#158 | What’s An Evangelical? It’s Complicated, Pt. 1 | Mark Noll

What's an evangelical? Mark, what's an evangelical?

Well, I made a living for almost 40 years teaching undergraduates and graduate students, and I got to say a lot. It's complicated.

And I'm on a roll. It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host. And today in our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

What makes an evangelical an evangelical? And what does that even mean?

You know, recently we had a conversation with historian David Bevington about that very question, and we talked about four things that describe, not define.

He was quick to point out evangelicals, and if you remember, they were, number one, the authority of the Bible, number two, the centrality of the cross or the atonement, three, conversion or this idea that no one is born a Christian, you must become one. And number four, activism, both in sharing the gospel and living out social concerns.

There is a great deal of talk and confusion about what it means to be an evangelical. Some people don't want to use the term at all anymore because as soon as you bring it up, people roll their eyes.

They associate with certain political positions and a variety of different other things. I know some have said I'm not even using the term because it causes more frustration and pain than it does in me furthering the gospel.

I know of others that say no, we have to hold on to that term. We have to cling to it because it really does describe who we are. This is why I brought in historian Mark Noll.

Mark Noll is a former professor at Wheaton College in Notre Dame. If you want to know about North American Christianity, he is probably your guy because he has written extensively about it.

His books have been read by leaders and students and been go to texts for many Christians.

And today I get to talk to him about another book that he contributed to, simply entitled Evangelicals, a book, by the way, that David Bebbington also contributed to.

These two giants of contemporary evangelical history help us to see in greater detail who we are as evangelicals, both in our history and in our practice, as well as many of the issues that we're facing in our time today. I don't know about you, I don't know how you see this or how it works out for you, but it can be overwhelming.

Every time that I look at it, it seems to be overwhelming because it's sometimes hard to get a hold of simply because there seems to be this idea whenever we bring up evangelicals, that it promotes division and even greater confusion. After all, in terms of American evangelicalism, where we live and work and minister, I mean, who counts? Who do we listen to and who do we not?

Who is part of our tribe and who is not? What does it mean actually to be an evangelical? Or does that term even mean anything anymore? And how does Dr.

Bebbington's quadrilateral work itself out in real life with real people?

What happens when we don't adequately live out our beliefs, when people who do fit our spiritual beliefs aren't generally considered a part of us for reasons of history or ethnicity or politics? These are the questions that are found where we live.

These are questions that we must ask ourselves because it helps us to understand who we are and what we're doing. And as Dr. Noel said to us, you know, it's complicated.

But before we get to our conversation, we can't provide you with watering voices of faith without your help. We need your financial Support. Go to ApolloSwatered.org and click the Support Us button or simply click the link in your show notes.

We provided it for you. And I want you to know that by doing that, you're becoming a waterer to the world.

You are standing in the dry places, pouring out the water of life, making sure to bring life where it's been languishing. You know, I had one pastor send me a note about what the show meant to him, and he said the conversations with the people are so encouraging to me.

It's great being able to listen to these great Christian minds, to know that people are wrestling with these issues. There's so much in the media that is so worthless.

And then you listen to these people and the difference the Christian worldview makes, it's obvious as well as the difference Christ actually makes in their lives. That is an encouragement to me. And you know, that quote is an encouragement to me.

We want to be able to give encouragement and hope so that you can accomplish the mission of God where you're at now. With that in mind, let's get to my conversation with Mark Noll. Happy listening. Mark Noel, welcome to Apollo's Watered.

Thank you. It's a delight to be here.

Are you ready for the Fast 5?

Well, here we go. Ready or not.

Okay. All right, here's just is a simple one. This is an easy question. How do you like your coffee?

Black with caffeine before noon, without caffeine in the Afternoon.

All right, that's. That's a good. That's a good basic one to get it started. I like that. Number two.

Now, this one, because you're a historian, what is the one figure from American history that you would love just to sit and have coffee with and pick their brain?

I've been working recently a lot on African American uses of the Bible, and one of the most interesting people is James W.C. pennington.

