My debt to Protestantism is incalculable. The Reformation was my tutor in the Faith. Since my pilgrimage has led me to ancient forms of Christian worship and discipline that find little place in ordinary Reformational piety and vision, I find myself mulling over just what Protestantism might be, in the effort to chart my own itinerary.

What, exactly, is Protestantism’s genius? Where is its center of gravity? Where does it stand in relation to the whole Church?

My own nurture took place in a particularly earnest and, to my mind, admirable sector of Protestantism, namely, evangelicalism. I have never come upon Christian believers of any ilk who exhibit more clearly than do the evangelicals the simplicity, earnestness, and purity of heart that the gospel asks of us.

The word evangelical is an ancient and noble one, but it has become somewhat rickety. It has too many meanings. In our own time it sprang into popular use with the presidency of Jimmy Carter, when anyone who claimed to be born again seemed to fall into the category. The press often used the word as a synonym for middle-class religion. On the other hand, there are the historic uses of the word. Originally it simply referred to the gospel. Late in time it referred to the union of Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia, or to European Protestantism generally, or to the movement in the Church of England that stressed personal conversion by faith in Christ’s atoning death. Names like George Whitefield and Charles Simeon loom large in this last connection.

The evangelicalism of which I speak differs slightly from what one finds in Southern Baptist, Wesleyan, Pentecostal, or Missouri Synod Lutheran circles, even though all of these may lay claim to being evangelical in some sense.

I can best identify my own milieu by listing the following as touchstones: Billy Graham; the Scofield Reference Bible; Moody Bible Institute; Wheaton College; The China Inland Mission; The Sunday School Times; Wycliffe Bible Translators; Youth For Christ; Young Life; Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship; Campus Crusade for Christ; The Navigators; Gordon-Conwell, Fuller, and Dallas Theological Seminaries; and all the evangelical publishing houses such as Word, Fleming H. Revell, and Tyndale, as well as the journals Christianity Today and Eternity.

Everyone in my world could speak these names trippingly on the tongue, even though there were many internecine differences. The theologians at Fuller Seminary, for example, would not espouse the “dispensationalist” method of interpreting the Bible taught at Dallas Seminary and plotted out in the Scofield Bible.

A reader scanning this list will note that no church is mentioned. This is not without significance. While many small evangelical denominations have been formed in the last eighty years, the characteristic evangelical presence often lies in “para-church” organizations or in independent local congregations with names like Grace Chapel or Calvary Baptist Church. It is difficult for Christians with strong denominational loyalties, especially those with ethnic roots like the Swedish Baptists, the Dutch Reformed, the German Lutherans, the Scottish Presbyterians, or the Plymouth Brethren, to find the axis of evangelicalism. No city constitutes a Holy See, for example—no Zurich, Geneva, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, or Prague. Nor is there any single founding father—no Jan Hus, Menno Simon, Alexander Campbell, John Calvin, Oecolampadius, or J. N. Darby. The words “interdenominational” and “nondenominational” are words of good omen, not bad omen, in this environment. We attached almost no importance to ancient historic credentials.

At bottom, though, one cannot distinguish evangelical teaching from traditional Christian orthodoxy. We could be counted on to embrace wholeheartedly all that is spelled out in the ancient creeds of the Church. There is nothing in the Apostles’, Nicene, Chalcedonian, or Athanasian creeds that we would have jibbed at. We were stoutly among those who with Athanasius, “hold the Catholic Faith . . . whole and undefiled.” In this sense we would have been more at home in the company of apostles, fathers, doctors, confessors, and the ancient tradition of catholic orthodoxy than among modern churchmen who look on the gospel as being shot through with legendary matter.

But there is something peculiar in this way of talking about evangelicalism. Our imagination did not run to creeds, fathers, doctors, tradition, or catholic orthodoxy. When it came to anchoring our faith, we cited texts from the New Testament and nothing else. We never said, “The Church teaches so and so.” We were not thinking of the ancient Faith or of a long lineage of the faithful when we spoke of our beliefs. Yet there is perhaps nowhere in the world where ancient Christian belief is professed more candidly and vigorously than in evangelicalism.

