Early Evangelicalism Research Articles

Kerigma: preguntas teóricas en torno a la primera evangelización de América (Antillas, 1510-Nueva España, 1524)

This article aims to develop a theoretical reflection on the nature of the first announcement of Christianity in America, based on an analysis of the cycles of early evangelization in the Antilles and New Spain. For this purpose, it proposes the use of the theological concept kerygma in order to highlight a phase of the missionary project that would constitute the cutting edge of the struggle between the new faith and the old local cults. Taking kerygma as its starting point, this study deals with Pedro de Cordoba's Christian Doctrine for the Instruction and Information of the Indians (1510-1521) and the Colloquia of the Twelve Apostles (1524) recorded by Bernardo de Sahagun, as foundational works in the cycles of evangelization in the Antilles and New Spain, and simultaneously, the transformation of the first forms of preaching in each territory into texts. It concludes that the characteristics of the missionary challenge in the Americas involved the need to establish a pre-catechetical and pre-Christological basis, as the cutting edge of evangelization in each missionary experience analyzed. th century (author's

Copies With Souls: The Late Seventeenth-century Marianas Martyrs, Francis Xavier, and the Question of Clerical Reproduction

Although Ignatius created the template for Jesuit manhood, the task of modeling missionary masculinity for future generations fell to Francis Xavier as the first member to venture beyond Europe. This essay focuses on two late seventeenth-century followers of Xavier in the Marianas mission, Diego Luis de Sanvitores and Augustin Strobach, whom contemporaries characterized as virtual “copies” of Xavier with a twist: while the original Xavier longed for martyrdom in vain, Sanvitores and Strobach were able to shed blood for the faith. Their stories are set against the backdrop of the post-Trent revival of martyrdom and the Society’s need to keep generating new Christians as well as new missionaries to extend its reach across space and time. Print technology, which circulated images and stories of saintly exemplars worldwide and offered a cultural template for mimetic copying, was crucial in facilitating such clerical reproduction across the much greater distances involved in early modern evangelization.

Michael S.Whiting: Luther in English: The Influence of His Theology of Law and Gospel on Early English Evangelicals 1525–35. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010; pp. viii + 360.

Michael S.Whiting: Luther in English: The Influence of His Theology of Law and Gospel on Early English Evangelicals 1525–35. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010; pp. viii + 360.

Spanish Men, Indigenous Language, and Informal Interpreters in Postcontact Mexico

In the 1570s the alcalde of Motines (located in the coastal mountains of modern day Michoacán) was denounced to the Inquisition for having told the indigenous residents that they did not need to spend money decorating their churches and for engaging in other heresies, including Calvinism. His defense was simple; he claimed that he and his secretary could only speak standardized Nahuatl, and since the natives of Motines did not speak this dialect of Nahuatl they misinterpreted his statements. This is a unique case in which it is clear that several Spaniards, living soon after the conquest, spoke Nahuatl as a language of commerce and communication in order to operate among a diverse group of indigenous ethnicities. This article investigates the use of Nahuatl among nonindigenous persons who were not a part of early evangelization. Drawing on dozens of documents, this article examines how Nahuatl was used as a lingua franca among this diverse group of individuals living on the frontier. In these cases, like the one from Motines, Nahuatl served as the common language that connected various ethnic groups in the area. An analysis of quotidian Nahuatl use among secular individuals demonstrates the diffusion of Nahuatl as a dominant language in central Mexico. Similarly, comparing this process to what Solange Alberro has described for the acculturation of criollos, this article suggests that the use of Nahuatl among Spaniards represents part of the process of the “Indianization” of the dominant Creole culture.

Book Review: Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination

Spiritual Identities: Literature and Post-Secular Imagination. Edited by Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2010. Vol. 17 of Cultural Interactions: Studies in Relationship Between Arts. ISBN 978-03911-925-7. Pp. vi + 231. $58.95. The Peter Lang series, Cultural Interactions: Studies in Relationship Between Arts, of which this volume is a part, directs its attention to forging new relationships between arts, expanding their interdisciplinary possibilities. Spiritual Identities serves this purpose well, emphasizing fresh perspectives on role of the religious in contemporary literary (1). Those who dispute nineteenth-century claims that religion was no more than a relic of unscientific thinking will be heartened by articles in this volume, which start from perspective, reminiscent of Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, and others, that the religious is increasingly revealed as an irreducible category of thought, feeling, experience and imagination which can never be explained away and with which we will always have to reckon (1). In recognizing importance of contemporary religious yearnings, editors maintain that 'cracks' into which religious impulses flow in a world without religion are nothing other than space of literature itself: literature is neither an alternative to, nor a substitute for religion, but a way in which religious experience can happen (5). All of essays in volume, then, invite readers to rethink and reimagine persistence of religious ideas, questions, and influences on lives and works of a wide variety of authors and literary works. The essays in this volume are wide-ranging, some more illuminating than others. The essays in volume which seem least successful at highlighting a contemporary return to recognition of religious impulses in art are those focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors and their works. Essays by Nancy Jiwon Cho and Emma Mason that investigate work of lesser-known writers, like eighteenth-century devotional writer Susanna Harrison, and poets Anne Barbauld and Felicia Hemans, do helpfully underscore ways that these women negotiated their identities as writers by using, in various ways, their relationships with and commitments to both traditional and dissenting forms of Christianity. But Brian Ingram's essay on George Eliot's early Evangelicalism and Simon Marsdon's piece on spiritualized landscape of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights cover already analyzed territory. And although Andy Mousley's essay on spiritual humanisms focuses on more recent writers, in using work of Martin Luther King to create a dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Julia Kristeva, essay takes up so many aspects of these writers' work that it fails to bring its point home clearly. The essays that have more promise for thinking about religious in contemporary literary studies are those that specifically engage newer works of literature, underscoring ways in which religious impulses cut across, undermine, and reformulate traditional, dichotomous ways of thinking. …

