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The Advent of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities Edited by Michael A. G. Haykin and Kenneth J. Stewart B&H Academic, November 2008 432 pp., $17.99

Biblical scholars and systematic theologians usually grab the headlines during contemporary debates over evangelical identity. Church historians are called to testify as even-handed observers who place the debate in context. But this context itself is often the stuff of legendary dispute among historians. David Bebbington's Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, published in 1989, has set the terms of theological discourse by describing the historical context from which the modern movement emerged. In time for the book's 20th anniversary, a team of renowned scholars has published The Advent of Evangelicalism, where they reflect on Bebbington's vast influence and challenge several of his most controversial claims.

Reviewers have described Evangelicalism in Modern Britain with the common buzzwords that denote a must-read volume, such as "classic" and "magisterial." As Timothy Larsen notes in his chapter on the book's reception history, Bebbington's quadrilateral has become a standard definition of evangelicalism. Even Christianity Today, considered an authority on the movement for decades before Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, frequently appeals to the marks of biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism. Indeed, Larsen concludes that Bebbington's four pillars "have no rival anywhere near as influential or popular and are unlikely to be replaced by an alternative structure any time soon."

But the quadrilateral is practically a side note to one simple, straightforward sentence by Bebbington that has stirred much controversy: "Evangelical religion is a popular Protestant movement that has existed in Britain since the 1730s." Bebbington goes so far as to argue that the transatlantic revival of this period "represents a sharp discontinuity in the Protestant tradition." In other words, Bebbington sees evangelicalism breaking with the Reformation as it adapted to the Enlightenment, then Romanticism, and finally modernism. In his analysis, John Locke's epistemology lurks behind John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards where we might expect to find Martin Luther and John Calvin. According to Larsen, Bebbington "made as significant and substantial a contribution to scholarship as the author of any book could ever hope for, in the ambitious way that he related church history to other forms of history and wider cultural developments."

As several of the contributors to The Advent of Evangelicalism make clear, biblicism, crucicentrism, and conversionism can be plainly found in the Puritans and continental pietists who predated the 1730s. So Bebbington's argument for discontinuity stands or falls on activism motivated by a new type of assurance. "The activism of the Evangelical movement sprang from its strong teaching on assurance," Bebbington writes in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. "That, in turn, was a product of the confidence of the new age about the validity of experience." Then Bebbington drops a bombshell: "The Evangelical version of Protestantism was created by the Enlightenment." He draws a clear contrast between the evangelicals and their Puritan predecessors. "Whereas the Puritans had held that assurance is rare, late and the fruit of struggle in the experience of believers, the Evangelicals believed it to be general, normally given at conversion and the result of simple acceptance of the gift of God."

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June (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53