begins by examining the core dynamic with which all evangelical ethics grapples: belief in an authoritative, inspired, and unchanging biblical text on the one hand, and engagement with a rapidly evolving and increasingly post-Christian culture on the other. It explores the different roles that scholars and popular figures have played in forming evangelicals' understandings of Christian ethics. And it draws together the contributions of both senior and emerging figures in painting a portrait of this diverse, vibrant, and challenging theological and ethical tradition. This book represents the breadth of evangelical ethical voices, demonstrating that evangelical ethics involves nuance and theological insight that far transcend any political agenda.

Contributors include David P. Gushee, Carl F. H. Henry, Jennifer McBride, Stephen Charles Mott, William E. Pannell, John Perkins, Soong-Chan Rah, Gabriel Salguero, Francis Schaeffer, Ron Sider, Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Glen H. Stassen, Eldin Villafañe, Allen Verhey, Jim Wallis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and John Howard Yoder.

The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important, and otherwise unavailable, texts--English-language texts and translations that have fallen out of print, new translations, and collections of significant statements about problems and themes of special importance--in an easily accessible form. This series enables sustained dialogue on new and classic works in the field.

Editorial Reviews


"Evangelical Ethics: A Reader offers an important window into the breadth and variety of evangelical voices speaking on a number of issues. For those who may think evangelicals are narrow and parochial in moral emphases, the chapters in this volume will be a delightful surprise. The contributors open up our moral horizons by addressing a variety of social ethical issues, such as race, nationalism, poverty, social justice, and immigration, informed by ways of reading Scripture, and engaging in theological reflection, with important implications for social ethical engagement for all Christians. This volume is a welcomed addition to the Library of Theological Ethics."
--Wyndy Corbin Reuschling, Professor of Ethics and Theology, Ashland Theological Seminary


Books - New and Used

The following guidelines apply to books:

  • New: A brand-new copy with cover and original protective wrapping intact. Books with markings of any kind on the cover or pages, books marked as "Bargain" or "Remainder," or with any other labels attached, may not be listed as New condition.
  • Used - Good: All pages and cover are intact (including the dust cover, if applicable). Spine may show signs of wear. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting. May include "From the library of" labels. Shrink wrap, dust covers, or boxed set case may be missing. Item may be missing bundled media.
  • Used - Acceptable: All pages and the cover are intact, but shrink wrap, dust covers, or boxed set case may be missing. Pages may include limited notes, highlighting, or minor water damage but the text is readable. Item may but the dust cover may be missing. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting, but the text cannot be obscured or unreadable.

Note: Some electronic material access codes are valid only for one user. For this reason, used books, including books listed in the Used – Like New condition, may not come with functional electronic material access codes.

Shipping Fees

  • Stevens Books offers FREE SHIPPING everywhere in the United States for ALL non-book orders, and $3.99 for each book.
  • Packages are shipped from Monday to Friday.
  • No additional fees and charges.

Delivery Times

The usual time for processing an order is 24 hours (1 business day), but may vary depending on the availability of products ordered. This period excludes delivery times, which depend on your geographic location.

Estimated delivery times:

  • Standard Shipping: 5-8 business days
  • Expedited Shipping: 3-5 business days

Shipping method varies depending on what is being shipped.  

Tracking
All orders are shipped with a tracking number. Once your order has left our warehouse, a confirmation e-mail with a tracking number will be sent to you. You will be able to track your package at all times. 

Damaged Parcel
If your package has been delivered in a PO Box, please note that we are not responsible for any damage that may result (consequences of extreme temperatures, theft, etc.). 

If you have any questions regarding shipping or want to know about the status of an order, please contact us or email to support@stevensbooks.com.

You may return most items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund.

To be eligible for a return, your item must be unused and in the same condition that you received it. It must also be in the original packaging.

Several types of goods are exempt from being returned. Perishable goods such as food, flowers, newspapers or magazines cannot be returned. We also do not accept products that are intimate or sanitary goods, hazardous materials, or flammable liquids or gases.

Additional non-returnable items:

  • Gift cards
  • Downloadable software products
  • Some health and personal care items

To complete your return, we require a tracking number, which shows the items which you already returned to us.
There are certain situations where only partial refunds are granted (if applicable)

  • Book with obvious signs of use
  • CD, DVD, VHS tape, software, video game, cassette tape, or vinyl record that has been opened
  • Any item not in its original condition, is damaged or missing parts for reasons not due to our error
  • Any item that is returned more than 30 days after delivery

Items returned to us as a result of our error will receive a full refund,some returns may be subject to a restocking fee of 7% of the total item price, please contact a customer care team member to see if your return is subject. Returns that arrived on time and were as described are subject to a restocking fee.

Items returned to us that were not the result of our error, including items returned to us due to an invalid or incomplete address, will be refunded the original item price less our standard restocking fees.

If the item is returned to us for any of the following reasons, a 15% restocking fee will be applied to your refund total and you will be asked to pay for return shipping:

  • Item(s) no longer needed or wanted.
  • Item(s) returned to us due to an invalid or incomplete address.
  • Item(s) returned to us that were not a result of our error.

You should expect to receive your refund within four weeks of giving your package to the return shipper, however, in many cases you will receive a refund more quickly. This time period includes the transit time for us to receive your return from the shipper (5 to 10 business days), the time it takes us to process your return once we receive it (3 to 5 business days), and the time it takes your bank to process our refund request (5 to 10 business days).

If you need to return an item, please Contact Us with your order number and details about the product you would like to return. We will respond quickly with instructions for how to return items from your order.


Shipping Cost


We'll pay the return shipping costs if the return is a result of our error (you received an incorrect or defective item, etc.). In other cases, you will be responsible for paying for your own shipping costs for returning your item. Shipping costs are non-refundable. If you receive a refund, the cost of return shipping will be deducted from your refund.

Depending on where you live, the time it may take for your exchanged product to reach you, may vary.

If you are shipping an item over $75, you should consider using a trackable shipping service or purchasing shipping insurance. We don’t guarantee that we will receive your returned item.

Categories
X

Oops!

Sorry, it looks like some products are not available in selected quantity.

OK

Sign up to the Stevens Books Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit. our Privacy Policy.