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The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody by David Bebbington InterVarsity, 2005 300 pp. $23

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Alas, evangelicals often fail to apply L. P. Hartley's insight to their own history. After all, they implicitly reason, does not recognizing past believers as fellow evangelicals mean that they were also committed to the unalterable gospel once and for all delivered to the saints?

David Bebbington, in his masterly survey, The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody, underlines the otherness of the past—even the past of fellow gospel believers. He reminds us that there was a time when an organ was a controversial and daring instrument to use in public worship. Eschewing the church year entirely, evangelicals once objected in principle even to Christmas services. In our day of gospel sermons illustrated with video clips, it is perhaps necessary to recall that there was a time when the theater was strictly forbidden among evangelicals. On the other hand, in the mid-19th century, when the Baptist pastors of London gathered together for official ministerial meetings, wine was served with dinner as a matter of course. Far from celebrating every evangelical who managed to get elected to high office, evangelicals who aspired to politics were once told by some of their own that such a career would "offend against their dispensation." In the 19th century, daily family devotions were arguably "a badge of the movement."

Baptists in America considered it a "heresy" to invite all sincere Christians in their midst (thereby including those baptized as infants) to receive the Lord's Supper. Even an evangelical Anglican priest once argued that a host elevated in the high church manner was ipso facto "an idolatrous Communion" of which evangelicals could not partake. The Sabbath was kept so strictly in Scotland during the height of "the dominance of evangelicalism" that a visiting minister who had just emerged from Sunday morning worship was reprimanded by a policeman for whistling the tune of the hymn he had just sung!

If much of that is merely quaint, at his most bold Bebbington can assert that conservative evangelicals were often not defending historic fundamentals of the faith but rather "novelties" that were "less than a hundred years old." These innovations mistaken for timeless truths run across cherished evangelical terrain from the meaning of a life of faith through the nature of holiness to the second advent of Christ.

What then are the commonalities that make the label "evangelical" fitting for both then and now, here and there? Bebbington himself, in his 1989 classic study, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, has provided a definition that has become the standard one. It is, for example, the one used by a leading monograph series from Paternoster Press, Studies in Evangelical History and Thought. Donald M. Lewis' Dictionary of Evangelical Biography employed Bebbington's definition to delineate its scope, as did my Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals. Indeed, in the June 2005 issue of Christianity Today, beside the author's own thoughts, Bebbington's definition was the only one cited in an article by Philip Yancey on the nature of evangelicalism. This is really quite an extraordinary tribute to its persuasiveness and utility when one recalls that Christianity Today was already considered by many to be the authority on evangelicalism back when Bebbington was still spending recess climbing on a play set.

The Bebbington quadrilateral, as it is often called, defines evangelicals by their strong commitment to the Bible, the cross (that is, salvation through the atoning work of Christ on the cross), conversion, and activism (mobilizing the whole community for evangelism, missions, social work, and doing good generally). This definition, on the one hand, actually identifies doctrinal categories, and thus is more theological than some prominent attempts that have been made to describe evangelicals in entirely relational or networking terms. On the other hand, by naming characteristic priorities rather than attempting to formulate doctrinal statements, Bebbington has built in the required flexibility to account for change over time. In such an approach, one can recognize a common commitment to the Bible and the cross held both by those who believe that the words "inerrancy" and "penal substitution" belong at the core of any articulation of those doctrines and by those who find those terms problematic in some ways.

Yet evangelicals' commitment to these self-identifying traits has often been marked by ironies and tensions. It was felt, for example, that an evangelical emphasis on the cross needed to be distinguished from a Roman Catholic one:

Nor was the cross used as a physical symbol by evangelicals in this period. No woman would have worn a cruciform ornament, which was popish; no cross appeared on the holy table of an evangelical church, even in the Anglican tradition, since that savored of Rome. The only New Testament symbols, thundered the Irish Presbyterian in 1853, were water, bread and wine. A cross might be seen on spires of church buildings—even on Presbyterian buildings in Scotland—but the practice was deplorable.

