Inter-Varsity Press

CONTENTS

Foreword
Editors’ preface

PART 1: INTRODUCTION
1. The reception given Evangelicalism in Modern Britain since its publication in 1989
Timothy Larsen
2. Evangelicalism and the Enlightenment: a reassessment
Michael A. G. Haykin

PART 2: REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES
3. Evangelicalism in Scotland from Knox to Cunningham
A. T. B. McGowan
4. Continuity, novelty and evangelicalism in Wales, c. 1640–1850
D. Densil Morgan

5. Calvinistic Methodism and the origins of evangelicalism in England
David Ceri Jones
6. ‘Prayer for a saving issue’: evangelical development in New England before the Great Awakening
Thomas S. Kidd
7. Evangelicalism and the Dutch Further Reformation
Joel R. Beeke

PART 3: ERA PERSPECTIVES
8. The evangelical character of Martin Luther’s faith
Cameron A. MacKenzie
9. Calvin, A. M. Toplady and the Bebbington thesis
Paul Helm
10. Thomas Cranmer and Tudor evangelicalism
Ashley Null
11. Puritanism, evangelicalism and the evangelical Protestant tradition
John Coffey
12. Jonathan Edwards: continuator or pioneer of evangelical history?
Douglas A. Sweeney and Brandon G. Withrow
13. The Evangelical Revival through the eyes of the ‘Evangelical Century’: Nineteenth-century perceptions of the origins of evangelicalism
Ian J. Shaw

PART 4: EVANGELICAL DOCTRINES
14. The antecedents of evangelical conversion narrative: spiritual autobiography and the Christian tradition
D. Bruce Hindmarsh
15. Enlightenment epistemology and eighteenth-century evangelical doctrines of assurance
Garry J. Williams
16. Evangelical eschatology and ‘the Puritan hope’
Crawford Gribben
17. The evangelical doctrine of Scripture, 1650–1850: a re-examination of David Bebbington’s theory
Kenneth J. Stewart

PART 5: RESPONSE
18. Response
David W. Bebbington

FOREWORD

I first read David Bebbington’s Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s in 1990, one year after it was first published in the United Kingdom. I was impressed by the narrative force of its argument, its critical apparatus with references to thousands of soundings in primary sources, its sympathetic yet critical engagement with the movement it set out to describe. While I was not entirely convinced by its interpretation of evangelical history in the modern era, I knew this was a really good book, one to which I would doubtless return again and again. At the time, however, I did not sense that this volume would become the ‘classic’ it is now widely recognized to be some two decades later. The status of Bebbington’s book as a seminal study of great importance is born out not only by Timothy Larsen’s history of the reception of the book set forth in the first chapter of this volume, but also by the fact that no one to date has yet written a more compelling account of the history of the evangelical movement from the 1730s to the 1980s.

Several years later, in 1994, I was asked to write a brief article for Christianity Today, ‘If I’m an Evangelical, What Am I?’ I referred to what was even then being widely touted as the standard definition of evangelicalism – a movement of spiritual vitality within the Protestant tradition characterized by four distinguishing marks: conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism. The most contested of these traits, activism, looms large in a number of the chapters in this volume, not because anyone doubts that evangelicalism indeed was (and still is) a lively movement of intense activity, but because Bebbington’s linkage of activism to the doctrine of assurance has proved less than fully convincing to many scholars.

Still, it is a safe bet to assume that when one thinks of the distinctive marks of the evangelical church today, the Bebbington quadrilateral more often comes to mind than the venerable ecclesial attributes of the Nicene faith – one, holy, catholic and apostolic.

It is a measure of the persuasive and enduring strength of Bebbington’s book that so many historians of note still find it worthy of the kind of close analysis and critical engagement reflected in the following chapters. It is also a measure of Bebbington’s stature as a leading historian and interpreter of evangelical life that he has listened well to his critics and indeed has learned from the new light they have shed on his work. In the response he makes to these chapters at the close of the volume, Bebbington both reaffirms many of his original emphases and qualifies and adjusts others. In that sense, this volume is a model of the kind of scholarly interaction that advances knowledge and opens up new horizons of interpretation.

If there is one primary undercurrent that swirls through all of these chapters, as well as Bebbington’s response to them, it is the question reflected in the title and subtitle of this book: to what extent does evangelicalism of modern/postmodern times (say, from the conversion of John Wesley through to the era of Billy Graham) represent continuity or discontinuity with the preceding Christian story? Throughout history the Christian church has always been pulled toward one of two poles: identity or adaptability. This tension arises from the most central theological affirmation of the New Testament, the Word became flesh (John 1:14). The need to communicate the gospel in such a way that it speaks to the total context of the people to whom it is addressed courses through every age of church history and shapes the various disputes and controversies that have marked the development of Christian doctrine and spirituality: rigorism and laxism, orthodoxy and heresy, ecumenism and schism, reformation and retrenchment, to name only a few. Speaking of the Middle Ages, Roland Bainton once said that Christianity is wont either to conquer the world or to flee from it, and sometimes it seeks to do both at once. This same tension was certainly present in the eighteenth century as the Evangelical Awakening swept through many of the Protestant churches of Great Britain and North America. It is no less present today as Christianity in general and the world evangelical movement in particular is finding new centres of vitality in places like Nigeria, Korea, Nepal and Latin America.

