Roger Olson looks back on when evangelicals cared about holy living: The Way We Were

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Olson continues to be interestingly contrarian. Sometimes he’s right.

I’m talking here about a particular mindset of being different from “the world.” Today, I notice, it’s not uncommon for evangelical Christians to go to Las Vegas to gamble and attend “the shows”—some of which are lewd. Even deeper, though, I find it not uncommon that many evangelical Christians have no sense of being different from the world and have allowed the world, secular and pagan as it is, to press them into its mold in terms of materialism, nationalism, sexual immorality, lewd entertainment, drunkenness (getting “buzzed”), etc., etc.

In other ways, he seems to be longing for times when everything seemed simpler. The problem is that it really wasn’t simpler. We were just more ignorant of the complexity.

Both fundamentalism and evangelicalism more broadly tried to fix some things in Christian life and church life, maybe partly succeeded, but broke other things.

But that’s always how it is. We shouldn’t stop trying, but there are always going to be hits and misses in how we evaluate our relationship with the culture, where we draw lines, what we emphasize, what we reject, what we tolerate. Idealizing a period in the past won’t help with that, but we can still learn some lessons by looking back.

And here I thought I would never agree with anything Roger Olson wrote. To me this is evangelical Christianity reaping what they have sown. We are doing it too in Fundamentalism.

...is that Olson mentions some of "the rules" that used to pervade Christianity--I still see a lot of them even in "evangelical" setttings, really--and then he's noting something quite a bit broader, that evangelical Christians no longer believe in miracles and live like the world around them. OK, so he's arguing that there is a rot in practice, and a far more significant rot spiritually.

Olson suggests that the old rules protected people from the shift, but I wonder.....if many of the old rules did not have a firm basis in Scripture, is the church that relies on them sending a message that Scripture does not matter--and thus even when the pastor's message is Biblical, it is ignored.

Certainly much of fundamentalism (or professing fundamentalism) is cosying up to the world. We can't take being outsiders, it seems. In the comments section of his blog, Roger Olson mentioned that.

We can engage the world and preach the gospel without imitating them. We don't need to enter every field in order to bring the gospel to people from all walks of life. Some aspects of Christan world view teaching assume that we need Christians to enter every walk of life in order to do kingdom work. I don't think so. We need to do kingdom work (gospel work) wherever we are, fully committed to a holy lifestyle, separate from sin, with love and compassion for the lost.

As to Roger Olson's views, I've come to have a lot of respect for him, though his theology remains at odds with mine at certain points. He has the right spiritual instincts.