Is God a ‘conservative evangelical’?

A key goal of the Christian calling is to be more and more conformed to God’s image (Rom 8:29; Col 3:10; etc.). In other words, to become increasingly like him in how we think and what we do—as 2 Cor 3:18 puts it, being transformed “from one degree of glory to another.” The goal, on paper, is straightforward. The question, as always, is what does that actually look like in practice?    

There’s an old aphorism, credited to Voltaire, that God made humanity in his image and we have been trying to return the favour ever since. As with all such sayings, especially those designed to be amusing, they are less a statement of truth than a statement pointing to a truth. Which is, that we are instinctively inclined to assume that what we personally believe about things is what God believes; that what we personally care about the most (and the least) corresponds to the divine perspective.

A person’s worldview is what appears to them to be ‘obvious’—that which ‘must be’ the case and ‘can’t be’ the case—in terms of correct beliefs and behaviours: for individuals, families, communities, and wider society. We all have a worldview, whether we realise it or not. Whenever we use that kind of language, it’s a ‘worldview’ speaking—reflecting the way in which we view the world; the way things should be. It’s a collective term for what we think is ‘right’ and ‘appropriate’ about all manner of things: in politics and economics, in the home and family life, in morality and ethics, and for Christians, in the church.

Within a friendship group of like-minded people (most friendship groups are made up of like-minded people), these things are generally taken for granted and rarely need to be spoken about other than in a mutually ratifying way (this is what we mean by ‘a shared worldview’).

When it comes to Christian beliefs and practice, our goal must surely be for our worldview to reflect God’s worldview, rather than, as Voltaire was warning against, the other way round. However, pursuing this goal will take us into some very murky territory.

The first challenge that any reader of this article is going to have to try to face up to (if they wish to—everything is voluntary!) is that a worldview is so ingrained that it is extremely difficult even to recognise that we have one. And, still less, that a perspective drawn from any other worldview might be valid. The old adage is that a fish doesn’t know what water is because it’s so completely immersed in it. No other possibility has ever occurred to it.   

In the conservative evangelical context, Christians are often encouraged from the pulpit to have a ‘biblical’ worldview. Which sounds good. But as any biblical scholar will tell you, the biblical story reflects a wide variety of worldview features. What, therefore, tends to happen is that we naturally find and cite Bible verses (and accompanying interpretations) which affirm our own worldview. This is what’s known as ‘confirmation bias’—we are wired to expect Scripture to ‘obviously’ confirm our pre-existing view of things.

The word ‘biblical’ is horribly misused; at its worst, it is appended as an adjective to affirm “what I personally think,” with a favourable-sounding Bible verse usually attached as a ‘proof text’. This is not so much a problem on paper (it seems to be honouring the Bible’s authority) as it is in practice, since it’s possible to find a Bible verse to affirm any number of things. Given the diversity we see in Scripture—New Testament as well as Old—‘biblical’ is, unfortunately, a misnomer. Our aim ought to be to think ‘Christianly’, rather than simply ‘biblically’.  

It would be nice and straightforward to be able to define this to mean ‘Christ-centred thinking’. In other words, we look to the things that Jesus said and did, as recorded in the Gospels, for our frame of reference. That’s a really good start. But even that isn’t as easy as it sounds. We are all too frequently needing to look to ‘interpretation’—taking an informed view on what Jesus ‘obviously’ meant (or didn’t mean) by things he said or did. A ‘plain reading’ of Scripture is another virtuous goal, but that can be equally misleading and prone to being used to confirm a pre-existing opinion; not least because, amongst other things, a so-called ‘plain reading’ takes no account of context and genre. And Jesus did not express an opinion or offer any teaching on many questions that are significant to us today. We could say the same about the rest of the New Testament. All of this results in, by necessity, ‘cherry-picking’ the verses that we personally feel reflect God’s worldview on subjects, even when we’re trying to be Jesus-centric or New Testament-centric.

One of the solas of evangelicalism, inherited from the Reformation, is sola Scriptura—‘the Bible alone’. Again, that’s a lofty (and well-meaning) goal, but self-evidently it’s inadequate by itself. In practice, there is more to it—even if it’s simply the need for good interpretation of that Scripture. There is no such thing as an uninterpreted Scripture, in terms of its meaning and its application.     

