Once upon a time, evangelicalism was a countercultural upstart movement. Positioned in between mainline denominational liberalism and reactionary fundamentalism, evangelicals saw themselves as evangelists to all of culture. Billy Graham was reaching the masses with his Crusades, Francis Schaeffer was reaching artists and university students at L’Abri, Larry Norman was recording Jesus music on secular record labels and touring with Janis Joplin and the Doors, and Carl F. H. Henry was reaching the intellectuals through Christianity Today. It was the dawn of “classic evangelicalism.” Surveying the current evangelical landscape, however, one gets the feeling that we’re backpedaling quickly. We are more theologically diffuse, culturally gun-shy, and fragmented than ever before. What has happened? And how do we find our way back? Using the life and work of Carl F. H. Henry as a key to evangelicalism’s past and a cipher for its future, this book provides crucial insights for a renewed vision of the church’s place in modern society and charts a refreshing course toward unity under the banner of “classic evangelicalism.”

Reclaiming the Center is a valuable contribution to the study of contemporary evangelicalism. It is a guide for how evangelicals can move forward with wisdom and discernment without succumbing to the spirit of this age.

This new collections of essays edited by Kyle Strobel and Jamin Goggin offers an evangelical hermeneutic for reading the Christian spiritual classics. Addressing the why, what and how of reading these texts, these essays challenge us to find our own questions deepened by the church's long history of spiritual reflection.

Restless for rootedness, many Christians are abandoning Protestantism altogether. Many evangelicals today are aching for theological rootedness often found in other Christian traditions. Modern evangelicalism is not known for drawing from church history to inform views on the Christian life, which can lead to a "me and my Bible" approach to theology. But this book aims to show how Protestantism offers the theological depth so many desire without the need for abandoning a distinctly evangelical identity. By focusing on particular doctrines and neglected theologians, this book shows how evangelicals can draw from the past to meet the challenges of the present.

In Apostles of Reason, Molly Worthen offers a sweeping history of modern American evangelicalism, arguing that the faith has been shaped not by shared beliefs but by battles over the relationship between faith and reason.

A learned and uniquely constructive book that gently urges "suspicious" Christians to reclaim the patristic roots of their faith. This is the first book of its kind meant to help Protestant Christians recognize the early church fathers as an essential part of their faith. Writing primarily to the evangelical, independent, and free church communities, who remain largely suspicious of church history and the relationship between Scripture and tradition, D. H. Williams clearly explains why every branch of today's church owes its heritage to the doctrinal foundation laid by postapostolic Christianity. Based on solid historical scholarship, this volume shows that embracing the "catholic" roots of the faith will not lead to the loss of Protestant distinctiveness but is essential for preserving the Christian vision in our rapidly changing world.

A shrewd synthesizer, gifted popularizer, and inspiring founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance movement, A.B. Simpson (1843-1919) was enmeshed in the most crucial threads of evangelical Christianity at the turn of the twentieth century. Daryn Henry presents Simpson's life and ministry as a vivid, fascinating, and paradigmatic study in evangelical religious culture, during a time when the conservative wing of the movement has often been overlooked. Simpson's ministry, Henry explains, fused the classic evangelical emphasis on revivalist conversion with the intensification of that sensibility in the quest for the deeper Christian life of holiness. Recovering the practice of divine healing, Simpson emphasized a dynamically empowered and supernaturally animated Christianity that would spill over into nascent Pentecostalism. His encouragement of cross-cultural missions was part of a trend that unleashed the dramatic rise of world Christianity across the Global South. All the while, his Biblical literalism, antagonism to modernist theology, campaigns against evolution, and views on premillennialism, Biblical prophecy, and the role of Israel in the end times made Simpson a precursor of the fundamentalist melees of subsequent decades. From his upbringing in rural Canada and confessional Scottish Presbyterianism, Simpson journeyed into the heart of American evangelicalism revolving around his base in New York City. Against most previous writing on Simpson, Henry's biography presents both continuities and discontinuities in the development of modern interdenominational evangelicalism out of the denominational evangelicalism of the nineteenth century.

Over the last thirty years, conservative evangelicals have been moving to the Northwest of the United States, where they hope to resist the impact of secular modernity and to survive the breakdown of society that they anticipate. These believers have often given up on the politics of the Christian Right, adopting strategies of hibernation while developing the communities and institutions from which a new America might one day emerge. Their activity coincides with the promotion by prominent survivalist authors of a program of migration to the "American Redoubt," a region encompassing Idaho, Montana, parts of eastern Washington and Oregon, and Wyoming, as a haven in which to endure hostile social change or natural disaster and in which to build a new social order. These migration movements have independent origins, but they overlap in their influences and aspirations, working in tandem to offer a vision of the present in which Christian values must be defended as American society is rebuilt according to biblical law. This book examines the origins, evolution, and cultural reach of this little-noted migration and considers what it might tell us about the future of American evangelicalism. Drawing on Calvinist theology, the social theory of Christian Reconstruction, and libertarian politics, these believers are projecting significant soft power. Their books are promoted by leading mainstream publishers and listed as New York Times bestsellers. Their strategy is gaining momentum, making an impact in local political and economic life, while being repackaged for a wider audience in publications by a broader coalition of conservative commentators and in American mass culture. This survivalist evangelical subculture recognizes that they have lost the culture war - but another kind of conflict is beginning.

How do evangelism and social concern relate to one another in the mission of the church? How should the Old Testament's emphasis on social justice inform the praxis of modern believers? Does the Bible emphasize individual salvation, or does it teach a broader, more inclusive concept? Theologians, missiologists, pastors, and educators have wrestled with these questions for centuries. But especially since the early part of the twentieth century, this debate has increasingly become a point of contention among evangelical Christians, with few indications that a consensus may soon be forthcoming. Yet few have offered so thorough an answer to these questions as has Carl F. H. Henry. Henry's regenerational model of evangelism and social concern stands on the shoulders of Augustine and many others, and offers what may be the best way forward. This book explores Henry's thoughts on this subject and sets him in dialogue with numerous others who have written on these topics. Thus it will prove a valuable resource for all interested in this topic.

Historic Protestantism and evangelicalism has always been committed to the authority of Scripture and interested in the proper interpretation of the Bible. They uphold the motto: As Scripture says, God says; and as God says, Scripture says. Many today claim this type of reasoning is faulty, since individuals can no longer know the true meaning of Scripture because there are no stable metaphysical or epistemological frameworks. Moreover, they claim that approaches, such as the one presented by Carl F. H. Henry, no longer provide adequate grounds to address the pressing hermeneutical issues. This study responds to these types of claims showing each of these proposals is based upon faulty first principles or misrepresentations. This book surveys hermeneutical innovations and Henry's epistemological hermeneutic to show that Henry's epistemology is foundational to his hermeneutic, offering present-day evangelicals an epistemologically justified approach to hermeneutics as epistemology and methodology. The book will be of importance to those with interest in evangelical hermeneutics or philosophical hermeneutics in general. It provides a clear assessment of the impact of Carl F. H. Henry's epistemology and hermeneutic, and strives to respond to criticisms raised against his Augustinian, Reformed, revelational, cognitive-propositional hermeneutic.