Here, I think, lies the irony that has attended my pilgrimage. Have I moved or have I not?

I have certainly left nothing behind. I was taught, for example, that Jesus was born of a virgin. This meant that He did not have a human father. At the Annunciation the Holy Ghost brought about what ordinarily occurs at human conception. Something gynecological occurred. Evangelicalism teaches this; ancient catholic orthodoxy teaches this.

Over against this robust dogma lie all the delicate techniques for skirting the miracle. Early heretics came up with half a dozen artful formularies. Nineteenth-century modernists were frank enough to deny it flatly. More recent and oblique theologies bring literary criticism and the psychology of religion to bear on it, managing to keep the language of virgin birth alive while not actually believing a syllable of it. My own passage from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, and thence to approaching old age, has not obliged me to shift ground from what my Sunday school teachers taught me. They agreed with the fathers and doctors of the Church that the Virgin Birth happened in the real world before any early Christian piety went to work on the notion. Similarly, the Resurrection happened before any “Easter Faith” existed.

To this extent, then, I cannot be said to have traveled anywhere on my pilgrimage. I have no new light on things such as that claimed by Mormons, Christian Scientists, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Evangelicalism taught me all the major points taught by traditional orthodoxy. Against this stand all heresies, cults, and all forms of theological liberalism.

And yet the flavor of evangelicalism is very different from that of the traditional Church, which I have come to understand as being one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

For one thing, we stressed the Bible alone as the touchstone for our doctrine, piety, and order. We distrusted the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox emphasis on the Church as the guardian and teacher of Scripture, and even the Anglican formula of Scripture, tradition, and reason. There was even a slight but unmistakable difference between us and the Reformation itself with its cry of “Sola Scriptural” It is so slight that perhaps the only way of identifying it is to say that if an evangelical ever visits a Lutheran or Reformed church, he does not find there quite the stress on each Christian’s private spiritual life and devotional Bible reading that he finds in his native evangelicalism. To this extent evangelicalism would stand in Pietist and Wesleyan traditions and not quite in the classic Reformational heritage.

Evangelicalism’s First and last instinct is to take the Bible at face value. What the Bible reports is true, we said. Moreover, the Bible stories are in some sense true as they are told. This holds not only for major doctrines like the Virgin Birth but for lesser stories as well. If the narrative tells of a rod that turns into a snake, or of a withered hand that suddenly becomes whole, then we are to take it as a true account of what happened in the real world. We are not reading a mere record of primitive faith. To reduce the Bible to forms that are routinely acceptable to modern categories is to subvert it. God has disclosed Himself not only in natural events like thunder and the whirlwind but also in signs and marvels, and it is these latter, especially, that attend and corroborate the drama of Redemption.

This stress on the Bible alone calls for a complicated vocabulary of “inerrancy” and “verbal inspiration” that has never marked Catholic and Orthodox theology, since these latter would look to the magisterium of the church, or to Holy Tradition, to keep the ancient Faith intact. The evangelicals, pinning everything as they do on the Bible alone, have had to devise formularies that will guard the text of Scripture while leaving room at the same time for discrepancies in the various Gospel accounts of Christ’s life, for example. These formularies at times resemble the twelfth- and thirteenth-century attempts to chase down exactly what happens at the Mass, and it is very difficult to find phrases that avoid all the pitfalls. At the same time, it is probably fair to say that most of us did not concern ourselves with the fine points here any more than ordinary Catholics do with Thomistic formularies for the Sacrament. Our assumption was that what we read in Genesis, Haggai, Luke, or Jude is true, trustworthy, important, and God’s Word.

This sense in which evangelicalism is of one fabric with ancient orthodoxy and yet has an unmistakable texture of its own appears in other doctrinal emphases besides this focus on the Bible.

We laid great stress, for example, on Christ’s atoning work and on his “vicarious, substitutionary” death. We believed nothing on this point that is not supported by traditional catholic dogma and Scripture. We all memorized texts like “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” and “For [God] hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”1 “He was wounded for our transgressions . . . the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” and “. . . the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.”2 These texts loomed large.

