Journal: Central Bible Quarterly
Volume: CENQ 03:2 (Summer 1960)
Article: The Bible: The Unchanging Evangelical Volume
Author: Richard V. Clearwaters

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CenQ 3:2 (Summer 1960) p. 33

The Bible: The Unchanging Evangelical Volume

Richard V. Clearwaters

In the year 1956 a much discussed magazine article gave popular notice of a new evangelical theology. The notice was predicated on the proposition that the former evangelical theology based on Fundamentalism had been supplanted by a new evangelical theology based on the imperative of Jesus, “Ye must be born again.” According to the writer, Fundamentalism had a watchword, “Ye should earnestly contend for the faith,” which is described in such Bible doctrines as “the inspiration of the Scriptures, the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, the atonement, the resurrection.”

John Calvin, in INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, warned that wrong emphasis on the second Person of the Trinity leads to humanism, but a wrong emphasis on the third Person of the Trinity leads to a type of Christianity based on human experience instead of on the doctrines of the Word of God.

The first danger in the change from Fundamentalism to New Evangelicalism is that Fundamentalism, based on the outstanding doctrines of the Word of God, provided the old evangelicalism, whereas, the New Evangelicalism is based on human experience, namely, “Ye must be born again.” Human experience cannot take the place of the doctrines of the Word of God. The change offered by New Evangelicalism is actually a step down from a doctrinal position to a position in human experience. The old position had a body of Bible doctrine, whereas the new position, based and centered in human experience, decries doctrine.

Strange as the implication is, the article which openly discredits Fundamentalism almost flippantly indicts the Fundamentalists. Why do not these teachers of the new evangelical theology discredit science when a scientist like Einstein denies the existence of the personal God of the Bible and dies in his unbelief? Is it not strange that these teachers still like to worship at the shrine of science, which is “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” and yet the scientists in many instances disregard and even mock the Bible as a divine and exclusive revelation. We can truthfully say without fear of contradiction that science is “ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth!” (II Tim. 3:7). We mean by “the truth” that exclusive revelation which is spiritual, given by God, and found only in the Bible; which cannot be found in the test tube, under the microscope or before the sweep of the telescope.

CenQ 3:2 (Summer 1960) p. 34

A third introductory point cites the Pietistic attitude of the leaders of the new evangeli...

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