The Real Difference Between Evangelicals and Liberal Protestants – Daniel K. Williams

But liberal Protestants’ attitudes toward evangelicals is not much more charitable. One of the professors at the seminary Talarico attended has just cowritten a book titled Being Presbyterian in a Dysvangelical America. The catalog copy for the book begins with the line, “Dysvangelical names a theology that is distorted, dysfunctional, and dystopian, twisting the good news of God’s grace into a message of fear, partisanship, and exclusion.”

So much for any prospect of a charitable meeting of the minds between liberal Protestants and evangelicals.

From a theological perspective, it may well be that one side in this debate is heretical. After all, from the beginning of Christianity, followers of Jesus have insisted that there is an objective standard for orthodoxy—which means that not everyone who uses the self-moniker Christian is a genuine disciple.

As an elder in my church, I’m aware that there is a place for determining what is “sound doctrine” and speaking out against those who oppose it (Titus 1:9).

But as a historian of American Christian theology, I think there’s also a place for attempting a nonpartisan, historically objective, nuanced description of the intellectual categories of thinking that led to particular theological developments. I teach in a pluralistic, ecumenical environment that attracts students from a wide range of beliefs, and I write for pretty diverse audiences who need to know how to understand those with whom they disagree – even if they still find, at the end of the day, that they disagree with them.

So, for the rest of this post, I’m going to attempt to shed light on two very different approaches to Christianity in a way that I hope will lead to greater understanding, even if not greater agreement. My point in my last post was not that we have to agree with Talarico’s beliefs, but we need to understand the context that shaped his views. And that will be my aim in this post as well—except that in this post, I’m not talking about Talarico in particular, but instead about two broadly defined groups of Christians that collectively include nearly all Protestants today.

What is evangelicals’ greatest concern?

Non-evangelicals might answer this question by saying something like cultural takeover, imposition of their own morality on others, conservative political victories, or simply the acquisition of power for their group. But all of these miss what has historically driven evangelicals.

At this point, I should probably say what I mean by “evangelical.” In two previous posts, I noted that “evangelical” is not a word that most Christians who can be categorized as evangelical use today to describe themselves, and that pollsters who use the term have not agreed on a uniform definition for it. One might be tempted, therefore, to abandon the term entirely.

But the problem with abandoning the term is that there really is a subgroup of Christians who share a set of primary beliefs that have historically been called “evangelical.” If we give up on the term evangelical, we’ll need to find a new term to describe Christians with that set of beliefs, and that would only complicate the matter.

It’s better, I think, to be clear about what the beliefs (or belief) is that we are describing. Some historians have wrongly suggested that evangelicals should be defined by their political or cultural orientation. Other historians (myself included) have used the Bebbington quadrilateral to define evangelicals. As David Bebbington has argued for the past 35 years, evangelicals are Protestant Christians who believe in the supreme authority of the Bible, salvation through the atoning work of Jesus on the cross, the necessity of a born-again conversion, and a Christian life that is characterized by activism, including evangelism. Those four points have characterized evangelicals in both Britain and America for the past 300 years, Bebbington argues.

I agree with the Bebbington quadrilateral, but I think there may be a simpler way to explain evangelical belief to those who find evangelicalism puzzling.

Here’s my definition: Evangelicals are Protestant Christians who believe that the fundamental human problem is individual sin and the fundamental human need is individual justification or reconciliation with God.

So, the test of whether a Protestant Christian is an evangelical is to ask whether they agree with these two statements:

If a Protestant Christian agrees with those two statements, they’re probably an evangelical. If they disagree, they may be a mainline or liberal Protestant or some other variety of Christian, but they are not likely to fit into evangelicalism, even if they might use the term “evangelical” to describe themselves.

In other words, evangelicals believe that the essence of Christianity is making people right with God and that this process of making people right with God centers on a born-again personal conversion that takes place when a person places their trust in Jesus as their savior. So, the main problem that humans face is individual (sin) and the solution that is offered is also individual (conversion).

