Dear Colleagues,
May I have your help in a project I am about to undertake? In the latest PSCF, Willem Drees, in an piece entitled "Can We Reclaim One of the 'Stolen Words'?", suggests that "Evangelical may be one more such ['stolen'] term, which is in the process of losing the wider meanings it had., becoming more and more a particular style within the Protestantism."
How one understands and defines "evangelical" is significant for my project. Over the next several months I shall be producing a series of annotated essays on important issues in science and religion that will be posted on a home page on the web site of Berea College, where I taught for thirty-two years. During the last five of those years, I taught a senior seminar called Science and Faith. These essays will be based on my experience in teaching the course, and will provide a resource (which can be updated) that will be used by Berea faculty and students in natural sciences and some humanities courses. Several of my Berea colleagues in biology, chemistry, physics, and biblical studies will be collaborating on the project. Though designed first for the Berea academic community, through the World Wide Web, there is a much larger potential audience of faculty, students, and others who may find the essays of use-I hope so-and I shall be writing with this other potential audience in mind as well.
Berea College is an independent, non-sectarian liberal arts college founded in 1855 by Christian abolitionists "to promote the cause of Christ." It was the only college in the South to educate both blacks and whites, both men and women during the 19th cent. It educates women and men from low-income families that otherwise would not be able to afford a high-quality education. Thanks to the College's large endowment, those who enroll pay no tuition, and every student works in the College's Labor Program. Berea has remained staunchly non-sectarian. Its founder, the Rev. John Gregg Fee, summarized the message of Jesus as a "gospel of impartial love," and that phrase constitutes the heart of Berea's Christian self-understanding. The College welcomes people, as Fee wrote, "of every nation and clime," whatever their ethnic or religious background. While the faculty broadly represents the range of Christian traditions, as well as Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, and Baha'i faiths and no faith, the students, 80% of whom come from the mountain counties of Appalachia, represent largely conservative and fundamentalist Christian traditions. In a survey conducted in the late 1990s, 75% of Berea College students identified themselves as Protestants, nine percent as Roman Catholics; 48% described themselves as "conservative," 30% as "fundamentalist," 9% as moderately liberal," and 13% as "liberal" Christians. More specifically, about 45% represent the numerous Baptist variations of the Upland South (though predominately Southern Baptist), another 20% Pentecostal and Holiness traditions; and there are many who would describe themselves as conservative Methodists and Presbyterians. (There are a very few Lutheran, Episcopalian and eastern Orthodox Christians.)
The majority of Berea students who will be reading my essays, then, will be conservative to fundamentalist, a fact reflected in the enrollments of my Science and Faith course. In my essays, as in that course, I will present the modern scientific world picture characterized by the evolution of the universe and of life and responses to it by Christian theologians to students who would largely describe themselves as creationists, many of whom had been taught in their churches to be suspicious or even hostile toward science and especially big bang and evolution. Therefore, in my essays, I have decided to present them with another conservative Christian voice, of those who are in faithful conversation with Holy Scripture and their own theological traditions, and who also accept the knowledge and theories of mainstream science and have found a way to integrate it with their own Christian commitment and belief. Many ASAers will be among the representative of this group, and it will include both practicing or retired scientists and theologians and those who wear both hats. While Roman Catholic, Anglican, and other Protestant voices will also be heard (e.g., John Haught, John Polkinghorne), the essays will highlight Christians who would identify themselves on some sense or other as "evangelicals."
This brings me back to Drees' comment and my own question. How might I best define "evangelical" for the purposes of these essays? The question is important for the very reason Drees notes. A large number of Berea's students would think of themselves as evangelicals and think of the word to describe that "particular style" Drees alluded to. I want them to understand that it stands for more than that, even as I demonstrate that one can be an evangelical Christian and believe that God creates the universe through evolutionary processes. I think the best way I can do that is to share the thoughts about being an evangelical you all might contribute to this venture. We all know how important personal testimony can be to others.
So, I'm asking for your help. I invite you to share your own understanding of what "evangelical" and "evangelicalism" mean, both generally and in this context, and would appreciate anyone providing me with a statement about it. I will be grateful for your help, and this might be an interesting topic for us on the listserv to reflect upon.
Grace and peace,
Bob Schneider
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