Born, enslaved, he escaped, published a book called the Fugitive Blacksmith, became a Presbyterian minister, wrote the first textbook for African Americans on the history of races, eventually pastored in New York City and eventually down south. Was just a terrific person of God, but then also a really extraordinary student of the scriptures. He had to learn to read when he was in his 20s.

He was the first person to sit in as a black student at the Yale Divinity School. He wasn't allowed to take classes formally.

And so, I mean, there are other people I've known about studied for decades, but Pennington, I've read his books and books about him the last five or six, 10 years, and really an interesting guy.

And what years did he live?

And when's this book supposed to come out?

I really want to learn more about this guy. He sounds like a phenomenal man. Didn't learn to read until he was 20.

Well, this is actually one of the fun things about studying, trying to broaden out study of evangelical tradition.

Pennington is just as evangelical as the day is long, but he doesn't have the standard Caucasian hermeneutical approach to the scriptures because of learning it and even preaching it while he was still learning to read and then having the experience of internalizing the scriptures from his own experience and not the experience of, you know, the Reformation and the English settlement of America and what was common in the white world of the time.

It's a character that I wasn't familiar with, but now I want to learn more.

I can't blame you because maybe until 10 years ago, I'm supposed to do this for a living and I maybe heard of him, but not really done too much study.

Well, there's just so much to study. I mean, you can't study everything, right?

Exactly. That's a humbling realization.

Oh, my goodness.

Well, let's get to our third question, this one's going to be a little bit different, but if you were a restaurant, what restaurant would you be and why?

We had a lovely little Chinese restaurant here in Wheaton called Fu Yuan's that is now just recently closed. It was where I used to go have lunch with John Wilson when Books and Culture, the editor of Books and Culture, when it was still going strong.

And when we moved back to wheaton after living 10 years in South Indiana.

We were delighted to come back to Fu Yuan's because the service was good, the food was delicious, it was not pretentious, and you sat over your table for 45 minutes for an extra long conversation. Nobody minded. Unfortunately, they've closed, so we're missing that gastronomical as well as cultural highlight of Wheaton, Illinois.

I hate it when my favorite restaurants close. I hate that. Now you got to find something else. It's just the place where you can relax and be yourself.

Right? Right.

Okay, Question number four. One thing that people may not know about you is what?

Well, just how wonderful it is to be a boring historian. You know, people think going to the library, sitting around reading books all day, what a boring life. Well, it's anything but boring.

I've just been delighted day in and day out to have that kind of like.

Have you ever read Anton Chekhov's the Bet?

No.

You ever read that?

No.

In the book, I'm not going to tell you. It's not a book.

It's like a short story that in the book he has these two men make this bet, and they were talking about life imprisonment or the death penalty. And one says it's better just to be dead rather than be alone. And the other guy says, basically, you want to put a bet on that?

And so they make this bet, and for years, one of them agrees to be alone and completely by himself, cut off from the world. It's a fascinating story, but at the end of it, I mean, he ends up.

I'm not going to give you the ending, but he does say in the story, there's this part where the guy that's locked up, he says, I've been in more places than you could ever imagine. Because he could have any piece of literature, he had to write it down on a slot and just get these books.

But I don't think people realize that the adventure, it does something different to your mind. It takes you places into the minds of people.

I don't think I'd want to be entirely isolated, but a lot of isolation has been pretty Good.

Well, I think, I think people like to be quiet and to just reflect. I think that's a, that's not a bad thing, especially just to really just get an idea of who we are. But the next question, final question.

If you were an era of history, any history, world history, American history, whatever you pick, what era would you be and why?

I remember asking one of my favorite teachers, David Wells, once about questions similar to this, and he said, well, intellectually and even spiritually, there's many places I'd like to be, but if I wasn't living today, I'd be dead. Because he'd had a physical condition that had to take him to the hospital and have a procedure that wasn't available even 10 years earlier.

So intellectually, it'll be great to be at the table of Martin Luther and hear him spouting off and a mixture of craziness and deep spirituality. It'd be wonderful to know Latin well enough to understand Thomas Aquinas as he's dictating some of the Summa Theologica.