We knew that novels and Broadway plays retailed “the blood of the Lamb” as a sort of droll specialty of Salvationist and hillbilly religion. Judy Garland sang gaily, “Forget your troubles, come on, get happy, get ready for the Judgment Day . . . wash your sins away in the tide.” This treatment of the matter had the same ring to our ears as would the suggestion that everyone play tiddly-winks with the blessed Sacrament to a Catholic’s ears. We could have appealed to the Roman Missal itself and to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer to show the world that a devout attitude towards Christ’s blood is no specialty of hillbillies.

We were aware that “our” kind of preaching was what attracts huge numbers of converts. You cannot flag down busy modern people with a gospel that offers nothing but caring and sharing. Liberal Protestants are vexed when their churches dwindle, despite all their infinitely resourceful and energetic programs to update the gospel, while evangelical churches fill up and burst with converts. Millions of confessing Christians credit Billy Graham or Young Life or Campus Crusade with having brought them into the Faith by means of preaching what sounds for all the world like the gospel preached by Saint Peter at Pentecost or by Saint Paul at Athens, or for that matter, by our Lord Himself. It was He, after all, who said, “Ye must be born again.”3 Neither Billy Graham nor Billy Sunday, nor General Booth, nor even Chuck Colson made up that idea.

As with our stress on the Bible and on faith in Christ’s atoning death, we looked on the Second Coming as something of a specialty of our own. The doctrine is taught in the creeds, and, hence, all Christians are supposed to believe it. But many have only the dimmest notions about it. The liberals often appeared to suppose that things will gradually get better and better until at last, when we all have learned to be generous and thoughtful, a new Golden Age will arrive. The lion and lamb will lie down together, and all of us will beat our spears into pruning hooks.

That picture of the end is indeed scriptural, we said, but it is not going to come to pass by any gradual process whereby humanity improves its behavior. Things will probably get worse. We need only consult Jesus’ own remarks about how history will go if we are not clear on that point. Evangelicals look, usually, for “the imminent, personal return of Christ in glory,” basing this expectation on all of Christ’s alarming words about how suddenly the Son of Man will come, and about watching, and about the cry, “Behold the bridegroom cometh!”4 and about the Son of Man who will come in His glory with all the holy angels. Saint Paul also appeared to be on our side, with his teaching about the Lord Himself descending from heaven “with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God.”5

This language must not be watered down, we said. Surely it refers to the end of time as well as to how the Kingdom of God makes its way into the heart of man. The gospel pictures of sheep and goats, and of weeping and gnashing of teeth, and of God’s saying, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire”6 are all too violent to be ameliorated with oleaginous expressions of optimism.

Some evangelicals pasted bumper stickers on their cars in this connection, announcing the news that “Jesus Is Coming.” Even though most of us drew the line short of this particular tactic, nevertheless we would all, if pressed, have urged that indeed it is an event that no mortal may ignore with anything approaching impunity.

The preacher regaling his quaking congregation with the blistering torments of hell is a comic figure in our time and is no more congenial to evangelicals than to anyone else. But we would have pointed out that this sort of preaching did not originate with stump preachers and tent evangelists. Dante drew grotesque pictures of hell’s pains, and the Dominicans and Franciscans brought the art to a high degree of horror in their preaching. Seventeenth-century prelates like John Donne could dilate exquisitely on the clinical minutia of hell’s agonies. They all took their cues from the apostles, who took theirs from Jesus. It was not Jonathan Edwards, after all, who invented the picture of the deathless worm gnawing damned souls. It was Jesus Christ Himself (cf. Mark 9:44-48).

In the face of dreadful texts like this, a liberal can say, “Oh, the text is corrupt,” or “Jesus never said that,” or “You must understand Jesus’ first-century frame of mind.” An evangelical, on the other hand, finds himself investing the words with something like their face value, no matter how crushing they may sound or how revolting to all his human instincts. The drama must include all the horrors somehow—real evil and real free will and hence real perdition, as well as the lilies of the field. Otherwise the thick darkness that shrouds the Passion of our Lord is not so thick after all. If the gospel says nothing more than that we should all try to be amiable, then there is a great deal of smoke and dust in the drama that ought long since to have been cleared away so that we could have been left with the gentle story that it really is.

