Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Monday, July 24, 2023
Moore is a former Southern Baptist leader and Gospel Coalition council member who is now the editor of Christianity Today magazine. The mere fact that he’s now the editor there shows something is afoot, given that Moore was historically strongly complementarian and Christianity Today has long been egalitarian. As I noted in a previous post, Moore wrote a column in March of this year saying that evangelicals needed to rethink their gender wars. Though obviously in a Moore style rather than a Keller one, it is an almost perfect instantiation of Keller’s framework and strategy. 

The term “Big Eva,” short for big evangelicalism, was coined, I believe, by the theologian Carl Trueman, who has been using it since at least 2014. It’s a catchall term for evangelical elites and powerbrokers, mostly referring to the leadership of the New Calvinist movement and adjacent spaces.
New Calvinism is but one faction of the evangelical world, but is disproportionately influential, particularly in enforcing doctrinal boundaries. As sociologist Brad Vermurlen noted in his academic study of the movement, its influence is far greater than its numbers. Hence what these leaders do is highly consequential for evangelicalism as a whole. As he put it, “New Calvinist leaders’ symbolic capital (recognition or esteem) translates into symbolic power as the authority to define legitimacy and membership in the field.”
New Calvinism, along with the rest of the evangelical field, is facing a rapidly shifting landscape as a result of the transition to the negative world. The dawn of the negative world – one in which for the first time in the 400 year history of the United States, secular society views Christianity negatively – has produced significant intra-evangelical conflict, realignment, and even deformation in some cases. As Vermurlen put it:
Evangelicalism in America writ large can no longer properly be considered a unified Christian movement but instead is a heterogeneous arena of conflict and contestation—that is, a field. It is not merely diverse; it is divided.
For New Calvinism in particular, its leaders face additional challenges. First, the movement, while far from dead, is past its peak in terms of energy and influence, something Vermurlen also notes. Secondly, the leading lights of this movement were baby boomer or older figures who are retired (John Piper), have died (Tim Keller), or soon will no longer be active. The movement today needs to take steps to reinvigorate itself.
In this newsletter I will explain a core element of how some of them are planning to reposition themselves for the future by redefining “legitimacy and membership.” This strategy is to redraw the boundaries of the movement by eliminating complementarianism and replacing it with anti-fundamentalism.
Complementarianism is the gender theology that says only men can be pastors and that husbands are the head of the home. Big Eva has been firmly complementarian, treating that not as a first order matter necessary for salvation, but defining part of the boundary that defined their own community as instantiated in organizations like the Gospel Coalition. In the proposed strategic change, complementarianism would be downgraded further as becoming more a matter of personal conscience that does not function as a community boundary. (The alternative to complementarianism is egalitarianism, where women can be pastors and husbands and wives hold equal leadership weight in the home).
In other words, as New Calvinism loses traction – and comes under increasing attacks from the right of a variety and intensity previously unseen – this strategy says the movement should responds by shifting left, acquiring new allies among more conservative leaning egalitarians. Rather than a solidly conservative movement, as New Calvinism had previously been, this new alliance would be much more of a self-consciously centrist movement (possibly under new branding).
Brad Isbell, who hosts a podcast called Presbycast, has suggested an additional reason to make this move. He points to the ongoing split in the United Methodist Church, in which over 6,000 conservative leaning churches have departed the denomination. Methodist theology long ago led to an acceptance of female pastors. So creating space to ally with egalitarians creates the potential for finding new allies among this large block of Methodists (although Methodism is theologically very different from Calvinism, so it’s not clear what that would look like).
Tim Keller’s Strategy for Renewing the American Church
This new strategy was explicitly outlined by Tim Keller, arguably the most respected and influential New Calvinist leader. He wrote a four part series on the decline and renewal of the American church in 2021 and 2022. Then he consolidated these installments and added a lot of new material, publishing a consolidated version late last year.
