Recent Trends in Brazilian Evangelicalism

 by

Augustus Nicodemus Lopes

Let’s start with a little bit of history: when did the Reformed faith first come to Brazil?

The Reformed faith first arrived in Brazil in the 16^th century, when a ship sent by Coligny, a noble French protestant, came to the new land to establish a French colony, under the authority of the Catholic French admiral Villegaignon. There were many Huguenots in the ship who later were joined by two Reformed pastors sent by Calvin. The goal of founding a new French colony failed, however, and some of the Huguenots and Reformed pastors were sent back to Europe and others were killed. Before their death, they were able to write the first Reformed confession of the Americas, the Guanabara Confession of faith. Guanabara is the actual name of the place in Rio de Janeiro where they suffered martyrdom.

About one century later, the Dutch invaded the northern part of Brazil, and together with their ships and soldiers, they brought pastors and evangelists, who soon started the evangelistic work among Brazilian Indians and the Portuguese who already lived here. After three decades, they had to leave, expelled by the Portuguese armies. Reformed preaching and missionary work ceased once more. Roman Catholicism prevailed all over the country.

It was only at the end of the 19^th century, about the same time that the first Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Korea, that the Reformed faith came to Brazil to stay. First, from Scotland came a medical doctor who was also a Presbyterian preacher, the Reverend Robert Kalley, who started a small church in Rio de Janeiro. Soon after Reverend Ashbel Green Simonton arrived, sent by the Board of Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. From this small beginning, the Presbyterian church grew to be about half a million members by today’s latest pools. Not as much as we would like in a country that has 188 million inhabitants.

Then, came the Evangelicals.

About 50 years after the Reformed faith arrived on Brazil’s shore, came the Pentecostals and by the middle of the 20^th century they had become the largest Protestant group in Brazil, a position still held by them up to the present day. Recent statistics show that between 15 and 20% of the Brazilian population call themselves Evangelicals. More than 70% of these are members of one of the hundreds of different Pentecostal and neopentecostal churches and denominations of Brazil.

As we know from the recent history of the Church, Evangelicalism is a movement that came from American fundamentalism in the 50’s. Evangelicals or neo-fundamentalists wanted to preserve those fundamental points defended by the fundamentalists in the battle against liberalism in the beginning of the 20^th century and, at the same time, to get rid of the separatist and more militant spirit of the first generation of fundamentalists. Thus, Evangelicals sought communion and association with other Christians, Pentecostals, Conservatives and even Liberals, trying to escape the "fundamentalist" stereotype. For some scholars, the Evangelicals were, in a sense, the continuation of the English Evangelical Movement initiated by the Wesley brothers and George Whitefield in the 18^th century.

Evangelicalism reached Brazil at first through the historical churches. As the missionaries kept coming from the States, they brought with them not only the Evangelical view but also theological liberalism of all kinds. The Methodists and the Lutherans were heavily affected by liberalism, as well as the Presbyterians. The largest Presbyterian body, however, was able to shun the influence of main liberal preachers, missionaries and pastors within the denomination. Today, the Presbyterian Church of Brazil, the largest Reformed body in Brazil, is conservative and reformed for the most part.

In the last few decades, the term "Evangelicals", in Brazil, designates all non-Catholics. That means Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Pentecostals and lately Neopentecostals. Even Seventh Day Adventists and some cults like Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons are sometimes confused for Evangelicals in the media. Reformed people, like the Presbyterians, identify themselves separately because of the term’s broad scope and the emphasis on Neopentecostalism given by the media.

In this paper, we will use the name "Evangelicals" for the Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Pentecostals and Neopentecostals. We will leave out, obviously, the cults.

Even a superficial look at the religious scenario in Brazil will reveal that Evangelicals are indeed in crisis. Several issues support this conclusion.

We start with the absence of a strong Evangelical leadership with moral and spiritual authority. We observe with deep sadness and fear the doctrinal and moral crash of leaders that were once considered exemplary, and the appearance of totalitarian leaders that nominate themselves pastors, bishops, and apostles. They are rapidly filling the vacuum left by biblically oriented leadership.