Because of evangelicalism’s zeal to get people saved, we developed what might be called a “task-force” strategy. We mobilized to carry the gospel to every conceivable cranny of the human endeavor: to the jungle, the steppes, and out of the way aboriginal islands; but also to skid row derelicts, Washington’s social elite, prep school students, neighborhood children, military officers and enlisted men, doctors, businessmen, university students and faculties, Jews, and strangers on airplanes.

To this end an entire world of television programming has sprung up. The gospel needs to be carried into people’s living rooms, we said. An empire of Christian entertainment has grown up, complete with films, drama groups, rock and folk music, and celebrities. Evangelicals eagerly welcome people like Bob Dylan or Paul Stookey into the Faith: now the Word will get out since here is someone who already commands an enormous hearing.

These enterprises all came under the headings “witnessing” and “missions” for us. I was brought up with a lively sense of duty to tell my friends and chance contacts, as well as the remote heathen, about Christ. “Ye shall be witnesses unto me,” said Jesus to His disciples at the Ascension.7 “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you,” said Saint Peter.8 These texts spurred us to memorize Scripture so that it would be on the tips of our tongues if we found chances to witness. Whereas you might find a certain diffidence if you collared a Roman Catholic or a liberal Presbyterian on the street and shouted, “What must I do to be saved?” you would be fairly sure of getting an answer if your passer-by happened to be an evangelical.

Closely attached to this stress on witnessing, or “personal work” as we called it, was the matter of missions. Although foreign missionary work has a very ancient pedigree in the Church, we did not much speak of such men as Saint Martin of Tours, Saint Ninian, Saints Cyril and Methodius, or Saint Francis Xavier when we thought about missions. We tended to discover the wellsprings of world evangelization in the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries when men like Henry Martyn, William Carey, and Hudson Taylor set sail. Our emphasis on foreign missions, oddly, would have put us somewhat closer to the Catholics than to the Reformers since Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, whom we held in the highest honor, are not remembered principally for having fostered this overseas travel in quite the same way as the Catholics and evangelicals have done.

Foreign missionary service was at the top of the hierarchy of callings for us. The order went something like this: jungle missionary work; then other foreign mission work in some city like Rangoon, Algiers, or Chungking; then preaching; then “Christian work,” which meant joining the staff of a Christian periodical perhaps, or an evangelistic task-force like Youth For Christ; then secular work, the idea here being that God needed some people in the world to be witnesses right in the marketplace.

But there was no question, at least in my own imagination, that jungle missionary work was the noblest calling. The man with the pith helmet and Bible, slogging in knee-deep mud through the Congo, formed a sort of unofficial icon for me. We all had a picture, perhaps apocryphal, of David Livingstone dead on his knees in his hut, worn out with carrying the gospel to the ends of the earth. (David Livingstone, however, was never quite in the first rank of our undoubted heroes; there were too many ambiguities about his life, and about what, exactly, he preached. We liked his intrepidity, but we did not hear as much about him as we did about William Carey and Hudson Taylor.)

The corollary to all of this was that we had as our first priority the matter of finding the will of God for our lives. This meant quite literally that you began at an early age to ask God in your prayers to show you what He wanted you to do in life. The idea was that sooner or later, by means of circumstances, Scripture, and inner conviction, God would make clear to you whether you were to go to China with the China Inland Mission, or to Kenya with the Africa Inland Mission, or to Chicago with Youth For Christ. Perhaps—perhaps—He might want you on Wall Street, bearing witness at Morgan Guaranty. More probably He would have Vermont or Kentucky in mind, with Village Missions or Child Evangelism Fellowship, if your place was not to be overseas.

