EVANGELICAL SPIRITUALITY IN THE LIGHT OF PAUL’S LETTER TO THE ROMAN
Page 3
1.	Introduction	
2.	Scripture as the church's key resources.

3.	The fact of humanity's unrighteousness and injustice		8
4.	God's grace as the foundation of spirituality		10
5.	Christ's death as the heart of spirituality		12
6.	The reality of a present relationship with the risen Christ in the
Spirit		15
7.	Concern for proclaiming the gospel to the whole Jewish and
gentile world		19
8.	The  nature  of our transformation:  the  relation  of  mind,
worship, and life in society		21
9.	Conclusion		25
Copyright John Goldingay May 1 992
THE COVER PICTURE
is by Wendy Carter
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This booklet begin life as a talk in the context of the course on spirituality at St. John's College, Nottingham, and I am glad to acknowledge my debt to members of college for some of the points which follow, in particular to Colin Hart, Richard Hayes, Charles Sherlock, and Jane Sinclair. I am also grateful to members of the Grove Spirituality Group who gave me a testing oral examination on a draft of the booklet, and identified a number of important points which needed clarifying. Biblical quotations are from the New RSV.

1. INTRODUCTION
The word 'evangelical' suggests a particular set of theological emphases, and a particular set of emphases in spirituality. I want in this booklet to reflect on the nature of evangelical spirituality by setting it alongside the major themes of Paul's Letter to the Romans.
There are two reasons for examining it in that way. The more general one is the well-known fact that evangelical theology and evangelical spirituality take as a fundamental underlying principle that they ought to be based on scripture. This is the way to do evangelical theology and the way to test anything that claims to be evangelical. So the evangelical way to do theological reflection on a tradition of spirituality and to seek to develop it involves considering how scriptural it is.
The reason for looking at Romans in particular is that Romans is evangelicalism's classic text. J.I. Packer describes it as the fittest starting-point for understanding the Bible and theology.1 In particular, Romans is the basic text for modern evangelical spirituality. Martyn Lloyd-Jones gave his most famous set of expositions on Romans.2 When John Stott gave Bible expositions on Romans 5-8 at the Keswick Convention, it was recognized that he was thereby handling the key and controversial text for the concerns of the convention.3 Romans is the dominant text in Watchman Nee's The Normal Christian Life.*
My hunches in undertaking the study that led to this booklet were that Romans indeed affirms many characteristic emphases of the evangelical tradition in which I was brought up, that it puts a question-mark alongside other aspects or draws attention to further facets of spirituality which evangelicalism may have missed, and that it reminds us of important themes of theology and spirituality which the evangelicalism of the 1960s took for granted but which the evangelicalism of the 1 990s may have forgotten.
So what theological reflection on evangelical spirituality does Romans suggest?

 

First Impression May 1992
ISSN 0262-799X ISBN 1 85174 208 5

1	Fundamentalism and the Word of God (IVF, 1958) p.107.
2	They are being published as Romans (Banner of Truth, seven volumes so far, 1970-).
3	The expositions were first published in The Keswick Week 1965 (Marshall, 1 965), later as
Men Made New (IVF, 1966; Baker, 1 984).
4	Third ed.. Victory Press, 1961.

2. SCRIPTURE AS THE CHURCH'S KEY RESOURCE
Half-way through Romans 1 Paul states the heart of the message he preaches: 'lam not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, "The one who is righteous will live by faith" '(1.1 6-1 7). The gospel, salvation, faith, the Jew and the Greek, the justice of God. the key features of Paul's message already appear here. Much of the rest of the letter is but a further exposition of this opening statement, and we will find ourselves considering its themes as Paul comes to expound them.
One particular feature of it is characteristic of Paul's thinking in Romans as a whole, though it is not a theme he ever expounds independently. The phrase 'it is written' draws attention it. This marker reflects Paul's belief that his gospel is biblical, it is in keeping with the Hebrew scriptures with which he had been brought up. The evangelical emphasis on scripture's significance for theology and spirituality, to which I have already referred, is one learnt from a letter like Romans. It is through scripture that we find out what the gospel is and what a life lived by the gospel looks like.
For the church, of course, 'scripture' has acquired a broader sense than the one it had for Paul (a broader sense which may have been rather a surprise to him), but the principle involved in this dependence on scriptures is unchanged-or perhaps made more significant. Before Christ there had been a series of events which were of decisive importance for the achieving of God's purpose in the world, and the Hebrew scriptures bore witness to these. It is those Hebrew scriptures which are 'scripture' for Paul. That series of events had now come to their climax in Jesus, and the writings of people such as Paul himself now became the witness to their reality and meaning and in due course themselves also come to be seen as 'scripture'.
Scripture as he knew it was a key resource for Paul as believer and theologian. He did not derive everything from scripture; he found out the facts about Christ from people who knew Christ, directly or indirectly, and he experienced Christ himself appearing or revealing things to him from time to time. Indeed, although he had possessed the scriptures from the beginning of his life, had been brought up on them and taught to be a theologian by means of them, much good did they do him until Christ appeared to him. Paul discovered Jesus through an experience of Jesus. When that happened and worked its revolution in his life, one might not have been surprised if he had abandoned those Jewish scriptures. At the point it most mattered they seemed to have obscured the truth for him rather than enabled him to recognize Jesus.
In fact, when he then came to rethink who Christ actually was and how the gospel worked, he thought it out and checked it out in a dialogue with scripture in which scripture, not his own thinking, was the senior partner. His experience of Christ on the Damascus road was the beginning of his

