Neo-evangelicalism

Neo-evangelicalism (also called new evangelicalism) names the mid-twentieth-century movement of American evangelicals who broke from fundamentalism’s cultural and ecclesiastical separatism while still holding fundamentalist doctrine, an “application of, not a revolt against, fundamentals of the faith.”¹ The movement organized around the National Association of Evangelicals, founded in 1943, and around leaders such as Harold Ockenga, Carl Henry, Harold Lindsell, and Bernard Ramm.²

Historical Origin

Neo-evangelicalism emerged onto the American theological scene with the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1943.² Carl Henry’s 1947 book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, became an early rallying statement for the movement.³ Neo-evangelicals held to the same fundamental doctrines fundamentalism had defended, but urged that Bible-believing Christians engage the surrounding culture rather than withdraw from it, and grew embarrassed at being identified with a fundamentalist separatism they saw as needlessly combative.² Neo-evangelicals sided firmly with Billy Graham against the separatists when Graham drew fire for holding crusades jointly with mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic sponsors, though this inclusivism did not mean, for Graham or the movement generally, giving up fundamentalist defenses of the faith, especially the inerrancy of Scripture.⁴

Historical Development

The Fuller Theological Seminary controversy (1947-1963)

In 1946, Charles Fuller chose Harold Ockenga to preside over a new evangelical divinity school he hoped would become the “evangelical Cal Tech.”⁵ Ockenga recruited fellow evangelical scholars he had come to know through Cambridge to fill the founding faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary, among them the young Harold Lindsell, and the school’s doctrinal statement committed its faculty to affirm that Scripture is “free from all error in the whole and in the part.”⁶ That commitment was tested within a few years: Bela Vasady, a visiting professor recruited from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1949, could not sign the statement in good conscience and left the institution.⁷ By 1962 the same doubts had spread further into the faculty and board. A meeting that came to be remembered as “Black Saturday” ended with the board declining to hold the line on the seminary’s original confession, and Charles Woodbridge (1957), Wilbur Smith, Lindsell himself, and Gleason Archer all resigned in the years that followed, each departure “directly related to the question of biblical inerrancy.”⁸

The Battle for the Bible and the movement’s divide over inerrancy (1976)

Having left Fuller over the controversy, Lindsell published The Battle for the Bible in 1976, arguing that inerrancy had been the historic position of the church and calling it “a touchstone, watershed, and rallying point for evangelicals.”⁹ Carl Henry, though closer to Lindsell than to Fuller’s own drift, placed the emphasis differently: for Henry, Scripture’s authority came first and inerrancy followed as a deduction from it, since inerrancy “is implicitly taught, is logically deducible, and is a necessary correlate of Scripture as the inspired Word of God.”¹⁰ On Henry’s view inerrancy was a test of evangelical consistency, not, as Lindsell held, the test of evangelical authenticity itself, and Henry worried that Lindsell’s stricter line would fracture the “Big Tent” coalition he wanted to keep working alongside even scholars uncomfortable with the word “inerrancy.”¹¹ Bernard Ramm pressed further still: he affirmed verbal plenary inspiration but held that “the Bible is errant in historical, factual, and numerical matters which do not affect its faith and morals,” a position Henry judged was sailing too close to neo-orthodoxy for the direction he wanted the movement to take.¹²

Related Doctrines

References

Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947), xiii, quoted in Ryan Reed, “The House Divided: An Assessment of the American Neo-Evangelicals’ Doctrine of Scripture,” Themelios 49, no. 1 (2024): 146. ↩
Reed, “The House Divided,” 146. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Reed, “The House Divided,” 151. ↩
George M. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 171, quoted in Reed, “The House Divided,” 147n3. ↩
Reed, “The House Divided,” 147. ↩
Reed, “The House Divided,” 147-148. ↩
Reed, “The House Divided,” 148. ↩
Reed, “The House Divided,” 149. ↩
Reed, “The House Divided,” 150. ↩
Reed, “The House Divided,” 151-152. ↩
Reed, “The House Divided,” 152-153. ↩
Reed, “The House Divided,” 154, 156. ↩