It takes 256 pages of careful, documented and well informed analysis to reach this conclusion, but it is a compelling and significant comment on the future of evangelicalism. And it shows exactly why a biblically founded and funded theology is of the essence of Christian faith classically understood and existentially appropriated. Brian Stanley is not a partisan apologist for a particular sub-species of evangelicalism, he is a widely respected authority on World Christianity and heads up a Centre of unimpeachable academic credentials in the study of World Christianity. So here is food for thought for Christians whether evangelical or not.
"If the global diffusion of evangelicalism proves eventually to have transmuted into the global disintegration of evangelicalism, it will not be because of the philosophical and hermeneutical boldness of a few post-conservative evangelical theologians in the North. It will rather be because in the explosive popular Christianity of the southern hemisphere the balance will have been tipped away from a Bible centred gospel that while being properly holistic, still holds to the soteriological centrality and ethical normativity of the cross, towards a form of religious materialism that that subordinates the cross to a crude theology of divine blessing reduced to the promise of unlimited health and wealth here and now. In the majority world the sharpest challenge confronting believers in the message of the atoning power of the cross derives not from Enlightenment scepticism but from the daily realities of endemic poverty, hunger, pandemic disease and structural injustice….The battle for the integrity of the gospel in the opening years of the twenty-first century is being fought not primarily in the lecture rooms of North American seminaries but in the shanty towns, urban slums and villages of Africa, Asia and Latin America." page 247.
The implications of Stanley's conclusions for the future of Christianity are stark and should set the agenda for further reflection on the nature of evangelicalism and the need to both redefine and revitalise that way of following Jesus in which a biblical cruciformity is the mark and measure of discipleship. And if the term Evangelical is to retain a reliable validity and value as a descriptor of such discipleship, then that may well have to lead to process of feview, revision and redefinition. Such a process might include a revisiting of the evangelical tradition, a rediscovery and recovery of evangelical essentials and a consequent realignment of loyalties and owned identities. Stanleys work as a historian rightly stops short of such a suggested process. But it does seem as if his conclusion implies the urgency and cogency of such far reaching and considered reflection.
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