Boy, apparently he wore out several people a day dictating these books.

It'd be wonderful to hear David George again, one of the great African American preachers of the early late 18th century, as he encouraged his congregations in Georgia and then Canada and then Sierra Leone to go on with the gospel. So when you're a historian, there's just too many places. Too many, too many, yeah.

But to stay alive, I kind of would like to live in the present, you know.

Well, let's get into. You talk about the present, let's get into a bit of your biography, who you are, how you came to faith, and how did you ever become a historian?

I know that's a loaded question for a historian. So we're looking for the 30,000 foot view.

Historians in general are not too self reflective, so it's actually maybe a little bit hard question to answer, but I always enjoyed reading historical things. American history first, eventually the history of Christianity.

I was an English major in college, did a master's degree in comparative literature, but then decided for intellectual reasons, then also spiritual reasons.

After college, after graduating Wheaton College, the question of what was real about the world, what was real about faith, became urgent in a new way.

And I did find, through studying the Reformation, studying particularly the life of Martin Luther and then some of the things around him, that there were answers to intellectual questions, answers to personal questions that I found in that historical era, historical debates I had not found in my experience of contemporary Christianity.

So after having sort of been reading on my own history for all my reading life and then seeing how important the understanding of a new angle on the faith provided by studying the 16th century, it just seemed natural to go on and you know, lo and behold, you could actually in those days make a living as a historian.

Things are really rough now for people who are trying to study history, and they weren't great when I studied it professionally, went to graduate school, but at least you could get a job.

So I think I became a historian because of the sense that examining what had happened in the past gave me real insight into the nature of humankind, the nature of human cultures, the possibilities of Christian faith.

Later, actually quite a bit later, when I got to know a little bit about Christianity around the world, it was the same thing, just super revealing about the character of Christianity opened up by looking at historical development in places like Canada, Britain, the continent, eventually Africa, Latin America, Asia. So once sort of dipping my toe into the historical stream, it just seemed like I needed to go deeper and take a bath and just stay there.

We're going to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsors and we'll be right back. The most important Bible translation is the one you read at Apollos Watered.

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Get one today because understanding the Bible changes everything. And the NLT is the Bible you can understand. You mentioned that it's hard to make a living as a historian nowadays. Why is that?

The classical liberal arts model, in which the ideal is students who do want to study anything.

Veterinary science, engineering, business, will have an exposure to philosophy, history, literature, the theory of the social sciences, the history of science.

That model is under tremendous pressure because of the economic realities of our time, because of how difficult it is for liberal arts colleges and liberal arts emphases and universities to get the funding they need, as opposed to the fields where people are being trained to get that first job right away.

I've seen some really discouraging figures and just recently about the number of historians employed at universities and colleges throughout the Midwest. Almost every place you can look, a reduction from half to a quarter to a third of the people used to be teaching things.

And I think our world in the west is hyper focused on the present. So the expansion of the Internet has been good in some ways. There's certainly more information about more things available.

Of course quality checks are good. Some of the information is just bogus.

But you can find, for example, working on this book on the Bible in the 19th century for almost anything that was a book in print. I could bring it up on my computer in 30 seconds.

On the other side, however, the Internet makes it possible for people to be drawn into what's happening around the world, drawn into what is being contested in their own environment.

And the attraction of things that are immediately present and that seem to call for immediate, at least opinions, if not reaction, is very, very strong.

And so I think that hyper focus upon the present has detracted from the understanding that in order to understand the present, we have to have a better grasp of the past. And then when the past does come into play, it's almost always in the popular media a simplified, simplistic, overly reductionistic approach.

So I think, for example, that the Black Lives Matter and debates over critical race theory have been really important for drawing into the public eye genuine facts of life that had been obscured. But the way in which that focus is sometimes brought to bear is as if nothing else matters.

And so the proponents and the opponents end up shouting and getting excited and demonizing their opponents rather than being pushed to examine more carefully and with a fuller understanding the events of the past.

In this particular instance, it's just as a historian, it's just imperative to realize how ever present considerations of race were in American history.

