I’m currently in a History of Evangelicalism class taught by none other than Stan Gundry, Academic Vice President of Zondervan. One of the requirements for the class is a book review of a current evangelical topic. My first selection was Roger Olson’s “How to Be Evangelical without being Conservative.” The title of the book really intrigued me, as did the contents as I started reading. Beginning today, I will be posting my review section by section.
In Roger Olson’s book “How to Be Evangelical without being Conservative” he addresses the current assumption of many mainline evangelicals and popular media that presumptuously link the titles of evangelical with conservative. In Olson’s distinctions between the two terms, one should not associate conservative with evangelical, as there may be areas, that to truly be evangelical one cannot be conservative. In fact Olson challenges the major assumption that “Most people assume that to be evangelical is to be conservative socially, politically, and theologically.”
Olson bolsters this claim with his definition of evangelical. For Olson, a broad description of the posture of evangelicalism means “being radically open to the gospel in all of its implications, including our comfort zones and vested interest in upholding the status quo and reiterating the past…that’s not conservative or liberal; its radical, extreme, and progressive.”
MORALITY
One of the first issues Olson confronts is morality. In his chapter entitled “Building Character without Moralism” Olson puts forth the primary thesis that evangelicals in the historic definition of the word are “too rigid in their morality and too moralistic toward outsiders (that is sinful unbelievers).
Morality in this chapter is defined as “setting up a code of conduct that derives largely from tradition and seeks to enforce it on people with harsh sanctions for this who fall short of perfection.”
Although recent history has seen the rise of the Moral Majority and the Religious Right as beacons of this mindset, Olson argues that this is far from being biblical and even farther from being truly evangelical. One truly is bewildered by the past and current attempts to foist Judeo-Christian morality onto a Protestant defined depraved humanity. How one holds these two positions together presses the the realms of logic. The charge of inconsistency seems to be highly relevant at this point.
Olson argues biblically, that neither Jesus nor Paul, and for that matter the early church, tried to help the surrounding culture pull themselves up by their moral boot straps. In fact Paul’s language at the end of First Corinthians five seems to indicate that Christians have no place in judging the outside world.
Olson holds that the main thrust of the Bible’s moral code is a call for character reformation of God’s covenant people. Olson goes onto critique the movements such as the religious right when he says “nowhere do I see Jesus Christ or any apostle giving Christians a mandate to change the word by using political power”
In conclusion, Olson argues that to be truly evangelical, one must give up the temptation to be moralistic, and the attempts to make a pagan culture moral. Rather the true evangelicals, as biblicists, should be concerned with the inward and focus on transformation of character. Because moral conservatism is concerned with making people behave by the use of rules and shame. Evangelical morality is about “fostering an environment where God’s spirit can inculcate the desire to please God through a life of obedience.”