When seen in the wider perspective of Christian history, evangelicalism is best understood as a renewal movement within historic Christian orthodoxy. At its heart is a theological core shaped by the trinitarian and Christological consensus of the early church, the formal and material principles of the Reformation, the missionary movement that grew out of the Great Awakening and the new movements of the Spirit that indicate ‘surprising works of God’ are still happening in the world today.

This understanding leads me to stress the fundamental continuity the evangelical faith shares with a Great Tradition of Christian believing, confessing, worshipping and acting through the centuries, while not discounting the many local histories that must be written to explain this phenomenon in any given era.

I want to say a closing word of gratitude to David Bebbington, whose scholarly work has stimulated our reflections in this volume. Not only is he a superb historian and fine teacher; he is also a participant-observer in the movement his studies have illuminated so well. A committed person of the church, he has been a deacon in a Scottish Baptist congregation and has a record of involvement in various Christian ministries across the years. Thus this book is a tribute to one of the great scholars of our day, an extraordinary historian whose insight, character and breadth of sympathy is a model for us all.

Timothy George
Founding dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University and a senior editor of Christianity Today

Extract from Chapter 9. CALVIN, A. M. TOPLADY and THE BEBBINGTON THESIS by Paul Helm

Introduction: the suffix

David Bebbington’s thesis is that evangelicalism is a phenomenon beginning in the early decades of the eighteenth century. He offers four essential qualities that together ‘form a quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of Evangelicalism’: conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism. Each of these features was present in earlier eras of Christianity, but in a novel development they come together in the early part of the eighteenth century, in the British Isles, to form ‘evangelicalism’.

The suffix ‘ism’ on each of these terms adds to the exactness of the thesis and as a result both exposes it to empirical refutation and also protects it against such refutation. It adds precision, because according to the thesis not only are each of these features essential to evangelicalism (another term that also shares the suffix), indeed form the essence of evangelicalism, but also each of these features is capable of being stated, if not by an exact definition, then by a set of necessary conditions that come close also to being sufficient conditions. Like vegetarianism, liberalism and cubism, Bebbington’s four features embody an expectation of precisely characterizable, if not exactly definable, conditions. They also suggest, what Bebbington may not intend, the presence of a strong self-awareness on the part of the new evangelicals that they are in the vanguard of a novel Christian movement. We need to keep in mind both these features, the possible overexactness of the thesis, and the issue of self-awareness, in what follows.

Rather surprisingly, as Garry Williams points out, despite the prominence of the four ‘isms’, Bebbington reckons that it is a fifth factor, the more optimistic and introspection-free doctrine of assurance that he believes is characteristic of the Revival, that is the new element, and that this gave rise to activism, the only really distinctive feature of 1730s evangelicalism when compared with its earlier relatives. No evidence is offered as to why such assurance leads inevitably to activism. Perhaps the connection is regarded as being self-evident. But it is far from being that. After all, it could be claimed a priori, in a parallel fashion to Bebbington’s claim that such confident assurance could lead to an ‘I’m all right, Jack’ attitude, to complacency and indifference towards those who lack it. In what follows, I shall ignore this slimmed-down version of his thesis and keep the four ‘isms’ in mind. In any case, I reckon that there is plenty of evidence of eighteenth-century evangelical saints wrestling with their doubts and fears; we shall touch on some of this evidence later.

Paradoxically, the suffix also fortifies the thesis against empirical refutation. For it denotes a step change. To anticipate a little of our discussion, it is not at all difficult to show that John Calvin believed in religious conversion. He believed that he himself was converted, and that others needed conversion. He tells us (see below), in his characteristically modest and self-effacing way, how he himself came to be converted and how important it was. In his preaching and teaching he told his hearers of the need for conversion. It is true that for Calvin conversio was a term used not to denote a bounded, shortish period of radical religious change but a lifelong reorientation of the self. We must not, however, confuse the word and the thing. Calvin believed both in the need for conversion and in the need for conversio. But did he believe in conversionism? Or (not quite the same question, as we have learned), was he a case of conversionism without believing it?

Either question is a much harder one to answer, at least as Bebbington presents it. While Bebbington recognizes the presence of continuities between evangelicalism and earlier Protestant traditions, the presence of the suffixes make it easier for him to stress discontinuity than might otherwise be the case.

A scholar is entitled to regiment his field of enquiry as he wishes if he believes that what he is doing will yield explanation and illumination. Nonetheless, one might complain that Bebbington’s approach is a rather unhelpful one, if not an unfair one. For in the field of religion, and of religious belief, and particularly in the study of changes in religious belief, almost invariably we are dealing not with step changes but with gradual, incremental shifts. When does a belief in the need for conversion become a case of conversionism? Clearly there are many important differences between John Calvin and, say, George Whitefield. Yet each believed in the need for conversion. What made Whitefield a conversionist and Calvin not one?

Does David Bebbington tell us? It is not clear to me that he does. For his answer to that question has to indicate that there has been a stepwise change between Calvin and Whitefield. What would the evidence for that be? It becomes a relatively easy task to discover that a person believes it is important for him not to eat meat. But is this vegetarianism? It is relatively easy to show that a person believes in the need for conversion. But is this conversionism? Bebbington’s claim that it is not, or may not be, insulates his thesis (it seems to me) from empirical refutation.

What lies ahead

In this chapter I shall attempt to discuss some of these questions further by doing two things. First, I shall look, fairly briefly, at the case of John Calvin (1509–64) in the light of Bebbington’s four ‘isms’. And then I shall examine, at a little greater length, the case of Augustus Montague Toplady (1740–78), an undoubted ‘Calvinist’. ...