Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part Two – Evangelical and Catholic: Part One of Part Two – Evangelical

In the outline of this series at the end of Part One, I had stated that in the second entry we would look at how shifts in the meaning of “evangelical” and “Catholic” have indicated a move away from orthodoxy. In the writing of this second entry it has become apparent that this will require more than one essay. This, therefore, is Part One of Part Two, in which we will look at “evangelical.” Part Two of Part Two will focus on “Catholic.” There will, of course, be overlap, because both semantic shifts point to the same movement away from orthodoxy in evangelical Protestantism.

In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformers referred to themselves, their teachings, and their followers as “evangelical”. For this reason, in continental Europe the term evangelical is still largely synonymous with “Protestant.” Before looking at how this word has developed different connotations in the English-speaking world and especially North America, we should consider why the Reformers adopted this term in the first place.

Evangelical is a word formed from the Greek word that is usually translated “Gospel” in the New Testament and which literally means “good news.” The Gospel is the kerygma of the Christian faith - the message of good news that Jesus Christ told His disciples to proclaim to the whole world. St. Paul summarized the content of that message in the fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians – that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of a long list of eyewitnesses culminating in his own. Stated in its fullest, it includes the entire revealed narrative concerning Jesus Christ from His Incarnation to His Ascension. This is why the books of the New Testament that provide such a narrative are, accordingly, called Gospels.

What, therefore, did the Protestant Reformers mean by calling themselves “evangelical”?

They did not mean to say that they had rediscovered the Gospel after it had been lost. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and indeed His Incarnation and Ascension, are the very heart of the ecumenical or Catholic Creeds that the Church in both its Greek and Latin divisions, had been affirming since the early centuries of Christianity. In both the baptismal (Apostles’) and Eucharistic (Nicene-Constantinopolitan) Creeds these are the found in the second and longest, of the three paragraphs that make up the Creedal confession.

The reason the earliest Reformers, the Magisterial Reformers – Dr. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, et. al., - began referring to their teachings as evangelical was because of their emphasis on the Pauline explanation of why the Gospel is just that, “Good News”, for the whole world. In this, they did not see themselves as recovering something that had been long buried beneath the accumulation of centuries of tradition. They saw their understanding of the Gospel as being consistent with rather than opposed to the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church. They saw their opposition as being the papacy – the patriarch of Rome who had usurped jurisdiction far beyond the legitimate confines of his own ecclesiastical province in clear violations of the canons of the early Councils – and his followers. They called the papal doctrines that they opposed “Roman” rather than “Catholic”, insisting that they were fairly recent inventions of the papacy rather than part of the faith that was “quod ubique, quod semper, et quod ab omnibus creditum est” (“that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all”) and therefore “Catholic” as defined by St. Vincent of Lerins.

So what is the Pauline explanation of why the Gospel is “Good News”?

The answer to this is spelled out for us by St. Paul in his epistle to the Romans. In this epistle, he declares that the Gospel is “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” because “therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith” (1:16-17). He then spends the next three and a half chapters explaining what this means, which explanation culminates in another summary statement of the Gospel, that Christ “was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.” (4:25).

St. Paul begins his explanation with an indictment of the nations of the world for turning away from God to idols, which resulted in their being given over to a depraved mind and wicked practices. He rests this indictment upon God’s having given a sufficient revelation of Himself and His character, including His wrath against wicked and unrighteous behaviour, in His creation as to render all men without an excuse (1:18-32). He then shows that national Israel derives no special advantage in this regard from her having received God’s written Law because unless she obeys the Law it will only condemn her (chapter 2). The “day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God” is coming, he warns, and on that day He will “render to every man according to His deeds”, whether good or bad, regardless of whether they be Jew or Gentile and a hypothetical Gentile who lacks the written Law but nevertheless does what is right according to it, will be better off than a Jew, who boasts of the Law, but does not obey it. However, this hypothetical Gentile does not exist, because neither Jews nor Gentiles maintain the righteousness that God requires of man in His Law. With a string of quotations from the Old Testament, St. Paul draws his indictment of the entire world, Jew and Gentile, alike to a close by stating plainly that all have sinned, there is none righteous, that the whole world is guilty before God, and that therefore “by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight.” No one will be pronounced righteous by God, on account of his having done what is right.

While so far this sounds more like bad – even terrible - news than good, St. Paul then immediately declares that “now”, that is, in the Gospel, “the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and prophets.” The ‘righteousness of God” so manifested, however, is not the righteousness of God’s wrath against “all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men”, however, but the righteousness by which God counts as righteous all those who believe in Jesus Christ. This is the significance of the Gospel – Christ’s death is both a redemption (a price paid to free someone from bondage, in this case bondage to sin and death) and a propitiation (an offering which satisfies the offended justice of God against sinners) and therefore the grounds upon which God can so credit sinners who believe in Jesus with righteousness without compromising His own justice. (3:22-28).