Christians who recognise these challenges—which would generally exclude biblicist fundamentalists and others, such as staunch Calvinists, who work backwards from their own inalienable doctrines—have traditionally looked to the ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’ (attributed to John Wesley by his followers, but never articulated in those terms by the man himself—it was first coined by Methodist theologian Albert Outler). Its four ‘lenses’ for pursuing the heart and mind of God on matters of belief and practice are Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. It seeks to look at subjects and questions from each of  those perspectives, bringing them into conversation with each other.

In an evangelical context, of course, Scripture would get the casting vote—and rightly so, one would think, provided it’s being read well (and therein lies the challenge). By ‘tradition’ we mean listening to the voice of what our predecessors (either more widely in the Christian tradition, or more narrowly in our particular tradition) have historically thought. But to avoid inappropriate anachronism, we need to enquire not only what they thought but why they thought it. We also need to be aware that traditions change over time, and they are always (by definition) rearward-looking. At a minimum, however, tradition must include the ecumenical early creeds. By ‘reason’, we mean applying rational thinking—reasoning things through, seeking a fully-informed logical coherence in beliefs and Scripture. This would include theological reasoning. Wesley believed that reason was ‘a fundamental principle’: to renounce reason was to renounce Christianity, because they ‘go hand in hand’. Finally, the conclusions we arrive at should cohere with our personal experience and that of our community—asking, what does lived experience tell us? Silencing any of those other three voices in the conversation will lead to flawed conclusions.

Necessarily, tradition, reason, and experience are generalised terms. One might even say ambiguous terms. That does not devalue them as such, but it cautions us that—as with Scripture—interpretation cannot be avoided. What we can say is that wherever we locate the best coherence of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, we are likely to find the most adequate conclusion.                

The diligent reader may at this point be wondering whether any of this answers the original question: Is God a ‘conservative evangelical’? No, it doesn’t. And nor would it answer what I toyed with as an alternative title: Is God ‘woke’?*

To be honest, I didn’t really intend to address it directly. I simply wanted to point out the complexities in coming up with a simple answer. That, in turn, might (hope springs eternal) lead to a more informed and kindlier conversation on what God is like and what God thinks and feels about the issues of our day (and what ‘imitating him’ would therefore look like). It’s one thing to debate the Imago Dei, but we should surely want just as much to talk about the Imitatio Dei.         

The easier answer is to the second part of the question: Is God an evangelical? A ‘yes’ would mean non-evangelical Christians are by definition in error. Aside from the inherent divisiveness of a ‘yes’—which would appear to clearly vitiate God’s desire for the unity of his church per Jesus’ prayer in John 17:20-23—we have the challenge of defining exactly what an ‘evangelical’ is. Calvinists are evangelicals, but not all evangelicals are Calvinists. Fundamentalists (including young-earth and six-day creationists) are evangelicals, but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. And even conservative evangelicalism comes in more- and less-conservative brands. Even the famous ‘Bebbington Quadrilateral’ (of the Bible, activism, conversionism, and crucicentrism) is minimalistic, and generalises in terms of evangelical beliefs and practice. Many ordinary evangelicals don’t even know what kind of evangelical they are (or are supposed to be), influenced as they are by titbits of Calvinism and fundamentalism thrown into their weekly theological diet. (NB Whenever evangelicalism is feeling pressured by ‘the world’, it defaults further towards Calvinism and fundamentalism, and a more conservative posture generally.)     

The point I’m making is that ultimately, we need to be very careful that we do not make God into a conservative who is shaped and formed in our image. When we do that, we are preaching and teaching conservatism as much or more than Christianity. Greater openness and sensitivity towards other perspectives would be values worth pursuing to help us avoid unwittingly falling into that trap. Feeling threatened (on God’s behalf) by the idea of openness and sensitivity will, of course, likely lead to the opposite outcome—a hardening.

In sum, we should be the kind of Christian that we believe God to be; the kind that we believe most fully reflects the nature and character of God. But perhaps a bit more provisionality, a bit more listening, and a bit less stridency in conveying our particular beliefs on God’s behalf might be no bad thing—and especially if our starting point heretofore has been to assume that God is, indeed, a conservative evangelical.    

*The content of this article would have been much the same had I approached it from that direction; I would simply have used different points of reference. According to YouGov, ‘woke’ referred originally to a need to ‘wake up’ to—and stay ‘awake’ to—the realities of Black people’s experience in the United States and a system designed to keep them down. As it became more mainstream, the word evolved to mean a more general sensitivity to social injustice affecting all groups. To those who oppose its aims, however, it’s become a catch-all term for a certain type of socially liberal ideology that they dislike—much as the term ‘political correctness’ can often be. See https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/35904-what-does-woke-mean-britons