While one might think of the Christian life as a journey, what is important is that one makes certain the path on which the journey takes place is the right path—the straight and narrow according to Jesus. However, as the extract of Douglas A. Sweeney’s The Essential Evangelicalism Dialectic shows: “In the fifty years since the emergence of the neo-evangelical movement, the connotations of the word ‘evangelical’ have changed significantly.

Francis Schaeffer, in 1984, spoke of Christians who softened their view of Scripture in order to make their message more acceptable to the world. There are several matters I would like to consider in the next couple of blogs to help in understanding what was going on. First is the history of how this has become almost mainstream in those who call themselves evangelical. The evangelicalism Schaeffer warned against was initially known as neo-evangelicals (new evangelicals). This trend among Protestant Christians began shortly after World War II but it seems to have nothing to do with the war. It was a reaction to Fundamentalism which the newly named evangelicals believed had been unresponsive to the changing conditions of the world. I am not here defending Fundamentalism although my view of Fundamentalism was and is mostly positive and I am not alone in this, but that is beside the point. After all, it was the form of Christianity into which I was brought when I accepted Christ (1965). I remember discussions in the late 1960s that noted that the neo-evangelicals were relaxing their view of the inerrancy of Scripture. Not all who were involved shared this relaxed view of Scripture and when the neo-evangelical views gained steam, some criticized the movement such as Harold Lindsell. According to Ryan Reed “When Harold Lindsell wrote The Battle for the Bible in 1976, he effectively threw down the gauntlet against those who would bear the evangelical title but jettison the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.”

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