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Inartful or not, broad evangelicalism is just as confused as the pew people find it to be.
Here is a formula for obtaining the kinds of numbers the Pew people found among evangelicals:
Abandon sola scriptura in favor of "Christian experience" +
quit preaching doctrinally in favor of revivalistic existential themes +
send your best and brightest students off to ape the liberal scholars in the academy and prostitute themselves in a craven "me too" way in order to obtain the approbation of the scholarly community +
disconnect church practice from historic confessional boundaries +
have the leading evangelical seminaries ridicule traditional theological doctrines +
confuse lay people with a plethora of translations (useful enough in themselves, but devastating to a shared text of the Bible as Scripture) +
continue the trajectory of "revival" from the doctrinally Calvinistic First Great Awakening, through the Finneyesque Pelagian pragmatism regarding "means," to the heavy emotionality of the Pentecostal practice, to the emphasis on miracles of healing in place of evangelism in the Todd Bentley Lakeland "Revival" +
get some of the younger theologians to jump on the postmodern bandwagon and become its cheerleaders +
get evangelical pillars like J.R.W. Stott to come out as an annihilationist +
promote "evangelical feminism" as so obvious that anything else represents bigotry +
find a way to erase the differences between evangelical Christianity and the Roman Church (e.g., start a group and call it, say, Evangelicals and Catholics Together) +
deny doctrines of imputation and become proficient in speaking the language of the NPP +
develop an "ecology of relationships" with Islam
EQUALS
The Evangelical of 2008
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Dennis E. McFadden, Ex Mainline Baptist (in Remission)
Atherton Baptist Homes, CEO
First Baptist Church of Alhambra, Member, Transformation Ministries (CA)
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