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For our purposes, any discussion of the terms evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, and pentecostal should steer a middle course between an extended, technical treatment and the kind of dismissive description suggested by Potter Stewart’s attempt to define pornography a few years back. “I can’t define it,” the Supreme Court justice acknowledged, “but I know it when I see it.”
The term evangelical has been bandied about a lot in recent years. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it simply: “Of or pertaining to the Gospel” of the New Testament, especially the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.1Close Historically, the term often refers to the theology of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, when Martin Luther “rediscovered the gospel” after its eclipse in the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages. Luther believed that Roman Catholic theology, particularly the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, had compromised the evangel or gospel, the “good news” of the New Testament, by substituting a theology of works (the notion that you effectively earn your salvation by good works, avoiding sin, and remaining in communion with the Church) for the New Testament theology of grace (God, through Jesus Christ, bestows a saving grace without regard to human merit). For Luther, this discovery, based on his study of St. Paul’s letters to the Galatians and to the Romans, liberated him from responsibility for his own salvation.
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