SCRIPTURE AS THE CHURCH'S KEY RESOURCE
understanding the nature of the gospel, but as he sought to enter into a fuller understanding of it, scripture played a key role. When he asked himself, or was asked by others, whether that experience was real and authentic, scripture played a key role in establishing that it was. How does he know that the law of Moses fails to lead Paul's own people to live righteous and just lives?
Because scripture says so (chapter 3). How can we understand the significance and purpose of Christ's death? Scripture provides the categories for understanding it, in terms of atonement and redemption (3.21 -26). How can Paul claim that a person is justified by faith not by works? Because scripture says so, in the story of Abraham (chapter 4).
While Paul's own experience or thinking is sometimes his starting point, suggesting a conviction which he works out more or tests by scripture, his use of scripture is not just a matter of proof texts. It is not simply a matter of making up his mind what he thinks and then casting around for scriptures to justify it. The scriptures are his proactive resource (they shape his thinking ahead of time) as well as his reactive norm (they evaluate his thinking afterwards). The point emerges particularly clearly from the most sustained piece of theological argument in Romans, the discussion of the problem of the Jews' failure to recognize Jesus, in chapters 9-1 1. It was the scriptures that gave Paul the ideas for understanding that enigma. He does receive theological revelations, and Ephesians 3 may imply a claim regarding a revelation about this question, but the revelation comes through scripture. Scripture is his key resource for working out the truths about the gospel, and scripture thus decisively shapes the foundation of his spirituality.
In adult education at the moment people are emphasizing that our human experience is our key resource, and there is certainly an insight there. But generally we do not actually have experiences until we have acquired a framework for having them.
In the evangelical understanding scripture is designed to enable us to form the framework within which we have our experiences.
It is also the means by which we reflect on our experiences and evaluate them. I know someone who first found himself speaking in tongues and then discovered that 1 Corinthians talked about this so it must be all right. It is in the light of scripture that you discover what to make of your experiences. Ordinary human experience, and religious experience in particular, is a potential resource, but it is not self-interpreting or self-authenticating. We discover what to make of it by looking at it in the light of something else. For evangelical spirituality, scripture is the resource which makes this interpretation and evaluation possible.
It is in keeping with the conviction that scripture is our key resource that evangelical spirituality has focused on the Quiet Time with its stress on

EVANGELICAL SPIRITUALITY
reading the Bible systematically so that our mind comes to be shaped scripture's way, and on reading it in the expectation that we will hear God speak to us through it.1 In recent years evangelicals have learnt from other traditions just to sit quiet before God expecting God to speak to us out of the silence. Evangelical spirituality's focus on listening to God speak to us through scripture may have a more obvious basis in scripture itself; it certainly points to everyday with scripture rather than on everyday with Selwyn (as Selwyn Hughes would be the first to point out). I might add that the interest in silence which evangelicals are learning from more catholic spirituality is interestingly difficult to support from scripture. A parable of that fact is the appeal to Psalm 46.10 in support of the use of silence, given that this command to 'be still' is actually concerned to bid an army to stop fighting (cf GNB, NEB, REB) and has nothing to do with religious practice. There are scriptural pointers to a quiet, open, scripture-less seeking of God, but more pointers to a quiet, open, scripture-led seeking of God.
Scripture being Paul's key resource affects the form of his actual prayer and praise. Whether he cries out in anguish or cries out in worship he is likely to do so in the words of scripture, as Jesus did (see 8.36; 11.33-35). Evangelical tradition has its ways of praying, but they can seem to have little link with scripture. A useful example is the suggestion that prayer involves adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. It may be that one chief attraction of this scheme is that it generates the acronym ACTS. Its individual elements are scriptural enough, and the fact that as a whole it comes from tradition rather than scripture need not in itself trouble Anglicans, at least, who feel free to learn from tradition. But I am concerned that in the Psalter scripture itself suggests a different dynamic cycle of prayer and praise in which worship, lament, and confessional praise lead into each other; evangelical spirituality prefers a scheme of its own devising.2 It might also be suggested that the nature and content of the Lord's Prayer and of Paul's own prayers have (as far as I can tell) little influence on the prayer of evangelicalism.
Evangelical spirituality's focus on listening to scripture is one of the reasons for the enthusiasm many evangelical Anglicans feel for theASB, and for the lack of enthusiasm for it on the part of some people of more liberal theological views; the ASB\s full of scripture. It may also be one reason why evangelicals have become more fond of the Offices, if my impression on this matter is right, because praying the Offices takes us into systematic reading of scripture. It is the reason people often have a time of silence after the lessons in the Offices, that silence does give scripture opportunity to wash over us and give God the opportunity to speak some personal word to us through the passages.
1	The 'Quiet Time' which has been the staple of evangelical spirituality is a period of (perhaps)
twenty to thirty minutes daily, ideally in the morning. At least half this time is given to reading and reflecting on a passage of scripture; day-to-day reading may well work through the Bible systematically. The rest of the time is given to prayer stimulated by this reading, to intercession, and to other forms of prayer.
2	On the spirituality of the Psalms, see especially the works of Walter Bruggemann, notably
his The Message of the Psalms (Augsburg, 1 984); also my own Poetry and Wisdom (Bible Society, 1 988).

SCRIPTURE AS THE CHURCH'S KEY RESOURCE
As far as I can judge, however, Bible reading and Bible study does not have the prominence it once had in church services within evangelicalism, or in individual spirituality, or in parish fellowship groups and the like. Evangelical spirituality may be heading for a crisis or may already be in a crisis over this foundational feature. W. B. Glover has noted that the decline of evangelical nonconformity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century involved the Bible ceasing to be the key means of grace for evangelicals; for more catholic people the sacraments of course fulfilled that function, while for many nonconformists the Holy Spirit came to occupy the place once filled by scripture.1 Glover draws attention to H. Wheeler Robinson's book The Christian Experience of the Holy Spirit2, with the explicit starting point in religious experience implied in its title. Scripture having a reduced place in people's hearts and minds as we enjoy a renewed appreciation of the sacraments and a renewed appreciation of the Holy Spirit, all in the context of a stress on experience and of attempts to come to terms with critical approaches to scripture, the dynamics of the scene sound familiar and the prospects cause for concern.
Within evangelicalism scripture has the formal status of guiding principle; it is at best an open question whether it is so in reality.

1	See Evangelical Nonconformists and Higher Criticism in the Nineteenth Century
(Independent Press, 1954).
2	Nisbet, 1928.