But if I say American history is only the ever present consideration and difficulties of racial stereotyping, then I've betrayed what actually happened. Because the past is broader.

But in our media age, it's the extreme positions that Gain the attention, that gain funding, they gain the pushback and that monopolize debate.

And as you know, as a conductor of this kind of podcast, if someone wants to say, well, to answer your question, we need to examine three background factors and then to keep in mind this and that, well, you've lost at least some of your audience.

But if you say what's the situation about X and I'm really firm and vigorous and have a sharply pointed answer, then that's going to carry and people will be picking that up. And that phenomenon, I think is undercut the desire for fuller, deeper, richer historical understanding which is available.

We're living in a great age of seriously produced history, but we're also living in a great age of dismissing seriously produced history. Well, that's the answer for the question. But.

Oh, no, no, I think you have.

There's kind of economic factors, but then there's also cultural factors that explain why historical but why becoming a historian as a, as a way of earning your living is becoming more and more difficult.

That I got feeling I've been pacing, trying patience. It's time to take a chance on whatever. I know this is a loaded question because I've just read this. The book is called for those that Can't See.

You're not on our YouTube, you're on our audio. It's. It's simply called Evangelicals who They have Been, Are now and could be.

And the first really part of the book is just arguing over the term itself because there are challenges. You have those who are self identifying as evangelicals.

You have associations that have called themselves evangelicals and have the points, of course, David Bevington, who's coming on the show talking about his quadrilateral. And even you guys debate the validity of the quadrilateral, which we'll get to in a moment for those that don't know who it is.

But let's really get into it because. And here's why this is your other book, the Rise of Evangelicalism, because you give a basic.

And I say that putting all the qualifiers around it of the starting of even American evangelicalism, which I find to be very key and helpful in understanding the tenets of it, especially with Whitfield. So I don't remember the question that I asked you. What's an evangelical, Mark? What's an evangelical?

Well, I made a living for almost 40 years teaching undergraduates and graduate students. And I got to say a lot. It's complicated.

That's what you should. I know you're not a Facebook person but they have your relationship status. It's complicated. Evangelical. It should have. It's complicated.

But go ahead and describe that.

Elaborate. Let me start with what I think it be a simple way of getting at this. The evangelical use as an adjective goes way back to the Middle Ages.

Actually, one of the first times that term was used was with the followers of St. Francis. So in 11th and 12th century, to be an evangelical was to sit very lightly to your possessions and even perhaps to follow St. Francis.

And Claire is the female counterpart to just give your stuff away.

Well, and this is, of course, a simplified history, but the 16th century Protestant leaders, William Tyndale, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer in England said, well, the church has preserved a lot of what's really important, but the machinery of the church has gotten away from understanding the heart of Christianity as it had been communicated by Christ and kept alive by the Holy Spirit.

And what was being lost was an understanding of God's free grace, the good news of the gospel, the evangelion that offers people peace with God, reconciliation with God and with others. And so in the 16th century, the adjective evangelical can be used on those.

The emphasis that stressed God's grace as the key matter for understanding Christianity.

So that's an element in Protestant circles, and it's even present a little bit in Catholic circles where there are reforming movements of people who say, well, yes, we do need to emphasize more the offer of reconciliation, peace with God, forgiveness of sins by grace. It's a subordinate element in Catholic circles until much, much later, it's dominant in Protestant circles.

But 16th century, 17th century, it's really hard to say, well, Martin Luther's an evangelical, John Calvin's an evangelical, Mennon Simons is an evangelical.

Because the structures were such that these groups either didn't want to have anything to do with each other, or they weren't identified as evangelical. They weren't identified as Reformed, as Lutheran, as Mennonite, as Anglican.

It's not until we get to the 18th century that some of the tendencies that have been present all along are heightened and highlighted. And some of the structures that had given shape to the institutional history of Protestantism begin to weaken.

And we get people like George Whitfield, who several times in his career would be challenged, you're a priest in the Church of England. Don't you want to uphold Church of England doctrine?

