June 17 1996

ARTICLE TOOLS

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In 1646, the leaders of Puritan New England gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to chart the future course for their nascent churches. Out of their meetings came the Cambridge Platform, the first confessional statement drafted in the New World. This document embraced the Westminster Confession and set forth a plan of congregational church government that became known as the New England Way.

This spring, 350 years later, some of the spiritual descendants of the Puritans came back to Cambridge. Meeting under the banner of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, they produced a document, the Cambridge Declaration, that unambiguously reaffirms the doctrinal themes of the Reformation: salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone, on the basis of Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone.

The logo for ACE is the sun rising at dawn with the motto of the Genevan Reformation, post tenebras lux, "after the darkness, light." But the state of evangelical Christianity, as described in the Cambridge Declaration, might more accurately be captured by the phrase post tenebras--flux, "after the darkness--confusion." The document states that "evangelical churches today are increasingly dominated by the spirit of this age rather than by the Spirit of Christ."

The evangelicals of 1996, unlike the Puritans of 1646, do not have the luxury of arguing over the niceties of church polity. More fundamental issues are at stake today. The erosion of a Christ-centered faith threatens to undermine the identity of evangelical Christianity no less than more liberal, mainline traditions. Real revival and genuine reformation will not be built on flimsy foundations. It is proper and timely for evangelicals to be called to affirm with ...