One Major Difference Between The Reformed And The Evangelicals

By Dr. R. Scott Clark - Posted at The Heidelblog:

American evangelical religion, whether one traces it to Edwards, Whitefield, and Wesley or to the nineteenth-century revivalists (e.g., Charles Finney), has always been oriented around personalities. Reasonably, American evangelical Christians nurtured in the personality-oriented tradition assume that pattern as the norm when they evaluate other traditions. This can be a challenge for evangelicals discovering Reformed theology, piety, and practice.

Most evangelicals seem to encounter the Reformed doctrine of salvation before anything else. Particularly, evangelicals are fascinated by the Reformed doctrine of divine sovereignty and in popular presentations the impression frequently left is that once one has embraced the doctrine of divine sovereignty—an Augustinian doctrine long before it was “Calvinism” or Reformed—one is now Reformed. The newly “Reformed” evangelical proceeds to synthesize his Reformed doctrine of salvation with his evangelical doctrine of the church and evangelical assumptions about the nature of church life. When evangelicals on the road to Geneva find themselves in a Reformed church they can be in for a bit of a culture shock.

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