Here is the crucifixion-based verification. “The Word was the source of life, and this life brought light to mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out” (John 1: 4-5). At stake is nothing less than firsthand and personal knowledge of the liberating truth (Ibid, 8: 31-32) with no room for any religion, whatsoever, including Christianity (Ibid, 4: 21-26)!

On a personal level, it is working for me since 35 years!

To be otherwise, would be out of character, Frank.

But in that, Joe, I’d be willing to call all full-throated Arminians (not semi-pelagians or full-on pelagians) “Christian” in the same sense that I am a “Christian” by faith in Jesus Christ. I have no interest in deamnding that we define “Christian” as “7-point, a-mil, high-church Calvinists” — and I don’t think that anyone should.

My point in driving down the path of whether “Evangelical” is a meaningful distinction or not is to point out that I think you mean something more than you’re willing to say by the category “evangelical”, and we’d all better served to say that than we are allowing for “evangelical Christians” and “post-modern Christians” and “new kind of Christians” and so on.

Are you a person who affirms 1 Cor 15:1-4 in the sense that Paul meant as he wrote it to the Corinthians? Then I count you are a brother in Christ — even if you baptize your babies or have a chart which predicts the time and the day of the return of Christ.

The rest is, if you will forgive me for saying it, posturing that attempts to include that which ought not to be included, and also to exclude others but make them feel better about it.

But while its important to fight for the traditional meaning of terms, it can easily lead to a self-defeating, “Win the label, win the argument” approach. Just because we are using a term that in a way that we consider correct does not mean that everyone else understands the term in that way.

Richard Mouw once wrote something to the effect that when we all get to heaven a lot of people will be surprised to find that they were Calvinists. What he meant was that much of Calvinism is simply biblical doctrine. But if we trying to force people to call themselves Calvinists it would likely be counterproductive.

Let me say this about your common reply:

[1] If those are in fact the distinctives, I’m curious why we would call someone who doesn’t believe those things “Christian”. I would quibble over the priority of those 4 issues, but for example someone who rejects the authority of the Bible cannot be a Christian — it’s an application of John 5 to see that faith with the wrong object is not faith in the sense we mean when we talk about “faith in Christ”.

[2] In [1], it seems to me that saying someone is “evangelical” is therefore not much of a distinction at all. It’s redundant at best, and obscurative at worst. Here’s what I mean by that: let’s assume that we can say someone is an “evangelical Christian” and someone else is a “post-modern Christian”, and by the latter we mean someone rejects the authority of Scripture to define the particulars of the faith, and finds crucicentrism somehow intellectually untennable.

By saying there is another kind of “Christian” besides the “evangelical”, we are succumbing to a barely-sociological view of the faith — and this, frankly, erodes our ability to declare the Gospel credibly. We face the problem that there becomes ‘another Gospel’ besides the ‘evangelical’ Gospel, and the criticisms of guys like Bill Maher in his movie Religulous are vindicated.

I guess my root question would be, “why do we want to call ourselves ‘evangelicals’ rather than ‘christians’?” What’s the actual benefit?