Have Evangelicals Forgotten God?

Despite the “evidence of ongoing vitality, the evangelical movement shows disturbing signs of dissipating its energies and forfeiting its initiative.” While this sentiment has pervaded discussions about evangelicals over the past decade, the close association of Donald Trump with “evangelicalism” has raised it to a feverish pitch.

Only the concern isn’t that recent: evangelical stalwart Carl Henry wrote it in his 1976 lament, Evangelicals in Search of Identity. Henry worried that the vigor of evangelical institutions in the 30 years since he had published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism was eroding because of disunity over inerrancy and evangelicalism’s social and political witness. 

Now, some 40 years later, Mark Galli—who has most recently stewarded Henry’s chair at Christianity Today—has brought forth his own diagnosis of evangelicalism’s ills, as well as remedies for its future. Galli writes with a light touch, similar to the accessibility of Henry’s journalistic prose. Though Galli lacks Henry’s polemical edge, he shares Henry’s ability to embed real theological learning within a colloquial style.