[T]he evangelical movement imploded because it nurtured its own deficiencies. Neo-evangelical principles ultimately eradicated historic evangelicalism, and those of us who are paleo-evangelicals frankly have no movement that we really belong to…

I haven’t even given you a single quote from Lloyd-Jones’s book What is an Evangelical? So let me strongly recommend again that you read those lectures. In essence, those lectures were Lloyd-Jones’s answer to neo-evangelicalism. He was a classic paleo-evangelical without a neo-evangelical bone in his body. Here’s a sample quote:

One of the first signs that a man is ceasing to be truly evangelical is that he ceases to be concerned about negatives, and keeps saying, We must always be positive. I will give you a striking example of this in a man whose name is familiar to most of you, and some of whose books you have read. This is what he has written recently: `Whether a person is an evangelical is to be settled by reference to how he stands with respect to six points’, which he then enumerates. His definition is by reference only to what a person is for rather than to what he is against. He goes on: `What a man is, or is not, against may show him to be a muddled or negligent or inconsistent evangelical, but you may not deny his right to call himself an evangelical while he maintains these principles as the basis of his Christian position.’

Now that is the kind of statement which I would strongly contend against. I believe it is quite wrong. The argument which says that you must always be positive, that you must not define the man in terms of what he is against, as well as what he is for, misses the subtlety of the danger.

Lloyd Jones saw that doctrinal indifferentism was inherent in the neo-evangelical agenda, and he knew that would spell the ultimate demise of the evangelical movement as a truly evangelical entity.

He was right. In many ways and in several contexts, he predicted with spot-on accuracy what was coming. (Where Evangelicalism Went Astray – Part 2)

Phil Johnson