3. THE  FACT OF  HUMANITY'S  UNRIGHTEOUSNESS AND
INJUSTICE
The main body of Romans opens with the bad news which is the backdrop to the good news. God's wrath hangs over us all, gentiles and Jews (1.18-3.20). Humanity is in bondage to its moral failure. To a Jew it might have seemed quite obvious that the gentile world lived with this bondage; we gentiles knew God was there and we turned our backs. Paul believes his own people are in the same situation, because they had more of God's truth revealed to them and they also turned their backs. So the whole of humanity is at fault and is destined to be condemned and punished.
Theologically we are talking about 'sin', but it is worth seeing how Paul actually speaks of the matter. The word 'sin' itself, hamartia, comes less often than the word adikia (1.18, 29; 2.8; 3.5). That term tends to be translated 'wickedness', but etymologically a-dikia suggests something which is the opposite of righteousness and also the opposite of justice. It covers going wrong in your attitude to God and going wrong in your attitude to other people. Humanity is constitutionally unrighteous and unjust, says Paul.
Evangelical theology and spirituality emphasize sin and guilt.
That is both a strength and a weakness. It is a strength in that it enables us to be realistic about what can be achieved in the world and realistic about human nature. Evangelical theology and spirituality know that social reform is not going to bring in the kingdom of God. They know that wickedness runs deep in the structures of human society, too deep for political and social action to reach. At least that is what evangelical spirituality has traditionally known, though some aspects of contemporary evangelical enthusiasm for the social and political make it look as if we have now forgotten it. Romans is about justice and righteousness, Paul's opening statement has declared, but the righteousness and justice that only God can achieve. The evangelical tradition shared socialism's caring stance but it also shared some of Toryism's assumptions about the self-centredness of human nature. It would not fall into the trap of thinking that once the Tories are out the kingdom of God will arrive.
There is another sense in which evangelical spirituality may need to come to terms again with Romans 1-3. These chapters' understanding of failure and guilt have had a profound influence on how evangelicals have seen personal spirituality. It made people see themselves before God as sinners, and that was right. No doubt it could become excessive and out of proportion, but I rather think that as evangelicals we have lost something of the right sense of our own responsibility, guilt and need of forgiveness which a former generation had. By God's own grace we have learnt to see ourselves as hurt people in need of healing, not just guilty people deserving of God's wrath. What has been done to us, and not just what we have done or failed to do, is of concern to God. We may well feel that a healing service is an improvement over the commination service prescribed by

THE FACT OF HUMANITY'S UNRIGHTEOUSNESS AND INJUSTICE
the Book of Common Prayer for Ash Wednesday. But Romans does call us to see ourselves as guilty people in need of justification as well as hurt people in need of healing.
Indeed, is not guilt often the inner need for which we need inner healing?
One question about evangelical spirituality's relationship with Romans 1 -3, then, is that we may no longer take it seriously, either in its understanding of the strength of wickedness in the world which social reform cannot reach, or in its stress on the guilt which affects the people of God and thus affects us and is the deepest aspect of our need, to which the gospel then speaks.
The other danger of evangelical spirituality's relationship with Romans 1 -3 is that we may take it too individualistically.
The evangelical stress on our responsibility and guilt to which I have referred was more individualistic than Paul's.
Throughout the letter he is writing on the broadest possible canvas. His argument in Romans is an argument about the history of humanity. It looks back to creation and forward to judgment day. It is concerned with the whole cosmos, the world above, and the world below. Evangelical theology and spirituality has tended to read it in an individualistic way and in an existentialist way. That does not mean that anything that evangelicalism said was wrong. It does mean that there were other things here in Romans to discover.
The fact of humanity's unrighteousness and injustice thus dominates Romans 1.1 8-3.20, declaring the bad news which is the background to the good news. The good news for spirituality comes in the subsequent section of the letter, 3.21-8.39.
Three key features of evangelical theology and spirituality emerge here. Its foundation is the grace of God, to which we respond in trust. Its centre is the death of Christ, which is compared with that of an animal sacrificed in the temple. Its promise is a living present relationship with the risen Christ in the Spirit.

