Twenty four years ago I wrote a letter and sent copies to my Christian friends and few congregations. I want to share a couple of paragraphs.  I looked at it and thought, “What has changed over the past twenty four years?”  I wrote it January 1993.

What will 1993 bring as we all seek to serve the Lord?  As a nation, will we continue to decline in the spheres of responsibility that made us a great nation?  As a church, will we continue to decline in our understanding and remove ourselves from biblical truth?  As Christians collectively, will we continue to obscure eternal principles with compromise and allow contradiction as we defend the Christian faith. 

The thrust of popular fundamental preachers in recent years has given way to a misunderstanding of the role of Christianity in the formation of the United States Government.  What made this country great was not that it was founded as a Christian nation, but it was founded on principles and ethics that were derived from the Bible. Jesus Christ is the Savior of the church, not the United States.

Just as the nation struggles to identify itself in the world, so the church struggles to identify itself in the nation.  The struggle is pushing the church into a neo-dark age.  Tens of thousands of pulpits will be filled this Sunday morning with men and women who, however subtle it may be, will distort the truth.  Why?  Because, many do not know the truth and others do not believe the truth.  Others have not made any attempt to learn the truth. As we stand on the precipice of a neo-dark age, the church needs an ongoing debate, committed to humility, to expose the truth.

The great European theologian Emil Brunner once said, "contradiction is the hallmark of Christianity."  Fortunately that is not true.  Unfortunately the majority of the Protestant Church happens to believe that is true.  In the secular world it is called relativism.  Some evangelicals try to escape the problem by calling a contradiction an antinomy.  Webster defines antinomy as "a contradiction between two principles each taken to be true."  You can see that the problem is getting more difficult.  Contradictions bring chaos and confusion to the church and culture.  The mind of God is not filled with chaos and confusion.  Christians collectively need to seek reformation. Individual professing Christians ought to adopt a Christian worldview.

Every person reading this article has a world view.  A world view is simply the broad perspective of how someone understands reality.   World views such as secularism, humanism, pragmatism, consumerism, and individualism are un-Christian world views.  There are also Christian world views. I want to consider evangelicalism.

The word, evangelicalism, is derived from the Greek words "euangelion" which means good news and "euangelizomai" which means to announce good news.  Evangelicalism is the world view that emphasizes the gospel of Jesus Christ."  It is the gospel of forgiveness and regeneration through personal faith in Jesus Christ.  At this point most Protestant Christians would say "I'm evangelical." 

The crucial question pertains to the scope and content of the good news, not the basis of the good news.  Protestant Christianity recognizes Martin Luther as one of the first evangelicals.  Luther believed that people were justified by grace through faith alone. 

The question remains:  Do you embrace evangelicalism?  If I had lived 500 years ago, I would have called myself evangelical.  Evangelicalism was equal to the Protestant Church.  Today the church is so fractured by various doctrinal and theological beliefs (and disbeliefs) that one has to be definitive to remain true to a conscionable confession.  It is impossible to be a Christian and not believe in evangelicalism, but it is possible to be a Christian and be confused about the meaning of evangelicalism.

Michael Horton, an evangelical theologian and writer, has said, "by undermining the doctrinal, intellectual foundation of the faith, evangelicals left evangelicalism without a serious defense in that marketplace of ideas it once built, but from which it was now evicted."  True evangelicals have not left the substance of evangelicalism, but they have been driven out by the abundance of heresies in the 20th century Protestant Church.

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