This consolidated strategy for the future of the church was released about the same time as his final book Forgive. He had terminal cancer at the time, and died six months after its publication. The fact that this was in essence his final publication shows how important he obviously thought it was. While he cannot drive its implementation, given his intellect, thoughtfulness, track record of success, and wide respect, this strategy will and should receive significant attention from evangelical leaders. There’s a lot of good material in there and I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
Keller divides evangelicalism into four zones ranging from conservative to liberal. On his graphic of this, conservatives are to the left and liberals are to the right.
He defines Zone 1 as Fundamentalism, Zone 2 as Conservative Evangelicalism (complementarian), Zone 3 as Egalitarian Evangelicalism, and Zone 4 as Ex- or Post-Evangelicalism. He further divides Zones 2 and 3 into subregions A and B. A key difference between these sub-zones are a willingness to work with people in the other zone. So Zone 2b are complementarians willing to work with egalitarians, and Zone 3a are egalitarians willing to work with complementarians.
The fact that his “zone of renewal” spans 2b and 3a shows that he is explicitly dissolving any boundary between complementarianism and egalitarianism. Now, Keller himself has long been willing to work with egalitarians as far as I know. At the same time, he co-founded the Gospel Coalition, the key New Calvinist hub, as an explicitly complementarian organization, showing that he previously put something of a high value on this distinction.
As the chart indicates, he proposes to divide from Zone 1 fundamentalism, saying, “Something like the evangelical-fundamentalist split of the 1940s may need to happen (or is happening) again.” He calls this “dividing with tears and grace.” Then he wants a new movement that combines both complementarian and egalitarian elements.
He sums up the strategy as:
Generally speaking—the way forward is to (a) divide from Zones 1 and 4 in different ways, and (b) bring both individuals, and leaders and some older institutions most likely from the ‘right half’ of Zone 2 and the ‘left half’ of Zone 3 into a new Zone 5. (c) Then: do the strategic initiatives, launch the mission projects, and start new institutions.
This is about as clear as it gets. He wants to eliminate complementarianism as a movement boundary and replace it with anti-fundamentalism (New Calvinism having already divided from Zone 4 ex-vangelicalism). So when I say this is the strategy, I’m not making something up that’s not really there. It’s explicit.
Russell Moore Puts the Plan Into Action
Keller’s strategy could be viewed as little more than an academic exercise were it not for the fact that we see various elements of the evangelical world starting to put it into practice.
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Not everyone in Malachi’s day shared this cynical attitude toward the Lord. Some still feared the Lord, and the Lord saw that attitude and kept them as His “treasured possession,” (segullah; Mal. 3:17), the same word used to describe Israel in Exodus 19:6. The Lord would soon appear in His temple to bring the justice for which people were supposedly longing (Mal. 3:1–2). He would separate the righteous from the wicked once for all, and those who feared the Lord would be vindicated as His true people, while the wicked would be judged and destroyed (Mal. 4:1–3). 

The Lord says many challenging things to His post-exilic people through the prophet Malachi. The book of Malachi is arranged as a series of seven prophetic disputations that each begin with a bitter saying of the people to which the Lord responds. Most of these oracles are searching rebukes of the attitudes and actions of Malachi’s contemporaries. However, before the Lord rebukes the people, He begins by affirming His electing love for them, which is the reason they continue to exist after the judgment of the exile. Before He says, “This is what I have against you,” the Lord first declares, “I love you” (Mal. 1:2).
1. Malachi reveals that God’s electing love is always the starting point.
The people, meanwhile, respond with a rebuff, “How have you loved us?” (Mal. 1:2). This is a question to which the Lord gives a surprising answer. We might have expected the Lord to point to the exodus and conquest of the land of Canaan, where He performed mighty miracles to protect His people and grant them their inheritance. Instead, the Lord points Israel even further back, to the election of their forefather, Jacob, and the contrasting rejection of his brother, Esau (Mal. 1:3). This utterly undeserved love is the reason there is still an Israel after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the exile. Israel had suffered for her sins, to be sure, but she had nonetheless been restored because of the Lord’s great love. Edom, the descendants of Esau, survived the Babylonian period relatively unscathed by aiding the Babylonians (see Obad. 1:10–14). But Edom’s present comfort would soon be destroyed, and her fall would be full and final (Mal. 1:4–5). God’s chosen people might stumble through their sins, but they will not fully fall, for the Lord holds them up out of love (see Ps. 37:23–24).
