Touchy Touchstone

  • Inter­est­ing post by S. M. Hutchens on Touchstone’s Mere Com­ments (here) assert­ing that the evan­gel­i­cal move­ment as a whole needs to pull up its socks …

    Evangelicalism’s orig­i­nal basis of cor­po­rate iden­tity was coher­ent only as long as it was fundamentalism–a con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tant alliance based on a com­mon con­fes­sion of the “fun­da­men­tals of the faith,” against Protes­tant liberalism.

    … and go back to the old school …

    There needs to be a gen­eral move­ment away from self-assertion and self-definition towards shut­ting up and lis­ten­ing to older author­i­ties, a re-entry into the life and mind of the Church as it was before Evan­gel­i­cal­ism came along, and will exist when the move­ment is only a foot­note to its his­tory.[empha­sis mine]


    Well, in the Ortho-blogosphere, what can we say but “amen and amen?” Though the dif­fer­ent branches of Chris­tian­ity main­tain a (healthy) dis­tance from each other, it has occurred to me that the tremen­dous reli­gious free­dom that Amer­i­can Ortho­dox enjoy and the fact that there is any kind of Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ism in Amer­ica may both be owed to Evan­gel­i­cals past and present. And so I want to see them healthy and sta­ble, if pos­si­ble. I don’t know much about the state of affairs out there, but judg­ing from the com­ments that Hutchens got with this post, he struck a nerve.
    I found the com­ment dis­cus­sion fas­ci­nat­ing, and you have to love a follow-up com­ment by Hutchens:

    I am extremely care­ful about mak­ing spe­cific pre­scrip­tions for Evan­gel­i­cal­ism, and have in fact made very few of them. They amount to two: stop mis­han­dling scrip­ture — clear your con­sciences on this — and restore the Lord’s Sup­per, no longer deny­ing the Words of Insti­tu­tion, to its proper place in the ser­vice of wor­ship. It seems to me that all the nec­es­sary reforms will flow from these in the course of time, when their mean­ing is given proper weight.

    But appar­ently, some of the read­ers were very dis­pleased at what they thought was “evangelical-bashing.” His post call­ing for a return to church his­tory and account­abil­ity caused one com­menter to note:

    I’m sorry, but you guys are ridicu­lous … This site is becom­ing more and more of a pro-Orthodox, anti-everything-else site; if that is your inten­tion, I would ask that you would change your mis­sion state­ment to reflect that.

    I know that there are some who dis­like Touch­stone for being feisty and opin­ion­ated some­times, but you have to hand it to them: they’re one of the few places where Protes­tants, Catholics and Ortho­dox get together even if it’s just to agree to disagree.


    Related posts:

    1. The S-word
    2. Becom­ing Ortho­dox by Peter E. Gillquist
    3. No room at the inn. Or the megachurch.
    4. Fred­er­ica on unity and chaos
    5. The Sitka Icon

    December 12th, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required