What makes a doctrine properly evangelical? - Mondays with McMaken

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What’s the point of having a blog if you don’t occasionally engage in some shameless self-promotion? With that in mind, I’m starting a new shameless self-promoting series entitled “Mondays with McMaken.” In these posts I will highlight small snippets from the book that I recently published on Barth and baptism (see below). If you find this stuff interesting, tell your friends about it. If you find it really interesting, buy a copy. If you find it epically interesting, buy 10 copies!

W. Travis McMaken, The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism after Karl Barth, Emerging Scholars (Fortress, 2013), 5.
What makes a doctrine properly evangelical? In the most formal sense, such a designation refers to doctrinal positions that are deeply reformational in orientation. Barth himself defined evangelical theology as “that theology which treats of the God of the Gospel.” What does it mean for a theological position to be governed by such an attention to the God that is revealed in the gospel (euaggelion)? It is the gospel itself that must hold one’s attention in doing theology of this character. In the first and constitutive sense, this gospel is that of Jesus Christ (see Mark 1:1), and so a properly evangelical theology will attempt to articulate doctrine with a self-conscious attention to his person and work. In a second and derivative sense, . . .
To learn more about the second and derivative sense, buy a copy!

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Comments

Matthew Frost said…
If you find this stuff interesting, tell your librarian about it, too!
September 09, 2013 8:57 AM
W. Travis McMaken said…
Yes - tell your librarian to buy it even if you don't find it interesting! ;-)
September 09, 2013 9:13 PM
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