Inter-Varsity Press

CONTENTS

Prologue

1.The evangelicals of the world
2.Varieties of evangelicalism
3.The practice of faith
4.The legacy of the Enlightenment
5.The permeation of Romanticism
6.Conservative theological trends
7.Evangelicals and society
8.The dominance of evangelicalism

PROLOGUE (extracts)

This volume, like the others in the series, takes the evangelical movement of the English-speaking world for its subject. The members of this international network professed the Christian faith in broadly the form that it had assumed during the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century. The movement was by no means confined to a single denomination, for the revival had transformed many older Protestant bodies as well as creating new ones. Evangelicalism had injected a fresh expansive dynamic into the churches. It had given rise to the modern missionary movement that carried the gospel to many lands where it had hitherto not taken root. Although some attention is paid here to the missionary impulse, the ‘English-speaking’ limitation is designed to focus the series not on missions themselves but on those who sent out the missionaries – in this period, the peoples of the United Kingdom, the United States and the settler communities of the British Empire. The range of territories where the movement flourished will be discussed in chapter 2, but here it will be useful to indicate the broad social and political context in which the movement operated. Despite their other-worldly preoccupations, evangelicals did not live a life apart. They numbered in their ranks many of the merchants and artisans, the wives and children, politicians and voters, who acted and suffered in the day-to-day events of society at large. The dominant place of their faith in the culture of the times, a central theme of this book, ensured that evangelicals engaged particularly closely with the trends of the day. So a brief review of the framework of circumstances that moulded their lives during the later nineteenth century can help set the scene for a closer examination of the evangelical movement.

Politics, national and global

The political state of Britain is a suitable place to begin. The ‘Year of Revolutions’ in continental Europe, 1848, had largely passed the country by. The Chartists, a radical working-class grouping whose efforts at insurrection had disturbed the previous decade, alarmed the government by its plans in that year, but managed only a minor demonstration and afterwards withered away. Subsequent years in Britain were marked by constitutional stability. Queen Victoria, who had come to the throne in 1837, ruled to the very end of the century, but the crown no longer played a publicly partisan role in politics. Instead, the parties held effective power through commanding a majority in the House of Commons. The Liberals, led by broad-minded peers and gentry but drawing support from new industrialists and many lesser folk, favoured moderate measures of change. They had been responsible for the Reform Act of 1832 that greatly enlarged the franchise without threatening the influence of the landowners. It was, however, the Conservatives under Benjamin Disraeli who passed a further measure of parliamentary reform in 1867 with the aim of attracting the new voters in the towns to their side. The Conservatives, who had previously been the party of upper-class traditionalists, the bulk of the professionals and the dependants of each, now mobilized a wider range of electors. Especially after a further round of reform in 1884–85, the Conservatives attracted solid support from the middle classes. The Liberals under William Gladstone adopted increasingly radical measures, culminating in the proposal of Home Rule for Ireland in 1886. Nationalists in Ireland, often fired by memories of the devastating famine in their island of the 1840's, aspired to a separate state, and Gladstone believed that only the concession of a subordinate parliament in Dublin would keep the Irish within the United Kingdom. Home Rule, however, failed to pass, and the grumbling sore of the Irish question continued to aict the body politic. In general, however, the people of the British mainland, the English, the Scots and the Welsh, were well content to live together in a secure and prospering United Kingdom. ...

Society and economy

Although the political systems of Britain and America were different, some of the social developments in the two countries showed marked similarities. Rapid demographic growth was one of them, but, because of immigration, America greatly outstripped Britain. ...

The period was notable for the gradual spread of the American population westwards, establishing new states, keeping up the frontier spirit and squeezing the native Americans off their ancestral lands. The last territory to be opened to settlement was Oklahoma, the former Indian Territory, in 1890.The half-century witnessed a large-scale English-speaking diaspora.

It also saw the triumphant progress of industry. 1851 was the year of the Great Exhibition in London. The products of many nations were on display, but the overriding purpose was to celebrate the technical expertise of Britain, the first country to industrialize. The opening of the exhibition, said Queen Victoria, was ‘the greatest day in our history’. The subsequent advance of industrialism continued unabated. ...

... Each of these characteristics of the age interacted with religion. In politics, for example, the place of Roman Catholicism in predominantly Protestant lands caused endless debate. The allegiance of some four-fifths of the Irish population at home and abroad to the Catholic Church ensured that interconfessional issues cropped up repeatedly. International affairs often had a Protestant/Catholic dimension, and how far imperial authorities should endorse Christian missions was another perennial question. Evangelicals strongly supported each side in the American Civil War, and the black slaves it emancipated, though continuing to suffer serious social restrictions, nonetheless used their freedom to build up their own denominations. Population growth meant more people to evangelize, while migration carried Christian allegiance from one continent to another. Those who prospered through industrialization often adopted a more cultivated taste and could afford to pay for its indulgence. Hence they built churches in a more elaborate style and expected more refined sermons of their preachers. The rising tide of respectability, in fact, was one of the forces that exercised most influence over religion during the period. The plight of those who shared little in the new affluence, on the other hand, stirred the Christian conscience of those who turned to the social gospel at the end of the period. Better communications, together with widespread education, meant that the latest news and novel ideas spread rapidly. Evangelicals knew what was happening among their fellow-believers on the other side of the globe and were often swayed by their opinions or inspired by their schemes. Hence there was a large-scale interchange between evangelicals in different lands. As we shall see, the movement possessed a high degree of unity across the world. Already during the later nineteenth century evangelicalism was contributing in a major way to globalization.

