On Friday afternoon, I spent an hour listening to Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion excoriating all things Christian.  A more virulent and vitriolic attack on Christianity I have not heard since I was in junior high school.  Last night, I attended a lecture by my supervisor, Robert Wilken, on the Authority of Tradition given at the Center for Christian Study here in Charlottesville, just off the grounds of the University of Virginia.  The contrast was astounding. One man used the bully pulpit to espouse a juvenile and naïve ultra-naturalist view of the human life. The other quietly reminded the gathered—mostly protestant evangelicals, and himself a Catholic—that the voices of the history of our church should be heard along with our own, and that if we are honest with ourselves, we have learned more of the Christian life by tradition than by intellectual pursuit. As he put it, you don’t learn how to roast a chicken from a book—you have to watch someone do it and follow along behind them.

     I suppose these experiences, and the recent experience of preaching at my home church (where I hardly ever preach because I am a resident scholar/pew warmer--not the pastor) and wearing my Geneva tabs, have made me want to take the time today and share a little bit of a manifesto from an "evangelical Presbyterian." My church members were a little surprised to see me wear the collar and tabs at worship.  They know me as an evangelical, a laid-back easy-going guy who loves Jesus and hopes others know that Jesus loves them.  When I come to church, I don't even wear a tie.  And then they saw me do something that struck them as very formal and traditional—wearing the tabs to preach and serve communion on World Communion Sunday. Wearing the tabs is my way of honoring tradition and recognizing that I am not doing something novel when I stand behind the table of our Lord, but I am doing what has been handed to me, and I will hand on to you. And besides that, I once got twenty minutes in the muddy streets of Kikuyu, Kenya, from a Kenyan woman and Presbyterian elder who chided me for being “ashamed of the gospel” for not wearing a collar! But that’s a story for another time.

     What gives? What exactly is it to be an "evangelical Presbyterian" in the Presbyterian Church (USA)?

     I take no pleasure at all in the recent shame of Ted Haggard, but it is only accidentally that I am related to him at all (ecclesiastically, that is.  In the BIG CHURCH, we're all family!).  I am not a member of the National Association of Evangelicals.  I even looked at the Evangelical Theological Society and considered joining, but balked at the request to download a statement of subscription (a list of beliefs that a member must subscribe to) and fax back with signature.  I call myself 'evangelical', but these societies mean little to me.

     I learned to be 'evangelical' from Dr. Bruce McCormack at Princeton Theological Seminary.  Dr. McCormack is a Karl Barth scholar--he's more than that, of course, but that is how he has made his mark.  He is an Historical Theologian who studies the 19th and 20th century moves in Protestant theology and teaches Systematic Theology.  He does not see Barth as the wishy-washy universalist that many conservative theologians cast him as, but as the one man who stood up to the marriage of theology and culture that was the German Christian Church of the Third Reich.  Yes, the Nazi's had a church...and Barth, and Bonheoffer, and the Niebuhr brothers, all thought it stank!  Barth was a radical reformer crying "There is no religion, only Christianity.  There is no natural or philosophical knowledge of God, only the revelation God in Jesus Christ.  There is no grounds or authority for the university’s critique of the Christian faith and scriptures."  These were cries that shattered the German Liberal Protestant movement and could still shatter liberal theology if they were heard and applied properly.

     Karl Barth was carried into English translation by a man named Thomas F. Torrance.  Born of Scottish Presbyterian missionary stock, T. F. Torrance spent his childhood in China at the beginning of the 20th century.  He topped out in theological education, then spent his life marrying church and academy (and science) in Edinburgh, Scotland. Torrance is still alive today, though ailing. This intellectual tradition was carried on through Alister McGrath. 

     Having studied systematic theology through Alister's textbook, and the lectures of Bruce McCormack and Ellen Charry, I had the opportunity to study at Oxford University where I was a member of Wycliffe Hall—a permanent private hall that educates evangelicals for the priesthood in the Anglican church.  Alister McGrath was the president at the time and along with sharing tea and wine with the man on various occasions, I also attended many of his lectures and tried to acquaint myself with his publications (good luck...it would take a lifetime, and I get the feeling he is only getting started).

     So when I think of the word "evangelical", I am thinking of a very different group of blokes than when Tim Russert uses the word.  I'm thinking of Torrance, and McGrath, and John Stott, and J.I. Packer—C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton and the Baillie brothers have to fit in there somewhere—and Bruce McCormack and how they aligned themselves with Calvin and Luther, and even Aquinas, and even Augustine, and even deeper in the history of theology until I find myself sharing thoughts of Jesus with the earliest thinkers of our faith.  It is also telling (and some of you will think I am already lost to intellectualism) that I don't list theological precepts to explain my evangelicalism, nor do I recount how I voted yesterday, I name an intellectual tradition.  It’s a tradition that is faithful to the call to love the Lord with your mind, as well as your heart and soul and strength.  It is an intellectual tradition that helped me fill in the blanks. 

     I became a Christian through Young Life.  The challenge for Young Life was to get kids to go to church once they had accepted Christ!  We never wanted to, and for all their official party statements at fundraisers that they wanted to fill the churches with new believers, they always start their talks with lines like, “You’ll never see a teenager come to Christ in a musty old church basement.”  As a Young Life grad, I needed a tradition.  I needed a past for my faith as much as a present and a future.  I found it in the Presbyterian Church (First Pres., Evanston, Illinois, to be exact), and in the intellectual tradition I have just outlined. 

     What we are doing as evangelicals is not new, and as much as we desire to be “cutting edge” and render a “high impact” on our present generation, we must remember as well that we stand in the great tradition of the Christian Church, and when we do something “new” we discard what was “old”—and often we lose more than we gain. 

     Well, that’s the story of my “evangelical Presbyterianism”—part of it anyway.  I hope it is one that maintains my evangelical bona fides with my American colleagues.  But maybe not.