Over at the Touchstone Magazine blog an entry was posted about the evangelical manifesto. In the comments on the post a rather lengthy discussion started about the meaning of the word evangelical. Here is my off-the-cuff attempt to define the word as I see it.

An evangelical is a Christian – usually, but not always, Protestant – who believes in the authority of Scripture and generally holds to the teachings of historic Christianity, included definitions of the faith found in the ecumenical councils and clarified in the historic creeds.

I do not know the history behind the use of the word, but I think of evangelicals sort of like nice fundamentalists. We tend not to be quite so extreme as most Christian fundamentalists, though we would agree with the doctrinal position of many fundamentalists. The guiding principle is the Bible, and the unifying belief is that the Bible is authoritative for all of life. 

Evangelicals distinguish themselves from fundamentalists by being willing to dialog with believers who are not themselves evangelicals or fundamentalists. Many of us would be willing to worship with Catholic or Orthodox believers and while we disagree with much of their theology, we will not refrain from calling them our brothers and sisters in the faith. One of the practices of many fundamentalists is to oppose any who claim to be Christian and yet are not fundamentalists.

(A brief tangent: When we speak about Christian fundamentalists we are talking about something very different than Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists. Christian fundamentalism is an attempt to revive the faith by holding fast to a specific set of fundamental beliefs that are viewed as essential for all Christians; Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism are attempts to revive the faith by killing all who think in a different way.)

Evangelicalism is losing some of its force in recent years with many people who call themselves evangelical drifting away from a firm belief in the Bible. This is seen most clearly in the emerging church movement. Many of the people involved in that movement would call themselves evangelical and yet one of the trends “emerging” from them is the tendency to downplay or question the importance of the Bible in the Christian life.

Evangelicalism is also losing some if its force by being overly-politicized. This is happening from both the left and the right. Many people seem to make evangelical mean little more than political activism on behalf of a particular ideology. That is what makes the evangelical manifesto interesting, it looks like the document will be an attempt to call evangelicals back to what we were (Christians seeking to live faithfully according to the commands of Scripture) rather than being a group that focuses all of our energies on the political arena.