Professor Jacobs went on, "Besides, people who make the kinds of theological statements found in this document--for instance, "We believe that the only ground for our acceptance by God is our trust in Jesus Christ"--are going to be called fundamentalists no matter what they say."

There I would disagree with him. That chosen theological statement is made by leaders representing a billion Roman Catholics and hundreds of millions of Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Protestant, and other labeled groups who never get called fundamentalist when they say it. But thanks to Jacobs and this Washington Post web log for asking us to take a fresh look at evangelicals and point to some of its features.

That's really hard. I remember reading a book review by a Puerto Rican Pentecostal pastor in New York of the finest American seminary history I've read, George Marsden's book on Fuller Theological Seminary, a purely evangelical place. As I took it, the reviewer was saying that every name in the Marsden index was evangelical and would consider the Pentecostal pastor an evangelical and everyone the Pentecostal hung out with consider all the Fuller people evangelical, and yet they seemed to have little common with each other, thanks to differing histories, cultures, and missions.

The most helpful, though not original, feature of the Manifesto is to show that the Evangelicals represented in it are more and other than scrubbed-up and toned-down ex-Fundamentalists. If not in this little Manifesto they had no space for it, in other writings many of them pay respects to the American fundamentalism (born around 1920) for having thrown blocks in the path of liberal Protestants, who were coming to dominate at least in elite Protestant worlds. But fundamentalism had a different agenda.

Also as I take it, these drafters and signers of a manifesto were pointing out that the version of evangelicalism that came to political prominence around 1976 or 1980 tended to be more fundamentalist and "hard-line" in theology and politics than evangelicalism had been or than many of them had never wanted it to be. As the hard-line coalition breaks down, sees its edges soften, and allows for diversity at its center, evangelicals will have to be busy showing what they are for.

So, evangelicalism?

While the drafters and all fair historians and lexicographers would point out, "evangelical" connects with the Christian gospel in all ages. Three times by my count their word became a party label. In the 16th century the Reformers--Luther, Calvin, the Anglicans, were called "evangelical" because they stressed the gospel of grace over against the legalism they perceived in Catholicism. The label stuck, and in some European nations Lutherans and Calvinists are still officially evangelical, and the church body to which i belong, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is, well, evangelical (but never was 'fundamentalist', American style).

The second time around Evangelicals labeled themselves or were labeled thus because they were trying to revitalize their church on gospel themes, and carried them into the public and political worlds, notable through efforts to abolish slavery in England. They were also active in many progressive moral causes in America, though they sometimes got distracted and became specialists in reforming individuals who had fallen into vices.

The third time, in America post-1942/3, when they organized a National Association of Evangelicals they criticized the hardest-line fundamentalists, kept to their doctrines, but became 'Neo-Evangelicals." Think Billy Graham, who was converted by a fierce fundamentalist and spent his later life showing openness to many kinds of Christians and friendliness to those in other faiths--without compromising his own. The early stage was mainly "otherworldly," non- or anti-political, but after around 1980s many were organized into what became the Christian Right, which had a narrower agenda than the Manifesto writers appreciate.

Here are a few things I observe historians of evangelicalism stressing:

1. Always central is focus on Jesus Christ, affirming that the human Jesus, the rabbi of Nazareth, is also the ascended Lord. Unitarians respected Jesus but did not keep the Jesus-focus, and many liberal Protestants wavered or wandered or progressed beyond it.

2. Evangelicals have high views of biblical authority. In the fundamentalist and neo-evangelicals many attached this to a philosophical view which contended that there could be no "errors" in God's word. They disagreed with each other on many things that should have been agreeable-to in the inerrant Bible, but they agreed on its inerrancy. Today's evangelicals continue to have a high view of biblical authority, but many find the inerrancy approach confining and not true to the scriptural teaching itself.

3. The key theme of the "evangel" is God' grace, the call for faith, and not depending upon human "works" to please God.

4. Evangelicals stress a conversion experience--each believer certifies an experience or at least a process of turning, powered by the Holy Spirit.

5. Fundamentalists knew how the world would end, and wanted no one "Left Behind." Many evangelicals have apocalyptic views and all believe that the End of History is in God's hands, in Christ. But they don't hold to a single defining and confining literalism about the end.

6. And this is huge, and being recovered: evangelicals believed and believe that, after being "saved by grace through faith" they were and are to make faith active in love, through works of mercy and, though less clearly, works of justice. Today many new energies--including embrace of environmental and justice issues--moves evangelicals.

That's a short list, but I think I can find these wherever people call themselves evangelical or get called that.

For thirty of forty years they got called "righteous," "rightist," "fanatic" and other unflattering terms that are not at the heart and core of evangelicalism. To desert that part of their recent past does not make evangelicals wishy-washy. It means that they want to realign themselves with their classic priorities and be seen as attending to them.