Blogger Frank Viola released an e-book this week entitled Beyond Evangelical. “Beyond” has become a rather popular buzzword recently around the evangelosphere and this is Viola’s contribution to the trend. This 80-page e-book includes a series of blog posts he wrote earlier this year of the same name and nearly twenty pages of quotations and book recommendations for further reading. In the book, he argues the word “evangelical” has lost its ability to define a group without hyphenation since when Carl F. Henry and Billy Graham broke from the fundamentalists of the mid-twentieth century. Instead, Viola advocates moving “beyond evangelicalism” and the pitfalls of defining oneself as left or right. He writes: “Another direction exists: It’s forward.” (8)
He breaks contemporary evangelicalism up into four streams: systematizers, activists, emoters, and those who are moving beyond. While he stresses that these characterizations “shouldn’t be used to denominate any particular individual,” their descriptions cannot help but beg for denomination. Viola insists he is not making a value judgment: ”Each stream represents a segment of the body of Christ that is just different from the others.” But this does not hold water through the rest of the book. Viola gives equal time to criticisms of both young, restless, Reformed types and emergents, but his claim that being “beyond” is not better falls flat. In fact, he denominates himself into the “those moving beyond evangelicalism” by consistently referring to that camp as “those of us.” And frankly, I don’t blame him.
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