The Protestant Reformation recovered the gospel of God's free grace that had been obscured in the medieval church by a moralism that dismissed man's deep depravity, by a sacerdotalism that interposed a religious caste between men and God, and by an ecclesiasticism that erased the Creator-creature distinction the church itself became the new Incarnation. This is the Biblical evangelicalism. But what passes for evangelicalism today is at most points far removed from the evangelicalism of the Reformation, as it is more generally removed from Biblical teaching at other points. What are perhaps the three chief distinctives of evangelicalism stand in sharp contrast to a Biblical, Reformational belief and practice of Christianity. While modern evangelicals profess a firm belief in the Bible, at the center of their religion is not their view of the Bible, but their view of the gospel.
Evangelicalism prides itself on the centrality of the gospel and of salvation.
It is just here, however, that evangelicalism is perhaps the most polluted. In fact, ironically enough, the evangelical view of the gospel is much closer to that of medieval Rome than it is to the Biblical gospel of the Reformation. The Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic response to the Reformation, held that salvation is a cooperative endeavor between God and man. According to Rome, man's free will plays a big part in his salvation. The Reformers correctly recognized that this destroyed the gospel of the grace of God.