Second, there is a lack of defined theological positions, aggravated by a great number of diverging theologies. To make things worse, there is a deep depreciation of the study of Scriptures and of the formulation of doctrines, under the argument that "the letter kills but the Spirit gives life." For many Evangelicals, doctrine is divisive, cold and anti-revival and anti-church-growth.

Third, there has been in recent years a surprising revival of old theological liberalism, once pronounced dead in the seventies by German scholars like Gerhard Maier. Liberalism has gradually taken over many theological institutions run by universities, public and private. Many pastors and leaders are taking these theological courses in order to obtain a diploma with State accreditation. Together with this, many classical liberal books are being translated and published in Brazil by a few but efficient publishing houses.

Fourth, there is an evident lack of moral standards among Evangelicals by which at least to exert church discipline. There have been recently many public cases of Evangelical leaders caught in terrible sins, like one "Apostle" who was caught trying to get into the Unites States with thousands of dollars, not declared, hidden even in his own Bible. He is now imprisoned in the States, but has suffered absolutely no discipline by his Church. Others have been caught in adultery, robbery and corruption and no disciplinary process has been started against them. They just stay out of public view for a time and then, they return and continue their ministry as if nothing ever happened.

Fifth, there is the growing commercialism of various Evangelical publishers that in the past were committed to publishing only conservative, Evangelical, solid material. Today, under the pressure of market demands, they have started to publish liberals, neo-orthodox, strange writers and material, to the point that it has become increasingly difficult to recommend their publications as a whole, as in the past.

Sixth, we observe with awe the phenomenal growth of the neopentecostal churches, in spite of the terrible scandals with their leaders, problems with the government, and the obvious failure of the promises made by the prophets and preachers of the theology of prosperity.

These are some symptoms of a terrible crisis that has emerged due to attitudes and decisions taken by Evangelicals a few decades ago.

This crisis did not occur overnight. It is the logical result of some steps taken by Evangelicals. I will mention just three of the most important ones.

First, they started to communicate with other lines of thought without clearly defining doctrinal suppositions and limits. Nowadays, Evangelicals have a hard time defining the boundaries of true Christianity and excluding heresy. This is the result of the adoption of the "non-exclusive" principle, opening the door for doctrinal plurality and moral relativism. There are no more theological and moral boundaries that are accepted or available to all.

Second, there has been a gradual abandonment of even the most crucial points of the Gospel in an attempt to gain more communion with other lines of teaching within Christendom. Thus, the definition of "Evangelical" has become increasingly broad and general. With this, came the abandonment of the great creeds and confessions of the past that shaped historical faith with their Scriptural interpretations. By throwing away centuries of theological tradition, Evangelicals have become vulnerable to all sorts of new interpretations and theologies.

Third, there was a shift from an Augustinian and reformed perspective to an increasingly Arminian perspective that has allowed all sorts of new Arminian theologies to enter the Evangelical realm. This made room for an invasion of mystic spiritualism based on the revivalist experience of the pelagian Charles Finney. This change has brought with it the depreciation of doctrine in favor of pragmatism, and placed an anthropocentric spin on church services.

In the midst of this complex situation, several theological trends and tendencies are perceptible in the Brazilian Evangelical scenario. I will mention four of them.

1. Open Theism

According to Open Theism, God’s most important attribute is love, and all other attributes are subordinate to it. God put aside his sovereignty to truly relate with his creation. In thus emptying himself, God is incapable of doing whatever he wants to, like preventing tragedies and eradicating evil. He doesn’t always get what he wants and things don’t always turn out the way he planned. He adapts to human decisions and reshapes history according to these decisions.