Implicit in this outlook on things was the assumption that the human race may be divided into the saved and the unsaved. Otherwise witnessing and foreign missionary work seemed somewhat ill-conceived. Here again we had Scripture and tradition on our side. The New Testament talks stridently and unabashedly about these two categories, and the Catholic church teaches that there is no salvation outside the Church,

It must be said in behalf of our charity, however, that any talk of one’s playmates’ being among the damned was virtually nonexistent. Naturally, if evangelical doctrine had been pressed home every time, some such conclusion would have been reached. But your imagination stopped a bit short of that. You were not thinking, “Bingy is going to hell,” as you played with him in the sandbox (I had a friend named Bingy). You hoped, if you thought about it at all, that one day Bingy might hear the gospel and believe it. Things became awkward if you felt you yourself should attempt Bingy’s conversion. Suddenly the whole gospel became wildly confusing, and you fumbled about among the phrases and eventually gave it up as a bad job.

This terrible experience was not confined to children. Many an unhappy evangelical has sat, writhing and perspiring, wondering how to open up a conversation and witness to the man sunk in his newspaper next to him on the plane. For sheer discomfort it is an experience not unlike being pressed to death. And it is almost indescribable to nonevangelical Christians who are not nearly so hagridden with the sense of responsibility on this front.

If the human race may be divided into the saved and the unsaved, there is a further distinction that crops up among evangelical Christians. It arises over the matter of “separation.”

The word refers to a number of points at which Christian behavior will differ from worldly behavior. It does not so much refer to outright sin (pillage, concupiscence, piracy) as to certain marginal but highly visible items. Often evangelicalism has been identified in the eyes of the world by means of these points. Wheaton College, for example, doubtless the best-known evangelical college in the world, will perhaps never surmount its reputation here, no matter what pure scholarship it produces.

Everyone knows that certain groups of Christians refrain from this or that activity for conscience’ sake. The Amish drive buggies and hold their clothes together with hooks and eyes rather than with buttons; the Mennonites won’t fight; Baptists are not supposed to drink alcohol; Catholics used to eschew flesh on Fridays. The list of items in the evangelicalism of my own childhood included smoking, drinking, dancing, cards (bridge, that is, not Old Maid), movies (all movies, until the borders broke down with Walt Disney, World War II news-reels, Cinerama, and finally television), gambling, theater, ballet, Sunday papers, mowing the lawn on Sunday, lipstick, and certain baubles which included earrings, but not rings, necklaces, or bracelets.

The matter of religious conscience is a matter of the greatest delicacy. It touches on some of the noblest instincts of mankind. One does not jeer at a Hindu woman for wearing a dot of red on her face, nor at a Moslem for touching his forehead to the ground, nor at a Quaker for refusing to vote, nor at a Jew for wrapping himself in a shawl and bawling his prayers at the corner of 111th Street and Broadway! All of these customs entail taboo.

All tribes, cultures, and religions have known that taboo lies deep in the human grain. The absence of taboo means that human life has sunk to a bestial level. There is a reason for every item on anybody’s list of taboos, and outsiders have to approach the topic gingerly.

What might be written as a superscript over the entire evangelical list of taboos is the word cleanliness. Saint Paul teaches, for example, that the human body is the temple of the Holy Ghost; hence, evangelicals have objected to poisons like nicotine being absorbed into this shrine. Long before the surgeon general started waving everyone away from tobacco, we were in there waving. As for alcohol, we would have pointed out that whatever may be said for it as a social lubricant, it is a dangerous substance contributing little to good health. We felt that bonhomie ought to arise from true fellowship, not from the haze of inebriation.

As for dancing, it sails too near the wind: here is one body, so full of the heat of desire, pressed to another, only fanning flames that ought rather to be dampened. This heat should be saved for the holy sacrament of marriage.

Cards: evangelicals had an idea—and who knows what truth is in it—that the origin of playing cards is all shot through with cabalistic and even obscene hints and that therefore it is just as well to stay clear of the whole business.

Movies: Hollywood is an evil place, and Christians should not support an industry that emanates from a purlieu like that. Besides, what you see in most movies is very far from encouraging virtue. The same goes for theater.

Ballet: the tutus and tights are much too brief and revealing. Somehow modesty is being violated.

Gambling: it is a manifest evil and at best a waste of time and a misuse of money.

