We had a great crew for the podcast this week - and get ready for some new voices in the conversation in the next few weeks!

This week's participants were:

• Me - this is all my fault
• Jamison - Main Line Malcontent
• Michael - He makes funny sounds
• Kevin - Only two more months of exile!
• Sarah - Soon to be even more "not the token female!"

Listen Now!

We only discussed two articles this week, and here they are:

• Patrick proposes funds for cervical cancer vaccine for girls - Listen in as we go over the flare up over the desire to mandate HPV vaccinations for young girls.

• Definition of 'evangelical' debated - we psychoanalize Barna, and wonder why the Trinity appears no where on the key features of being an "evangelical" (Click Here for a link to data about as raw as Barna gives out)

   

Comments (1)

1  Evangelical Written by This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , on 06-03-2007 19:01 Someone mentioned in the discussion on Barna's op-ed ;-) that Evangelicals are like Calvinists (regarding the closed-set vs open-set views of salvation).    Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Jonathan Edwards a very influential, early voice in American Evangelicalism? Not to say that he was, himself, Evangelical, but, at the least, he was a part of a movement toward what we, today, call Evangelicalism.    As for a working definition of "Evangelical," here's the main points I've seen:    The most basic aspect of being an Evangelical is having a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ." This personal relationship must begin with a conversion. This is stressed very, very often. Some may even ask for a specific date, although the idea, overall, is "there was a time when I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior." If you cannot recall a time that you "prayed for Jesus to come into your heart," you are not "saved". End of story.  Once you have had this conversion experience, you're "in." Baptism, therefore, becomes a "mere symbol," because you are already a Christian.    What this means, of course, is that a Methodist who was baptized as an infant, grew up in the Christian faith, and has grown into a vibrant spiritual life in Christ is not "saved" according to Evangelical soteriology.    Contrariwise, a person who is born into an atheist family, prays to accept Christ at a Billy Graham crusade, possibly attends church somewhere but is never baptized and has little if any vivacity in his spiritual life would most likely be considered "saved."    It seems to me that this is the main common ground among Evangelicals. From this point, you get into the more liberal and conservative (and everything in between) branches, and, especially, into the Evangelical and the Evangelical(TM) divisions.    And, of course, there are some within Evangelicalism that add to the above soteriology. Some hold that salvation can be lost, so the second person described above may well "lose his salvation," while others put conditions on salvation, such as "a changed life" and might maintain that the second person wasn't "really saved" to begin with. Both would agree, though, that the first person still needs to be saved.    I would also suggest that there is a particular anti-traditionalism and a somewhat extreme version of sola scriptura practiced amongst Evangelicals. Perhaps I should just write up a blog post on all this...

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