(First Things) Gerald McDermott—The battle between Meliorists and Traditionists to define evangelic

from TitusOneNine by Kendall Harmon

Long confused with fundamentalism by most of the academy and dismissed as intellectually inadequate, evangelical theology has in the last two decades become one of the liveliest and most creative forms of Protestant theology in America. Not long ago the Lutheran theologian Carl Braaten noted that “the initiative in the writing of dogmatics has been seized by evangelical theologians in America. . . . Most mainline Protestant and progressive Catholic theology has landed in the graveyard of dogmatics, which is that mode of thinking George Lindbeck calls ‘experiential expressivism.’ Individuals and groups vent their own religious experience and call it theology.”

Evangelicals generally believe theology is reflection on what comes from outside their experience as the Word of God. For that reason—that they talk not primarily about themselves but about a transcendent God whose self-revelation must be wrestled with—they not only have more to say than mainline Protestantism, but more interesting things to say.

Read it all.