Sunday: it is the Lord’s Day, and every possible routine activity should be set aside, not because God wants the day to be dull but because the principle of a sabbath rest is woven into the fabric of Creation itself.

Lipstick and baubles: paints and bangles have always been the marks of heathendom. Christian womanhood should be adorned with modesty and charity. The world ought to be able to perceive a beauty that does not owe itself to the cosmetic industry, which is, after all, a form of fraud since its appeal is to vanity, promising as it does to make us look younger and more beautiful than we really are.

Thus would run the rationale offered by the evangelicalism of my own background on these points. We thought of the early Christians, who absented themselves from Rome’s amusements and manners.

No single mode of life can settle the matter, of course. There will always be a paradox in Christian behavior, with Jesus dining and winebibbing on one hand, and Saint John the Baptist living a fiercely ascetic life on the other. Benedictine sparseness or rococo plenitude? Quaker quietude or Pentecostal noise? Total abstinence or gratitude for wine? The Christian gospel itself is fraught with paradoxes and mysteries, and no one style will exhaust its amplitude.

All of this bespeaks what, in my opinion, is the supreme hallmark of evangelicalism, namely, its extremely tender conscience. Evangelicals are not at all cavalier or swashbuckling about matters of piety and spirituality, much less about morals. If the Bible says no cursing, then the discussion is over. It is a sin to toy with God’s Word or make light of biblical injunctions. Evangelicals can never be saucy about sexual matters. They cannot pretend to be blameless, but the note struck in their preaching and teaching is that there is only one legitimate context for sexual activity; monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Even to record this is to invite catcalls nowadays, and hardly an evangelical family remains unscathed on this front. Nevertheless, evangelicalism itself makes no attempt to update biblical morality in the interest of winning greater autonomy and variety for us all, It is piquant that the evangelicals’ most powerful ally and advocate in these matters is someone whom many of them in the past looked on as the Antichrist, namely, the Bishop of Rome.

Evangelical spirituality stands or falls with private Bible reading. This answers to its doctrinal stress on the Bible alone as the touchstone. In some sense evangelicalism is very Judaic on this point; almost the whole duty of the Jews was to fill their children’s minds with the Law of the Lord.

In the household where I grew up, family prayers occurred twice a day. At 7:30 in the morning we all went from breakfast into the living room. With my mother playing the piano we sang a hymn, after which my father read the Bible to us. Then we knelt down, facing into the overstuffed chairs with our elbows sunk in the cushions, and my father led us in prayer, all of us joining in the Lord’s Prayer at the end. There was no awkwardness surrounding the rite. It was as natural as washing the dishes. In the evening we stayed at the dinner table, and again my father read and prayed.

Sunday school took us to the Bible as well. Its agenda concentrated almost exclusively on familiarizing us with the text of Scripture. Bible stories were told and retold, often illustrated with a device called flannelgraph, in which the teacher stood by an easel and put up small paper figures on the flannel-covered board as she told, say, of Abraham’s servant’s going out to find a bride for Isaac.

To this day biblical events remain in my imagination as they appeared on the flannelgraph. There were little palm trees and stone altars and even a rock for Jacob’s pillow. There was also a wonderful celestial ladder, shot through with light, on which the angels descended and ascended in Jacob’s dream. A rain of burning sulphur rocks falling out of the sky onto the little walled city of Sodom (you could get a whole city quite handily in one cutout) will aways be the picture for me, no matter what we are told by scholars about what never happened back there.

Evangelical Sunday schools are not full of demurrals about “myth” and “legend.” Tell the story as though it were God’s own story, says evangelicalism. Nothing is gained by endless hemming and hawing. Faith cannot feed on that.

Evangelical spirituality centers, finally, on personal daily devotions, also called “quiet time.” Just as all Christian traditions enjoin some sort of regular private exercises for the faithful (the Rosary, the Order for Morning Prayer, or some other aid), so the evangelicals emphasize the reading of the Bible itself. They find something farcical in the religious profession of people who voice loud opinions on God, prayer, or the spiritual life but who never pray or read the Bible. Seminarians who march in the streets and offer opinions on social matters but who say that Bible reading and private prayer have long since disappeared for them do not attract the evangelical imagination. Even more odd is the theologian who says briskly that he may find Jesus in the local bar or massage parlor but certainly not in cold and musty churches. One wonders just who it is, then, that people find in these musty churches.