Thus – and this is Open Theism’s most polemical affirmation – God ignores the future, for it is "open." The future is determined by the combination of what God and his creatures do. God does not know in advance what choice a person will make even a minute into the future. The main proponent of Open Theism in Brazil, Ricardo Gondim, a Pentecostal pastor, has put it this way:

For him and other Open Theism supporters, God lives inside time and not above it. He learns as time passes. Therefore, God changes. Only His essence is immutable. He changes his plans and repents of decisions He made. As such, God takes risks, because he does not know the future. For example, He did not know what Adam and Eve would decide, but created them anyway. He acted in this way because he decided to respects people’s freedom and because he desires to truly have a relationship with them. For Open Theism, the only way to preserve man’s free will is to deny not only God’s sovereign determination of everything that will happen, but also his foreknowledge of what will happen.

Open Theism appeared in Brazil’s Evangelical scenario in 2004 after the giant wave called tsunami killed thousands of people in Asia. The Pentecostal preacher Ricardo Gondim, already mentioned above, who had already been very critic of Calvinist theology in Brazil, in an attempt to save God from being accused of evil, wrote that God did not know about the disaster and much less could do anything to prevent it. This publication exposed for the first time this leader’s theological views and raised a storm of protests from both Calvinist and Arminian leaders in Brazil. The debate at first went on mainly in the Internet, in the blogs, Orkut, e-mails and Internet sites. The Presbyterian publishing house, however, soon translated and published two books against Open Theism by John Frame and Douglas Wilson. Soon after, a Pentecostal publishing house published the very helpful book by the Baptist John Piper "Open Theism," with a Portuguese introduction written by a Methodist theologian. Also a few articles were published in theological journals.

The controversy finally abated after a split in Ricardo Gondim’s own denomination. Several pastors and their churches publicly rejected Open Theism and Gondim’s positions and broke away from him. After this, Open Theism lost its main voice and has receded to the background. However, the seeds of this damaging and heretical theology were spread all over Brazil and they remain there, perhaps only waiting for the right time.

In my understanding, the main reason why Open Theism did not prosper in the Brazilian Evangelical setting is that in spite of all this pluralism and multiplicity of thought and ideas, Evangelicals in Brazil are still largely conservative as to the main points of Christian faith. When Calvinists and conservative Arminians reacted against Open Theism their arguments and appeals found receptive ears among the people.

2. The return of Theological Liberalism through Theological Education

About 20 years ago the Brazilian government recognized theology as a profession and authorized public universities to offer accredited programs in theology, from bachelor to doctor’s degrees.

These theological programs offered by the State and later by private and religious schools, like Roman Catholic, Methodist and Lutheran universities, adopted the secular model of Europe, especially the German model. These programs were soon dominated by old theological liberalism and the historical-critical method. Their standards were not scientifically unbiased, as they proposed. The ideal of studying theology from a scientific and neutral perspective is, of course, a fallacy.

It is not that only two decades ago Brazilians came in touch with theological liberalism. Already in the 50’s of the last century liberals were very active in Brazil and dominated the theological seminaries of historical churches like the Methodists, the Lutherans, some Presbyterian denominations and, more recently, the Baptists. However, they were few and liberalism never really became prominent or generally accepted in Brazil. Recently, however, it has raised its ugly head again, when Evangelicals crowded these Theology and Sciences of Religion programs.

These programs are methodologically, philosophically, and pedagogically committed to a humanistic and secular worldview. In them, both Scriptures and theology are studied from a non-Christian perspective. Liberal theology claims that the concepts of the Trinity and Christ’s divinity are a result of Greek influence on Christian theology. Theological Liberalism teaches that Paul perverted the simple Christianity of Jesus and his disciples and invented the doctrine of justification by faith in Christ alone and the doctrine of the physical resurrection. According to the Liberals, the Christian church erred when it started making creeds and confessions, creating a Christ of faith different from the historical Jesus. According to the Liberals, the church got lost in centuries of Biblical interpretation, and only with the advent of the critical method of Bible study has it started being studied correctly. They say that the Bible is nothing but the fallible writings of the early church and the people of Israel. One must remove from the Bible its myths, fables, legends, and additions, such as creation, the flood, Adam, Moses, Jesus’ Miracles, etc.