That definition in turn tells us what evangelicals’ greatest concern is. Evangelicals’ greatest concern has historically been (and continues to be) rescuing individual lost people from sin by proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ. The word “evangelical” comes from the Greek word for “gospel” or “good news,” and evangelicals define the gospel primarily as the good news of individual justification—that is, the declaration that an individual has been forgiven of sin and is now right with God.

This was the central concern of the 18^th-century transatlantic religious awakening that many historians (such as Bebbington, Mark Noll, and Thomas Kidd, as well as many others) point to as the beginning of evangelicalism. Puritans and Anglicans who were obsessed with the question of how they could know they were saved and reconciled to a holy God found joy and assurance in a salvation experience, and they became the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists of an emerging British and American evangelicalism. 

The hymns that some of these 18^th-century evangelicals wrote attest to their joy over finding God’s “amazing grace” shown toward “a wretch like me,” as John Newton put it. “And can it be” Charles Wesley wrote, “that I should gain an interest in my Savior’s blood? Died He for me, who caused His pain, for me, who Him to death pursued?” “Rock of Ages,” “Alas, and Did My Savior Bleed,” “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” and numerous other 18^th-century evangelical hymns centered on an individual sinner’s great need for God’s grace and the wonderful gift of that grace in Christ’s atoning blood, which a sinner received by faith.

Evangelicals still sing those songs (along with many other 19^th-, 20^th-, and 21^st-century hymns that express a similar message of personal redemption). And though evangelicals are divided theologically among Calvinists, Wesleyans, Baptists, Pentecostals, conservative Lutherans, and adherents of other Protestant theologies, they still largely agree that the central message of the gospel is the free gift of individual salvation from the penalty of sin that Jesus gives to sinners who trust him as Savior.

The centrality of this message can easily be seen on the websites of all of the major evangelical denominations. Most evangelical church websites say almost nothing about politics. They may talk about opposition to abortion, but they’re not likely to say very much about particular political policies and even less about political parties or candidates. They don’t talk about political conservative ideology. They do, however, say a great deal about the need for justification or conversion through personal faith in Jesus.

From the homepage of the Southern Baptist Convention: 

There’s more detail on this in the Baptist Faith and Message 2000: 

Presbyterian Church in America: 

Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (From the denomination’s 1973 statement of beliefs): 

Evangelical Free Church of America: 

Church of the Nazarene: 

Christian and Missionary Alliance: 

While evangelicals speak this message in slightly different theological accents (with Nazarenes emphasizing personal holiness, the Christian and Missionary Alliance emphasizing spiritual healing for hurting people, conservative Presbyterians emphasizing justification, and the Assemblies of God emphasizing the work of the Holy Spirit), all of these denominations emphasize the Great Commission and the message of personal salvation through Jesus Christ, with several explicitly stating that there is no salvation apart from personal faith in Christ. All of them agree that the primary human problem is the problem of sin and the need to be reconciled to God.

Mainline or liberal Protestants have a different theological orientation. The more theologically liberal a Protestant denomination is, the less likely it is to mention the need for individual justification; instead, the message is on bringing a message of love to society. Liberal Protestants, in short, believe that the primary problem the world faces is injustice and the primary solution to that problem is demonstrating God’s love by confronting injustice at the structural level and showing compassion to people at the individual level.

American liberal Protestant theology emerged in the 19^th century among evangelical Protestants who began distancing themselves from some of the traditional tenets of evangelical theology—especially its ideas of penal substitutionary atonement, a God who was wrathful against individual sin, and a view of the Bible as inerrant in all of its historical details. Heavily influenced by German liberal theology as well as by social concerns that would come to be associated with American Progressivism, liberal Protestants emphasized social redemption over individual salvation and viewed the gospel as a message of God’s universal love revealed in Jesus, not a message of individual salvation from sin accomplished on the cross. Jesus was still very important to the 19^th– and 20^th-century theological liberals, but the Jesus they emphasized was the Jesus whose teachings of love could transform the world—not the Jesus who paid the price for sin through an atoning death on the cross.

