The Rise of Evangelicalism

Historical Theology

Historical Setting

By the 1940s, fundamentalism had won its doctrinal point and lost its cultural standing. Driven from the mainline denominations and stung by the Scopes verdict, it had withdrawn into a defensive subculture — separatist, often anti-intellectual, suspicious of the arts, the academy, and social engagement. A younger generation of conservatives, orthodox in conviction but troubled by this isolation, set out to build something broader.

They called it the new evangelicalism. It would hold the fundamentals — the inspiration of Scripture, the deity and atoning death of Christ, his bodily resurrection — while reentering the wider culture with confidence rather than retreat. It would think, write, evangelize, and engage. The movement they launched became, for half a century, the most visible face of Protestant orthodoxy in America and beyond.

What Was at Stake

The question was whether orthodox Christianity could be both faithful and engaged — whether one could affirm the supernatural gospel without surrendering the mind, the campus, the marketplace, and the public square to liberalism on one side and a withdrawn fundamentalism on the other.

Beneath that lay a harder question, one the movement never fully answered: how broad can a coalition be before its center dissolves? Evangelicalism was defined more by a network of institutions and a posture toward the gospel than by a confession. That breadth was its genius and its vulnerability.

Key Players

Carl F. H. Henry gave the movement its conscience. His 1947 manifesto, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, indicted fundamentalism for abandoning social responsibility and intellectual rigor. He called orthodox believers back to a gospel that addressed the whole of life. Henry became the founding editor of Christianity Today (1956), conceived as a thoughtful evangelical counterweight to the liberal Christian Century.

Billy Graham gave the movement its face and its reach. His crusades drew millions; his integrity and warmth won a hearing across denominational lines; his convening power made him the movement’s natural center of gravity. Graham preached a simple, urgent gospel of repentance and faith in Christ.

Harold Ockenga coined “new evangelicalism” and helped found both Fuller Theological Seminary (1947) and the National Association of Evangelicals (1942), which gave the coalition an institutional spine distinct from the separatist fundamentalist bodies.

Later, the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization (1974), gathering evangelicals globally and producing the Lausanne Covenant largely drafted by John Stott, married evangelism and social concern and signaled the movement’s worldwide, increasingly southern, scope.

The Outcome

The new evangelicalism succeeded brilliantly as a coalition. It built seminaries, magazines, mission agencies, colleges, publishing houses, and parachurch ministries. It gave orthodox Christianity a public confidence it had lacked since the 1920s. By century’s end, “evangelical” named a vast, global, energetic constituency.

But the very breadth that powered the movement strained its doctrinal core, and the strain showed first at Fuller. From the 1960s, disputes over biblical inerrancy divided the faculty. Some held the historic view that Scripture is without error in all it affirms; others limited inerrancy to matters of faith and practice. Fuller eventually revised its statement to drop the word, and the fracture became public.

The response was the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), drafted by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy — including R. C. Sproul, J. I. Packer, and many others. In nineteen articles of affirmation and denial, it set out a careful, nuanced doctrine: Scripture is wholly true in all it teaches, rightly interpreted according to its intended sense and literary genre, without demanding a wooden literalism. It remains the standard evangelical articulation of the doctrine.

Yet the Chicago Statement could clarify the doctrine without unifying the coalition. Over the following decades evangelicalism fragmented — over Scripture, over the gospel itself in the “open theism” and justification debates, over worship, politics, and identity. The tent that had no confession proved hard to keep.

Scriptural Grounding

The movement’s evangelistic urgency rested on the Great Commission and the universality of the gospel call:

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” (Matt. 28:19)

Its conviction about Scripture rested where every such conviction must:

“For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Pet. 1:21)

And Henry’s call to engaged orthodoxy drew on the prophetic concern for justice and mercy that the gospel does not cancel but fulfills (Mic. 6:8; James 1:27).

Doctrinal Significance

Evangelicalism preserved and propagated the core supernatural gospel across the twentieth century on a scale no confessional body could have managed. Through Graham’s crusades and Lausanne’s networks, it carried the message of Christ crucified and risen to the ends of the earth. The Chicago Statement, in particular, is a genuine doctrinal achievement: a precise, generous defense of biblical authority that confessional Reformed Christians can gladly endorse.

Yet the movement’s defining trait — breadth over confession — meant it lacked the doctrinal ballast to settle its own controversies. Without binding standards, every dispute became a fresh negotiation, and the center could not hold what it had never confessionally defined.

A Reformed Assessment — Wheat and Chaff

The wheat is real and large. The evangelical recovery of cultural engagement, intellectual seriousness, and global evangelism corrected fundamentalism’s real failures. Henry’s insistence that the gospel addresses the whole of life is thoroughly biblical. Graham’s faithful, Christ-centered preaching bore eternal fruit. The Chicago Statement is a gift to the whole church. And the Lausanne movement’s global vision anticipated the southward shift of Christianity in a healthy, gospel-centered way.

The chaff is the doctrinal looseness that breadth required. Evangelicalism is a coalition, not a church, and not a confession. It has no creed but a cluster of commitments held with varying firmness. This produced three persistent weaknesses: a thin ecclesiology, since the movement transcended and often bypassed the local church and its government; a recurring instability on Scripture, the Fuller controversy being only the first tremor; and a man-centered drift in much of its piety and method, where the urgency of decision sometimes eclipsed the sovereignty of grace.

From a confessional Presbyterian vantage, evangelicalism is best regarded as an ally and a mission field both — a vast company of true believers who would be strengthened by the very confessional roots the movement’s breadth tends to leave behind. Reformed Christians within evangelicalism have labored precisely to supply that ballast.

Connections

Evangelicalism grows out of chastened fundamentalism (07_01) and inherits its battle with liberalism (06_03). Its inerrancy debates are, in part, a delayed reckoning with the doctrine of Scripture that Karl Barth (07_02) had relativized and that Old Princeton (06_04) had defended; the Chicago Statement consciously stands in the Warfieldian line.

Systematically, the movement bears on Bibliology and inerrancy (the Fuller and Chicago disputes), Soteriology (the gospel of grace and faith), and Ecclesiology (its characteristic weakness — see WCF 25 on the church and WCF 30 on church government). The inerrancy question ties to Westminster Confession 1.

Forward within this era, evangelicalism is the soil from which the recovery of Reformed theology (07_05) sprang — the “Young, Restless, Reformed” movement arose largely among evangelicals seeking the doctrinal depth their tradition lacked.

Lessons for Today

A coalition is not a confession. Shared enthusiasm can gather a crowd, but only shared, binding doctrine can hold one through controversy. The church needs evangelistic zeal and confessional ballast together; zeal without ballast drifts, and ballast without zeal stagnates.

The word “inerrancy” had to be defended because it had quietly been assumed. What one generation takes for granted, the next must articulate or lose. The Chicago Statement teaches us to define our convictions with care before the pressure comes.

And the local church matters. A Christianity carried mainly by crusades, magazines, and parachurch networks will struggle to disciple across generations. The means Christ appointed — word, sacrament, and discipline in a gathered, governed congregation — are not optional infrastructure but his ordained way of keeping the gospel.