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Regarding this point, Garry Williams delivers perhaps the strongest response to Bebbington. Williams, academic dean and tutor in church history and doctrine at Oak Hill Theological College in London, examines Edwards's Religious Affections. He argues that it does not depend on Enlightenment epistemology for counseling believers on how to find assurance of salvation. Rather, Edwards appeals to the biblical teaching that genuine believers act out of love despite trials that test their faith. As for Wesley, Williams does not deny that his teaching on the "spiritual sense" draws language from its Enlightenment times. But there is a big jump from relevance to dependence.

"The leitmotif of Bebbington's work is the claim that evangelicalism has always been fashioned by its contexts," Williams writes. "In principle that is an unobjectionable claim, but it is quite another step to say that evangelicalism was 'created by' one of its contexts."

In his voluminous writings, Bebbington variously describes evangelical activism as evangelism, prayer meetings, social reform, philanthropy, preaching, and pastoral care. However, this is hardly the stuff of innovation in Christian history. But Bebbington also cites foreign missions, a surprisingly and shamefully late development closely associated with the emergence of modern evangelicalism in the 1730s. Should this one criteria alone mark evangelicalism as a "sharp discontinuity" from the Reformation, Puritanism, and pietism? Williams does not think so.

The Advent of Evangelicalism advances the discussion because Bebbington took the time to respond. Occasionally he concedes that his book could be tweaked in response to these challenges, even to his key point about assurance. "A type of assurance deriving from contemporary thought was not the single hinge of the door into evangelicalism," Bebbington allows. But he is not easily bowed. "Despite the justified criticism of the treatment of assurance in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, it may still be the case that the common (though not universal) greater confidence in knowing God among evangelicals, for example in the Wesleyan doctrine of the witness of the Spirit, was a counterpart of the charismatic quest of the age for greater certainty. So many of the features of evangelical faith and practice during the eighteenth century, and for long afterwards, bore the stamp of the Enlightenment. Though not created by the Enlightenment, evangelicalism was embedded in it."

The debate over assurance illustrates how historical interpretation so often shapes theological discourse. If evangelicalism did not appear on the religious scene until the 1730s, then detractors gain a key point in their argument that novelty undermines credibility. If the Enlightenment created evangelicalism, then perhaps the movement should be re-created or abandoned altogether in our postmodern era. If inerrancy first emerged as evangelical dogma amid modernism in the 19th century, then less stringent definitions of biblical authority should be accepted. If, however, evangelicalism extends back to the Reformation and beyond, then the movement's identity and coherence depend on its doctrinal continuity with earlier eras.

With Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, Bebbington helped rescue evangelical history from the backwaters of fleeting reactionary movements. He has shown how leading evangelicals engaged meaningfully with the intellectual trends of their day. But noting evangelicals' gift for contextualizing the gospel should never sever them from their spiritual inheritance, as Timothy George observed in his foreword to The Advent of Evangelicalism.

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June (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53