The actual frame of mind of an evangelical as he comes to the Bible in his daily devotions is a matter of some importance. His whole ambition is to “get a blessing.” This can take on a somewhat magical aspect at times. I can remember struggling to wring spiritual counsel from the lists of names in 1 Chronicles or from the hair-raising tales of butchery in Judges. Generally speaking, however, the attempt turns out to yield fruit if it is pursued consistently. There is an agile immediacy about an evangelical’s attitude towards Scripture.

Evangelical prayer is extempore. We learned at a very early age to pray aloud with great aplomb. Usually we embarked on prayers with “Our dear heavenly Father, we just want to praise and thank Thee. . . .” This was a safe start. We distrusted such openings as “Almighty God,” or “Eternal God,” since liberal Protestants tended to approach Him that way, and we thought that they had perhaps not really met Him intimately.

The acid test of vocal prayer came at the end of the prayer, however. If someone finished his petition or thanksgiving with a bald “Amen,” he gave everything away. He was not one of us. A true evangelical used the scriptural formula, asking it all in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, or, in the shorter phrase, “. . . in Jesus’ name, Amen.”

If Bible reading and prayer form the taproot of evangelical spirituality, then fellowship is the characteristic activity. All Christians will agree that fellowship in Christ is the bond that actually unites them to other Christians, rather than race, family, money, class, or taste.

But evangelicals have made a major specialty out of fellowship. They talk to each other about the Lord. They meet in groups whose sole purpose is to bring Christians together for informal Bible study, often without any teacher, and for prayer and “sharing.” They speak openly about their inner burdens and about what God is teaching them. They find the embarrassed and tongue-tied religion of other Christian traditions incomprehensible. “Let the redeemed of the Lord say so!” was an extremely popular biblical text in my own church.

Testimonies play a major role in evangelical spirituality. In a testimony someone stands and says something about his present experience of the Lord. He might recount some victory in his personal life, such as the overcoming of some temptation, or perhaps tell of a decision that God has helped him make.

No account of the atmosphere in evangelicalism would be complete without some reference to its hymnody. It is difficult for nonevangelical Christians to appreciate the place occupied by hymn-singing among evangelicals. We sang and sang. Isaac Watts, William Cowper, John Newton, Charles Wesley—these were the big names. My father would sit down at the piano as he came through the living room at odd moments and play “When All Thy Mercies, O My God,” or “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” or “Praise Him, Praise Him, Jesus Our Blessed Redeemer.”

Evangelicals draw mainly on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hymnody for their “worship” hymns, but nineteenth-and twentieth-century revivalist hymns and gospel songs form a major part of the literature. “Jesus Saves,” “Blessed Assurance,” and “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” are favorites, as are “Since Jesus Came into My Heart” and “There’s Power in the Blood.” There is also an enormous number of “choruses,” such as “Every Day with Jesus,” and “Safe Am I.”

During the latter 1940s the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship performed a great service for our wing of evangelicalism by publishing a hymnal for student use that included a number of hymns hitherto unknown to most of us. Charles Wesley’s “And Can It Be That I Should Gain” and Horatius Bonar’s “I Hear the Words of Love” and others like these vastly enriched devotion for us. Groups of us met to do nothing but sing these hymns, hour after hour. They seemed to give shape to our experience of God and to articulate sentiments that would otherwise have remained somewhat amorphous. Later, when I came upon written prayers and the liturgy, I recalled this sense in which pre-set forms of words such as we have in hymns, far from quelling devotion or cramping the liberty of the Spirit, actually seemed to nourish devotion and give an infinitely larger notion of liberty than we would otherwise have had.

The obvious question that arises in the light of what I have sketched here is, Why set out on a pilgrimage at all? If home base was that good, what is there to seek? If the Reformation may be credited with fostering this sort of Cristian earnestness, zeal, and fidelity, where else would anyone want to turn?