the New Pantagruel

Evangelicalism’s Insecure Calvinists: The Proliferation of the Evangelical Self-Critique Book at the End of the Twentieth Century

by Gregory Johnson

fter half a century of unprecedented growth in both evangelicalism’s adherents and its cultural visibility, and after the development of a vast network of evangelical seminaries and colleges, publishing houses and periodicals, parachurch organizations and churches, an increasingly vocal cluster of evangelical leaders is questioning whether American evangelicalism can survive its success.¹ Nestled among the devotionals, bibles and self-help books of the evangelical Christian bookstore, one notices a recent spurt of books criticizing the evangelical movement from within.

Almost all of the authors of these evangelical self-critique books are confessional Calvinists, conservative in their evangelical faith. All perceive a theological declension within American evangelicalism in which the movement’s historic theocentric theology has been replaced by an anthropocentric and experience-driven faith without a theological grounding. This “club” of Reformed authors illustrates the declension in various areas of evangelical faith and practice, warning of impending catastrophe unless American evangelicals return to the theologically grounded, God-centered faith of evangelicals past. These volumes—all written since 1991—demonstrate a pronounced insecurity about evangelicalism’s successes within the movement’s Calvinist branch, an uncertainty that is noteworthy considering that the movement’s modern incarnation began in the 1940s among a small group of northern Calvinists.²

1. Join the Self-Critique Club: On Recommending Each Other’s Books

If one is fortunate enough to find a collection of these evangelical self-critique books with their original dust jackets intact, one is quickly struck by the recommendations on the back covers of these volumes. The same handful of names keeps recurring in each volume: Anglican theologian J. I. Packer, Presbyterian minister and former head of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy James Boice, historian Mark Noll, founder of Reformation & Revival Ministries John Armstrong, New Testament scholar D. A. Carson, Prison Fellowship founder and Templeton Award winner Charles Colson, biblical counseling advocate David Powlison, Baptist leader John F. MacArthur, Presbyterian theologian and founder of Ligonier Ministries R. C. Sproul, evangelical sociologists James Davison Hunter and Os Guiness, Reformed theologian David Wells, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Albert Mohler, and Reformed theologian and founder of Christians United for Reformation (CURE) Michael Horton, who also serves as vice-chairman of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ACE), of which many of these authors are a part. It would appear that when one of these figures composes a book, the others provide the recommendations.

One is also struck by the number of these books that are multiple author compilations. Four of the eight works central to this study are compilations, and this same pool of authors—with additions or subtractions depending on the volume—provides the essays within each of these books. The names read like a who’s who of modern evangelical Calvinism. With the odd Lutheran thrown in from time to time, these figures are the most recognized confessional Calvinists within Presbyterian, Baptist and Christian Reformed circles, and not a few oversee large Christian radio, publishing and multimedia ministries. These self-critique authors are writing in consultation with one another; they are reading each other’s works. Their concerns represent the uncertainties of the theologian’s club of American Calvinism.

2. The Evangelical Theological Declension Observed

These authors perceive a declension within American evangelicalism, a decline from a theocentric world and life view to an anthropocentric one, a turn from a life grounded in theology to a life grounded in the personal experience of the divine and the benefits such experience brings. Perhaps the earliest of these contemporary Calvinist jeremiads is Michael Horton’s 1991 Made in America: The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism.³ Here Horton lays out the program for the works that follow. Horton speaks of a crisis of truth in the evangelical churches, a crisis badly needing a return to classic Protestant theological orthodoxy. He writes, “The crisis of truth in our time, even in the evangelical church, is indeed serious. And it is due in part to our cultural accommodation.”⁴

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