Book Review: Iain Murray’s Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000

It’s a new year, and for the Church of England it’s time to find a new Archbishop of Canterbury after the disastrous reign of Justin Welby. When Welby was enthroned, there was a great deal of enthusiasm about him. He’s an evangelical, they said; he can fix the problems of heterodoxy that plague the Church of England. Personally I never had much confidence in this; I could not see the UK government of the Equalities Act select a truly orthodox Archbishop, and don’t expect one this time around either. Beyond that evangelicalism in the Church of England had already “sold the pass,” and much of that process in the UK—and the US for that matter—is documented in Iain Murray’s Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000.

It’s a well written and documented account of how a movement with so much rectitude going for it could go off the rails the way it did. Murray writes from a Reformed perspective; like many Reformed people, he works under the assumption that the only way to achieve a truly Biblical state in the church is through Reformed theology. He undermines his own case as the book goes along, as we will see.

Evangelicalism in the Church of England after World War II was a relatively small and homogeneous group with little support from or representation in the upper reaches of the hierarchy, a long way down from the days of J.C. Ryle and others. The idea of a truly evangelical group in any “nominal” church is one that Americans tend to greet with “rofl” but it was there. How it was dislodged from that happy if isolated state is due to forces that, in no small measure, came from this side of the Atlantic.

Getting past his initial (and deserved) swipe at the Germans (and especially Schleiermacher) he starts with the rise of Billy Graham and especially his first London crusade in 1954. Graham’s apparent broad based success, coupled with his outreach to non-evangelical churches and especially non-evangelical elements in the Church of England (including Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher,) was both thrilling to British evangelicals of the time but left others like Martyn Lloyd-Jones flat. Murray doesn’t evidence any awareness of the fact that Billy Graham, Southern Baptist that he was, had taken the peculiarly Baptistic combination of Arminian election with Calvinistic perseverance to its logical conclusion. Many of those who came forward ended up in liberal or Anglo-Catholic (yes, the “unEnglish and unmanly” are back to confuse the issue again) churches, but in such a theological framework once they made the decision it really didn’t matter what happened next.

Coupled with Graham’s impact on British Christian life were several forces at work on both sides of the Atlantic that weakened the evangelical witness.

The first was the desire for academic respectability and success. His special focus is on Fuller Theological Seminary, but he documents the broad effect of the accreditation system on what the seminaries taught and the people who taught there. The introduction of the German PhD system (unsuited for non-science disciplines to start with) shifted the faculty composition from those with pastoral experience to professional academics schooled in German higher criticism, something that had already taken its toll in the Anglican/Episcopal world.

The second was the ecumenical movement, with its forced contact with non-evangelical people and especially Roman Catholics (more about that later.) The ecumenical movement forced evangelicals to put institutional unity ahead of doctrinal assent, which went against the whole concept of church that evangelicals—and even the Church of England in the Thirty-Nine Articles, which it dumped in 1975—had held.

The third—and the one that tied the rest together—was the general push for respectability in evangelical circles. That drove many of Billy Graham’s associations, including the celebrated ones with U.S. Presidents, some of which backfired. Such results should have alerted the Pentecostal and Charismatic people to the perils of such associations, but they have not.

There are three events in the life of the Church of England which Murray points to as crucial in the transition of evangelicals from a Biblical group to a more “comprehensive”—and less Biblical—one.

The first two were the evangelical conference at Keele in 1967 and the one at Nottingham ten years after. In these conferences evangelicals shifted to a more open view of themselves and Christianity. There were warnings at the time of where this was going—and the drifting apart between Lloyd-Jones and J.I. Packer is during this period—but these went unheeded.

The third was the evangelicals’ role in torpedoing the union of the Church of England with the Methodist church in 1971. The evangelicals felt that the Methodists were too liberal and would shift the church to the left, so they made common cause with the Anglo-Catholics and got it voted down. This is a strong evidence of an attitude that was becoming common amongst Evangelicals in that time that liberalism, instead of Roman Catholicism, was the real enemy of true Christianity.

This leads us to the topic of the Catholic Church. Murray, like Bossuet in his exposition of the variations in the Protestant churches, is selective in his choice of topics, devoting most of the chapter to the subject of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together document. A little history before that would have strengthened Murray’s case that the document wasn’t a good thing, and a brief recapitulation of that would be helpful.

It is difficult for Protestants to understand the “wild west” feel of the Catholic Church in the years following Vatican II and during the pontificate of Paul VI. Murray criticises evangelicals for confusing their own concept of becoming a Christian against the Roman Catholic one; what he doesn’t realise is that there was a broad spectrum of Roman Catholics who were having doubts about their own system. That opened up Catholics to things like the Charismatic Renewal, which gave parts of the church a decidedly “evangelical” feel to them. The accession of Pope John Paul II in 1978 signalled a reversion to the “old ways” (which Murray is well familiar with) and the brutal assimilation of groups and people which followed. That led many of us to take our leave, which illustrates something that Murray and other evangelicals frequently don’t get: the best way to get Roman Catholics out of the church isn’t to tell them to leave, but to get them to a direct encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ, and then they’ll “figure it out.”

By the time of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, the die was pretty much cast. Had the document stuck with social and political issues, it could have been valuable. By trying to make into a blueprint for ecumenical “progress,” evangelicals discovered what Murray points out (but not in this way,) namely that the Catholic position on unity was the same as U.S. Grant’s to Simon Bolivar Buckner—no terms but unconditional surrender.

Murray doesn’t say much about the Charismatic Renewal and its effect on evangelicalism. He is certainly a cessationist and, although like D. James Kennedy he knows that salvation is more than intellectual assent, he is loathe to see that our encounter with Jesus Christ is both experiential and Biblical, with the latter informing the former. He is silent on the role (if any) of classical Pentecostal churches, which had their own reservations about the Renewal.

So what’s the solution? With all of his Reformed sensibilities and his dislike of “come-out-ism,” he appeals first to the revivals of George Whitfield and John Wesley, which is odd since a) Wesley was more Arminian in his view and b) the Methodist church ended up coming out of the Church of England, in spite of Wesley’s efforts to prevent that event (in England; his approach in the new United States was different.) He’s basically right, and Pentecostal churches—heirs of Wesley—would do well to continue in that path.

The years following the time that Murray documents have seen the sexualisation of the divide between liberal and non-liberal, which have in turn exposed the weaknesses of a movement which Murray documents. The rise of a Justin Welby in the wake of those weaknesses should be seen as inevitable, even if the government had been more conservative. They’ve also had their share of “come-out-ism” (the ACNA is the best evidence of this) and the shift towards the left of the Roman Catholic Church, one facilitated by the uncertain sound from the current Occupant. Perhaps this will be clear sign that Roman Catholicism isn’t the safe haven that some evangelicals thought it was. In any case, although a quarter century has passed since the end of the period the book covers, Iain Murray’s Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000 is still a valuable resource for a period whose legacy is only now beginning to be understood.