Interesting thought …

Conservatives entered the twentieth century largely focused on teh struggle with theological liberalism. For many, this battle centered on the defense of certain central doctrines, considered to comprise the “fundamentals” of the faith. Richard Lints comments perceptively that the net result of this broad coalition ws the loss of a theological framework:

Theologcial truth was separated from the fabric in which it inhered. Truth still mattered to evangelicals, but no longer as an expression of the full organic unity of the revleation of God in Scripture. It became a political platform, the assemblage of a disparate collection of dogmas that had been gathered with the intent of avoiding offense to any of the diverse theological traditions represented in the evangelical coalition. The theological task degenerated into the faithful repetition of core dogmas rather than a harvesting of the rich fields of Scripture with the help of the community of interpreters of the past. (all taken from Grenz and Franke, p.111)