Journal: Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal
Volume: DBSJ 06:1 (Fall 2001)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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DBSJ 6 (Fall 01) p. 117

Book Reviews

Evangelicalism Divided, by Iain H. Murray. Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2000. 342pp. $21.50.

Many voices have raised a clarion call to the sad state of affairs existing within the evangelical movement, now about fifty years old. From its origin as a reactionary response to fundamentalism, new evangelicalism has charted an uncertain course. Contemporary evangelicalism embraces a wide array of professed believers from Roman Catholics to conservative Protestants.1 How this broad coalition came about is the subject of Iain Murray’s new book, Evangelicalism Divided. Murray is well qualified to write this history. As a close friend and colleague of the late D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, he was an eyewitness to much about which he writes. He is an accomplished historian who has already penned a rich legacy of historical research. In this work, one finds another engaging and historically significant book as Murray sets out to delineate the current divided, or some might say deteriorating, state of evangelicalism. In describing this deterioration, he is not alone. Harold Lindsell, Francis Schaeffer, David Wells, and others have all offered an assortment of books discussing similar issues.2 But now, for the first time, the history of the decline of evangelicalism is set forth. As it has grown larger in size and stature, its doctrinal core has dissipated. Theological certainty has given way to pragmatic opportunity. Murray tells us why this has happened.

The book begins by tracing new evangelicalism from its inception with the birth of Fuller Seminary (1947), Christianity Today (1955), and the rise to prominence of evangelist Billy Graham. A brief introduction sets evangelicalism in the flow of church history, beginning in the Reformation, moving to the birth of liberalism under Friedrich Schleiermacher, and tracing new evangelicalism’s emergence in the post-fundamentalist-modernist controversy era. Billy Graham is

DBSJ 6 (Fall 01) p. 118

rightly seen as the key figure in this new movement. Under the strong influence of his wife-to-be, Ruth Bell, and her father, Nelson, he moved away from a separatist posture toward mainline denominations permeated by liberalism. He came to believe the denominations could be recaptured for orthodoxy if only the sound men would stop withdrawing their influence. One of Graham’s often repeated slogans was: “the one badge of Christian discipleship is not orthodoxy, but love” (p. 33). Christianity Today, under the editorship of Carl F. H. Henry, also contributed to the new movement. The magazine’s goal was not “to reach or please the American fu...

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