1. The evangelicals of the world

In 1846 the Evangelical Alliance was formed to bring together the Protestants all over the world who were the heirs of the awakening of the previous century. Its basis of faith, designed to express the ‘prominent characteristics of the designation evangelical’, had been drawn up in the previous year by a sub-committee representing the British Isles alone, but it was approved unanimously at the founding conference that included a substantial American and continental presence. Its clauses, therefore, reveal what beliefs the founding evangelicals believed to be the common property of the movement around the middle of the nineteenth century. One clause, it is true, had occasioned considerable doubt because, by affirming the obligation of upholding the Christian ministry, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, it had effectively excluded Brethren, who rejected the ministry, and Quakers, who repudiated the sacraments. Yet other evangelicals insisted that these institutions were of sufficient importance to incorporate them in the basis. The remaining clauses were less controversial. There were articles asserting the doctrines of the Trinity, of human sin and of the last things, but three other topics call for particular comment. There were two clauses on the Bible. One professed the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures and another the responsibility of private judgment in their interpretation. There were also two on conversion. The sinner was declared, in the manner of the Reformation, to be justified by faith alone, and the Holy Spirit was identified as the agent of conversion (the word had originally been ‘regeneration’) as well as sanctification. Another clause confessed the incarnation, atonement and mediatorial intercession of Christ. The work of Christ in redemption was clearly regarded as central to the faith. The Bible, conversion and redemption were cardinal articles in the evangelical creed. If the authors of the document had gone on to specify what Christians should do alongside what they should believe, they would undoubtedly have put the preaching of the gospel at the head of their list. Dedicated effort for the spread of the Christian message was assumed to be the duty of believers. Activism, in fact, was as much a feature of the evangelical world as what was specified in the basis of the Alliance. A stress on the Scriptures as the source of faith, on conversion as its beginning, on redemption as its object, and activity as its consequence were hallmarks of the evangelicals.

The same four characteristics, albeit variously formulated, regularly appeared in evangelical statements about the kernel of Christianity. Evangelicals were normally orthodox in the sense of sharing with other Christians – Eastern or Roman Catholic, Lutheran or High Church Anglican – an acceptance of the beliefs expressed in the ancient creeds of the church. But it was not these doctrines that they normally stressed. They usually preferred to dwell on what, as a package, distinguished them from other orthodox Christians. Even the Anglicans amongst them, those who weekly recited the Apostles’ Creed in church, insisted that the supreme characteristics of vital Christianity were different from the formal traditions of higher churchmanship. Thus, in 1857, a leading article in the journal of the Evangelicals in the Church of England in Australia declared that they existed to maintain ‘the pure unadulterated Gospel of salvation by the blood of Christ, and of justification, only by faith in that blood, of sanctfication by the operation of the Holy Spirit, and of the supreme authority of the inspired word of God in all matters of faith and practice’. ‘To us’, it went on, ‘emphatically belongs also to convey these truths to the ignorant, the careless, the immoral, and all who are persisting in sin’. Like the framers of the Evangelical Alliance basis, the writer wanted to lay down that the believer should make spiritual progress through sanctification, but there is also insistence on the birth of Christian life through justification, on the Bible as the word of God and, with double emphasis, on the blood shed by Christ. The redeeming work of Christ is understood, as it normally was in evangelical professions of faith, as having been achieved by his atoning death on the cross. And there is an explicit avowal of the responsibility of the believer to take the gospel to the hitherto unconverted. Evangelicalism typically chose to give prominence to conversion, the Bible, the cross and missionary activity.

Nor did these features disappear during the second half of the nineteenth century. Although (as we shall see) some of them faded in certain quarters and all of them underwent unconscious change and deliberate adaptation, these qualities remained the defining features of evangelicalism down to the end of the century and beyond. In the 1880's the South African Methodists, in an annual address of their Conference to the members, expressed very similar views: ‘We are determined, as ever, to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified ...We invite you, and all men, to behold the Lamb of God, and by faith to realise a present, conscious pardon ...We cannot urge you too strongly to search the Scriptures ...Let the heathen of this Dark Continent have the gospel.’ There were the typical emphases on the atoning work of Christ on the cross; the need for personal faith through conversion; the supreme value of the Bible; and the binding obligation of mission. What we can call crucicentrism, conversionism, biblicism and activism formed the enduring priorities of the evangelical movement throughout the English-speaking world.

The Bible

The place of the Bible, always the supreme evangelical court of appeal, can be explored first. ‘There is,’ announced the newspaper of the American Free Methodists in 1884, ‘but one final standard of Christian living, or Christian doctrine. That standard is the word of God, revealed to man in the Holy Scriptures.’ Theology was therefore rooted in the Bible, ...