3
theoretical and practical. But increasingly evangelical arrows are aimed at the wrong
places. In our various dirges, we may sometimes give way to a tacit critique of
Protestantism as a whole. But evangelicals must remind themselves of the glorious
advances which were secured as a result of the Reformation and its heirs. Our
shortcomings are often the result of an abandonment of the presuppositions which once
made evangelicalism great. As Os Guiness, Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum,
accurately observed,
At the heart of the Reformation was an insistence on the utter dependability of
God and an unrelenting protest against any absolutizing of the created, the
relative, and the purely human. . . . Protestant and evangelical are two faces of the
same truth. Protestant is the critical stance of evangelicalism, just as evangelical
is the positive content of Protestantism.
4
Unfortunately, as Guiness concludes, "Yet the Protestant principle is weak in
American evangelicalism today."
5
Yes, the church desperately needs reform. But this is
precisely why I am glad to be an evangelical, whose very name is derived from the work
of the Protestant Reformers; for it was they who challenged the medieval abuses of the
church, both theological and practical, by urging a return to the word of God alone.
The Unwitting Reformation?
But in addition to the more overt kinds of self-deprecation, another kind of
internecine poor-mouthing persists among evangelicals. This kind comes from our own
evangelical cultural analysts who, in their attempt to explain what has gone wrong with
the modern world, lay much blame (albeit without much fanfare) at the doorstep of
4
Os Guiness, "Introduction," in No God But God ed. Os Guiness and John Seel
(Chicago: Moody Press, 1992), 25.
5
Ibid.