Liberal Protestants wrote fewer hymns than evangelicals, but the handful that have survived and become widely known emphasize social justice and societal uplift through a message of God’s universal love. For most Americans today, one of the best known liberal Protestant hymns was the creation of a 19^th-century Unitarian, America’s original theologically liberal denomination. 

That hymn is the Christmas carol “O Holy Night,” originally written in French but then translated and rewritten in the 1850s by Massachusetts Unitarian John Sullivan Dwight. The original French version of the song included a line that expressed a reference to a traditional atonement theology that both 19^th-century Catholics and evangelicals subscribed to: “Midnight, Christians, is the solemn hour when the Human God descended to us, to erase original sin and cease the wrath of his Father.” Dwight erased this message and instead highlighted the universal love of God and brotherhood of man, the concerns of 19^th-century Unitarians (and later, 20^th-century liberal Protestants), coupled with a social justice message of antislavery: “Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is Love and His gospel is Peace; Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother, And in his name all oppression shall cease.”

Most evangelicals don’t necessarily disagree with that message, because they do believe that Jesus taught us to love one another and that his gospel is peace. They do believe that Jesus breaks the chains of oppression, including (for many evangelicals) the oppression of injustice. But even the most socially minded evangelicals don’t think that this is a substitute for the message of substitutionary atonement and the forgiveness of individual sin, as Dwight seemed to think; if they thought that, they would cease to be evangelicals, in my view. At best, evangelicals would say, the message of Dwight’s hymn is an outgrowth of the gospel but not the gospel itself. But for many liberal Protestants both in the 19^th century and today, the social justice message of Jesus’s teaching of love and its application to end oppression in the present is the gospel. That’s where evangelicals and liberal Protestants part ways. 

This can easily be seen on the denominational websites of most mainline Protestant denominations that are influenced by liberal theology. 

Unlike evangelical denominations, mainline denominations don’t include a discussion of how to be saved on their websites. Instead, their websites emphasize the universality of God’s love and the need for the church to serve society by addressing areas of injustice. When they talk about reconciliation with God, they do so not with an emphasis on being saved from sin (still less of being saved from hell) but instead with an emphasis on coming to know God’s love and overcoming our self-imposed alienation from God.

For liberal Protestants, ethical considerations (usually with a strongly social dimension) are first-order concerns, because they define the essence of Christianity. For evangelicals, transformed ethics are a product of justification, but they are a secondary effect. For liberal Protestants, by contrast, Jesus’s ethic of love is the sine qua non of Christianity and the test of being a true Christian. And, just as there are Bible verses that support evangelicals’ emphasis on justification, there are other Bible passages—1 John 4:7-8, James 1:27, etc.—that coincide with liberal Protestants’ interpretation.

But for most liberal Protestants, their ethical commitment to social justice is not based primarily on particular Bible verses, even though they do believe that the Bible supports their ethical vision. Instead, for more than a century, they have believed that God’s progressive revelation unfolds in human experience, which means that while the Bible is important, it is not the sole source of religious authority, as many conservative Protestants have argued. The Bible instead needs to be read through the lens of the insights that are gained from collective and personal experience and from human reason. It is thus perfectly appropriate to take ethical commitments that are gained from experience and self-evident reason and interpret the Bible through the lens of those commitments. Evangelicals, by contrast, insist that a commitment to biblical authority should be primary, and that experience should be interpreted in light of the Bible rather than the other way round—which is why they have often insisted on the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

To get a sense of how mainline Protestant denominations that are influenced by liberal theology speak about their social mission and their understanding of the essence of Christianity, consider these statements on mainline Protestant denominational websites, and notice the differences with the language that evangelical websites use.