Thus, these theological programs offered in accredited universities, both public and private, became open doors for the old liberalism to enter Brazilian Evangelicalism. A desire for the level of credibility attained by secular academies has driven Evangelicalism to submit its own institutions of pastoral training to the same educational standards of the State and secular universities. In their intense search for a credible theological diploma, Evangelicals are tempted to sacrifice their commitment to Scripture for so-called scientific credibility and a future job.

As a result, Evangelicals taught by the historical-critical method end up being vehicles for the transmission of the liberal ideas taught at these institutions, weakening the already frail and vulnerable Evangelicalism in Brazil.

Liberalism never planted churches, never increased its number of members nor even its finances. All it has done is make more liberals, who themselves have to survive. Theological liberalism has always had to find a host for it to suck dry. Today, we watch the last dying convulsions of the remaining historic denominations in Europe and the United States, denominations that at one point housed the liberal parasite. The same thing may happen in Brazil with some denominations.

3. Medieval Spirituality

Spirituality, an ancient theme of the Catholic praxis, has become an important part of the Evangelical agenda in the world and, of course, also in Brazil.

The proposal of the spirituality movement is the return to the spirituality of the mystics of medieval times. The proposed spirituality seeks to attain great communion with God through the spiritual disciplines, methods and means used by these old medieval mystics. Supporters of spirituality tend to criticize modern Christian piety and its apathy towards spiritual activities such as meditation, fasting, prayer and contemplation. They condemn what they call the malignant influence of systematic theology, claiming it approaches reality and experience in a cold and mechanical way without room for prayer. For them, Calvinists are cold and dry rationalists.

The spirituality movement is being advanced in Brazil today by: 1) Evangelicals who propose dialog with the Catholic and Orthodox churches; 2) by Catholic theologians, and by; 3) liberals. Medieval mysticism would work as a sort of bridge to this dialog. I am not saying that every Evangelical who defends aspects of medieval spirituality is really a liberal.

What really intrigues me is why liberals, who believe that truth changes and evolves, who are fierce critics of everything traditional in the church, have now resolved to drink from ancient medieval mysticism? I thought that, for them, old is bad, and new is good.

Well, it is not difficult to guess why liberals, Evangelicals and Catholics have come together in Brazil to drink from medieval mysticism. First, because it focuses on experience and lacks biblical and theological content. Ascetic piety, including vows of abstinence, self-punishment, social isolation and a life dedicated to contemplation, was certainly not shaped by the Scriptures. It is a search for a deep, inner, mysterious experience, of communion with God where man does not speak theologically and God does not respond theologically. The case is the same for the Evangelical heirs of F. Schleiermacher, the father of protestant liberalism. To him, religion consisted of an inner sense of dependence on God, not an adherence to doctrines.

Second, medieval mysticism was based on a lot of direct revelations. A good deal of the spiritual experiences of the medieval mystics were visions or direct contemplations of God. A medieval nun, Hildegard, ever since she was three years old, had visions of God in which He revealed to her His and the universe’s nature. Teresa of Ávila, one of the greatest representatives of medieval spirituality, tells in her book Interior Castle about how, in a series of mystical experiences, Jesus Christ came to her personally and how she began to love Him unrestrainedly. Modern mystics desire the same experience. Liberals don’t have visions, but they believe that the truth is constantly evolving and that God is always revealing new things to the Church. In both cases, mystics and liberals seek God without the mediation of Scriptures, being open to new revelations.

Third, many medieval mystics isolated themselves in protest against the corruption of the church during their time. They had this messianic view of themselves, as if they were to save the church. Liberals in Brazil are also messianic and believe themselves commissioned to reform the contemporary church, although their tactics are not to isolate themselves but to remain inside the church.

In spite of its great appeal to the Catholic soul of Brazilian Evangelicalism, the spirituality movement remains only as a moderate influence. On the side of Evangelicals, their main supporters are a few well-known Brazilian leaders and the literature is basically translated works of renowned modern mystics, like the Catholic Henri Nouwen and ex-Catholic Brennan Manning.