4. GOD'S GRACE AS THE FOUNDATION OF SPIRITUALITY
The foundation of a life with God is the grace of God. 'All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by God's grace as a gift' (3.23-24).
The trouble with the word 'grace' is that in English it has become an essentially religious word. In the Bible it was the ordinary word people used when they had that strange experience in ordinary life of someone liking them and being nice to them against all the odds. Jacob arrives back from Mesopotamia imagining that Esau still wants his guts for garters. Instead Esau throws his arms round his brother like the prodigal son's father and bursts into tears, and Jacob understandably cannot comprehend why he has found favour, why he has found grace, in Esau's eyes. He thought he would need to buy Esau's forgiveness. In reality, of course, neither forgiveness nor grace can be bought. Grace means another human being loving, accepting, forgiving, taking our side, and putting himself or herself out for us when there was no logical reason, or at least no logical reason in us. It is this human experience which the Hebrew scriptures used to describe the way God relates to us, and which Paul takes up in his own writings. The grace of God is the foundation of our life with God. The appropriate response to it is our trust in God or in Christ; such trust is referred to eight times in Romans 3.21 -31, either side of that reference to grace.
Evangelical theology and spirituality stress the priority of the grace of God and the response of trust over against the importance of human initiative and human effort. The latter tend to be the emphases of liberalism and of liberation theology with their stress on human responsibility. Indeed, evangelicals often accuse people such as Jews and Roman Catholics of legalism or of believing in justification by works.
Now admittedly there is a paradox here, for evangelicals are also great works people. The accusation I have just referred to is often unfair, and I suspect it is an example of projection, the psychological mechanism whereby we accuse other people of our own weaknesses. Being great works people is one of the strengths of evangelicals, with our commitment to holiness, witnessing for Christ and sacrificial giving, but it is also one of our weaknesses. We talk about grace and trust, but tend to live by works, to be legalistic. The same is true of charismatics. It is simply a consequence of being human, because all human beings are like that. So evangelical theology at this point is magnificent; unfortunately evangelical spirituality in practice does not correspond to it. There is a case for saying that evangelicalism in general is in practice unhealthily guilt-ridden and guilt-driven. One of my colleagues with much more parish experience than me is inclined to reflect that evangelical parish life runs on guilt; it is the chief basis on which clergy get people to do things. So while we talk about grace and trust we may be involved in manipulating people and being manipulated by them with false guilt.
For some ordinands the most important thing that happens to them in training for the ministry is that they discover that their relationship with
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GOD'S GRACE AS THE FOUNDATION OF SPIRITUALITY
God depends on grace and trust, not on expectations and works. They have never quite been told that before, or the penny has not quite dropped. They thought being a Christian was about trying to live a life committed to God.
It is that, but it does not start there; its foundation is that God has reached out to us and shown grace to us. In the ministry, of course, such ordinands may then turn into the clergy who make their parishes run on guilt; like most spiritual lessons, this is one easily unlearned, or always needing to be relearned.
Among the ordinands who need to make this discovery are some who find college training difficult because all their life they have been doers; suddenly they are not, and they therefore do not quite know who they are. 'I do, therefore I am.' 'I achieve, therefore I am.'
At St John's College, Nottingham, we once had a visit from Canon Sehon Goodrich, who in a spirituality address talked about Descartes' phrase 'I think, therefore I am', and tried various alternatives on us. I especially liked 'I dance, therefore I am.' Romans suggests a much more profound iaerspective. 'I am graced, therefore I am.'
My wife Ann is disabled, but she is generally very cheerful, and smiles a lot. A little while after Sehon Goodrich's visit I said to her one day, 'You smile, therefore you are.' She said back to me, 'I smile, therefore you are.' That was theologically more profound than anything /said all term, I think. 'I smile, therefore you are' is true in human relationships, and true ' Between us and God. God smiles and we are. Not 'I work, therefore I am' or 'I minister, therefore I am' (which incidentally means that in the end my ministry is entirely self-centred, its object being to make sure that I exist), but 'God smiles, therefore I am.' That is grace, the foundation of evangelical spirituality, and my affirming it is the response of trust for which it looks.
Spirituality is often thought of as a matter of 'seeking God' or 'reaching out to God.' If evangelical spirituality begins to speak in these terms, it has lost touch with its most fundamental base, in the fact that God has already reached out and found us in grace in Jesus.
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5. CHRIST'S DEATH AS THE HEART OF SPIRITUALITY    I
The grace of God is expressed in God's giving up Jesus for us.
Thus the centre of evangelical spirituality is the death of Christ. 'While we were still weak, Christ died for the ungodly... While we were still sinners, Christ died for us ... While we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son' (5.6, 8, 10). Humanity's heaviest burden is its deep-seated unrighteousness, its moral failure, and it is the death of Christ which deals with that. Whereas the word 'sin' comes less often in Romans 1 -3 than we might have thought, it comes 42 times in Romans 5-8. In Romans as a whole it thus comes more often than in the whole of the Gospels. The death of Christ removes the burden of human failure which) otherwise weighs heavily upon us.
It is thus excellent that the ASB includes forms of the Rite A Communion Service which retain the Prayer Book emphasis on the once-for-all death of Christ which made it possible for us to relate to God. That emphasis in Paul, like his emphasis on scripture, raises questions about the stress on our own present experience in contemporary culture, which deeply! affects our approach to spirituality. The gospel is about an experience of God because it is first of all about the historical fact of Christ dying for us; it is this event which makes experience of God open to us. Further, in this understanding of Paul's, the death of Christ is not primarily an example of how we should let ourself be crucified (though it is that). Nor is it even primarily an expression of God's being identified with us in our suffering (though it is also that). It is the means whereby God deals with our guilt. Paul's emphasis makes us ask whether we are in danger of letting the problem of justifying God in the face of human suffering become more important than the problem of justifying human beings in the face of human sin.
For evangelical theology and spirituality the key element in the Christ event is not his incarnation, as it was for the anglo-catholic revival, nor his miracles, as may seem to be the case for sections of the charismatic movement, nor the Sermon on the Mount, as it may be for the man or woman in the street, but his death. That focus on the cross in evangelical spirituality is a characteristic feature of evangelical hymnody, and one which contrasts with the drift of charismatic hymnody. It appears in the evangelical understanding of the dynamics of the spiritual life, which involve letting Christ's death be the key to our justification and thus to our sanctification.
Paul expounds that in chapter 6. He starts from a possible objection to his gospel. Apparently the more sin there is, the more that gives God the chance to be generous with grace. Is it not logical, then, to sin some more, to give God more scope for this generosity?
I suspect that if I had been asked that question, I would have replied that people who behave in that way will soon find that God is capable of chastising and not just of showing grace. To react in such terms, however,
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CHRIST'S DEATH AS THE HEART OF SPIRITUALITY
would have been to qualify the stress on grace. It is thus not Paul's response. His response is more profound, which is one reason why he is in the Bible and I am not. His answer is, if you can enthuse about the idea of sinning some more, it shows you have not really understood the argument so far with its concern for the establishment of justice and righteousness in the world.'How can we who died to sin go on living in it?' (6.2).
We may find this remark puzzling, though Paul apparently expects us to understand it quite readily. It is a basic, elementary point (as he sees it), and one crucial to evangelical spirituality. We have died to sin, he says. Elsewhere he is capable of saying that we are dying to sin or that we should die to sin, but when the idea first comes it is that we have died to sin. In what sense is this so? It is the case simply by virtue of Christ's having died for us, and by virtue of our having been baptized into Christ. Paul puts the point more sharply in 2 Corinthians 5.1 4. 'One has died for all, therefore all have died.'
Our trusting in Christ and being baptized means that what Christ did counts for us. What Christ did, in effect we did, because he represents us. When people gather in General Synod, they go to represent the people of their diocese because they have asked them to do so, and what together General Synod decides goes for all of us who are Anglicans. Whatever they do, in effect we do, because they represent us. When the allied armies defeated Saddam Hussein, then we defeated Saddam Hussein, whether we actually agreed with military action or not, because they represented us. In a parallel way, anything Christ did, in effect we did, because by being baptized we have joined him. He has become our representative, our substitute. What Christ did as our substitute was to die, and when he died it meant he was dead to sin.
It is particularly important to understand this expression aright. We sometimes speak of people being dead to the world, they are actually or apparently fast asleep, hearing nothing and feeling nothing. That is not the connotation of the expression when Paul speaks of being dead to sin. He is not claiming that we are no longer aware of sin's pull, that sin has no emotional hold on us, so that we no longer find sin attractive. He is claiming that sin no longer has legal hold on us, has rights over us. It is in this sense that it has no power to hold us in bondage.
He has established in chapters 1 -3 that once sin did have legal power over us. It used to control us in the sense that it had the right to demand our death. So Jesus came and submitted to that claim, although he personally did not need to do so. He let sin exact its penalty. But of course once it has done that, sin loses its control or legal power.
This is the sense in which Christ died to sin. Once he had died, sin no longer had any power over Christ. He was free to begin a new life with God. And, Paul says, because Christ died for us, because we have joined him by being baptized, that also applies to us. He has died to sin; therefore we have died to sin. He paid the penalty on our behalf. It is a historical fact.
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EVANGELICAL SPIRITUALITY
There is a sense in which we are dying to sin, and a sense in which we must die to sin, but that is not the basic thing. The basic thing is that Christ died to sin, and rose to new life, and therefore as a matter of fact we have also died to sin and risen to new life.
Of course often we do not feel dead to sin. Sin seems attractive. We feel guilt. Sin tries to pull the wool over our eyes. Dying to sin we may be, die to sin no doubt we should, dead to sin we certainly are not. That is the moment when it is crucial for us to remember that this is fact. Christ died to sin; we have been baptized and have joined Christ; therefore we have died to sin. We must not be conned into disbelieving it.
There is a splendid British television series called Sorry, about a forty-year-old man whom his mother still treats as if he were a little boy. She succeeds because he lets her. He is a forty-year-old man, that is the fact, but he lets his mother con him into letting her continue to run his life. There are, of course, people like that in real life. I once knew a middle-aged woman who was terrified to telephone her mother because of the way her mother could make her feel guilty as if she were a little girl again. The only way forward for that woman was to start living in accordance with the facts, to stop letting her mother con her. Evangelical theology says the way forward in spirituality is to start from the fact that I have died to the claims of sin and that sin has no rights or power over me, because Christ died for me. That is the key to a life of mature obedience. The death of Christ is thus the centre of evangelical spirituality.