In his next chapter St. Paul explains justification further by considering the example of Abraham. In the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, God comes to Abram – he would not become Abraham until two chapters later when circumcision was established as the sign of the covenant - in a vision and tells him “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.” This is in reference to Abram’s having just turned down the reward offered him by Bera, king of Sodom, for recovering all that had been taken by Chederlaomer of Elam and his confederates when the latter defeated the kings of the Plain of Jordan in the Battle of Siddim. Abram’s response was to ask God what He would give him, hinting heavily as to what he wanted it to be by twice mentioning that he was without child and that his servant, Eliezer of Damascus was his steward and heir. God makes him the promise he is looking for and tells him that “he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels” shall be his heir and that his seed shall be as the stars of heaven in number. Moses then says of Abram that “he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.”

St. Paul draws two important conclusions from this. He uses the fact that this took place prior to Abraham’s circumcision to make the point that just as Jew and Gentile are alike sinners, so they are justified before God in the same way, by faith, and that Abraham is the father of all who follow him in being justified by faith, whether circumcised Jews or uncircumcised Gentiles. Before going into this, however, he makes it clear that works are no part of justification in the eyes of God. If Abraham was justified by works, he says, “he hath whereof to glory, but not before God”. That God credited Abraham’s faith to him as righteousness was an act of grace on God’s part – grace meaning favour that is freely bestowed upon its recipients. The justification of sinners in the eyes of God is always an act of grace – and therefore it can never be by works for “to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.”

The Pauline doctrine of justification by faith without works became one of the five famous Solas in which the Reformers summed up their evangelical doctrine. Specifically, it became Sola Fide – by faith alone. In his Lectures on the Psalms of Ascent Dr. Luther declared of this doctrine: “quia isto articulo stante stat Ecclesia, ruente ruit Ecclesia” - “because if that article stands, the Church stands, if it collapses, so collapses the Church.” It accordingly was made prominent in the confessions of all the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation – Article XI of the Anglican Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Article IV of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession and Article XXIII of the Reformed Belgic Confession. Against this doctrine, the Romanists asserted a) that it violated Catholic consensus, b) that it added a word “alone” which is never used by St. Paul to qualify “faith” in his writings on justification, and c) that the qualification of justifying faith by “alone” is in fact denied by St. James in the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of his epistle.

I will defer discussion of the first of these objections to Part Two of Part Two for while it pertains to a significant difference between the sixteenth century evangelicalism of the Magisterial Reformation and subsequent evangelicalisms, that difference has to do with their understanding of the Catholic tradition, namely that whereas the Reformers denied that any such break with Catholic consensus had taken place, the later evangelicals affirmed it. The second objection is entirely specious as the “alone” in “faith alone” means “and not by works” which is stated repeatedly and in much stronger language than this by St. Paul in Romans: 3:28; 4:4-8 (note the especially strong wording of verses 5 “to him that worketh not” and 8 “without works”); 9:30-32; and 10:4-10. Similar statements can be found throughout the entire corpus of Pauline literature. As for the third objection, it is quite evident that the Jacobean use of the terms “justification”, “faith” and “works” cannot be the same as the Pauline use of these same terms, for if the two Apostles were using all of these words with the same meaning, they directly contradicted each other. It is entirely defensible to maintain that all three words have different meanings in St. James than they do in St. Paul. It is certain, however, at least for anyone who believes in the verbal, plenary, inspiration of the entire New Testament, which all orthodox Christians do, that St. James means something different by the word “justification” than St. Paul and that the justification that he writes about is not justification before God. St. Paul himself tells us that in the second verse of the fourth chapter of Romans. (1)

It was because of their insistence on the primacy of the doctrine of justification by faith and not works that the sixteenth century Reformers called themselves “evangelical.” For it meant that the Gospel was just that – the message of the Good News of a salvation already accomplished and completed to be proclaimed to the world in the hearing and believing of which the salvation so proclaimed is personally appropriated by the believer and not a set of instructions as to how people are to save themselves.

Is it not evident that what is called “evangelical” today is radically different from this?

Consider the average “evangelical” formulation of the Gospel today. There are many variations, of course, but they all tend to follow this three part pattern. The first part is to present people with the Scriptural truth that all of us are sinners and cannot achieve the righteousness which God requires of us through our own works. The second part is to present the Gospel message itself – that God has given us His Only-Begotten Son to be our Saviour, Who died for our sins on the cross and rose again from the dead. So far this is in accordance with Scripture, Catholic orthodoxy, and the evangelical doctrines of the Reformers. The first part is what the Reformers called the message of the Law, the second part the message of the Gospel. The third part of the contemporary evangelical formulation, however, is to present the step – or steps, this detail is where all the variation comes in – that the individual must take to personally appropriate the offered salvation.

