Have Evangelicals Forgotten God? by MATTHEW LEE ANDERSON for The Gospel Coalition
Despite the “evidence of ongoing vitality, the evangelical movement shows disturbing signs of dissipating its energies and forfeiting its initiative.” While this sentiment has pervaded discussions about evangelicals over the past decade, the close association of Donald Trump with “evangelicalism” has raised it to a feverish pitch.
Only the concern isn’t that recent: evangelical stalwart Carl Henry wrote it in his 1976 lament, Evangelicals in Search of Identity. Henry worried that the vigor of evangelical institutions in the 30 years since he had published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism was eroding because of disunity over inerrancy and evangelicalism’s social and political witness.
Now, some 40 years later, Mark Galli—who has most recently stewarded Henry’s chair at Christianity Today—has brought forth his own diagnosis of evangelicalism’s ills, as well as remedies for its future. Galli writes with a light touch, similar to the accessibility of Henry’s journalistic prose. Though Galli lacks Henry’s polemical edge, he shares Henry’s ability to embed real theological learning within a colloquial style.
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Yet the difference between their efforts is illuminating. Henry spends the bulk of his book worrying about the impotence of evangelical leaders and the fracturing of our institutions, the absence of a persuasive social and theological program, and the expending of our energies on internal fights about the Bible. “What evangelical renewal does require,” Henry writes, “is recovery of the larger sense of evangelical family in which fellow-believers recognize their common answerability to God in his scripturally given Word and their responsibility for and to each other within the body of faith.”
Galli’s diagnosis starts elsewhere, with the simple, if difficult, claim that the root of the evangelical crisis stems from a single source: “We have forgotten God.” For Galli, such forgetfulness is especially damning, as the “yearning to know God” has distinctively characterized “evangelicals” since Whitefield and Wesley began touring America with their gospel message.