2. Malachi demonstrates that people are tempted to cynicism when life is hard.
In the book of Malachi, the people’s response to the Lord is deeply cynical from beginning to end. At the beginning, they brush off the Lord’s declaration love for them (Mal. 1:2).
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A church generally will follow the example of its pastor. Through their teaching, through their example, pastors play a huge role in setting the culture of the church. Whatever the pastor is passionate about, that will come through, and the congregation usually will follow. As a general rule, the pastor will generally be the most spiritually-minded person in the congregation, because they’re the ones giving themselves to studying and preaching God’s Word. Which means how we live really matters. We want pastors to be men of “eminent piety.”

For Spurgeon, the Pastors’ College, out of all the many institutions of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, was the one that was “dearest to his heart.” Every Friday afternoon, after a long week of study, one of the favorite times of the students was when Spurgeon would lecture on a variety of topics related to pastoral ministry. And out of the many topics that he preached on, the one that he emphasized the most was the importance of the pastor’s “eminent piety,” that is his character.
We live in a day when so many gifted pastors and church leaders with large public ministries go astray in their private lives, in their character. And as a result, all that public ministry comes crashing down. This was no different in the 19th century. Spurgeon understood this well and he placed “eminent piety” as his first qualification for his students who were aspiring to be teachers. All who find themselves in the position of being a teacher of God’s Word should follow Paul’s admonition to Timothy: “Pay close attention to your life and your teaching.” This is what Spurgeon called “the minister’s self-watch.”
But why does a pastor’s character matter?
We Are Our Own Tools
Spurgeon puts it this way:
We are, in a certain sense, our own tools, and therefore must keep ourselves in order. If I want to preach the gospel, I can only use my own voice; therefore I must train my vocal powers. I can only think with my own brains, and feel with my own heart, and therefore I must educate my intellectual and emotional faculties. I can only weep and agonize for souls in my own renewed nature, therefore must I watchfully maintain the tenderness which was in Christ Jesus. It will be in vain for me to stock my library, or organize societies, or project schemes, if I neglect the culture of myself; for books, and agencies, and systems, are only remotely the instruments of my holy calling; my own spirit, soul, and body, are my nearest machinery for sacred service; my spiritual faculties, and my inner life, are my battle ax and weapons of war.
When it comes to the ministry of the Word, we are the tool, the instrument for conveying the gospel. That’s not to say that we ourselves are the Good News. No, we are jars of clay, bearing the treasure of the gospel. But at the same time, it matters how we conduct our lives. I think of Paul’s words to Timothy
2Tim. 2:20       In a large house there are articles not only of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay; some are for noble purposes and some for ignoble. 21 If a man cleanses himself from the latter, he will be an instrument for noble purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.
It is interesting to think about all the other things we think make for an effective minister: the latest laptop, a massive pastoral library, a powerful Bible study software tool, resources to help with sermon illustrations, on and on it goes. There is no shortage of pastoral tools and resources that Lifeway, Crossway, Logos, and everybody else wants to sell you. And in one sense, all those things are fine. But at the end of the day, as a minister of God’s Word, those things are not what carry the gospel. You are the vessel, the instrument of the gospel. As a pastor who owned thousands of books, Spurgeon reminds us that in the end, it’s character and life that matter.
Robert Murray M’Cheyne writing to a minister friend who had gone to study German theology put it like this,
I know you will apply hard to German, but do not forget the culture of the inner man — I mean of the heart.
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