The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism: True Religion in a Modern World

Abstract

‘Is it possible for women and men to experience the presence of God in the modern world?’ This is the fundamental existential question posed at the beginning of Bruce Hindmarsh's brilliant and insightful study of early evangelicalism. Hindmarsh addresses the question by reflecting on evangelical faith and experience in the context of the evolving intellectual culture of the eighteenth-century British North Atlantic world, a world poised on the threshold of modernity. In the process he draws on anthropology and the social sciences, and the history of science, law, and art, as well as offering a close, careful, and sympathetic reading of the works and lives of a range of evangelicals, principally John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards.The book begins with Whitefield, focusing on the years between 1734 and 1744 in which he was converted and embarked on his remarkable ministry as a preacher. Using Whitefield's manuscript diary (1735–6) and his letters to explore the influences that brought him to conversion in 1735 allows Hindmarsh to show the role of Oxford Methodism, Pietism, and the ‘practical divinity’ of Matthew Henry's biblical commentaries and also the vital importance of personal spiritual experience in turning Whitefield into ‘a flaming fire’ (42) of evangelical devotion.The next two chapters, set against the backdrop of contemporary debates about the superiority of ‘ancient’ or ‘modern’ societies, explore evangelicalism as a ‘modern’ phenomenon and also as heir to classical Christian patterns of devotion. Thus evangelicals appropriated the spiritual resources of previous generations, including medieval and Roman Catholic mystical works, but expressed and practised their faith in the modern social conditions of an open public sphere and a world of voluntary groups and networks (‘connexions’). The ‘worked examples’ of ancient sources aphorized by writers like Henry Scougal, and then abridged by John Wesley and published in cheap editions are very telling: Hindmarsh presents evidence of Wesley's abridgement of Scougal being carefully read by Cumbrian Methodists in the 1750s (83–6).Attention then turns in chapters 4 and 5 to evangelical attitudes to science and the natural world. Most evangelicals accepted a Newtonian outlook, albeit cautiously, while resisting the implications of a mechanistic philosophy that threatened to banish God from the world. In the metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards, the poetry of Anne Steele, and the art of John Russell, evangelicals were able to sense God in all things and respond with ‘wonder, love, and praise’.From moral philosophy Hindmarsh moves to the law (chapters 6 and 7), discussing the place of the biblical law in evangelical theology and preaching and the backdrop to evangelical ministry afforded by England's ‘century of law’ and notorious ‘bloody code’ of capital crimes. An analysis of Charles Wesley's preaching in Newgate, the work of Silas Told in London's prisons, and John Wesley and Henry Venn's assize sermons adds depth and particularity to the breadth of the treatment here, as evangelicals insisted on the ‘spirituality and extent of the law’ (194).In the final chapter, Hindmarsh discusses art, using the debate between Reynolds and Gainsborough over beauty and truth to shed light on the Calvinist/Arminian conflict in evangelicalism. He captures the sense of different ‘schools’ within the same frame of discourse before offering a reflection on Calvinism as a religious version of the sublime—resting in the contemplation of God—and the Wesleys' Arminianism as a religious version of the heroic—resting in victory after struggle, summed up in Charles Wesley's hymn ‘Wrestling Jacob’. Commenting on the vocabulary of ‘striving’ in John Wesley's letters and sermons, Hindmarsh notes, with typical grace and insight, that ‘the mood of most of his sentences was the imperative’ (263).The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism weaves together an amazing breadth of scholarship with depth of knowledge in detail. Its analysis is subtle and suggestive, as well as comprehensive in synthesis. The thesis presented—that evangelicalism represents ‘a distinctive form of traditional Christian spirituality that emerged in the eighteenth century highly responsive to the conditions of the modern world’ (276)—is made persuasively and elegantly. This is a lucid and beautifully written book, and an important one.