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6. THE REALITY OF A PRESENT RELATIONSHIP WITH THE RISEN CHRIST IN THE SPIRIT
Romans 7-8 brings into focus another feature of this central section of the letter. We have noted that in Romans 1.18-3.20 Paul was concerned about the law and its inability to achieve righteousness or justice. He now returns to the subject; the word 'law'comes 2 5 times in Romans 7.1-8.7. Underlying Paul's concern here is the fact that Christians are just as inclined to think that law can achieve righteousness and justice as non-Christians are. Old-fashioned pietistic evangelicals do that by laying down a new set of laws for Christians to obey, to replace the Mosaic law (as if the problem with the Mosaic law was its content rather than the fact that people did not obey it). 'As a Christian you must do this, you must not do that.' The content of these new laws may be right, but Paul wants us to remember that they cannot achieve righteousness. Evangelical spirituality says 'Make sure you have your Quiet Time every day, otherwise something nasty may well happen to you', even though theologically it knows that laws like that have nothing to do with attaining a life of true righteousness.
Nor can they achieve justice in society. The affairs of Britain and of the world community basically operate in accordance with law, but they are often still unjust. The rule of law does not necessarily mean the rule of fairness; the law can be framed in such a way that the needs of the poor and the powerless can still be ignored. Indeed, the law can be administered in a way which encourages that. If this is so in North Atlantic democracies, how much more may it be so under totalitarian regimes-which may still operate via the law. In the life of the world as in the life of the individual, all that law may do, Paul implies, is enable human beings to act unjustly with more effectiveness. Thus the law may actually work against righteousness and justice. We find that we want to act in a just way but that the system prevents us from doing so. We ourselves are caught up in the web of an unjust system. 'I can will what is right but I cannot do it' (7.1 8). 'When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand' (7.21). I am caught in a legal but unjust system, guilty but incapable of escaping it or changing it. We can make new laws, but making laws has little to do with establishing God's justice in society. It never seems to be effective.1
To which the appropriate reaction is, 'Who will deliver me from this body of death?' (7.24). Paul's joyful response to his own question is. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.'
There is one possibility for change, and only one, the fact that Christ came to die in order to implement God's righteousness and justice in the world by a route other than law. Then, however, Paul conf usingly adds, 'So then,
I	of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the
law of sin.'
I1	am indebted to J. P. Miranda's Marx and the Bible (Orbis, 1 974; SCM, 1 977) pp.1 83-85
for this societal reading of Romans 7.
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EVANGELICAL SPIRITUALITY
Evangelical handling of these three enigmatic sentences at the end of Romans 7 opens up an important question about our living relationship with God in the Spirit. Is the Christian experience of God basically a one-stage or a two-stage affair?
Evangelical theology and spirituality are ambiguous on the matter. They have sometimes read the first two of those statements from the end of Romans 7 to imply a two-stage process, the same two stages as those of classic Pentecostalism, often taken over by the charismatic movement. First we are converted, then later we enter into the fullness of Christian freedom in the Spirit. The trouble with this understanding is that the last astonishing phrase of Romans 7 goes back on the celebration of freedom. I still serve the law of God with my mind but the law of sin with my flesh. The more plausible interpretation of Paul is that he sees us as given all God's riches in Christ and in the Spirit when we are converted and baptized (even if some of us do have stupendous post-conversion experiences which tempt us to a two-stage spirituality) but then that he sees us always living as citizens both of this age and of the age to come, so that we always will live with that double experience from the end of Romans 7.
Chapter 8 is the other side to chapter 7 in its talk about the living relationship we have with the risen Christ through the Spirit. Romans 7 emphasizes a negative point, that it is not a matter of law. Romans 8 emphasizes the correlative positive, that it is a matter of the Spirit.
The commentaries give quite varying accounts of how the argument of Romans as a whole works, especially in chapters 5 to 8.
There are commentators who offer clear outlines of how one chapter is about sin and another chapter about the law, but on the ground in the text it does not seem quite to work like that. There is an argument that moves forward, but it is not a straightforward linear one. It includes recaps, which were no doubt a help to the Romans themselves, who listened to this letter, and were not sent home with photocopies. In addition, the argument itself moves forward spirally rather than directly.
Paul goes back over topics not only to recap them but to add to them.
So it is with chapter 8 in relation to what precedes. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus', it begins; the statement could have come in chapter 3, chapter 5 or chapter 6. But then it proceeds in a new way, 'for the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.' The Spirit, having hardly been mentioned before in the letter (only 1.4; 5.5; 7.6), is now mentioned twenty times in chapter 8, more than any other chapter in the Bible.1
The key points are made in verses 1 4 to 17.
1 Some occurrences of the Greek word Pneuma in Romans 8 refer to the human spirit, and there is debate about how many. But the general point just made is not affected.
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THE REALITY OF A PRESENT RELATIONSHIP WITH THE RISEN CHRIST IN THE SPIRIT
'All who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, "Abba! Father!" it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if in fact we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.'
We are children of God, as is witnessed to by the confidence and ease with which we call on God as our Father. There may be people who find it hard to call on God as Father because of their bad experience of childhood, but that was at least as much the case in Paul's world as it is in ours. He assumes that nevertheless people have an instinct to call out to father, and that we do this in relation to God on the basis of joining Christ. In calling on God as Father, we are calling on the Father of Jesus who becomes also our Father. Evangelical theology affirms that we have a relation with God like that of a child with a good father, and that we talk to Father accordingly. We do this naturally and instinctively (a fact which has often made evangelicals wary of liturgical form), and that is an evidence that the Spirit of God is at work in our spirit. The evangelical Quiet Time at its best is a time just spent being with Father.1 It is, however, an essentially individual form of spirituality. Its proof text lies not in Romans 8, with its corporate emphasis, or Matthew 18.20, but in Matthew 6.6.2 In Romans the Spirit's ministry is at least as much corporate as individual, as elsewhere the Spirit indwells the church as well as individuals. Evangelical spirituality shares in the individualism of the Western world.
Romans 8 suggests two implications of being drawn into a child-father relationship with God through Christ in the Spirit.
One is that we will walk in the way that Spirit leads, it is the people who are led by the Spirit of God who are the children of God. Evangelicals and charismatics often talk about acting as the Spirit leads, but we usually use the phrase in a different sense from Paul's. Paul is talking about the Spirit leading us in the way of righteousness and justice. That is what the law was supposed to achieve and could not; it is what the Spirit is therefore given to achieve, though arguably that has not in practice worked much better. The invitation and the challenge Paul sets in front of us is the conviction that we are God's children and the Spirit lives in us, so that we pray with confidence, and we live in righteousness and justice. In one sense we have been rescued from slavery (Rom. 8.1 5) but in another sense we have rather passed from one slavery to another (6.1 8,22). We are expected not so much to sing The servant king' as to live it.3
