What Is a Thinking Evangelical?

So, what is a thinking evangelical?  I could just say that is how I define myself, but actually that isn’t all that helpful since most evangelical Christians would, I hope, describe themselves as ‘thinking’.  We are, after all, supposed to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength and with all our mind.

I was brought up in an evangelical flavoured Methodist Church and came to faith at an evangelical youth meeting in the Yorkshire Dales.  The major theological influences on me as a young man were John Stott, Michael Green and David Watson and their writing remains very important to me to this day, though my theological reading is now far wider.

About three years ago I read quite a lot of stuff that would probably be termed as Liberal Christian; books by members of the Jesus Seminar and John Shelby Spong.  I found that they challenged a lot of my assumptions about the Bible and Christian faith and whilst I found myself disagreeing with them about many things, I also found myself in agreement about others.  I came to the conclusion that if the Liberal Christians go too far in one direction then fundamentalist evangelicals go too far in the other.

As a thinking evangelical I see myself as somebody who is basically still faithful to the word of God as revealed in scripture.  I believe that those who wrote scripture were inspired by God, but they were also human with human limitations (including those of culture, scientific knowledge etc) and so we cannot claim that every single thing they wrote is from God himself.  The Holy Spirit had to work through the filter of their understanding.  When I read scripture I do it through the filter of the latest Biblical scholarship and scientific and cultural understandings.  This means that whilst I proudly call myself an evangelical Christian I do not necessarily hold the classical evangelical views on things like the leadership of women in the church.

I already have another blog running on current affairs, but find that I cannot always find something to comment on.  I hope to make this a daily blog where I can write about anything.  It replaces my old blog, Ramblings of a Student Minister as before too long I will no longer be a Student Minister.  I hope those of you who enjoyed my old blog will enjoy this one too.