Inter-Varsity Press

Volume 1 of 'A History of Evangelicalism'

INTRODUCTION
On Friday 19 September 1740, George Whitefield sat down for a theological conversation with the Anglican clergy of Boston, Massachusetts. Whitefield was just at the start of one of the most extraordinary preaching tours of that or any era. Before the tour came to an end in late November, he would preach in seven of the American colonies, often two or three times a day, and to crowds regularly into the thousands. It is likely that the total number of his hearers in these ten weeks (with, of course, some attending several times) equalled at least half the total population of these seven colonies. This charismatic personality, himself an Anglican minister not yet twenty-five years old, had already been preaching to large crowds in England for more than four years. From early in 1739 he had taken the radical step of preaching out of doors, and with fantastic results. While thousands thronged to hear his electing message of the New Birth in Jesus Christ, nervous leaders of the Church of England and some anxious members of the upper classes worried about the threat to public order, Whitefield had made one earlier trip to North America in order to preach and organize an orphanage in the new colony of Georgia. Now he was back.

After a brief stop-over in Georgia, Whitefield turned north. He arrived at Newport, Rhode Island, on 14 September. On Tuesday 16 September he preached twice in that small port city to audiences of a least a thousand. During his short stay in Newport – an active trading centre with its prosperity as dependent on the slave-trade as on the ability to smuggle goods past British inspectors – Whitefield had startled his audience at one point by asking, ‘What will become of you, who cheat the King of his taxes?’ But mostly he concentrated on telling his rapt listeners how important it was ‘not to rest till they found rest in Jesus Christ’.

Two days after leaving Newport, Whitefield arrived in an expectant Boston. Local printers had been stoking interest by pumping out new editions of his printed sermons, earlier numbers of his journal and also pamphlets attacking his ministry. The city’s four newspapers had been filled for months with sensational reports of Whitefield’s triumphs in the colonies and the mother country. Whitefield and his publicist, William Seward, had been writing regularly to ministers in the Boston area as well as to the newspapers in order to heighten anticipation. The ground was well prepared for what turned out to be a rich spiritual harvest.

But first there was resistance to overcome. On the morning of 19 September, Whitefield was taken to meet the governor, and then attended prayers at Boston’s Old North Anglican Church. After the service, he was escorted to the home of Dr Timothy Cutler, the Church of England’s Commissary and senior minister in New England. It was time to face some music.

Whitefield later reported in his published journal that the five Anglican clergymen whom he visited treated him cordially, but also that they wasted no time before bombarding him with accusatory questions:

• We hear that you called Gilbert Tennent, the Presbyterian revivalist in New Jersey, a ‘faithful minister of Jesus Christ’, but surely someone ordained as a Presbyterian could not be a real minister? Whitefield averred that he did indeed think Tennent was a faithful minister.

• How come your supposed friend and colleague, Charles Wesley, supports the Church of England so vigorously but you do not? Whitefield replied that he believed God had changed Wesley’s mind on this subject and that now Wesley was as willing to work with non-Anglicans as Whitefield himself was.

• We have heard that when you were in Savannah, you allowed a Baptist minister to take part in a communion service that you led. Could this really be true? Whitefield replied that not only was this rumour true, but that he was actually prepared himself as a properly ordained minister of the Church of England to receive communion from the hand of a Baptist!

At this point, Whitefield then went on to make a most important general statement: ‘It was best to preach the new birth, and the power of godliness, and not to insist so much on the form: for people would never be brought to one mind as to that; nor did Jesus Christ ever intend it.’

Whitefield’s fellow-Anglicans could not be convinced, but they had heard him articulate a defining principle of Protestant evangelicalism. In the evangelical movement that began with revivalists like Whitefield, Charles Wesley, his brother John, Gilbert Tennent and many others, and that would spread over the course of the centuries to touch every continent of the globe, the foundation was unswerving belief in the need for conversion (the New Birth) and the necessity of a life of active holiness (the power of godliness).

As the discussion in Boston on 19 September 1740 went on, Whitefield made a further statement to his sceptical interrogators that was equally definitive for the later history of evangelical Christianity. When one of the Boston Anglicans insisted that the Church of England was the only true church, because it followed exactly the ecclesiastical pattern provided by Jesus himself, Whitefield could not agree. To him there was much greater flexibility in the gospel: ‘I saw regenerate souls among the Baptists, among the Presbyterians, among the independents, and among the Church i.e., Anglican folks – all children of God, and yet all born again in a different way of worship: and who can tell which is the most evangelical?’

The concentration on conversion and holy living that marked Whitefield’s activity, as well as his flexibility with respect to church forms and inherited religious traditions, have always been important characteristics of evangelical movements. Such movements are the concern of this book and the other four volumes in the series, which seeks to offer a general history of evangelicalism in the English-speaking world since the eighteenth century, as also in other world regions touched by the activities of such evangelicals. But because ‘evangelical’ and ‘evangelicalism’ are words describing complex realities, it is wise to pause at the outset to define how these terms will be put to use in this five-volume series.

