After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

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.

I will argue in the next chapter that post-evangelicals need to do some fresh thinking about other ways of knowing—indeed, other ways of hearing God address us. These include tradition, science, reason, experience, intuition, community, and relationships. The power of a narrow evangelical biblicism must be broken, but you can’t replace something wi

Jesus himself needs to be re-presented and reconsidered, and I will do that here. A term I will offer to describe the vision of Jesus I am embracing is Christian humanism. It is a new term for me to use in my work, though not a new term in Christian history. It basically means orienting our lives by a version of Christian faith that is compassionat

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.

It seems ironic to acknowledge that a Catholic Mass almost certainly contains more Scripture than the average evangelical service. Scripture is quietly but profoundly treated as a trustworthy vehicle for encountering the word of God, surrounded with embodied gestures of reverence and receptivity.

The most difficult problem for a theology of biblical inerrancy (or infallibility, but we will focus on inerrancy) is resolving the respective divine and human roles in the writing of the Bible. Belief in biblical inerrancy depends on something like the idea that the Holy Spirit took such entire control of biblical writers that everything they said

The people who talk most about the Bible “speaking” are often those most guilty of ignoring or masking their own agency in biblical interpretation. . . . We cannot allow the . . . masking of human interpretive practices that are the actual agents that produce those “meanings” of the Bible so many people point to in their attempts to oppress other p

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.

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