In the current issue of Commonweal, a Catholic magazine, an excellent book review by Protestant historian George Marsden, looks at a new Oxford Press book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. This review is very good and has significant bearing on missional-ecumenism. The review is not available for free online but here is the final paragraph, which is worth reading on its own: Moreover, five hundred mostly acrimonious years after the Reformation, these seemingly free-floating Protestants are not as far away from core Catholicism as one might assume. By far the most popular intellectual among American evangelicals is C. S. Lewis. Mere Christianity has sold more than 3 million copies in English alone since 2001. Many Catholics also like Lewis, but among evangelicals he has been virtually canonized. One of Lewis’s most prominent characteristics is that he emphasized the core historical teachings of the church on which Protestants and Catholics can agree. So, whatever the centrifugal forces that would drive evangelicalism toward total fragmentation, they seem to be countered in part by some centripetal forces that allow a core Christianity to survive and flourish as well. Worthen does not say much about that degree of coherence, but it is also part of this puzzling story. Fragmented, contentious, institutionally divided, and often intellectually shallow evangelicalism may not be the ideal for the church, but despite its perennial crises in authority, it is not nearly as incoherent as one might expect.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 01:15:00 +0000
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