The Contemporary Era
From the fundamentalist–modernist controversy to global Pentecostalism, neo-orthodoxy, evangelical resurgence, and the digital age — a century of disorientation, expansion, and theological recovery.
Framework note. The Contemporary Era inherits every unresolved tension of the Modern Era — the authority of Scripture, the supernatural, the person of Christ, the nature of the church — and adds new pressures: two world wars, decolonization, the demographic shift of Christianity to the global South, the rise of secularism in the West, and the digital reordering of attention itself. This survey traces the major movements and asks where Reformed evangelical Christians have stood, and where we still must stand, faithfully.
1. The Contemporary Era at a glance
The Contemporary Era is the century the church entered with confident liberal optimism and that ended with that optimism shattered, displaced, and reframed. The First World War broke the old liberal assumption that progress was inexorable. The Russian Revolution opened seven decades of state-enforced atheism across a third of the globe. The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the collapse of the European empires forced Christian theology to ask what humanity actually is, what evil actually is, and what the gospel actually says — without the comfortable cushion of Christendom.
At the same time, the church was being remade demographically. By the start of the century roughly four-fifths of all Christians lived in Europe or North America. By the end of the century the centre of gravity had shifted dramatically south and east — to sub-Saharan Africa, to Latin America, to East Asia. See: Church History pillar The story of the Contemporary Era is therefore not only a Western story of controversy and recovery; it is the story of a global church.
2. Political and ecclesial setting
The Contemporary Era unfolds against four collapses and one expansion. The first collapse was the European order in 1914–1945: two world wars, fascism, communism, and the Holocaust. The second was the colonial order: between roughly 1945 and 1975 the European empires dissolved and the global South began to speak in its own voice — politically, economically, and ecclesially. The third was Christendom in the West: post-war secularization in Europe, the 1960s cultural realignment in North America, and the slow drift of mainline Protestantism from cultural centrality to cultural marginality. The fourth was the philosophical confidence of high modernity itself: by the late twentieth century, the assumption that reason, science, and progress would deliver a coherent public truth had given way to fragmentation, suspicion, and what some have called the postmodern condition.
The expansion was the global church. The missionary century (c. 1792–1910) had planted churches that, by the second half of the twentieth century, had become independent, self-governing, and rapidly growing. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, born around 1906, spread across Africa, Latin America, and Asia faster than any Christian movement in history. By 2010 there were almost certainly more Christians worshipping in Mandarin and in Yoruba than in German or French.
3. Principal figures
J. Gresham Machen
Confessional Old Princeton's last great defender and founder of Westminster Theological Seminary (1929). His Christianity and Liberalism (1923) argued — calmly and devastatingly — that liberal Protestantism was not a variant of Christianity at all but a different religion.
Karl Barth
Dialectical The most influential Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. His Römerbrief (1919, revised 1922) detonated nineteenth-century liberalism and reasserted the otherness of God and the priority of revelation. The Church Dogmatics (1932–1967) is the largest single Protestant systematic theology ever attempted. Reformed evangelicals read Barth gratefully for his christocentrism and against liberalism, and critically on Scripture, election, and universalism.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Confessing Church Pastor, theologian, and martyr. Co-author of the Barmen Declaration (1934) against the Nazi co-option of the German church; executed at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945 for involvement in the resistance. The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together remain widely read.
C. S. Lewis
Apologist Oxford and Cambridge literary scholar whose lay apologetic — Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, The Chronicles of Narnia — reached a vast twentieth-century English-speaking audience and shaped the imagination of generations of evangelicals.
Cornelius Van Til
Presuppositional Westminster apologist who recast Reformed apologetics around the impossibility of the contrary: only the triune God of Scripture provides the preconditions of intelligibility. Engaged Barth, modernism, and Roman Catholicism.
Carl F. H. Henry
Neo-evangelical First editor of Christianity Today (1956), founding faculty member of Fuller Seminary, author of The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) and the six-volume God, Revelation and Authority. The most important American evangelical theologian of the post-war period.
Billy Graham
Evangelist Preached the gospel in person to more people than anyone in history (an estimated 215 million across 185 countries). His 1949 Los Angeles crusade marked the cultural arrival of neo-evangelicalism. Catalyzed the Lausanne Movement (1974) and held global influence for half a century.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Preacher Welsh physician turned preacher of Westminster Chapel, London (1939–1968). Recovered expository preaching for a generation of British evangelicals; his Ephesians and Romans series and Studies in the Sermon on the Mount remain in print and in use.