The word ‘evangelical’ has carried several different senses throughout history, but almost all are related to its etymological meaning of ‘good news’. The English word ‘evangelical’ comes from a transliteration of the Greek noun euangelion, which was regularly employed by the authors of the New Testament to signify the glad tidings – the good news, the gospel – of Jesus who appeared on earth as the Son of God to accomplish God’s plan of salvation for needy humans. Translators of the New Testament usually used the word ‘gospel’ for euangelion, as in passages like Romans .:..: ‘For I am not ashamed of the gospel (euangelion) of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth: to the Jew first, and also to the Greek’ (King James Version). Thus, ‘evangelical’ religion has always been ‘gospel’ religion, or religion focusing on the ‘good news’ of salvation brought to sinners by Jesus Christ.

Already in the English Middle Ages the adjective ‘evangelical’ was being used in various ways: for example, to describe the message about salvation in Jesus, to designate the New Testament that contained this message and to single out specifically the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) in which the life, death and resurrection of Jesus are portrayed. Along with these usages, medieval students of the Bible regularly referred to the Old Testament book of Isaiah as ‘the evangelical prophet’, because Christian interpreters held it to be a forecast of the life and work of Christ.

During the sixteenth century the word ‘evangelical’ began to take on a meaning associated specifically with the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, the first great Protestant leader, proclaimed an ‘evangelical’ account of salvation in Christ over against what he considered the corrupt teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Used this way, ‘evangelical’ rapidly assumed a
critical cast, since it was posing a contrast between faithful adherence to the gospel message of the New Testament and Catholic perversions of that message. In the heat of conflict, the positive and negative connotations of ‘evangelical’ multiplied rapidly:

• it stood for justification by faith instead of trust in human works as the path to salvation;

• it defended the sole sufficiency of Christ for salvation instead of the human (and often corrupted) mediations of the church;

• it looked to the once-for-all triumph of Christ’s death on the cross instead of the repetition of Christ’s sacrifice in the Catholic mass;

• it found final authority in the Bible as read by believers in general instead of what the Catholic Church said the Bible had to mean; and

• it embraced the priesthood of all Christian believers instead of inappropriate reliance upon a class of priests ordained by the church.

The centuries since the sixteenth-century Reformation have worn away these sharp contrasts to the extent that volumes in this series treating the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries will include some consideration of groups that today can be called both evangelical and Roman Catholic.

In the sixteenth century, however, differences were so strong that ‘evangelical’ became a virtual synonym for ‘Protestant’. …
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The series
The five volumes in this History of Evangelicalism will differ somewhat because their authors differ in education, perspective, denominational affiliation, details of theological commitment and geographical location. But the books will be joined in their use of a general definition of evangelicalism as outlined above, and they will also be united by common intentions for the series. We hope the books will be accessible to a wide range of readers, that they will provide interesting interpretations more than just factual details and that they will provide enough scholarly references so that interested readers can pursue their own further research. The volumes rely on primary sources whenever possible, but their nature as synthetic interpretations requires also a broad use of the most reliable secondary literature as well.

Each of the volumes will focus on a specific ‘age’ of evangelical history, designated by a major figure or figures of that era. Yet the authors also realize that periodization is always artificial and so they do not hesitate to move backwards and forwards with reference to other times and places as it best suits their interests. There will also be modest chronological overlap between the volumes, since important points of emphasis and patterns of development do not always conform neatly to the chronological parameters assigned for the volumes. Yet this overlap will be minimal and will not compromise the presentation of a continuous narrative for the nearly three centuries of evangelical development treated in the five books.

The series also works hard at presenting a genuinely international story. By trying to keep many places in view at the same time, authors may tempt confusion as they expand upon trans-national evangelical connections, where historical literature is sometimes in short supply, at the expense of full-scale treatment of individual national histories, where there is often a great volume of expert secondary material. There are, however, two important reasons for maintaining an international perspective. First, it recognizes the sometimes neglected historical reality that the significant evangelical movements in any one place have almost always been linked to evangelical movements in other places. But, second, the books also intend to be useful in the contemporary world, where evangelical Christian movements have multiplied far, far beyond the narrow geographical confines of Britain and North America. The 2001 edition of David Barrett’s World Christian Encyclopedia testifies eloquently to the current situation. With a definition quite similar to the one provided above, Barrett finds over twice as many evangelicals in each of Nigeria (22.3 million) and Brazil ( 27.7 million) as in Britain (11.6 million), and more in Nigeria and Brazil together (50.0 million) than in the United States (40.6 million). In addition, he counts at least five million evangelicals in each of India, South Korea, South Africa, Kenya and Ethiopia; and at least one million more in eight other African countries, five Asian or Pacific, five Latin American, three European and one North American. And of this worldwide distribution of evangelicals today, considerably more than half speak English as their first or second language. To the extent possible, the books in this series will therefore try to show how the convictions and activities of earlier evangelicals led to the contemporary reality of worldwide evangelicalism.