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The Changing Shape of English Nonconformity The Changing Shape of English Nonconformity, 1825-1925 by Dale A. Johnson Oxford Univ. Press, 1999 272 pp. $45 Anglican Evangelicals Anglican Evangelicals: Protestant Secessions from the Via Media, c. 1800-1850 by Grayson Carter Oxford Univ. Press, 2001 350 pp. $85

I seem to remember that a great prince of English Nonconformity, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, once said something like, "It is no good protesting, 'We are all evangelicals, we are all evangelicals,' but never defining what an evangelical is." Dale A. Johnson's world of 19th- and early 20th-century English Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists is one in which almost everyone seems to be an evangelical, but the question of the meaning of the term is repeatedly elided. In his defense, Johnson is seeking to offer a corrective to an established narrative of decline in which all deviations from the doctrinal expressions and emphases of earlier evangelicals are viewed as, by definition, not evangelical.

The wider intellectual climate changed dramatically during the century 1825-1925. The older evangelicalism rested on the authority of ideas such as natural theology and the classic proofs for the existence of God, which were respected in the wider world of thought. It expounded its doctrines in an environment in which the modern discipline of biblical criticism had not yet yielded its harvest, and popular sensibilities were not yet greatly troubled by questions regarding the morality of eternal punishment and substitutionary atonement. In the face of these later winds of change, English Nonconformity produced some hard-working, reflective, spiritual leaders, who endeavored to keep faith with the evangelical tradition while reconstructing it to suit new conditions.

The Congregational theologian R. W. Dale is a noble example. He knew that the old evangelicalism of his ministerial predecessor, J. A. James, the author of The Anxious Enquirer after Salvation Directed and Encouraged, could not simply be parroted to a new generation which possessed an altered worldview. Nevertheless, in his own well-circulated volume, The Atonement, Dale fought for the substance of an evangelical witness on Christ's work, while adapting some of the language and imagery in response to recent challenges. Likewise P. T. Forsyth, although he had learned much from theological liberalism, was ready to defend the centrality of the cross in an Edwardian context. Johnson argues persuasively that this understudied third way between rejecting either the old faith or the modern world was actually the one which most Nonconformist theologians and ministers were seeking to travel.

Nevertheless, his zeal for his theme seems to push him toward the opposite extreme from the one he wishes to correct. It is almost as if everyone emerging from an evangelical background is viewed as, by definition, an evangelical, virtually irrespective of how their theological convictions might evolve. Johnson seems to have internalized the assumption that the label "liberal" is a pejorative one and he protectively guards his subjects from it. But his reluctance to draw such boundaries ironically weakens the valuable presentation he is making: the majority tradition can only fully be shown to be evangelical by defining what this means and what forsaking it would have entailed.

Johnson argues that the changes these Nonconformists made were not "a decline from earlier evangelical vitality and appeal" but rather "deeply serious efforts to come to terms with modernity." These categories, however, are not mutually exclusive. "Decline," of course, is pejorative, but, once that is set aside, arguing that someone's Christianity is no longer evangelical is not the same thing as accusing it of being shallow or frivolous (the true opposites of "deeply serious") or insincere or unspiritual. Johnson concludes that what emerged during this period was "different models of how to be evangelical," which is certainly true, but surely what also emerged were different models of how to be Christian. An evangelicalism that is ready to learn from Friedrich Schleiermacher is one thing, but when Mansfield College has a stained glass image of the grand old man of theological liberalism specially made to inspire the faithful in its chapel (a detail that Johnson does not mention), might that not be a clue that we are no longer dealing with a form of Christianity that can still meaningfully be discussed under the "evangelical" appellation?

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