He said, well, you know, if you're a Baptist, if you're a Congregationalist, if you're a Quaker and you preach the new birth, that I want to be with you, the Wesleys and their reforming movement within the Church of England and eventually with the Methodist movement said, well, church order is important, but what's really, really important are people who understand that it's God's free grace in Christ that brings us salvation.

So you get in the 18th century, the 19th century, the beginning of the movement from evangelical from an adjective to a noun, although that's a very long process and I think is what, what particularly David Bevington has shown and what we try to point out in the book, the book you mentioned, it's really not until after World War II that using evangelical as a noun. So what is Billy Graham? Well, people don't say, well, he's a member of a Southern Baptist church. They say Billy Graham is evangelical.

It's only after World War II that we get a history writing about evangelicalism as if it's a category, a real life category. Early you would say, well, Charles Simeon was an evangelical in the Church of England.

Charles Wesley wrote evangelical hymns, but Wesley's a Methodist. Charles Simeon's an Anglican. Charles Finney was a dynamic preacher of revival. There were evangelical elements in his theology.

Jonathan Edwards was a great evangelical theologian. But you can't write about all of those people together because they didn't have connections.

Whereas beginning with the national association of Evangelicals, beginning with the worldwide ministry of Billy Graham, beginning with Christianity Today magazine, you have institutions and researchable facts that are concentrated on what it means to be and evangelical.

There's the belief that the cross of Christ is the key thing and reconciliation of God and humans.

There's often conversion, although that's a little bit tricky because we get some well identified evangelicals in the modern world for whom conversion is less important than it is for others. And then there's activism. So Bible cross conversion activism.

Bennington quite clearly showed were characteristics of movements in the church that particularly in the last couple of generations, you can define people as problems. What about groups like the Lutherans? What about groups like the African American churches?

What about in the post Vatican II era where you have Catholics who will say, well, my experience of the Holy Spirit was like a conversion and clearly we follow the church, but we follow the church because the church honors the Scriptures. Bennington is very clear in saying that he's isolating characteristics not providing a definition.

I actually think on that score you can say evangelicalism is the conceptual understanding of Christian faith that emphasizes these four things on the ground, in groups, in historical development, it's much harder to say you're talking about evangelicalism. I've mentioned already how enjoyable it's been for me to study African American Christians in the late 18th, 19th, 20th century.

And here are groups that are focused on the Bible, believe in conversion, have a very strong place for the cross of Christ, and when it's permitted or quite active in the faith, you say, well, many of these African American traditions are clearly evangelical.

But if you would say, well, let's try to write a history of evangelicalism that includes the black churches and the whole panoply of white churches, well, you can do it. You can say, well, here's some evangelical emphases. James W.C.

pennington, Frederick Douglass, Charles Hodge from the White Presbyterian, Samuel Schmucker, white Lutheran. But there's no institutional connection between them. They're just. They're developing in separate streams.

Years and years ago, I did a book on evangelical professional Bible study. And I look back now and say, well, it's an okay book on what I researched, but I didn't have any African Americans.

African American approaches to the scriptures are really quite different historically. Not 100% different, but quite different historically than the white churches.

Can we say, we have an evangelical history of the Bible, evangelical history of Bible study. If we exclude African Americans.

And then you're interested in, as many people are, quite appropriately, in how Christian faith is spreading in some parts of the world very, very rapidly. Institutions like the World Evangelical Fellowship, in that case, send Brian Stiller around the world to report on evangelical movements.

Sometimes the movements he talks about call themselves evangelical, sometimes they don't. Sometimes there are things that look pretty strange from these traditional evangelical Presbyterians.

Is a lot of health and wealth amongst these prosperity gospel? And these are they. To what degree is a person still an evangelical? When they talk occasionally about prosperity, what degree are they evangelical?

They talk a lot. What degree are they evangelical? They talk all the time. Well, it's very hard to put these things together.

The general point I think I'd like to make is that evangelicalism, conceptually is a pretty clear category.

