Noah Lykins’s Reviews > Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal > Status Update

average American Fundamentalist… ha[d] a way of confusing America, the Republican Party and the capitalist system with the kingdom of God. He did not practice. circumcision, but he did assume that only those who had gone through a certain form of conversion experience were
"born again" and that the salvation of these persons was either unquestionably sure or else maintained by works of personal morality.

“Evangelicalism erected a stronger shell of protective enculturation (than the Puritan training-code morality) to guard it from the world… the revivalists of the 1820s and 30s moved on to redefine temperance as absti-nence, to the horror of Charles Hodge, who protested that the replacement of Communion wine with grape juice was an insult to Jesus and to biblical ethics.”

A missionary strategy which calls on its converts to "drop out of the Monopoly game" of normal human activities and become part of a quasi-military commune, like the Children of God, may seem to gain by focusing the attention of its whole membership on proselytizing new members… fails to see that converts are won more by the observable blessedness of a whole war of life than by the arguments of individuals.

The biblical symbols used have been so debased and trivialized by folk religion that modern imaginations find it hard to reach behind popular stereotypes to apprehend the serious realities described in Scripture.

Superstition was common in pre-Reformation Christianity as any readers of the lives and legends of the saints know. Now that it has been chased out of the church it should not be brought back in under the guise of faith and piety. Parts of the Pentecostal testimony are a jungle of superstition today, although discerning critics in Charismatic circles have carefully sought to correct this situation.

WOOOF. “The gravity of self-interest which naturally operates in our lives whenever we move out of the light and walk in the flesh is able to shape even religious intentions into carnal patterns.”

“Birth is a passive experience and not the effect of action initiated by the one born… The style of Evangelical Christianity which is constantly pushing and forcing people toward conversion in order to get them regenerated, manipulating them with music, repeated invitations or a sort of sales routine, is an ugly deformity of Christian practice resulting from bad doctrine.”

..perhaps the root cause of the decay of evangelicalism in America was the replacement of the old comprehensive concept of revival with the post-Finneyan machinery ofrevivalism. "Holding a revival" became synonymous with "using new methods to do mass evangelism…” this approach would never have satisfied the Puritans and Pietists.