John R. W. Stott
Anglican evangelical Rector of All Souls, Langham Place. Lead drafter of the Lausanne Covenant (1974). Author of Basic Christianity and The Cross of Christ. Shaped global Anglican evangelicalism and the Lausanne Movement's commitment to whole-Bible, whole-gospel mission.
J. I. Packer
Reformed Anglican Author of Knowing God (1973), Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, and a key drafter of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978). Carried Old Puritan and Reformed instincts into popular twentieth-century evangelicalism.
R. C. Sproul
Teacher Founded Ligonier Ministries (1971). Brought systematic Reformed theology, the doctrines of grace, and historic confessions to an enormous lay audience through teaching, broadcasting, and books such as The Holiness of God and Chosen by God.
John Stott, John Piper, D. A. Carson, Tim Keller, Sinclair Ferguson
Reformed evangelical recovery The late twentieth century saw a broad Reformed evangelical recovery — expository preaching, the doctrines of grace, the gospel as the centre, and a confident engagement with culture — through figures including these and others such as Wayne Grudem, Mark Dever, Don Carson, Michael Horton, and Kevin DeYoung.
Lesslie Newbigin
Missiologist Bishop of the Church of South India and later missionary to England. Foolishness to the Greeks and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society framed the post-Christendom missionary encounter of the West with its own secular culture.
Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh
Global South Walls (Scottish) and Sanneh (Gambian) reframed the story of Christianity as a translation movement that has shifted, again and again, across cultures and languages. Their work taught Western Christians to see the global South not as the church's mission field but as its centre of gravity.
4. Doctrinal developments
The reassertion of revelation (Barth and beyond)
Against the nineteenth-century reduction of Christianity to religious experience or ethical idealism, Karl Barth reasserted the priority of God's self-revelation in Christ. Reformed evangelicals received the protest gratefully — and then asked Barth, on Scripture itself, whether his actualism finally protected the very Bible the Reformed tradition reads as God's written Word. See: Liberalism
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978)
Drafted at a summit of nearly 300 evangelical leaders convened by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, the Chicago Statement gave evangelicalism a careful, confessional articulation of biblical inerrancy: Scripture as the Word of God written, fully truthful in all that it affirms, in the original autographs, when interpreted according to its own intentions.
The Lausanne Covenant (1974)
Drafted principally by John Stott and adopted by some 2,700 evangelical leaders from 150 nations at the International Congress on World Evangelization, the Lausanne Covenant tied evangelism and social responsibility together, affirmed the authority of Scripture, and committed evangelicalism globally to the unfinished task of world mission.
Vatican II (1962–1965)
The Second Vatican Council reshaped Roman Catholicism: vernacular liturgy, renewed attention to Scripture, "separated brethren" language about Protestants, and a more dialogical posture toward modernity. Vatican II did not retract Trent. The Reformation differences over justification, the papacy, Marian dogma, and the sufficiency of Scripture remain. But the tone and the texture of Roman engagement changed.
Pentecostal and charismatic theology
Born at the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in 1906, Pentecostalism rapidly developed a theology of Spirit baptism, tongues, and the continuation of all the New Testament gifts. The charismatic movement spread these emphases through historic denominations from the 1960s. Reformed evangelicals have responded across a spectrum — from confident cessationism (continuationism of certain gifts has ceased) to "open but cautious" continuationism. Both poles agree that the prosperity-gospel mutation of Pentecostalism is a separate matter and must be opposed.
The New Perspective on Paul
From E. P. Sanders (1977) through James Dunn and N. T. Wright, the New Perspective on Paul argued that Second-Temple Judaism was not "legalistic" in the way Reformation polemic assumed, and that Paul's contrast of "works of the law" and "faith" is primarily a contrast over the boundaries of the covenant people rather than over how a sinner is justified before God. Reformed evangelical respondents — Carson, Piper, Waters, Westerholm — have argued that the Reformation reading still stands, that the New Perspective trades on a false dilemma, and that justification by faith alone in Christ alone is, on Paul's own terms, soteriologically central. See: Soteriology
Open Theism and the doctrine of God
In the 1990s a small but influential cluster of evangelical writers — Clark Pinnock, Greg Boyd, John Sanders — proposed that God does not exhaustively know future free actions. Reformed evangelicals (Ware, Frame, Helm, Piper) responded that classical theism, divine omniscience, immutability, and impassibility (rightly defined) are not philosophical accretions but exegetical necessities.