1 It perhaps also at least needs saying that Scripture portrays God as possessing the positive characteristics of motherhood as well as lacking the bad characteristics of fathers. The one to whom we pray is a motherly father and not a male parent as opposed to a female, though I shall not attempt to discuss here whether in our context Paul would be encouraging us to call on God as mother. On such questions, see P. Tovey, Praying to God as Mother (Grove, 1 991).
21 recall as a child being puzzled at Matthew 6.6 which in the Authorized/King James Version exhorts us to go into our closet to pray. In our house the closet was a walk in wardrobe/storage space off my sister's bedroom, less than a metre square and without any light.
3 The reference is to a song by Graham Kendrick.
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The other implication is that we accept affliction because we know that God's purpose is taking us somewhere and taking the whole creation somewhere. It was a striking feature of traditional evangelical spirituality that it was not very preoccupied by the problem of suffering. Contemporary evangelical spirituality often seems haunted by that question, and by how suffering fits with our convictions about God being able to release and to heal. Traditional evangelical spirituality was less preoccupied by it, perhaps because it was rather heavenly-minded. Like Paul, it looked forward to resurrection life. The negative way to put the point is to say that it was world-denying, but it also has this positive aspect.
People could accept affliction because they knew that God's purpose was taking them somewhere and that suffering and death could not separate them from the love or the life of Christ. I sense that this heavenly, future-oriented perspective is now very weak. It is one of the reasons why evangelicals, like others, are so troubled over the question of theodicy.1
On the other hand, the conviction that God is active in this world and therefore that we expect to see God's action in response to our prayer is an important aspect of evangelical spirituality. Donald English once wrote a book about worship called God in the Gallery,2 The title hints at a way of characterizing the theology of some people in more liberal Christian traditions who believe that God is certainly real, but not actually very involved with what goes on down here on the floor of the house. God created the world but rather leaves us to get on with running it on our own. Evangelical theology believes that the dying and rising of Christ sets up the possibility of a real living relationship between us and a heavenly Father who is involved with us in this life.
Evangelical spirituality invites us to enjoy that living relationship and to expect to see that involvement.
It suggests another aspect of the importance of the evangelical Quiet Time, of listening and talking to God each day. The fact that God is not just sitting there in the gallery but is involved here on the floor of the house means God answers prayer, and a prominent feature of evangelical spirituality has been intercessory prayer, having lists of people we pray for each day or each month, praying for people and expecting to receive answers. Indeed, for an evangelical 'prayer' could effectively mean simply 'intercession.' Right at the beginning of the letter Paul referred to his ceaseless intercessory prayers for the Romans and for the chance to visit them (1.9-10). Such prayer issued from a living relationship with the risen Christ in the Spirit. My impression is that the lists are less common than they once were, however, and I wonder whether even evangelicalism has a crisis brewing over the significance of intercessory prayer.
' Cf. the converse conviction of Dan Cohn-Sherbok that any adequate theological response to the Holocaust has to involve affirmation of eternal life ('Jewish faith and the Holocaust' in Religious Studies 26 (1990) 289-93.
2 Epworth Press, 1975.
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7.   CONCERN   FOR   PROCLAIMING   THE   GOSPEL  TO  THE WHOLE JEWISH AND GENTILE WORLD
When readers reached Romans 8 they often felt free to stop, or at least to jump to chapter 1 2. It is now widely recognized that Romans 9-1 1 is fundamental to Paul's concerns in the letter as a whole; a section of it even appears every year in the/4Sfi Sunday lectionary, a week before Advent. How does evangelical theology and spirituality relate to Romans 9-11?
Evangelical theology involves being committed to proclaiming to the whole world this gospel about the grace of God, about the death and resurrection of Jesus, and about the possibility of a living relationship with God. The media often confuse the word evangelical and the word evangelistic, as happened in an extraordinary edition of Def 11 on television which assumed that the decade of evangelism was the same as a decade of evangelicalism. Yet the confusion is a parable of a link between the two words which goes beyond etymology. Here evangelical theology stands over against the view that there are many ways to God of which the Christian way is just one. It assumes that Jesus is the one way and that the world and adherents of other religions need to know about it. So evangelical spirituality has emphasized prayer for the church's missionary work, giving towards the work of missionary societies and being willing to go to share in that work. It has emphasized the importance of one's own personal witness for Christ and the importance of living a life of holiness which will mean we commend Christ by our deeds as well as our words.
For Paul the way in which that issue surfaces is over whether the Gospel applies both to Jews and gentiles and on the same basis, and he fights all his ministry for a positive answer to both questions. It was there in his programmatic statement early on in the letter. 'I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek' (1.16). Needless to say he does not mean that something else can bring salvation to people who do not have faith but do have works. The argument of chapters 1 to 3 rules out that possibility. There is only one way.
Over recent decades, not least as theologians have sought to come to terms with the implications of the holocaust, there has developed some Christian unease over witnessing to Jewish people. People who feel this unease may point to the affirmation in Romans 9-11 of God's continuing commitment to Israel; yet it is precisely that affirmation which makes it possible and necessary for Jewish people to be given the opportunity to believe in Jesus. The fact of the holocaust may make it appropriate for (European) gentiles to leave the initiative in that task to the increasing number of Jews who already believe in Jesus, and to let their concern that the gospel come to Jewish people be expressed through support of such Jewish believers in this task. If gentiles do take that stance, however, they will do so with a parallel sorrow and anguish to those Paul expresses regarding the Jewish people's position (9.2) and with a continuing beseeching of God that by this other means Jewish people may come to recognize Jesus.
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Paul's concern for the gentiles, for the gospel going to the whole world, is expressed in chapter 1 5. The gospel indeed belongs to the Jewish people first; but God always ultimately intended that the whole gentile world should share it with them. This went back to God's promise to Abraham, and it redounds in the invitation in the Psalms and elsewhere to the gentile world to join in the praise of Israel's God (see Rom. 1 5.8-1 2). Paul's own particular calling and the overriding priority of his life was to minister Christ to the whole known gentile world, from the M iddle East to Spain via Rome itself, so that its offering might be sanctified and acceptable to God (see 15.15-29).
Evangelical spirituality assumes that the gospel of Christ is for the whole world, and it prays, gives and goes accordingly.
At least it once did, though I note the evidence that evangelical giving has become diverted from evangelistic mission to relief agencies, rather than giving to the latter being additional to giving to the former; I note the interest in dialogue and not just evangelism, and the desire to learn from people of other faiths (a desire I share); I note the hesitation to envisage people being in hell (or even being on the way to annihilation) just because they profess the wrong religion; I note the way evangelistic agencies working among both Jews and gentiles regret the opportunities they cannot take up because of lack of funds; and I wonder ... The decade of evangelism may have come not a moment too early.

