Drippings from the Honeycomb
More to be desired are [the rules of the Lord] than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. (Psalm 19:10)
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To understand ‘an evangelastic’ one first needs to understand that it is a play on words with an evangelical. An evangelical is a broad adjective to describe Christian, ‘an evangelical Christian.’ All Christians should be evangelical because evangelical, euangelion in Greek, simply means Gospel. And the Gospel is at the heart of the Christian faith. It is the good news of Jesus death and resurrection (1 Cor 15:3–5), the proclamation of the good news of a king who’d won victory over sin and death and hell so that sinners who repent and trust in this King might have forgiveness and new life.
That is not all an evangelical is. Evangelicals, like all Christians, uphold the early Creeds as expressions of Biblical teaching, and as Protestants, uphold the core Reformed tenets of the Reformation (like the 5 solas, or the major confessions of Protestant orthodoxy, etc). Historian David Bebbington further identified 4 categories common to most evangelicals: biblicism: a focus on Scripture, crucicentrism: proclaiming Christ crucified, conversionism: the need for change, to repent and believe; and activism: spreading the good news and helping the poor. So, if this is a glimpse of what it means to be evangelical, what is an evangelistic? Enter the rubber band, first patented in 1845. Bands to hold things together that were elastic quickly became part of the office landscape (and toyscape too!). Elastics are stretchy. Thus, when a friend of mine heard a native Cornish speaker from Cornwall, England, with his thick accent try to say ‘evangelical,’ my friend mistook him to have said, ‘evangelastic.’ Because of the stretchiness of many modern evangelicals, he loved it and the term was coined. I have since used it extensively. An evangelistic is someone who generally holds to the above but has departed from some aspect (or aspects) of the old evangelical consensus. Sometimes this is for want of sound teaching, but more often because they are seeking to be less offensive to the culture, conform to prevailing trends, be seeker sensitive, etc. Thus they ‘stretch’ their beliefs beyond the form of the original. We should of course be adaptable to the times, however, we should never abandoned key evangelical tenets for convenience’s sake. Let us not be evangelastics! Did God save Adam and Eve or in the curse did they ultimately perish in hell?
The Bible isn’t overly clear but there are some hints to suggest they were saved:
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