January (Web-only) 2004

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Once a year, I take copies of the Christianity Today International statement of faith to the CT editors and ask them to sign it anew. I too sign a copy as a testimony to my own continuing commitment to the theological and biblical values on which this magazine was founded. (Our statement of faith was borrowed from Gordon Divinity School when the magazine was founded in 1956. Its language has been updated since then, but its content remains the same.)

The CT-Gordon statement of faith is one of hundreds of such declarations adopted by evangelical organizations to help them keep their commitments clear. The global evangelical movement also generates statements designed to frame and focus our efforts in spreading the gospel and living out its implications. One of the most significant of these broadly consensual statements was the Lausanne Covenant (1975). But major statements like this seem to be issued every few years, and the place names by which they are known reflect the global nature of evangelicalism: Amsterdam, Iguassu, Manila, Berlin, Chicago, Willowbank, Seoul.

I've just finished reading the unedited manuscript for a new book that surveys these many statements in an attempt to show the unity and theological coherence of global evangelicalism. In their introduction to One Faith: Charting the Evangelical Consensus, authors J. I. Packer and Thomas C. Oden argue that despite all the variation that marks the landscape of vital, evangelistic, Jesus-centered religion, there is a clear consensus.

Some scholars emphasize the diversity of evangelicalism. I recall an Evangelical Theological Society meeting some years back where one scholar asked rhetorically what the Anglican John R. W. Stott had in common with Brazilian Pentecostals. ...