"I think it goes back to the fact that the evangelical community often does not have a biblical vision of God"
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Campolo’s line lands like a gentle rebuke wrapped in pastoral language: the problem isn’t that evangelicals care too much about God, but that they’ve settled for a thinner, smaller one. “Often” and “does not have” soften the blow, yet the charge is blunt. He’s not accusing the evangelical community of being unbiblical in the sense of ignoring Scripture; he’s suggesting their imagination of God has been edited down - curated to fit a cultural mood, a political agenda, or a therapeutic need.
The phrase “biblical vision of God” is doing heavy rhetorical work. It implies not just correct doctrine but proportion: a God who is simultaneously compassionate and demanding, intimate and unsettling, concerned with personal salvation and public justice. Campolo, as a prominent evangelical insider-critic, is invoking Scripture as the shared authority while refusing the movement’s common shortcuts: the God who mainly ratifies “family values,” the God who blesses the nation, the God who exists to validate certainty. By framing it as “goes back to the fact,” he signals a root-cause diagnosis rather than a surface-level complaint about hypocrisy or bad messaging.
Context matters: Campolo built his reputation challenging American evangelicalism from within, especially where it merged with culture-war politics and neglected poverty, racial justice, and peacemaking. The subtext is that many evangelical disputes - about power, morality, even public policy - are downstream of theology. Get God wrong, and you’ll inevitably get neighbor, enemy, and responsibility wrong too.
The phrase “biblical vision of God” is doing heavy rhetorical work. It implies not just correct doctrine but proportion: a God who is simultaneously compassionate and demanding, intimate and unsettling, concerned with personal salvation and public justice. Campolo, as a prominent evangelical insider-critic, is invoking Scripture as the shared authority while refusing the movement’s common shortcuts: the God who mainly ratifies “family values,” the God who blesses the nation, the God who exists to validate certainty. By framing it as “goes back to the fact,” he signals a root-cause diagnosis rather than a surface-level complaint about hypocrisy or bad messaging.
Context matters: Campolo built his reputation challenging American evangelicalism from within, especially where it merged with culture-war politics and neglected poverty, racial justice, and peacemaking. The subtext is that many evangelical disputes - about power, morality, even public policy - are downstream of theology. Get God wrong, and you’ll inevitably get neighbor, enemy, and responsibility wrong too.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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