There's styles of Christian faith, particularly in the modern era, you can say, well, that's evangelical Evangelicalism as a researchable object, institution, substance on the ground is a much harder entity to get your mind around. This is. David Bebbing, and I have talked about this and argued about it for A long time.

Because I say there is no such thing that you can actually research as evangelicalism. There's clearly a concept of what evangelicalism means.

But if, if I'm going to study American evangelicals, I've got to put in there a lot of people who don't have anything to do with each other. So how, how do I write a history of evangelicalism if there's no one place I can go to research that history?

Well, Bennington says, well, the concept is clear, the characteristics are clear, and you put together the people who share the characteristics.

Well, that can work when you kind of grow up thinking, well, evangelical means the national association of Evangelicals, Moody Bible Institute, Asbury Seminary, Gordon Conloe Seminary. But does it include also the Assemblies of God? Does it include also the African Methodist Episcopal Church?

Does it include also the Catholic groups now that want to call themselves evangelical? Well, conceptually, yes. For research, historical purposes. I think a different answer. I've meandered on an awful lot.

No, no, no, no, no. What was it that the term that they threw at you, you were a nominalist, was that the term?

Yes, I think that when you name evangelicalism, when people say, here are the characteristics, that makes sense. But is evangelicalism something real that you can actually research? That's where I think it isn't.

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation. You and I both had wells, right? And I mean, of course he wrote the book the Courage to Be Protestant. He was done with the terminology altogether.

Just because it's become, when everybody self identifies as it, it's lost its meaning. And we both know that terms may have have a meaning at one time, but words in history are fluid. So I think of, I think of what C.S.

lewis said when he talked about, words are like a stream, they change over time. They meander back and forth. Like the word scan. Now we just means to glance over. But that's not how it was historically. It was like examine intently.

And so we've come to this point where, I mean, are we at this turning point where evangelicalism or evangelical is just lost and do we try to adopt a new term?

Like personally, I think of what Bonhoeffer did in World War II where it was like, we're the confessing church and again, you're just sub splintering. And then that itself will become historically, if, if I'm a.

You know, any type of term that we employ is going to lose its meaning from its original intent at some point in time as it goes on. And unless you're Roman Catholic or orthodox.

And even then, I mean, you've got a set, right set of beliefs that are institutionalized, right, that can adhere to. But when it's a free association of self identification, that becomes a big issue.

So we take the term evangelical.

We want to engage with the broader Christian world and the broader world of academia. So let's find a term that lets us keep what was really important in fundamentalism but can broaden things out. Well, let's call it evangelical.

So we get the national association of Angelica. But then right away, well, what about the Assemblies of God? What about these Pentecostals?

When Pentecostalism became a phenomenon in America in the early 20th century, oh boy. Most Armenian, Armenian groups, Methodists, Nazarenes, Reformed, said, this is an aberration.

If this is Christianity, it's a very skewed form of Christianity.

And so we have, right from the start, major contribution to national association Evangelical is the Assemblies of God and then eventually other Pentecostal groups. So a word was being used more broadly than it had been earlier in the century. And then right away also, what about the Missouri Senate, Lutherans?

These people above everybody else, believes in salvation by grace through faith. But you know, they also believe that baptism communicates the new birth. When they, when they take communion, they think Christ is there.

Now, should they? Well, so they sort of were in and sort of were not. So the word was flexible from the beginning.

And then more recently, we have the obvious question, what about African American groups? They share the characteristics.

We got a really nice essay for the book you mentioned by Jamar Tisby, black scholar activist, asking the question, should African Americans be considered evangelicals in the book? At least, he said, of course they should because they have these kind of characteristics.

But the national association of Evangelical Leaders really just, they weren't alert to that question. So it wasn't until at least the 60s and 70s, Billy Graham began to reach out in some intentional ways to black communities.

There was other sorts of interchange, but until the government moved to desegregate society.

The idea that you could have a single institution, regardless of what you call it, in which there was a long standing white Christian Protestant tradition and a long standing black Christian Protestant tradition considered as one thing, it's just an impossible notion.