5. Worship, piety, and church order
The Contemporary Era saw an enormous diversification of worship. Pentecostal exuberance, charismatic renewal, the liturgical renewal movement (both Roman Catholic and Protestant), the praise-and-worship contemporary form that emerged from the Jesus movement in the 1960s–1970s, the recovery of historic liturgy among younger evangelicals at the turn of the twenty-first century — all of these coexist. The church order question became, in many Reformed circles, again urgent: what is the shape of a healthy local church? Mark Dever's Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (2000) gave one influential answer; the recovery of expository preaching, plurality of elders, meaningful membership, and church discipline reshaped a generation of evangelical pastors. See: Church History pillar
6. Controversies
The Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy (1920s–1930s)
The Presbyterian and Baptist denominations of the United States divided in the 1920s over whether the supernatural claims of the historic faith — the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, miracles, the substitutionary atonement, the inerrancy of Scripture — were essential to Christianity or were optional ornaments on a moral kernel. Machen's Christianity and Liberalism (1923) named the issue. The mainline denominations chose latitude; conservatives left and founded new institutions (Westminster Seminary in 1929, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936, Fuller Seminary in 1947). See: Liberalism
Neo-orthodoxy and the question of Scripture
Barth and Brunner protested liberalism but did not, in Reformed evangelical judgement, finally secure the doctrine of Scripture. Cornelius Van Til's The New Modernism (1946) argued that Barth, for all his christocentric force, remained captive to the act/being structure of post-Kantian theology and could not deliver an inscripturated revelation. The controversy continues to mark how Reformed evangelicals read Barth — gratefully, critically, never as a settled authority.
The prosperity gospel
From E. W. Kenyon and Kenneth Hagin in the mid-twentieth century, through Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen in the late twentieth and early twenty-first, the prosperity gospel — health and wealth as the believer's covenantal entitlement — became one of the dominant exports of American Christianity to the global South. Reformed evangelicals have opposed it as a different gospel.
The sexual revolution and the church
From the 1960s, Western culture's understanding of sex, marriage, and the human person underwent a profound and continuing reordering. Mainline denominations have, in the main, accommodated; confessional Reformed and evangelical churches have generally not. The pastoral, ethical, and ecclesial pressure on the church to redefine what Scripture teaches about sex, marriage, and the body remains one of the defining tests of the era.
Race, justice, and the gospel
The American civil rights movement (c. 1954–1968) exposed the deep failure of much white evangelicalism on race. Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) named the failure precisely. The early twenty-first century saw a renewed and contested evangelical conversation about race, justice, and the gospel — with Reformed voices on multiple sides of how to apply biblical categories of justice, mercy, and the unity of the people of God.
7. Theological stakes
Four stakes have run through the Contemporary Era from start to finish.
First, the authority of Scripture. Every other doctrinal question of the era — Christology, soteriology, sexuality, ecclesiology — ultimately collapses into this one: is the Bible God's Word written, and therefore the final court of appeal? Reformed evangelicals have answered yes — at Princeton in the early decades, at Westminster from 1929, at Lausanne in 1974, at Chicago in 1978.
Second, the gospel itself. Liberal Protestantism, the prosperity gospel, certain forms of the New Perspective, certain pastoral accommodations to the sexual revolution — each, in different ways, presses against the historic Reformation gospel of justification by faith alone in Christ alone on the basis of his finished work.
Third, the supernatural. From the demythologizing of Rudolf Bultmann to the popular naturalism of the new atheists, the Contemporary Era has pressed the church to answer whether the resurrection happened, whether Christ is bodily ascended, whether prayer addresses a God who acts in history.
Fourth, the global church. The twentieth century forced Western Christians to recognize that they are now a minority within world Christianity. The theological centre of gravity has shifted. Reformed evangelicals in the global North have much to learn from, and much to offer, brothers and sisters in the global South. See: Church History pillar
8. Hard places
The Contemporary Era is the era we are still living. That makes it harder to read, not easier.
Western secularization is not a simple decline narrative. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007) showed that secularization is not just the subtraction of religion but the construction of a particular imaginary in which belief has become contested rather than default. The pastoral implications are deep: the work of evangelism in the post-Christian West is not the same as the work of evangelism in cultures where Christianity was never assumed.
The global South is not a homogeneous evangelical paradise. Pentecostalism, prosperity teaching, syncretism with traditional religions, persecution, and rapid leadership development without theological education all coexist. Reformed evangelicals in the global North should celebrate global growth without romanticizing it.
