This is a tricky one, for the simple reason that evangelical Christianity, at least in its best form, is committed to the idea of the centrality both of doctrine (something which can be given expression using a public vocabulary) and of the experience of God’s grace in the life of the individual. The two things are formally separable and this, of course, means that the public distinctives of evangelicalism can be learned by those who lack the second, while the second can be claimed with no real grasp of the first. This has led, in some quarters, to a fear not simply that the truth might be preached through the mouths of those who are actually unbelievers but also that there can be a fundamental opposition between the two, the head and the heart, and that the latter, the heart, should therefore be given precedence. Now, I want to be careful here, in that I do not want to be misinterpreted as saying that conversion is not a prerequisite for ministry. It most certainly is; but I do want to say that the content and efficacy of the gospel does not depend in any way whatsoever upon the moral qualities or salvific status of the individual who brings the message. The early church debated precisely this issue in relation to the efficacy of ministry of those who had fallen away during times of persecution and then returned to their old jobs when the persecution died down. It was decided then - and rightly so - that the Word of God was the Word of God, and not dependent upon the person bringing it to the church. To take any other position is surely disastrous, as none of us can know for certain what the state of anyone else’s heart is; it is only because the gospel concerns the promise of God revealed in Christ that we can have confidence in the efficacy of the message preached. To put it more bluntly: it is better to have the gospel competently preached by one who proves to be an unrepentant adulterer than to have it preached incompetently by one who has been born again, precisely because it is the Word which is efficacious not the heart of the preacher.
This has ramifications for various aspects of church life, not least in the realm of attitude towards learning. How many times have you heard the comment, ‘Old Mrs Jones has walked with the Lord for fifty years and knows more of God than any professor with a PhD.’ On one level, the comment might well be true - walking with the Lord in faith will get you into heaven in a way that mere possession of a PhD certainly will not. Nevertheless, when we grasp that the gospel is first of all a message, a proclamation of what God has done in Jesus Christ, and that experience comes as a response to that message, it is quite clear that a professor with a PhD may well have certain insights into that gospel message which Mrs Jones, for all her practical godliness, does not. Much of the anti-intellectualism which pours from pulpits in churches, from Reformed to charismatic, is the result of precisely this confusion between gospel as message and the believer’s response in experience - a confusion which has just enough appearance of truth to be superficially plausible while resting on a fundamentally skewed understanding of what the gospel actually is. Only when the church comes to acknowledge in both belief and practice that the gospel is a message, not a feeling or an experience, will such fuzzy thinking (and much else) finally be put to rest.
This is perhaps putting it somewhat crudely, but it makes the point that the gospel is a message with content and not simply a case of one person communicating an experience to a group of others. That is, after all, the essence of old-fashioned liberalism - Christianity is the feeling, not the doctrine, and theology is simply reflection upon religious psychology not upon the revelation of God.
