Thanks for posting this excellent article. You wrote:The weakness of the evangelical identity based upon the Reformation lies in its discontinuity with the rest of Christian history as suggested by Oden. The assertion that evangelicalism is tied to the Reformation suggests that all evangelicals everywhere should share the same convictions. This assertion simply cannot be supported since the Reformation was a response to the context of its time. Simply rooting evangelicalism in the Reformation negates the fact that evangelicals share the same history as the rest of Christendom.I'm not sure which part you're calling unsupportable: the assertion that evangelicalism is tied to the Reformation, or the idea that all evangelicals should share the same convictions. I think both are true. First, there would be no evangelicalism if not for the Reformation, as much of the evangelical identity is rooted in the break with the Catholic tradition which the Reformation signaled. Second, total unity as a goal in evangelicalism was rooted in the modernist assumption that we could apply logic and resolve all controversies through systematic investigation. So, rather than being a weakness, perhaps this discontinuity is a strength of evangelicalism – if we use it as an opportunity to look farther back, to take our cues from the early church rather than accumulated traditional baggage. Robert Webber, in Ancient-Future Faith, has pointed out the desire among evangelicals to return to our ancient roots. This is not just a call for simple, biblical Christianity, but a complex internalizing of our rootedness in the first five centuries of church history. While western evangelicals insist that their expression of Christianity is biblical there must also be an acknowledgement that the form of the expression is embedded in western culture.This is a very good point, but it can come as a shock to many evangelicals because we are not aware that what we have is a cultural expression of Christianity; we think of it as the correct way, and if there were a better way, we would be doing it. Uncovering this misconception has been o­ne of the primary return benefits to those sending missionaries. To butcher a phrase from Mark Twain, if we thought we were it, mission work set us straight. We need more of this two-way flow between the west and non-western Christianity. If evangelicalism is to survive in this new climate of global awareness, it must become less distinctly western and more universal – more “catholic,” as it were. For this to happen, the western Church must listen to the African and Asian Church, so we can see outside the box of our own culture, whether it is modern or postmodern elements we need to transcend.