Emphatic Evangelicalism

One of the books I have most benefitted from reading this year is Fred Sanders’ The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Crossway, 2010). I had picked up the book for the obvious reason of wanting to grow in my understanding of the Trinity, but what struck me about the book from its first pages on is that it is also a defense of the neglected resources available in evangelical theology.

Sanders admits that “evangelicals are not currently famous for their Trinitarian theology” and that “the evangelical movement is bedeviled by a theological and spiritual shallowness” (11). This causes some to develop what I’ll call an “Evangelical Inferiority Complex.” “Many evangelicals,” Sanders writes, “seem haunted by a sense of not being about anything except the moment of conversion. When they stop to ask themselves where they are taking their converts, they fear that when they get there, there will be no there there. … When serious-minded evangelical Christians feel the desire to go deeper into doctrine or spirituality, they typically turn to any resources except for their own properly evangelical resources” (12).

If the primary goal of the book is to show how “the gospel is Trinitarian, and the Trinity is the gospel” (10), the second goal is to show that this thesis is and always has been entirely at home in evangelical thought: in fact, Sanders argues “evangelical Christians have been in reality the most thoroughly Trinitarian Christians in the history of the church” (9). This in turn serves a third goal: “to reintroduce evangelical Protestants to what is best in our own tradition” (13). To borrow the title of another, more recent Crossway book, The Deep Things of God is a work of “theological retrieval for evangelicals.” 

But how did evangelicals get into this situation of being “radically Trinitarian without knowing it” (12)? How did we drift from our historical depths into “theological and spiritual shallowness” (11)? Sanders’ answer to these questions is what has reverberated in my mind ever since I read the book’s Introduction in January, and my reason for writing this post: evangelicalism is “emphatic”—that is, “It has made strategic choices about what should be emphasized when presenting the fullness of the faith” (14). In particular, evangelicals major on “Bible, cross, conversion, heaven”—and, Sanders stresses, “These are the right things to emphasize” (15, italics added). It isn’t wrong that we are so emphatic about these doctrines. The problem, though, is that in our enthusiasm for them we can tend to forget that “Bible, cross, conversion, heaven” only make sense, only have weight and meaning, in the context of a host of other doctrines. “When a message is all emphasis,” Sanders explains, “everything is equally important and you are always shouting” (17). If I wrote this whole post in italics, the italics wouldn’t mean anything. If everything is a nail, what is there left to nail down? After a certain point, emphatic evangelicalism can become “anemic,” “reductionist,” and open to the charge of “anti-intellectualism” (16-17).

But a healthy, robust evangelicalism does have things to say about the doctrines that surround and support our major emphases. “What is needed,” Sanders argues, “is not a change of emphasis but a restoration of the background” (19). And this “restoration of the background” can be had by learning from many of our evangelical forebears.