1/10. Evangelicalism in the Anglosphere is a rel. phenomenon of world historical sig. From the inside it is easy to see its warts, but it likely saved Britain from a French-style rev. & thus preserved liberal dem. in the West for 3 cen. Now the Fall of the West looms before us.
2/10. My pt. is not to reduce it to its pol. importance - only to say that Ev'ism is a big & on the whole positive thing. With that said, it is on to critique. Mod. Ev'ism needs to grow up theologically. It will be up to Ev'ism in the Global South to preserve the Great Tradition.
3/10. When it began in the 1730's, certain theol. foundations were in place that have since eroded. We are in a diff world now & diff priorities need to be adopted. Ev'ism started as a revival movement. It presupposed orthodox theol & called individuals to be renewed in faith.
4/10. Liberal Protestantism has embraced a mythological view of the world & rejected special revelation in Scripture. It is quickly becoming pagan. Marxism is a Xian heresy that has more impact on modern culture than orthodox Protestantism.
5/10. Rome has not reformed itself; Vatican II was largely a move toward liberal Protestantism & not even JP II could turn it around. When Ev'ism began doctrines like the inspiration of the Bible, the Trinity & Chalcedonian Christology could be taken for granted. Not anymore.
6/10. Anglicanism has failed & the UK is falling apart. This means Oxbridge is lost to Xianity & the ques. is where will the ch. do its res. & thinking in the 21st C? We cannot count on highly trained patristic scholars & the whole pub. infrastructure supporting them to continue.
7/10. We need Xian universities in Africa where the study of anc. Semitic languages, Latin & Greek flourish. We need to do our own basic scholarship - critical editions, lang. studies, textbooks, original res. This is already happening in the bib. languages, but not patristics.
8/10. Tom Oden & Richard Muller may turn out to be the most important scholars of the 20th cen. b/c they pointed the way back to the fathers & the post-Ref scholastics. John Webster's work on Barth may be forgotten, but the way he pointed students bk to Aquinas is a game-changer.
9/10. The RC Ch. thinks in terms of generations & centuries; we need to do that. Are there visionary sem. presidents who will build centers of patristic scholarship to rival Oxbridge? It is not that expensive. The fancy buildings are optional & the internet changes everything.
10/10. Evangelicals need to become stewards of the Great Tradition if they are to succeed in handing on the faith intact to future generations during the coming Dark Ages in the West. The future of the world ch. is likely Africa, but we have a bridging role to play. May it be so.