Conversion also needed to be handled with sensitivity. Some evangelicals became concerned that an emphasis on a dramatic, instantaneous conversion experience (what Bebbington delightfully describes as momentous and momentary) could make genuine believers who had gradually appropriated their faith while being raised by godly parents worry that they were not saved. A move toward being reassuring, however, could also eventually become an overcorrection. One woman told a story of how a minister tried to convince her to become a member of his church. When she informed him that she was not saved, he brushed aside such a trivial disqualification with the words: "Never mind, you are as good as the rest of them."

Activism is a key explanation for how evangelicalism came to dominate culture and society as a whole in the English-speaking world during the period 1850-1900. The preeminent Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon, exhorted evangelicals training for the ministry, "Brethren, do something; do something; do something. While committees waste their time over resolutions, do something." Laypeople, of course, were also roused into action—the devil would find no opportunity for making mischief through their hands being idle. Evangelicals, at their truest, do not preoccupy themselves with incessantly debating how to define evangelicalism. Rather, they sacrificially expend their time, money, and energy to reach a lost and suffering world.

A major outlet for evangelical activism during this period was foreign missions. Between 1860 and 1884, 12 percent of the money that Anglicans raised went to missions, and that is a result for a church which was only partially evangelical. As many British people were full-time missionaries as were pursuing entire secular professions such as accountancy or architecture. The dominance of evangelicalism made significant and perhaps sometimes surprising contributions to our world. Evangelical "Bible Women," for example, who visited the poor in their homes to attend to their spiritual and general welfare, pioneered what became the modern profession of social work. The evangelical Young Men's Christian Association literally invented basketball and volleyball. Evangelicals attracted to socialism "laid some of the intellectual foundations for the Labour Party in Britain in subsequent years"— resources upon which the current Prime Minister, Tony Blair, continues to draw.

The brilliant achievement of Bebbington's Evangelicalism in Modern Britain was his relating of the approaches of evangelicals from era to era with intellectual currents in the wider culture. The Dominance of Evangelicalism has a much narrower chronological focus (1850-1900), and therefore it concentrates on connections between evangelicalism and Romanticism. Those who have read the older book will recognize the basic contours of this argument.

The impressive new contribution of The Dominance of Evangelicalism is its sweeping geographical range. In the last fifteen years, Bebbington has done firsthand research in Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—as well as continuing to explore Irish, Welsh, English, and Scottish contexts. In this volume, examples are freely cited from across the English-speaking world. This is a fruitful and important advance in the study of evangelicalism. It allows Bebbington to argue convincingly that "evangelical" is a valid and coherent category—that distinguishing marks were possessed from the Scottish Highlands to the Antipodes, from Cape Cod to Cape Town, with a sense of a cause held in common in many different parts of the globe.

This was also true across denominations. In a splendid, unapologetic barrage of denominational stereotypes, Bebbington observes: "Anglicans might be more churchy, Presbyterians more intellectual, Methodists more exuberant, Baptists more rigid and Congregationalists more open, but they knew that they shared the same gospel." As L. P. Hartley reminds us, however, the passage of time is the real test of how effective Bebbington's claim for an identifiable evangelicalism is. We will be in a better position to judge his definition by that standard when all of the volumes in the History of Evangelicalism Series are published. The first one, Mark Noll's The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys, is already in print. The Dominance of Evangelicalism is the third volume of a projected five-volume sequence covering the period from the 1730s to the present. Brian Stanley has agreed to take on the daunting task of the final volume: The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Graham and Stott.

Surely the organizers of this series are not wrong to postulate that figures ranging from the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards in 18th-century America to the Anglican John Stott in 21st-century England would recognize one another as gospel believers of the same ilk. Bebbington shows us this movement in the days of Charles Spurgeon and D. L. Moody. This was a period in which evangelical dominance was the fruit of what was sown in the 18th century and during which evangelicals were busy scattering gospel seeds around the world, thereby contributing to the global Christianity of our own day. When we read Brian Stanley's concluding volume, we would do well to recall that other active evangelicals have labored that there might be such a harvest.

Timothy Larsen, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is associate professor of theology at Wheaton College and the author most recently of Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Baylor Univ. Press).

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