ABSTRACT

Throughout modernity an emphasis on piety and reason has distorted an evangelical understanding of the political. The tradition has subsequently become orientated away from its rightful emphasis on truth as evidenced in the church’s particularity towards an apologetic obsession with the universal good.1 This chapter outlines how evangelicals might begin to orientate the central themes/practices of the tradition towards a more truthful recovery of the political.2 I aim to engage with the lived practices and passions of the evangelical tradition as those of a people seeking for their witness to be ordered by the authority of God’s revelation in Christ as ‘good news’. Too much scholarly debate concerning our understandings of the political is dominated by crude and unhelpful characterizations of the church which fail to take seriously the lived witness of faithful servants. It is my hope that by asserting a form of reorientation which cherishes the central tenets of the tradition, others might be encouraged to discern the detailed performing of their faith in this more particular and constructive manner without giving up on evangelicalism.