As a reformed Calvinist, I am unwilling to see medieval mystics as spiritual models, for their theology was full of erroneous concepts about God, Man, and the Bible. I believe that Biblical mysticism – union with Christ in His death, lived by the Spirit, celebrated by holy communion and experienced through proper use of the means of grace – is still the standard for Christians today.

4. The Rise of Conservative and Reformed Theology

A surprising turn of events is the rise of conservative and Reformed theology among Evangelicals in recent years. Some factors may be mentioned as the probable reason.

First, Pentecostalism, after a hundred years in Brazil, has run its course and has left many Pentecostals hungry and thirsty for a more biblical and solid theology that, at the same time, allows and calls for experimental religion. They have found it at hand in the Reformed and Puritan literature that in the last 25 years has been increasingly produced by several publishing houses. The works of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in particular, have attracted many Pentecostals, because of Lloyd-Jones’ position on the baptism of the Holy Spirit and his emphasis on Puritan experimental religion. Starting with Lloyd-Jones, many Pentecostals have come to read Calvin and old and new Puritans. As a result, many of them have come to Reformed schools of theology seeking training and a more thorough knowledge of Calvinism. Many new independent churches, reformed in theology and Pentecostal in liturgy, have been founded. Even the largest and most traditional Pentecostal publishing house has made available books by Reformed authors, old and new. What will become of this apparently strange union is still uncertain. However, one thing is clear, that the Reformed faith has received a fresh and powerful impulse through these Pentecostals turned Reformed.

Second, some of the historical denominations that were heavily under the influence of liberal theology have gone through a surprising change in their theological orientation, like the Methodists, for example. In their 2006 General Assembly, the Pentecostal party within the denomination came to power. Their Assembly decided to break with all sorts of ecumenical relations with Roman Catholic Church. After that, some measures have also been taken to remove liberal professors from their University and theological seminaries. Another example is the Independent Presbyterian Church that has recently decided to close her seminaries, all of them heavily influenced by liberalism, and to start a new one with a more conservative stance.

Third, among the conservative churches there is a growing interest in Calvinism and Reformed theology. Every year dozens of young Reformed graduates are ordained as pastors. Reformed seminaries and conservative theological institutions receive every year a growing number of young people seeking theological training.

Fourth, the Internet, through reformed sites, groups and blogs, has made it possible for people to research, learn and interact about topics with which they are dealing, without the need or expense of buying a book on the subject. It has become possible for serious believers from various and contrasting denominations to interact and understand each other better, building unexpected and precious bonds of friendship and communion as brothers and sisters in Christ.

CONCLUSION

In spite of the good news about the growth of the Reformed faith in Brazil, it is very clear from the general scenario that Evangelicals in Brazil face a grave crisis. There is no easy way out of this crisis. However, the Reformed faith is still a possible and feasible alternative for the Evangelical Brazilian church, as long as it follows the great doctrines of grace and is faithful to the main slogans of the Reformation. Also, if the Reformed churches and theological institutions take care not to repeat the mistakes of the Evangelicals.

First, Reformed people should converse and interact with the great theological diversity in Brazil while still clearly marking off the boundaries of historical and biblical Christianity.

Second, Reformed pastors and theologians should strive to rescue the practical and experimental aspects of Reformed Theology and in this way not permit alternative mysticism to find its way in.

Third, they should continue to reject inclusiveness and adopt an exclusiveness that is intelligent, sensible, and wise.

Fourth, Reformed theologians and pastors must continue to place a high value on doctrines, especially the fundamental points of the Christian faith expressed in the creeds and confessions that shaped early Evangelicalism.

Last, we should make sure that we flee from the five sins that continually threaten and tempt Calvinists: spiritual pride, fraternal intolerance, lack of action, isolation, and accommodation in learning

Perhaps in this way we may one day trace with confidence the outlines of the face of Evangelicalism in Brazil.

Dr. Lopes is Chancellor of Mackenzie University in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the World Reformed Fellowship.

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