I don’t see the need for a proliferation of labels. What is wrong with “Evangelicals who accept evolution”? How many group identities and sub-identities are really necessary?
I like Roger Olson’s explanation:
[quote]What do fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals and postfundamentalist/postconservative evangelicals have in common? Much.
All of us, as evangelical Protestant Christians, believe in 1) the supreme authority of inspired Scripture for faith and practice, 2) basic Christian orthodoxy as embodied in the consensus of the church fathers and reformers about the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ, the Trinity, etc., 3) a supernatural worldview, 4) salvation by God’s grace through faith alone, 5) personal conversion as normative for authentic Christianity, 6) the cross of Jesus Christ as the only means of salvation and as vicarious atonement, 7) the virgin birth, resurrection and visible return of Jesus Christ.
The distinctive hallmarks of post-1925 fundamentalism are 1) adding to those essentials of Christianity non-essentials such as premillennial eschatology, 2) “biblical separation” as the duty of every Christian to refuse fellowship with people who call themselves Christians but are considered doctrinally or morally impure, 3) a chronically negative and critical attitude toward culture including non-fundamentalist higher education, 4) emphatic anti-evolution, anti-communist, anti-Catholic and anti-ecumenical attitudes and actions (including elevation of young earth creationism and American exceptionalism as markers of authentic Christianity), 5) emphasis on verbal inspiration and technical inerrancy of the Bible as necessary for real Christianity (including exclusion of all biblical criticism and, often, exclusive use the KJV), and 6) a general tendency to require adherence to traditional lifestyle norms (hair, clothes, entertainment, sex roles, etc.).
How did the postfundamentalist evangelicals differ from them? Beginning in the 1940s and increasingly throughout the 1950s former self-identified fundamentalists began to shy away from that identity and ethos without embracing liberalism or neo-orthodoxy. They 1) sought to establish ecumenical cooperation and fellowship among evangelicals who disagreed about non-essentials such as eschatology and predestination [“generous orthodoxy”], 2) sought to be cautiously open to secular culture and higher education and its products, and 3) sought to overcome legalism that had become characteristic of much fundamentalism. (…)
The new evangelicalism was to be a broad tent that included everyone from conservative Presbyterians to Pentecostals to Advent Christians to Nazarenes to (recently) the Worldwide Church of God. Fundamentalists were invited to join but declined. Still, formally speaking, fundamentalists are evangelicals and, to liberals, anyway, all evangelicals are fundamentalists.
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