But more recently the question becomes alive and then even more recently in the United States where we've got the politicization of the evangelical world, you've got to say, well, gosh, I, I, you know, I, I, I'm this kind of Christian, I believe in authority of the Bible. I, I think it's important people to be converted to Christ. The cross of Christ is important, need to be active in sharing the faith and showing.

But you know, I don't want to get involved in the political disputes. I don't want to say to someone who voted for Trump or voted against Trump, you are my brother, you are my ally.

I want to keep people defining their religious character on religious question, but not a political one.

But in the contemporary world, when so many of the voices in the public sphere, then some voices in the religious sphere are defining evangelical by their political stance. And you've got, in your metaphor, a wonderful metaphor, you've got the river moving on.

And the word that had denoted certain things in the past for at least many people does not denote the same thing. And then we have the world situation.

What are we going to say about the Chinese house churches where conversion is important, authority of the Bible is important, cross of Christ is important, Christian active and who, if they know about the American situation, it just doesn't does it register at all? Are these people evangelical? Are they not evangelical? Are they non American evangelical?

So you start stringing together adjectives and of course then you lose the coherence of a single term.

Well, even as you're talking about African Americans, whether or not they're considered to be evangelical according to the definitions that have been chosen and again defined as, let's say the national association of Evangelicals according to the criteria in which they've established, although of course we would both agree that, or at least I would think so, that that's just one particular manifestation of that.

But then you think in other terms, like for example, we had Sam George on, and Sam is of Lausanne and Diaspora, and we're talking about immigrant Christianities in the plural here in the United States. I mean, we haven't talked about the Latino church, we haven't talked about the Indian church or Asian in different incarnations of that itself.

And so there are many different. And so we're struggling for Those definitions. But then you have something come along like Lausanne.

And Lausanne does try to give an overarching umbrella as a clarification, help help our listeners understand what Lausanne is. I know that's not necessarily your field of expertise, but I'm sure you can speak into it.

And what has that done for the understanding of what evangelical is?

Yes, the lasagna move, but really is important.

So it's a kind of statement of faith, actually a very important gathering together of people who emphasized evangelical characteristics, as George Marston famously defined evangelical ones. Well, evangelical. Somebody who likes Billy Graham. So.

Did he write that in Religion and American Culture.

Is that the book?

I think I remember the Billy Graham part because I laughed just because of. I think that's really true.

What came was an effort spearheaded by John Stott and then a few other colleagues to pull together a doctrinal statement, a covenant that would speak very broadly for those around the world who were concerned actively about evangelism. And there were many denominations represented. There were more nations represented at Lausanne than at the United Nations.

The Lausanne Covenant is what I would call a kind of classical Protestant understanding of religious authority. Scripture, the way of salvation, focused on grace in Christ.

The innovation that people have focused upon, particularly in recent historical studies, is that there was a clear statement in the Lausanne Covenant that the gospel was designed for reconciling people to God and reconciling people to each other on earth. So it wasn't a social gospel.

But there's a very clear social implication of Christian faith spelled out in the Lausanne Covenant in a way that had been at the least de emphasized and in some cases disregarded or even opposed in traditions that we might call Western or at least American evangelical history.

So the Lausanne Covenant has actually worked very well around the world for some groups, not maybe a huge number, but some groups would say we want to associate the work of God that we see in our place with other things around the world. And the Lausanne Covenant has been a way to do that because it's not overly specific on things like the sacraments that divide evangelical people.

It's not detailed on explaining how the Christian gospel can be worked out in this life, but it says definitely that it should be worked out in this life. And so it served very important. Years ago, did a Textbook on world Christianity called Turning Points.

And I've actually been delighted to find two younger historians, David Comlein and Han Luen Concert Comlein, who recently revived revised the book.

But in later editions of the book, I tried to specify the Lausanne meeting and the Second Vatican Council as the two key events in the latter part of the 20th century that people can look back on as key turning points. For institutional Catholicism, it meant huge changes that are still being discussed and implemented.