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8. THE NATURE OF OUR TRANSFORMATION: THE RELATION OF MIND, WORSHIP, AND LIFE IN SOCIETY
If evangelical spirituality, like other readings of Romans, has moved rather quickly over Romans 9-11, it has then paid fair attention to the opening of Romans 1 2.
'I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.'
The closing chapters of the letter then work out some of the implications of this appeal. It reminds us of the importance of the mind, points to an innovative understanding of the nature of worship, and raises questions about our relationship with the world.
(a) The nature of Paul's call to transformation recalls how evangelical spirituality has emphasized the mind.
Evangelicalism has the capacity to be suspicious of reason and anti-intellectual, yet also the capacity to stress the importance of understanding our faith and of thinking straight.
The latter has already been illustrated by the evangelical approach to Paul's talk about death to sin which we have outlined. Evangelical spirituality says 'Do not be ruled by appearances or feelings over that question. Get your thinking clear on the nature of gospel truth and then live by it.' I believe Martyn Lloyd-Jones says somewhere that the whole secret of the Christian life is to get the mind, the heart, and the will working in the right relationship to each other. Romans 1 2 provides some justification for that view. We are transformed by the renewing of our mind. That is why theology is so good for your spiritual health, I tell students.
(If it isn't good for your spiritual health, it isn't theology.) There is indeed a negative side to that emphasis on the mind.
One reason why the charismatic movement had to happen was that evangelical theology and spirituality had become inclined to an intellec-tualistic rationalism. They needed to regain pietism's stress on a real felt relationship with God. But now this has been regained, and our generation needs to take seriously once more Paul's call to be transformed through the renewing of our mind. This was the emphasis of the Puritans which infused the theology and spirituality of 1 960s evangelicalism.1 While charismatic renewal has rescued evangelicalism from rationalism, at the same time it conveniently colludes with an existentialist stress in society. The mind has less place in worship now that the body has a more prominent place there. What Peter Adam calls this 'new pietism' can encourage
1 Cf. J. I. Packer's study of The spirituality of John Owen' in A Quest for Godliness (Good News, '\990)=Among God's Giants (Kingsway, 1991) pp.1 91-21 8.
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an uncritical following of feelings by means of the following devastatingly demonic quasi-syllogism.
1.	True religion must produce deep feelings
2.	My deepest feelings reflect true religion
3.	My deepest feelings must be true.1
I have noted in sections 2 and 4 that present experience, now much stressed, needs to be set in the context of scripture as resource and norm and the context of the once-for-all death and raising of Christ. The issue surfaces again here, for (as Peter Adam notes) the contemporary stress on experience is first cousin to the old liberalism with its stress on the ultimacy of reason. The shaping of our minds by scripture and the gospel is a key to our transformation.
(b) The nature of Paul's call to transformation suggests for evangelical spirituality an innovative understanding of worship. 'Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, ... as your spiritual worship', Paul exhorts. Later he will use the language of sacrificial worship again, in the description of his own involvement in the priestly service of the gospel and in offering the gentiles to God (1 5.1 6). In Paul's thinking, worship, ceremony, and sacraments seem to happen out in the world in a life lived in obedience to God and in a life given to evangelism. If there is a place for them in a cultic context parallel to that of the temple, such observances are secondary to the offering of these sacrifices outside in the world. If real worship lies in obedience and evangelism, church-type worship is a ceremonial version of that, essential but secondary to it.
Now the church itself does not see it this way. The church developed equivalents to Israel's ceremonial practices, with holy places (church buildings to replace the temple), holy time (Sunday to replace Saturday), holy rites (sacraments instead of sacrifices) and a holy caste (Christian priests to replace Israelite priests; and women, who are usually more canny, are now unperceptive enough to want to join in).
Worship does count. Paul talks about it elsewhere, even if he personally took few steps towards the development of those Christian equivalents to Jewish practices just described.
Worship is the activity to which we will give much energy in heaven and in which we will express great joy there. But here in Romans, at least, the real worship and the real self-offering is that effected out in the world. The worship and the spirituality of church and Quiet Time are authentic only insofar as they are the inside of that. We do not come to worship in order to escape the world, but to give liturgical expression to and to find inspiration for a self-offering which takes place in more literal form out there. The oppressed may be entitled to an enthusiastic worship which creates an
1 See Roots of Contemporary Evangelical Spirituality (Grove, Bramcote, 1 988) p.20.
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THE NATURE OF OUR TRANSFORMATION
alternative world such as denies the ultimacy of the everyday world in which they live. The powerful are expected to make their worship inform the process of creating a new world out there, in which they are called to be involved. Worship which merely confirms the status quo of an oppressive world receives the condemnation of a prophet such as Amos.
Further aspects of Romans 1 2-1 6 hint at Paul's alternative vision in this connection. The systematic greetings in Romans 1 6 suggest that the letter is designed to be read by the people of God gathered for worship. It is they who have been challenged in chapters 1 4-1 5 to an attitude of mutual acceptance and tolerance of diversity of conviction and behaviour, a 'generous orthodoxy'. Together they form one body enriched by its variety and infused by mutual harmony and self-giving (1 2.3-21). It models an alternative vision for society.
Apart from the church's difficulty in coming to terms with the moral and spiritual aspects to this vision, its development of a holy caste also stands in tension with it. It is remarkable that evangelicalism has been characteristically clergy-dominated; the notion of the priesthood of the whole church is another doctrine more important in theory than in practice. Like the faulting of other traditions' stress on works, the faulting of other traditions' sacerdotalism looks like a projection of an evangelical weakness which rightly gives us a bad conscience, for evangelicalism is characterized by hierarchical structuring and leadership-dependency. Here lay another reason for the necessity of the charismatic movement with its encouragement to 'body ministry', though that of course easily develops an authoritarianism of its own. The image of the church as a body and a priesthood also sits in some tension with the notion of the spiritual director now gaining popujarity within evangelical spirituality; the model of mutual support and direction through a group of peers looks in better keeping with the way Paul understands the church.
