The Future of Evangelical Theology

This week marked the end of the seminar I gave (in conjunction with Prof. Dr. Armin Kreiner) on Evangelical Theology ("Wohin Steuert die Evangelikale Theologie"), and I'd like to take a moment to reflect (now that the semester is over).

Through the semester, we looked at the origins and historical development of evangelicalism, especially in the english-speaking world, but the bit I found to be the most interesting was in the second half of the semester, which dealt with new developments and influences in evangelical theology. The point of the seminar was to present evangelicalism as something differentiated rather than a monolithic block, and especially to distinguish it from fundamentalism. I'll probably say more about some individual aspects here in the future, but for today I would like to give my summary thesis, which I formulated for the close of the course:

The future of evangelical theology is as one theological direction and influence among others in the so-called mainline denominations rather than in particular "evangelical" denominations.

 (OK, so I actually said something like "Die Zukunft der evangelikalen Theologie ist eher als eine Richtung bzw. Prägung unter anderem bei den sogenannten mainline-Konfessionen vorzustellen, anstatt als die Theologie besonderer und gesonderter evangelikaler Konfessionen.")

This seems to be the case not only from the doctrinal nearness of the New Evangelicals to the conservative-moving theologians of mainline denominations (Catholics included, by the way!), but also is supported by socialogical data in certain age groups (primarily my generation and younger) who change their church affiliation as well as rejecting single-issue politics. Prof. Dr. Michael Hochgeschwendner from the Amerika-Institut of the LMU was kind enough to guest-lecture for us once, and gave me the most support for my theory.

Evangelicalism lives in tension with fundamentalism. In distinguishing itself from the fundamentalist rejection of the world and society, and in taking a more active role in forming society, "evangelicals" end up on the same field of play as "mainliners", "liberals", and others. When the Christian conscience is not connected to the Religious Right, but decides on the basis of love and justice, "evangelical" social action starts to have a lot of similarity to "mainline" groups; the theological movements within "evangelicalism" are in conversation with the rest of the theological world.

That's probably pretty controversial, but I'm going to stick to my guns. I'm an "evangelical" in a "mainline" denomination, and there is enough evidence that the move I've made is one being made by many young adults. It's time to end the characterisation of church groups as being representatives of one or the other type of theology, and time to begin, for ourselves, representing the Truth for who He is, where and  how we can proclaim Him.