Evangelical, What Does It Mean?

The term evangelical seems to have lost its meaning in recent times.  Evangelical is basically the same as the word gospel.  So an evangelical Christian is a gospel Christian.  Evangelicalism itself has it's roots in the Protestant Reformation of the 1500's.  Martin Luther actually used the term evangelical instead of Lutheran.  

During the Reformation the gospel was rediscovered.  The Biblical gospel had become obscured by the Roman Catholic Church with it's faith plus works doctrine of salvation.  Men like Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin lead the way in the recovery of Biblical Christianity.  The Reformers taught that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone.  Since it is all the work of God, it is to God alone be the glory.  The Reformers also taught that Scripture alone is authoritative.  The Bible is the ultimate authority and not the Pope or the Roman Catholic Church.  

By the early 1900's the authority of Scripture was under attack by the secular culture and theological liberalism.  The fundamental doctrines of the faith as well as the authority and inerrancy of Scripture were defended by early fundamentalists like B.B. Warfield, R.A. Torrey, and J. Gresham Machen. Unfortunately later fundamentalists became anti-intellectual and extremely separatist, retreating from the culture.  

In the 1940's and 1950's modern evangelicalism arose led by figures such as Carl Henry and Billy Graham.  The movement initially held to historic, orthodox Christianity believing in the inerrancy of Scripture.  But division emerged in the movement as early as 1962 when Fuller Theological Seminary removed inerrancy from it's doctrinal statement.  

Some within evangelicalism no longer hold to the inerrancy of Scripture and deny certain parts of it.  Some modern evangelicals deny the existence of hell, believe in evolution, and some even embrace homosexuality.  Also many have embraced feminism as can be seen in the popular 2011 NIV translation of the Bible with it's gender neutral language.  

Evangelicalism has been infiltrated by liberalism no longer strongly identifying with historic, orthodox Christianity.  Some no longer want to even use the term evangelical because it has been emptied of it's meaning.  The term often needs to be qualified with other descriptive terms such as conservative evangelical or confessing evangelical.   A recovery of Biblical Christianity is badly needed in the evangelical movement.