Liberal Evangelicalism

Within Anglican churches evangelicalism is the name given to the movement founded and fostered by John Wesley. Those followers of Wesley who did not stay inside the Church of England became known as Methodists. Those who remained in the Church of England formed the evangelical party, which took shape during the latter years of the eighteenth century. The evangelical party flowered in the nineteenth century and still continues to be influential. A crisis of faith was created during the nineteenth century by the rise of new historical and scientific methods and the widespread replacement of the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies by the new thought of Kant, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, and others. Liberal evangelicals sought to incorporate the new learning in a reformulated evangelical theology which retained its loyalty to the gospel and its emphasis on atonement and sanctification while at the same time accepting a critical stance toward the biblical text, the evolutionary account of creation, a scientific attitude toward miracles, a morally based criticism of doctrines like predestination, and a commitment to social justice as a major Christian obligation. Liberal evangelicalism has had a stronger influence on the Episcopal Church than on the Church of England, where its counterpart has been modernism.