After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

The goal of this book, then, is to offer clues for getting out of some of the most difficult spots in the evangelical maze, in order to come out on the other side—not just alive and intact, but still interested in a relationship with Jesus.

When LGBTQ evangelicals, their families, and allies start pressing for dignity and even full inclusion, they begin their arguments from within an evangelical theological framework. Eventually they tend to discover that evangelical ways of reading Scripture and, more broadly, of observing reality and discerning truth, may themselves be the problem.

It is also a fact that every act of translation is already debatable, because languages reflect worlds of thought that differ dramatically across cultures. Don’t miss the stark reality that the evangelical versus mainline versus fundamentalist division is even reflected in preferred Bible translations. Which version of the Bible shall we trust as o

Post-evangelicals can set aside inerrancy without abandoning Scripture.

Interpreters read through their own lenses, which consist of social location, level and type of education, sources consulted, Bible translations, religious (sub)traditions, and a thousand other factors. Nowhere is the role of power-in-community more obvious than on this issue of interpretation.25 Whatever this or that evangelical understands God’s

dissenting evangelical

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, self-interested people are the interpreters. It will demythologize claims to authoritative truthfulness on the part of all interpreters, including those who claim the greatest authority in

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,

There is also the problem that the “plain commonsense,” straightforward, populist reading of the Bible has often proved disastrous.23 This was a huge issue in the pre–Civil War context when the Bible was used to defend slavery. Taken at its face value, the Bible does not condemn slavery. When abolitionists argued that the deeper message of the Bibl