Over the past fifty years, Evangelical Christianity has experienced considerable growth, and in the beginning of the twenty-first century consisted of about six hundred thousand of followers. This paper gives an overview of the attitude of evangelical Christianity toward inter-religious dialogue, and it indicates the basic principles of maintaining dialogue. Since, over the past half of century, the evangelical Christians in Croatia as well as all over the world have been mainly focused upon the spiritually relevant ecumenisation and establishing new churches, the issues of ecumentisation, inter-religious dialogue and inclusion in societal trends have been left to the few theologians and socially-politically engaged leaders who endeavoured to set up and maintain social relevance of evangelical Christianity. With continuous representation of biblical unity and communal feelings of Christians in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, towards the end of the twentieth century the conservative evangelical Christianity left participation in inter-religious in inter-religious dialogue, to the liberal evangelical Christians. The change took place upon the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century when several of influential leaders of the conservative evangelical Christianity entered the dialogue. Over the past few decades, theologies of religions have begun to rapidly develop and the inter-religious dialogue has become a frequent topic of theological thoughts and discussions. Attitudes toward religions as well as clear and unambiguous principles according to which evangelical Christianity may take part in ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue, are indicated in the basic documents of the world evangelical Christianity, including the authority and the power of the Bible, the uniqueness and the central position of Jesus Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit, the Biblical ecclesiology, the significance and the urgency of the evangelisation and the mission, the soteriological focus and eschatological perspective.
|