The wide variety of ways in which this step is presented is itself a huge problem because it generates confusion. Expressions such as “invite Jesus into your heart”, “accept Jesus Christ as your Saviour”, “make a commitment to Christ”, etc. are manifestly NOT different ways of saying the same thing and if one attempts to argue otherwise he is likely to end up proving merely that none of them mean anything at all. Moreover, to make these things into steps that one must take to appropriate Christ’s salvation AFTER one has heard and believed the Gospel is to teach salvation by works. As Orthodox Presbyterian Bible scholar Dr. Edward F. Hills put it:

And this would imply that we are saved not by believing but by a receiving which is different from believing, by a "yielding" to Christ perhaps, or a "surrendering" to Him, or a "turning over of our lives" to Him. But all this is salvation by works and contrary to the Bible. For the Scriptures plainly teach that to receive Christ as Saviour is to believe on Him. (The King James Version Defended, 4th edition, 1984, p. 184, bold indicating italics in original)

Sometimes, however, the step is presented as to “believe in Jesus Christ” or to “trust Jesus Christ” which expressions do mean the same thing. As the late Missouri Lutheran pastor John M. Drickamer put it:

What is faith? Faith is belief and faith is trust. Faith is believing the facts of the Gospel: God the Son, died for my sin and rose again from the dead; for His sake God has forgiven all my sins, so that I will not be damned to hell but welcomed into heaven forever. Faith is trusting God that this forgiveness is real because of Christ. There is no difference between faith as belief and faith as trust. Trusting a person to drive safely is the same as believing that he is a safe driver. (What is the Gospel? It is Finished, 1991, p. 2)

It is, of course, true to say that faith – believing the Gospel, trusting Jesus Christ – is how we appropriate the salvation God freely gives to ourselves. This is the role assigned to faith in God’s order of salvation. As the Right Reverend Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, nineteenth century Bishop of Lincoln, helpfully explained, St. Paul represents our faith neither as the principal cause, meritorious cause, efficient cause nor instrumental cause in God’s hand of our justification, for these are, respectively, God’s mercy, Christ’s death, the gracious operation of God the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Sacraments and Ministry of the Word, but rather:

He represents Faith as the instrument on our side, by which we rely on God’s word, and appeal to Him for mercy, and receive a grant of pardon, and a title to the Evangelical promises from God. (The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the Original Greek: With Notes by Christopher Wordsworth D.D., Part III – St. Paul’s Epistles, 1859, p. 200)

To present the appropriation of salvation by faith as a step to be taken after one has heard the Gospel and been persuaded of its truth is a distortion, however. Faith is precisely the condition of the heart that ensues from being persuaded of the truth of the Gospel and not a further step, an act of the will, to be taken in response to said persuasion. The Gospel, properly presented, as the sixteenth century Evangelical Reformers understood, directs the repentant sinner’s focus away from himself and makes it to rest in faith upon Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God, crucified for us and risen again. By presenting faith as a step to be taken by an act of the will after one has been persuaded of the truth of the Gospel, contemporary Evangelical Gospel formulae redirect that focus onto ourselves.

In the English-speaking world, the term “evangelical” has come to refer to the subcategory of Protestants who present the Gospel in this way. It has taken on this meaning through a series of historical steps. The first of these took place in the seventeenth century when the Dortian Calvinists who did not separate from the Church of England after the Restoration began to use the label “evangelical” for their own party within the Church. Thus “evangelical” became, for a time, synonymous with “Calvinist”, which was a more limited usage than in the sixteenth century when it included all branches of Magisterial Protestantism. In the eighteenth century, however, there was a further shift in the meaning of the term when it came to be associated with the revival movement represented by both George Whitefield (Calvinist) and John Wesley (Arminian). Since Wesley differed from Whitefield on precisely the doctrines by which the seventeenth century Anglican evangelicals had designated their party, this demonstrates that in the eighteenth century the label evangelical had come to distinguish its referents more by a common experience than by a common doctrine. This became even more obvious in the early nineteenth century, a period in which the most prominent American evangelical preacher was Charles G. Finney. Finney’s doctrine was heretical by the standards of Calvinists and Arminians alike. Indeed, it was heretical by much broader standards than these. Finney came very close to Pelagianism, if he was not actually a true Pelagian, in his rejection of Original Sin. This placed him outside the orthodoxy of all three branches of the Magisterial Reformation – see Article IX of the Articles of Religion, Article II of the Augsburg Confession, and Article III of the Belgic Confession. Indeed, it placed him outside of the orthodoxy of Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church for Pelagianism was condemned as heresy in the early centuries long before the Greek, Latin and English branches of the Church broke fellowship with each other. (2) It was with Finney, however, that the term evangelical finally arrived at a meaning recognizable as that of the present day. Having an identifiable conversion experience, understood primarily in terms of a change in one’s life and behaviour, came to be the distinguishing mark of the evangelical.

