Monday, August 27, 2007

A New Alignment?

"In 1987, two years before the Evangelical Affirmations conference, Kenneth Kantzer wrote:
Evangelicalism, as in the past, will present a cacophony of many voices. During the battles against liberalism, a common enemy held dissonant factions together. Yet this uneasy alliance seems unlikely to endure. Evangelicals will drift apart into two broad categories. The small group, more nebulous in doctrine and ethics, will seek rapprochement with the near-evangelicals so widely represented today in the top leadership of mainline denominations. The larger group, encompassing conservative evangelicals, both in and out of the mainline denominations, will join forces with the less truculent of the fundamentalists. On each side and in the middle, will significant groups that for one reason or another cannot quite stomach either group.

Kantzer was precisely right and wrong. He was right that evangelicals would split into two different parties. It is not at all certain that he was right, however, in the numerical distinctions he made between the smaller and the larger party. It may well be that the reformists will outnumber the orthodox evangelicals."

Quoted from "Reformed Evangelicalism: A Center Without a Circumference," by Albert Mohler as found in A Confessing Theology for Postmodern Times, edited by Michael Horton.

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