This entry deals with what An Evangelical Manifesto has to say about liberal revisionism. Also be sure and read the companion post on conservative fundamentalism. The following two paragraphs serve to introduce both posts so it will be repeated in both.

I am still working on a post on how Evangelicalism is defined in An Evangelical Manifesto. But along the way I thought I would write a post on the distinction made between liberal revisionism and conservative fundamentalism. This is one of the sticking points for many people – namely, what do the Manifesto writers have against fundamentalists? The writers spend just over a page (the end of page 8 and all of 9) explaining the distinction between the two groups. What are their criticisms and who are they targeting?

First a word about the terms. The writers are careful to explain that Evangelicalism cannot “be reduced to political categories such as ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’”. Their discussion about liberal revisionism and conservative fundamentalism is not about liberals and conservatives but a certain type of liberal and a certain type of conservative. The terms liberal and conservative encompass people who range from extreme to moderate positions. What the writers want to address are those people whose views and behaviors occupy the extremes.

The first group addressed is liberal revisionism. There is a lot of distance between Evangelicalism and liberal revisionism. It would not be correct to say that this document looks for a middle-of-the-road approach between revisionism and fundamentalism. The writers themselves acknowledge that fundamentalism is “even closer to Evangelicalism” than revisionism. They describe liberal revisionism as holding “an exaggerated estimate of human capacities, a shallow view of evil, an inadequate view of truth, and a deficient view of God.” The writers go so far as to say revisionists are “sometimes no longer recognizably Christian.” They then describe several areas that revisionists have cast off Christian truth:

1. They reject the truth of the Bible, turning instead to things that are culturally acceptable.
2. They reject the historical teachings of the church, separating themselves from Christians of the past and from Christians around the world.
3. They are unstable as they tend to be blown about by whatever trend is currently en vogue, following “the spirit of the age”.
4. They lose credibility by claiming a “new kind of faith” (which reminds me of the title of Brian McLaren’s book A New Kind of Christian though this was probably not in the minds of the writers) which looks more like the claims of the skeptics than the teachings of the Bible, leaving nothing “solidly, decisively Christian for seekers to examine and believe”.
5. They lose identity by turning themselves into something different than “the historic Christian faith that is true to Jesus.”

In other words, liberal revisionists can hold to a faith that is not biblical, historical, stable, credible, or recognizable. The writers do not name names in the document, though Os Guinness specifically mentioned Bishop John Shelby Spong in a radio interview with Al Mohler. I forget who made the comment and on which site it was made, but one person has already compared the description of liberal revisionism to some of the claims of the emerging church. While most of the people in the emerging church are more faithful to the teachings of Scripture than someone like Bishop Spong, the movement does seem to tend in the direction of revisionism and in some places have crossed into it completely.

The writers are less specific about the problems with fundamentalism, and their lack of specificity is one of the reasons some people have decided not to sign the document. Those who feel sympathetic to or identified with fundamentalism feel that the Manifesto is not clear enough in what it is rejecting or to what degree the writers believe that fundamentalism is praiseworthy.