United Methodist Church: 

Presbyterian Church (USA): 

United Church of Christ: 

Evangelical Lutheran Church of America: 

Many evangelicals would agree with a lot of what these mainline Protestant denominational websites say about helping the marginalized and showing the love of God to the world. It’s what they don’t say that tells us the difference between evangelicalism and mainline or liberal Protestantism. They don’t say anything about the need for individual justification before God and individual salvation from sin through personal faith in Christ. For evangelicals, that’s primary—that is, it’s the fundamental issue that comes before all other issues of social justice or discipleship. For mainline or liberal Protestants, it may not be a consideration at all.

The reason that this matters is because without an understanding of this theological emphasis in evangelicalism, much of evangelicalism will make very little sense. Evangelicals are not primarily culture warriors, political conservatives, or social justice advocates—even though some evangelicals have been found in each of those camps. Evangelicals are primarily people who believe that the world needs the gospel and that the gospel is defined in terms of individual salvation from sin.

Most evangelicals have traditionally also believed in individual personal holiness (including moral living and an ethic of love, driven by grace). Wesleyan evangelicals have especially emphasized this message, but even Reformed evangelicals talk a lot about personal growth in sanctification. Many evangelicals also believe that transformed people will produce a better society. Some have become strong social justice advocates. But they don’t begin their theology with those concerns. Instead, their chief concern is solving the problem of individual sin, and the social concerns are only a secondary outcome.

That’s even true of culture-war issues like abortion. Most evangelicals don’t begin with the premise that the country’s greatest need is to stop abortion, even if they use terms like “murder” and “holocaust” to describe it. Instead, they believe that the country’s greatest need is individual salvation from sin, and that abortion is a particularly heinous example of the sin from which we need salvation.

But by seeing sin and salvation in individual terms, they have tended to focus primarily on individual vice (not structural evils) when campaigning for government regulation, and they have tended to be suspicious of the sort of programs for social betterment that have interested liberal Protestants. In short, their theology has inclined them to be suspicious of institutions—especially government institutions for social uplift—and that in turn has made it more likely that they’ll be political conservatives. There are plenty of exceptions to this tendency (especially among African Americans, among others), but in general, American evangelical theology tends to encourage ways of thinking that are more compatible with modern American conservatism than American liberalism.

Yet by starting with theology rather than political ideology, I think that we’ll have a better understanding of how evangelicals think.

We’ll also be better equipped to understand the difference in thinking between evangelicals and liberal Protestants.

From the evangelical perspective, liberal Protestants are heretics because they don’t seem to care about individual justification, which for evangelicals is the sine qua non of being a Christian.

And for liberal Protestants, modern evangelicalism is a dangerous distortion of the faith because it stands in the way of the central ethic that they believe is the defining feature of Christianity: love, which they tend to define in social terms that are compatible with pluralism, justice, and equity. If Jesus came primarily to lift up the poor and marginalized—and if a majority of American evangelicals support a political ideology that according to liberal Protestants oppresses the poor and marginalized—evangelicals are opposed to Jesus.

No wonder the chasm between the two groups is so wide.

Indeed, it has been wide for the past hundred years. As liberal Protestantism developed out of the progressive and social gospel movements of the late 19^th century, conservative Protestants reacted by forming the fundamentalist movement to resist liberal Protestantism.

Perhaps the foremost intellectual defender of conservative Protestantism was J. Gresham Machen, whose book Christianity and Liberalism (1923) argued that liberal theology was not even Christian. It deserved to be classified as another religion entirely, because it rejected conservative Protestants’ standard of authority and their conception of the gospel.

The evangelical heirs of Machen are making the same argument today, but this time, with a slightly different twist. Because mainline Protestantism has shrunk so dramatically in recent decades, many evangelicals are only dimly aware of liberal Protestant theology at all, so when they encounter it, they have no historical or theological category in which to place it. If they encounter a liberal Protestant, they imagine that they are dealing with an individual heretic, not realizing that the person ascribes to a theological tradition that is more than a century old and that has the support of many seminaries.

Such an understanding will not heal this theological divide, but it will give us the appropriate categories to understand how to dialogue across the chasm. We don’t have to agree with our doctrinal opponents, but we should at least have the charity and intellectual curiosity to attempt to understand their theological paradigm.