After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

it is our stubborn rational capacity that makes us notice logical contradictions. If God is love, love never harms a neighbor (Rom. 13:10), and the Bible depicts God ordering the slaying of all inhabitants of entire cities, as in the early chapters of Joshua, one of these things is not like the other. They can’t all be true. But evangelicals are ta

Wouldn’t it be nice if post-evangelicals decided to devote at least some of our worship and study time to developing healthy and mature expressions of human rational capacity, rather than just one more Bible study?

Fundamentalist and evangelical biblicism taught believers to overplay the Bible and underplay extrabiblical ways of learning and knowing. The Bible was treated as trustworthy in a way that other human products were not, because it was not viewed as a human product. Human reason was generally treated as untrustworthy, human experience as irrelevant,

Augustine’s denigration of women is no less objectionable than John MacArthur’s, no matter how venerable Augustine’s writings might be.

The turn back to Tradition often seems to be a way of resisting the turn to the margins demanded by liberation theologians and other voices focusing on current oppression, especially oppression by the church.

We need to go for both-and syntheses, not either-or binaries.

Evangelicalism has made it an article of faith to believe that the Bible can do more than it does. Meanwhile, back in the real world, anyone who has been to very many evangelical “Bible studies” can attest that what happens in those meetings is often more about the sharing of people’s socially located biases, ideologies, and politics than close exe

Post-evangelicals can set aside inerrancy without abandoning Scripture.

A healthy post-evangelical approach to the Bible will heighten realism about the fact that the Bible is always an interpreted text, and that we flawed, limited people are the interpreters.