Enthusiastic worship must not be allowed to obscure the fact that worship belongs out in the world, and that we are transformed by the renewing of our mind. Historically evangelical theology and spirituality have been somewhat ambivalent about worship. In the nineteenth century being evangelical involved a stress on preaching and a suspicion of ceremonial, and in due course a lack of enthusiasm for the sacraments in reaction to anglo-catholic emphasis on them. There were thus historical reasons for nineteenth-century evangelical attitudes. It is an aspect of evangelicalism about which many of us may now feel uncomfortable as we have come to value the place of the body in worship and to appreciate the sacraments. But the evangelicalism where Morning Prayer takes 30 minutes and the sermon 45 minutes still lives, reminding us of that stress on the mind. Those of us who no longer find it congenial have special need to come to terms with what this aspect of evangelicalism stands for.
It reminds us that the content of the faith matters, that the preaching of scripture matters, that sacrament must not be allowed to overwhelm word, that movement, dance and ritual need to be servants of the gospel,
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because we are transformed by the renewing of our minds. Evangelicalism's traditional relative lack of interest in liturgy turns out to fit well with these two features of Romans 12 and 1 5. It fits, that is, with Romans' emphasis on the mind and with its assumption that real worship and real spirituality belong outside of church buildings (of which there were none), in obedience and evangelism in the world. Evangelical theology and spirituality had stumbled on something right.
(c) The nature of Paul's call to transformation also raises questions about how evangelical spirituality sees our relationship with the world. Traditional evangelicalism had a distinctive view of the way our transformation should distinguish us from the world (1 2.2). It expected Christians to have a different lifestyle from that of the world, though in ways which now seem trivial (we did not go to public houses, dances or films). Late twentieth-century evangelicalism encourages Christians to identify with the world-to look like the world and to be like the world, in appearance, music, enthusiasms, and political attitudes. We may not want to be distinctive in the way evangelical spirituality used to teach us to be distinctive, but there seems to be something suspicious about our being indistinguishable from the world.
Romans 1 2-1 5 make clear that our self-offering to God will issue in an attitude to the world. Their concern matches the concern for mission in the form of social action as well as in the form of evangelism, with which evangelicals have traditionally been identified. The theme of Romans as a whole, after all, is the righteousness and justice of God in world history (especially the history of Jews and gentiles), the triumph of God's just purpose in the lives of individuals, in the destinies of the peoples of the world, and in the history of the whole cosmos. Faith in Christ is not an end in itself or something which effects a merely notional change in people as they have righteousness imputed to them. It really makes them embodiments and agents of righteousness and justice rather than of lovelessness and oppression. They become instruments of righteousness and justice (see 6.1 3, 1 6, 1 8, 1 9). The words Paul uses indicate that the transformation expected by Romans 12.1-2 is the reversal of the failure analysed by Romans 1.18-3.20.
Being evangelical thus means being committed to social action in the world. In the nineteenth century Lord Shaftesbury both encouraged the development of missionary societies and campaigned for the abolition of slavery. Hannah More was involved in the development of Sunday Schools out of a concern both for education for its own sake and for children's instruction in the faith.1 They saw no tension between the two. They thus differ from evangelicals earlier this century who so feared the social gospel that they rather confined their faith to pietistic concerns and were inclined to reckon involvement in politics as worldly. The challenge to late twentieth-century evangelicals is the opposite one. It concerns whether they can affirm the importance of social action without losing their commitment to the preaching of a gospel about personal relationships with God.
1 See M. G. Jones's Hannah More (CUP, 1 952); also R. Nixon's study of Sunday Schools, Who's the Greatest? (National Society, 1985).
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Romans 1 3 of course goes on to commend a notoriously conservative
attitude to involvement in society. The reasons for this are the subject of
debate. They do point toward consensual rather than conflict models for
social change, whereas evangelicals like many other Christians have
recently been drawn in the opposite direction under the influence of
liberation theology. Romans 1 3 encourages people to acknowledge the
state authorities and work via them, not against them, as the nineteenth-
century evangelicals did, to great effect. In our own social and political
context, if there is to be a Movement for Christian Democracy the big idea
that is worth its pursuing is the development of consensual models for
decision making in society and government instead of the rather male
conflict model that dominates politics as we know it, in state and in
church. If the Tory Party has become the natural governing party in Britain,
Romans 1 3 may encourage Christians to get involved in it in order to
influence its policies in a direction which will encourage fairness in
society, in keeping with the vocation of governing authorities.
9. CONCLUSION
In identifying features of evangelical theology and spirituality which link with Romans, I do not imply that this is a complete appreciation or critique of them. If we looked at them in the light of Genesis, Ecclesiastes, 1 Corinthians, or Revelation other issues would emerge. But Romans is the theological canon within the canon by which evangelicalism asks to be miMMired, ;md applying this canon seems an illuminating exercise.
Nor do I imply that people are not entitled to identify themselves as evangelicals unless they are prepared to affirm all the emphases noted above, only that historically those seem to have been characteristic evangelical stresses. Nor are those emphases unique to evangelical theology and spirituality. There are Christians who would wish to affirm all of them and  yet do not wish to be saddled with the evangelical label. There is nothing sacred about labels; rather the opposite. Nor do I imply that these Christian truths are the only ones that matter or that other traditions of spirituality have nothing to teach us. But I do think that that the understanding of the gospel which we have been considering, and the way it finds expression in a spirituality, form a rich heritage.
Evangelicals are sometimes inclined to feel that they have little to contribute to discussions of spirituality, and when we do so I think we underestimate the importance of our tradition.1 These aspects of evangelical theology and spirituality are treasure for us to enter into and value for ourselves, and a resource for us to think through again especially at the points where we are inclined to have questions; it is precisely there that we may have something to learn. They are also a resource for us to be willing to share with people from other traditions even as we also seek to enter into the riches of theirs.
1 There is valuable material on the theme Towards a theology of spirituality' in the Evangelical Review of Theology 16/1 (April 1992).
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