Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 169:673 (Jan 2012)
Article: Periodical Reviews
Author: Jefferson P. Webster

BSac 169:673 (January-March 2012) p. 101

Periodical Reviews

By The Faculty and Library Staff of Dallas Theological Seminary

Jefferson P. Webster

Editor

“Evangelicals Divided: The Battle between Meliorists and Traditionalists to Define Evangelicalism,” Gerald McDermott, First Things, April 2011, 45-50.

The essence of this article is that the evangelical movement is currently facing a crisis that threatens to redefine it and to weaken its intellectual viability. McDermott suggests that the divisions between Arminians and Calvinists (who discussed human freedom, inability, and responsibility) is no longer the most pressing polarity in this movement. McDermott suggests that a new division is now emerging—Meliorists (also called post-conservatives, post-Reformationalists, and post-Protestants) and traditionalists. Meliorism is the view that the world tends to become better and that humans can aid its betterment. This is reflected in the views of Roger Olson, Stanley Grenz, and leaders in the emergent/emerging church. They believe that evangelicalism suffers from the mistakes of elevating the past, not viewing religious ideas as socially and culturally informed, and being intellectually debilitated by the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Traditionalists, however, believe that the past provides important directives and insights for Christian doctrine and contemporary culture.

Meliorist evangelicals do not see tradition as binding on the church today. In fact they say that to insist that historic definitions of orthodoxy are determinative is to impair the future of the movement. They reject the view that the Bible is an errorless book and is binding in its statements for all ages. Instead, the Bible is to be read as a dynamic, contemporary document.

Postconservative evangelicals argue that traditional evangelicalism has unwittingly embraced the rationalist approach to knowledge and that the traditionalists have reduced the Bible to timeless propositions that have resulted in a nonliterary reading of the text. Meliorists say that the insights of modern psychological theory are more important than the Bible in understanding and addressing the mindset of people in the contemporary culture. However, the notion that people’s feelings should shape the Bible’s message, and that ethics must be determined by that which does not offend or hurt others emotionally allows the message to be determined by the feelings of the audience rather than by the revealed mind of God. This approach has resulted in questioning the integrity of Scripture, the

BSac 169:673 (January-March 2012) p. 102

penal subtitutionary nature of Jesus’ death, and the existence of hell, ...