What is amazing is that Vines and Evans have little formal theological education and yet have widespread popularity, especially among Millennial evangelicals. As one of my friends pointed out to me, Evans in particular is the perfect writer for this low-attention-span generation which eschews dense reading and complex arguments. Young evangelicals have been raised in a culture that discourages good intellectual habits. Instead, they are informed by the blogosphere. Heaven help them if the truth is to be found on page 4 of a Google search.

This past year or so has witnessed a rollout of liberal evangelical nonsense. Matthew Vines wrote his controversial God and the Gay Christian, which asserts that evangelicalism and the homosexual lifestyle are compatible. While Vines received a tome-length critique from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary crowd, he also elicited great praise from Rachel Held Evans, who has been championing revisionist sexual ethics on her blog for quite some time now.

In the meantime, more traditional Christians of all sorts have been able to reflect and intellectually stew on these new developments. I gained a sense of the conservative consensus when my Facebook and Twitter feeds exploded with links to this First Things article by Owen Strachan and Andrew Walker. Pastors especially have run out of patience for the crowing of the progressive evangelicals. Soon after, the energetic Strachan posted a piece investigating Evans’s feminist theology, which mimics the same theological blunders as the infamous Re-Imagining conference, the ghost of which haunts some Mainline Protestant halls to this day.

In addition, a large contingent of laity have joined in this critique in their individual blogs and social media channels. Of course, Evans has taken to Twitter to voice her frustrations, only to be joined by her fearsome band of followers. The whole issue seems to be at an impasse.

What is amazing is that Vines and Evans have little formal theological education and yet have widespread popularity, especially among Millennial evangelicals. As one of my friends pointed out to me, Evans in particular is the perfect writer for this low-attention-span generation which eschews dense reading and complex arguments. Young evangelicals have been raised in a culture that discourages good intellectual habits. Instead, they are informed by the blogosphere. Heaven help them if the truth is to be found on page 4 of a Google search. For the orthodox and revisionist-leaning alike, there are a plethora of amateur theologizers rather than theologians in American congregations today.

Even Ivy Leaguer Tony Jones has to play the game. Everyone has to in order to get readers. Thus, even his Kindle book on the atonementresembles a long series of blog posts rather than a thorough-going analysis of primary sources.

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