ABSTRACT
Church Polity gives us little help in our attempt to get a clear idea of Evangelicalism. "The Evangelical Alliance" claim members in every one of the reformed churches. The same gulf which divides the Humanist from the Evangelical in Christology separates the evangelical view of the Bible and that of those to whom the Bible does no more than contain messages of 'abiding value and interest'. The modem Evangelical is dissatisfied with some of the older and cruder penal substitutionary theories of the Atonement. The satisfaction' theory of Anselm which is still current in certain evangelical quarters, the modified form of it held by the Reformers, known as the Penal theory, owed much to the Roman conception of discharging an obligation, and the concept of justice. As far as Evangelicals are concerned the fundamental question has remained the same whether answered by the substitutionary theory of the Plymouth Brother or the refined theories of some modem theologians.