Evangelicalism itself is contested. The word "evangelical" has accumulated political, ethnic, and cultural baggage in the United States that often obscures its theological core: the gospel of Jesus Christ, the authority of Scripture, the necessity of conversion, the priority of mission. The recovery of the theological core is part of the present generation's work.
The Christological core must be guarded. Every era's heresies have been Christological in the end. The Contemporary Era is no exception. See: Christology pillar See: Heresies through Church History
9. Influence
The Reformed evangelical recovery
The second half of the twentieth century saw a substantial Reformed evangelical recovery in the English-speaking world: the Banner of Truth Trust (founded 1957) reprinting the Puritans and the Reformers; Westminster, Fuller (in its early years), Trinity, Reformed Theological Seminary, Covenant, and others training a generation of confessional pastors; the Gospel Coalition (founded 2005) coordinating Reformed evangelical voices; Ligonier, Desiring God, 9Marks, and others producing accessible resources. The Reformed recovery has been substantial, generational, and global.
Global mission and the global church
By the early twenty-first century the missionary sending map had been redrawn. South Korea, Nigeria, and Brazil now send substantial numbers of cross-cultural missionaries. The church in China, in spite of state pressure, may number well over a hundred million. The church in sub-Saharan Africa is among the largest and youngest in the world. The Contemporary Era is, by sheer numbers, the most missionary age in Christian history.
The recovery of historic confession
A younger generation of pastors and theologians has, since roughly the 1990s, returned to the historic Reformed confessions — Westminster, the Three Forms of Unity, the 1689 Baptist Confession — as living instruments of catechesis and church order rather than museum pieces. The Heidelberg Catechism is again being taught. The Westminster Shorter Catechism is again being memorized.
10. Modern parallels and lessons
The local church is still the irreplaceable locus of Christian life
The Contemporary Era has produced extraordinary parachurch ministries, conferences, broadcasters, and publishers. None of them replaces the gathered congregation under the preached Word, the administered sacraments, and accountable pastoral oversight. A century of innovation has not improved on Acts 2:42.
Theology is for the church, not the academy alone
Where Reformed evangelicalism has been strongest it has held seminary and pulpit together. Where the seminary detached, liberalism followed. Where the pulpit detached, shallowness followed. The pattern of Carl Henry, John Stott, J. I. Packer, R. C. Sproul, John Piper, Don Carson, Sinclair Ferguson, Tim Keller, Kevin DeYoung — academically capable theologians serving the church plainly — is the pattern to imitate. See: Scholars
The Christological centre holds
Every detour of the Contemporary Era — liberal, neo-orthodox, charismatic excess, prosperity-gospel, progressive, accommodationist — has been corrected, where it has been corrected, by a return to the apostolic gospel of the incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended, and returning Christ. The next century's faithfulness will be measured the same way.
The Reformation is not over
Vatican II did not retract Trent. Mainline drift did not retract Westminster. The doctrines of grace, the sufficiency of Scripture, justification by faith alone, the priesthood of all believers, and the headship of the risen Christ over his church remain as necessary in 2026 as in 1526.
11. Where to start reading
A reading order
- J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (1923) — still the cleanest framing of the watershed.
- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952) — lay apologetic that has shaped a century of readers.
- John Stott, The Cross of Christ (1986) — the centre of the gospel held steady.
- J. I. Packer, Knowing God (1973) — accessible Reformed devotion at its best.
- Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) — the founding manifesto of neo-evangelicalism.
- Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989) — for the post-Christendom missionary encounter.
- Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism and successor volumes — sober historiography of the movement.
- Iain Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (2 vols.) and the Banner of Truth Puritan reprints — for the Reformed evangelical recovery.
- Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History — to reset the global frame.
- The Lausanne Covenant (1974) and the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) — short, foundational, still load-bearing.
12. Conclusion — a century in three sentences
The Contemporary Era began with the church confidently assuming Christendom and ended with the church learning, again, to live as a missionary minority — in the secular West and as a majority of the world. The great theological achievements of the era have been the reassertion of revelation, the confessional recovery of inerrancy, the global expansion of the church, and the Reformed evangelical recovery in the English-speaking world. The great theological tasks of the next era are the same as the great theological tasks of every era: to confess the gospel of Jesus Christ — incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended, returning — clearly, charitably, and at cost. See: Church History pillar