Evangelicalism at its worst

Frank Turk at the Evangel blog has "respectfully" declined to endorse the Manhattan Declaration, ostensibly because he believes it "obscures the Gospel." But his rationale is a disgusting, bigoted, and wholly uncharitable screed against Catholic and Orthodox Christians, reflective of a toxic attitude which is, unfortunately, still prevalent among oldline evangelicals.

See: as an actual Evangelical, I think that “We act together in obedience to the one true God, the triune God of holiness and love, who has laid total claim on our lives and by that claim calls us” to proclaim and thereafter live by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. God does this, and requires it of us believers, because we are in His image and frankly His creatures over whom He has a place above all kings, above all other reasonable allegiances, above even our own claim to our own lives.

When we substitute the phrase “with believers in all ages and all nations to seek and defend the good of all who bear his image” for the phrase “to proclaim and thereafter live by the Gospel of Jesus Christ” we have done two things:

[1] we have obscured the necessary and central fact of the Gospel by overlooking the irreconcilable differences between “Evangelicals”, “Roman Catholics”, and “Orthodox” by calling all of these groups “believers” in a rather indiscriminate way. I’ve said it elsewhere, so it should be no surprise when I say it here that I am sure there are Catholics who are saved, and likewise for the occasional Eastern Orthodox you may run into who exercises an Evangelical (large “E” intended) understanding of Jesus and the consequences of Him; but to throw out the wide blanket and just call all of these groups “Christian” in an overly-broad sociological sense, and to call all of them “believers” in the sense required to make the rest of the reasoning in this document is much. It makes the distinction between “belief” and “unbelief” such a fuzzy line that I doubt anyone signing this document actually means what they have said here.

By obscuring that line, the Gospel is obscured — because the actual consequences of the Gospel are obscured.

[2] We have substituted the reasoning of the Gospel with the reasoning of statism. The reasoning of the Gospel is this: because Christ died for sins in accordance with Scripture, and was buried and raised on the third day in accordance with Scripture, men are called to repentance which is not just a confession of past wrong but a second birth — a new life in which we are dead to the moral law and its condemnation and raised to new life in the kind of love Christ has and showed us by dying on the cross.

The reasoning of statism is that the state defines what sort of people we will be — that if the state defines marriage, or if the state defines human rights, or if the state defines the religious liberty of the citizens, then they have it.

When you look at these two things side by side in this short form, it is clear how the latter interposes itself against the Gospel and in place of the Gospel.

Fellow Evangel blogger Mark Olson takes his colleague to task and pulls no punches.

This, to my ears, sounds very Pharisaic. Here we have Mr Turk standing in judgement of the whole of Catholicism and Orthodoxy and finding them wanting … except those few who secretly are “Evangelical.” Well, fortunately (apparently) for me, Mr Turk is not my judge, for I have a Judge already. It seems to me the Gospel has a few things to say about those trying to put themselves in the place of that Judge.

At its best, evangelicalism is a vibrant, positive force for the proclamation of the Gospel and the transformation of the world. At its worst, it is a parochial sect looking down its nose at fellow believers, rendering the witness of the whole Christian community impotent by its smugness. Frank Turk is a textbook example of the latter.