Restless Faith, by Richard Mouw

It has become popular, especially since the 2016 presidential election, for evangelicals to publicly eschew the label evangelical.  Richard Mouw, who has taught at Fuller Seminary since 1985, and served as president of the seminary from 1993 to 2013, acknowledges that those who distance themselves from the evangelical label have reason for concern.  But, as he writes in Restless Faith: Holding Evangelical Beliefs in a World of Contested Labels, he's not willing to give up the label: "For myself, I can't think of a label that suits me better than 'evangelical.'"

Mouw wants the evangelical tradition, a tradition he loves and that he nurtured him, to be preserved, and calls on "intellectual leaders who have been talking about simply resigning from the evangelical movement" to lend their aid to its preservation.  In Restless Faith, Mouw addresses some of the criticisms while affirming the strengths of the movement.

Mouw himself was active in the evangelical social movement in earlier decades, and rejects much of what the religious right, as it arose in the 1980s, stands for.  He makes it clear that one needn't embrace the religious right if one is to be an evangelical.  At the same time, Mouw's theological statements herein should disabuse anyone's suspicions that he is a universalistic theological liberal.  He absolutely affirms, for example, the need for individual faith in Christ for salvation, but goes on to say that "individual salvation is not enough."

Mouw's work is encouraging and challenging.  He has, in his academic life and public service, exemplified an evangelicalism that holds firm to faith while living with, speaking with, and cooperating with culture and society at large.  The bottom line, as I read him, is that evangelicals should not permit people and cultural forces outside of evangelicalism to define what is meant by the term.  The burden, then, is for evangelicals to model and preserve its meaning.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!