But then for the Protestant world, it represented an alternative to the institutional developments of the World Council of Churches, where there were all sorts of elements, some that evangelicals say would be fine and really helpful, some that evangelicals say would be really distorting the Christian gospel. So those, whether or not people in 20 years or 50 years, 100 years, will look back and say, well, those really were the key moments.

Certainly from our perspective, in the early 21st century, what Lausanne represented is a real good faith effort supported by a wide, not a universal, but a wide spectrum of people that would be relatively traditional, relatively confessional, relatively evangelistic in their outlook.

It represented a way of coalescing, Bringing together, at least temporarily, at least on the basis of the covenant was very disparate, Using the term evangelically. Characteristic evangelical groups tend not to be institutional builders in the same way that denomination, formal denominations are.

And so the Lithuanian covenant was a really important signpost that many of these groups that look like they're just harum scarum and scattered and independent do actually have a center, do have some coherence. And so it really, I think, remains a very important event in late 20th century American Christian history, and not just Protestant history.

But I'm pretty much convinced that if the ordinary pastor and ordinary evangelical church said, now today we're going to examine how important it was uncovered and is 95% of the audience in the congregation. The what? What are we talking about here?

I've never heard of this Lausanne covenant, and that that would be a problem where what people like myself, whose job it is to sit in a library and read things, would know about a very important event, a very important document. But the dissemination of information explaining why that was important just hasn't gone too far. Would I be wrong in concluding that.

Who is an evangelical? It's complicated.

There are lots of things in people who are evangelical in belief, but have not generally been included in who many of us think are evangelicals. One of the things that Bebington showed us when we talked to him was that evangelicalism has always been in conversation with culture.

Noel brought out something about American culture that wouldn't have been as apparent to him as a Brit. It wasn't until after the civil rights movement that certain shifts happened in American evangelicalism, good and bad.

We could recognize groups normally not even considered as part of us. But the stake was also set for politics to co opt the spiritual heart of evangelicalism too. I like the fact that Dr.

Null is not shy about showing us the complications of evangelicalism. I appreciate that because that's how life is. I like how he says that.

It's conceptually a pretty clear category, but on the ground, it's much harder an entity to get your mind around to get a hold of. Now, I know many of us wish that wasn't true. We want it to just be simple. But I like it because it presents the truth of the matter.

That's how life really is. It's complicated. It's not always that easy. Now sometimes it is, but other times it is complicated. We are complicated. So why is all of this important?

What does this conversation do besides muddy the waters? Well, I have a couple of thoughts. First, I think we need to be careful as we assess the past.

We need to look deeply and sometimes into places that we wouldn't expect. We may find kindred spirits we didn't know, and we may find problems in our own tribes that might happen with you. Have you noticed that?

I mean, I think you and I both need to be honest about that.

Because if you're not, if I'm not, then we are depriving ourselves of resources and connections within Christ Church on the one hand, and stifling our ability to correct errors in thought. Indeed, that will always creep in. Second, it's actually not all doom and gloom. I know sometimes we seem to paint it that way, but it's not.

There's hope. You know, when I ended this conversation with him, we were talking about the Lausanne movement for a reason. It was, as Dr.

Null says, a good faith effort to bring together disparate or different parts of the body of Christ for the purpose of spreading the gospel. Boom. It did look further out in a field than just the West. It sought and as Sam George told us, still seeks to hear from the church around the world.

We need to hear the church around the world. Sam is from India and his family have been Christians since the 12th century. That's about 900 years for you non math people.

Evangelicals are bigger than we tend to think, certainly bigger than the political definitions that we have here in the United States. And we need to remember that Dr.

Noel called attention to the fact that being part of the evangelical church is about belief, about God's free grace, reconciling us to himself. But part of it also is that the grace reconciles us to one another. And that's where Bebington's activism comes in.

The way we live out our faith matters. And we're going to talk more about that in part two of our conversation later on this week.

I want to thank our Apollos Water team for helping us to water the world and I want to thank you, the listener, for tuning in. You have many different podcasts that you can check out and I am so grateful that you have decided to listen to us. And also we want to hear from you.

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I want to thank our Apollos Water team again for helping us to water your world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo Watered. Stay watered everybody.