Sweat of Your Brow Winter 1996

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Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity by Alister McGrath (InterVarsity, 1995), 209 pp.

Like Reinhold Niebuhr and other notable predecessors, Alister McGrath is a pastor and theologian who embraced liberalism in his seminary days but found it inadequate to the real life of an urban parish. He returned to the evangelicalism of his youth and is now one of the intellectual leaders of the movement, teaching at Oxford and Regent (Vancouver) and serving on the editorial board of Christianity Today. He writes with the sensitive confidence of one who has explored other options and returned home.

Home is, for McGrath, the loosely demarcated Christian movement that gives supreme place to Scripture, emphasizes the majesty of Jesus Christ, acknowledges the lordship of the Holy Spirit, gives priority to personal conversion and evangelism, and values the Christian community's role in spiritual growth. These are the "evangelical distinctives" that McGrath sets out early on. He also explores evangelicalism historically, as the heir to the Reformation, and as a "devotional ethos" that emphasizes the personal appropriation of faith.

This movement, McGrath believes, "holds the key to the future of Western Christianity." This is not just because its most direct competitor, mainline liberalism, has suffered from what Gabriel Fackre calls "Christological heart-failure"; evangelicalism, with its strong ties to historic orthodoxy, its evangelistic energy, and its increasing global diversity, seems poised to grow in "its numerical strength, its influence at every level of church life, and its theological sophistication."

Of course, McGrath has some warnings to offer. An emphasis on charismatic personalities and a tendency toward dogmatic fragmentation ...

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