ABSTRACT
Evangelical identity has its origins in strongly particularist senses of Christian selfidentity, and has tended to form its own social culture over and against that of the world around (as witnessed to in its Puritan and Pietist past). While evangelicalism has been happy to assimilate itself to certain cultural phenomena, especially around economic market forces, its desire to be ‘in the world but not of the world’ determines that many evangelical impulses arise from a form of separationism which relies on straightforward binary descriptors of insider-outsider, saved-damned, elect-reject. Strong particularism gives rise to strong separationism, and underpinning this separationism is often a degree of eschatological self-certainty which seeks such utter self-assurance as to push to the outside anyone who seems vaguely other or an outsider to the central issues perceived to be definitive for inclusion in the Kingdom of God. For this reason, we evangelicals often engage in seeking evernarrower circles of acceptability – from the Reformation to Puritanism to Pietism to card-carrying evangelicalism of various kinds.1 Even within the latter, there are often issues which become ‘fundamental’ to being seen to be insiders, whether that be certain attitudes to the manner in which the Spirit inspires Scripture, timetables of the eschaton, or scholastic arguments about the minutiae of dogma which become defining issues for salvation. What is most pernicious is that often these issues that determine insider ‘soundness’ arise not from articulations of what we stand for, but of what we stand against. Assurance of our place within the Kingdom comes to be governed by what it is we are able to stand against in order to stand on the Lord’s side, and the other’s otherness to us all too easily becomes the other’s otherness to God: perceptions about the present become predictions about the future and judgements upon a person or a group.
