Thursday, August 27, 2009

What is an Evangelical?

http://ugleyvicar.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-is-evangelical.html#more

[The Ugley Vicar] 27 Aug 2009--A Lack of Definition?

The first topic I’m going to consider in our three talks is ‘What is an evangelical?’

This is actually a question which has been around for a remarkably long time. It was considered, for example, by John Stott at the end of the second National Evangelical Anglican Congress in 1977.

But before that, Dr Martin Lloyd Jones asked the same question in a 1971 book of that title.

And more recently, in the mid-1990s, Mark Thompson, of Moore Theological College, has addressed the issue in a series of articles in The Briefing, and in a book titled, Saving the Heart, subtitle, ‘What is an evangelical?’

The sheer fact that the question has been asked so often, and that answers by such erudite contributors have apparently failed to settle the issue, forces us to acknowledge that evangelicalism is not a set of commonly-held, narrowly-defined, doctrines.

On the contrary, there are evangelicals who hold quite different doctrinal views, and who belong to entirely different denominations.

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