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Returning to "Amazing Grace" author John Newton: he clearly crafted his conversion narrative under the influence of the sentimentalists. Newton wrote his Authentic Narrative in the form of personal letters, with warm greetings and relational rhetoric at the front of almost every chapter. This is no accident. This "epistolary" form was exactly the form used by the first writers of sentimental novels—like Samuel Richardson in his Pamela.

Also in the sentimental tradition were several of Newton's other stylistic decisions: (1) the frequent, detailed descriptions he gives of his inner states, (2) the vivid, visually rendered tableaux or "scenes" designed to draw his readers imaginatively into his own experiences, and (3) the way he weaves his own courtship and marriage into his account, portraying his romantic relationship with Mary as an important part of his spiritual reawakening.

The result of Newton's sentimentalist approach is an engaging and affecting story designed to do the quintessential sentimental work of changing the hearts of those who read it.

The book's popularity was instant and long-lasting. It was reprinted many times. Treasured copies were passed from friend to friend, long into the 19th century. And most importantly, it helped pattern the conversion narratives of evangelicals for centuries after.

Evangelicalism's most important book, a sentimental narrative?
If you are still tempted to dismiss Newton's sentimental conviction as a dinosaur or a dangerous concession to emotional self-indulgence, consider this:

A generation before Newton's Authentic Narrative (1764), contemporaneously with Richardson's sentimental novel Pamela (1740), another famous book was published that owed much to Lockean empiricism and the ideals of the sentimentalists. Like Newton and Richardson, the brilliant Puritan thinker Jonathan Edwards wrote his 1737 classic The Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the form of a series of letters. And like those other two authors, Edwards sought to lay bare the intricacies of the human heart.

Mark Noll, in his recent Rise of Evangelicalism, tells how Edwards's Narrative became the primary textbook for revivalistic Christianity in his age and long after. Out of his sentimentalist conviction that reading about the experiences and emotions of others would illuminate one's own heart and relationships, Edwards wrote a masterpiece that has shaped the whole course of modern evangelicalism.

The novels of Charles Dickens and Samuel Richardson, the Authentic Narrative of John Newton, and the Faithful Narrative of Edwards all remind us that there was once a space in Western culture for people to read and be deeply influenced by the experiences and emotions of others—whether in fictional or non-fictional form.

Grace and Peace to All who are Still Open to being Changed by Stories,

Chris Armstrong
Bethel Seminary

Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

More Christian history, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church's past, is available at ChristianHistory.net. Subscriptions to the quarterly print magazine Christian History & Biography are also available.

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February (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50