Moreover, Finney seems to have been the first to have translated the Gospel into the language of technique. By the language of technique, I mean the kind of language used in an instruction manual. A series of steps explaining the irreducible minimum of the correct procedure towards achieving a particular end. This language is the language of modern science and technology, and the product of rationalism. By the last century it had so permeated every field of knowledge that it came under the heavy critique of such thinkers as Michael Oakeshott, Jacques Ellul and George Grant. In the nineteenth century is was most evident in the writings of Charles Finney with regards to the conversion of sinners, leading to the criticism that his theology of evangelism was so mechanical and anthropocentric that, in B. B. Warfield’s words, “God might be eliminated from it entirely without essentially changing its character.” The contemporary evangelical presentation of the Gospel discussed above, while not as susceptible to the charge of having made God irrelevant, nevertheless has its discernible origins in his mechanical, technical, approach to making converts.

In the sixteenth century, evangelical designated the doctrine of justification by faith and not works, the doctrine that God, through events of the Gospel, the death for our sins and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ, had accomplished the salvation of the world so that all who believe in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel are pardoned of their sins and credited with a righteousness that is given to them freely rather than earned through their efforts. It was primarily doctrinal – about the truths which God has revealed in the Gospel in His Word – rather than experiential. Through the changes this term underwent between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, this was reversed and it became primarily experiential rather than doctrinal – about our experiences rather than about the truths of God as revealed in His Word.

This itself is an indication of a move away from orthodoxy. The truths which God has revealed in His Word are stable and unchanging. Human experience is ever shifting and changing. Remember the illustration with which Christ ended His famous Sermon on the Mount. God’s truths are a safe foundation to build upon. Personal experience is not. This does not mean that experience is not important, but it very much means that sound doctrine must take primacy over personal experience. When this is reversed in the basic meaning of an important theological label it does not speak well of the orthodoxy of the movement bearing that label. Note that none of this should be taken as meaning any particular individual values personal experience over sound doctrine merely because he calls himself an evangelical.

This change also indicates a shift in the ranking of the doctrines of salvation. The sixteenth century evangelical Reformers awarded the primacy to justification. The Romanists, as we shall discuss in Part Two of Part Two, maintained that this was a departure from Catholic orthodoxy which granted sanctification equality with justification, if not awarding it the primacy. Contemporary evangelicalism, going back to Finney, and some might argue even to Wesley, would seem to award the primacy to regeneration, at least in practice. In doing so, however, they have radically changed the meaning of the new birth. Whenever the new birth is mentioned in the Scriptures it is described as a sovereign act of God (John 1:13; 3:8), operating through His instrumental means of His Word (James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:23) and baptism (Romans 6:3-5; Colossians 2:12, Titus 3:5), independent of the will of the recipients. In contemporary evangelical theology the new birth is depicted as an experience that you can bring about by following a prescribed set of steps. This is pretty much the complete opposite of how it is presented in the Scriptures. We shall look at this further in Part Two of Part Two.

(1) Note also that the word “grace” does not appear in St. James’ discussion of justification. Whatever St. James means by “justification” it is by works and not by grace and ergo not the same “justification” of which St. Paul writes in Romans.

(2) There are some who would maintain that the Greek branch of the Church – the Eastern Orthodox – is Pelagian or Semi-Pelagian. Those who take this position are generally either strong Calvinists who mean it as a criticism of Eastern Orthodoxy or the type of person I referred to in Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part One – Orthodoxy when I said “there is also a type of convert who is drawn to the Eastern Church because its unfamiliarity to most Westerners allows him to selectively draw from minority voices within that tradition and present them as if they were the mainstream of that tradition in order to create the impression that ideas of his that would be considered liberal neo-Protestantism in the West are really the ancient views of this venerable Church.” Either way, what they are saying is a distortion of the fact that the Eastern and Western branches of the Church were beginning to diverge already in the days of St. Augustine and that the Eastern Church never embraced Augustinianism. This does not mean that it accepted a form of Pelagianism or dissented from the condemnation of such as heresy by the pre-Schismatic Church. The kind of reasoning that would equate non-Augustinianism with Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism is the same kind that argues that if you are not a Calvinist then you must be an Arminian or vice versa. It is invalid in either case. The Greek Church’s problem with Augustinianism was not with the idea that we have all inherited a broken, fallen, sinful nature from Adam. It was with the idea that we have inherited his guilt for the specific sin committed by Adam and Eve. Pelagianism requires the denial of the former as well as the latter. These ideas can be distinguished as “Original Sin” and “Original Guilt” although the lack of consistent usage has led to much confusion.