“The Spirit Breathes upon the Word”: The Formative use of Scripture in the Hymns of William Cowper

Recently evangelicals have been discovering the benefits of a formative reading of Scripture. However, eighteenth-century evangelicals consciously practiced both an informational and formational way of reading the Bible. This article raises the question how early evangelicals read Scripture and what was the role of the Holy Spirit in that reading. The hymns of William Cowper from the Olney Hymns (1779) serve as the primary text for this exploration. Cowper's experimental piety that was common among evangelicals assured that the Word would be read both with the head for knowledge as well as the heart for experience and transformation. This paper analyzes Cowper's varied use of Scripture in his hymns, as well as the formative nature of Scripture within those hymns. One prominent feature of Cowper's writing is the dynamic intersection between the Word and Spirit. This article concludes by asking the practical question of retrieval of how the contemporary church can learn to read Scripture more formatively through the themes of Cowper's hymns.

Bonfires of Culture: Franciscans, Indigenous Leaders, and the Inquisition in Early Mexico, 1524–1540 (review)

Reviewed by: Bonfires of Culture: Franciscans, Indigenous Leaders, and the Inquisition in Early Mexico, 1524–1540 Fernando Cervantes Bonfires of Culture: Franciscans, Indigenous Leaders, and the Inquisition in Early Mexico, 1524–1540. By Patricia Lopes Don. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2010. Pp. xiii, 263. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-806-14049-0.) An intriguing feature of the early evangelization of central Mexico is the extraordinary manner in which the natives flocked with genuine zeal to be baptized at the hands of Franciscan friars. It all seemed to confirm Hernán Cortés’s efforts to reassure the emperor Charles V that the conquest of Mexico had more than made up for his losses in Europe by adding vast new territories populated by people who would merely need instruction rather than forced conversion. Unfortunately, this initial enthusiasm soon was replaced by disillusionment. The apparent enthusiasm for baptism was likely the result of the Mesoamerican tradition of incorporating the victor’s deities into the pre-existing pantheon, but the practice was in no way meant to be accompanied by the outright rejection of the other deities. As evidence of indigenous recidivism increased, therefore, so did a sense of betrayal and a growing distrust among the friars in the face of what they could only interpret as duplicity and bad faith. This led to a flurry of inquisitorial trials in the late 1530s under the leadership of Archbishop Fray Juan de Zumárraga that reached a tragic climax in 1539 with the burning at the stake of the Cacique de Texcoco, Don Carlos Ometochtli Chichimecateuctli. The documents relating to these episodes have been widely available to historians since Luis González Obregón published them in 1912. Nevertheless, this is the first scholarly monograph that attempts a detailed reconstruction of the trials, placing them authoritatively in their historical context and delving into the circumstances behind each case and the chain of intrigue on both sides of the cultural divide. The author is as comfortable in the Inquisitorial methods deployed in Spain to deal with conversos and moriscos as she is in analyzing the structures and dynastic intricacies of the Valley of Texcoco and the Sierra de Puebla. She thus sheds as much light on [End Page 176] the attitudes of Zumárraga and his illustrious coreligionist, fray Andrés de Olmos—both of whom had been involved in witchcraft trials in the Basque region before setting off to evangelize New Spain—as she does on the motives of the likes of Martín Ocelotl, Andrés Mixcoatl, the keepers of tlaquimilloli (the puzzling sacred bundles containing prehispanic relics), and the cacique de Texcoco himself. The fluidity and adaptability that the author brings to light in her reconstructions also allow her to provide a thoroughly convincing reinterpretation of the Boban Calendar Wheel, now in the John Carter Brown Library, which she dates to the years shortly after the execution of Don Carlos. It is a beautiful example of the mid-way process between pictographic and alphabetic documentation in Nahuatl to which both natives and Spaniards clearly contributed. It therefore is a pity that the analysis of the Calendar Wheel should not be better integrated into the main argument of the book, for it would have allowed the author to resist a tendency to present a rather neat picture that draws too sharp a dividing line between the flexible adaptability of the indigenous actors (who allegedly did not know “moral temptation” [p. 157] and thus managed to “shape the contours of Franciscan teaching in ways that showed little regard for Franciscan dreams” [p. 191]) and the comparatively monolithic, “black and white” morality of the Franciscans (which, according to Patricia Lopes Don, prevented them from understanding “the natives’ values and moral dilemmas” [pp. 58, 174]). But this is a minor quibble in what is otherwise a very solid and illuminating study, whose evident merits will prevent it from gathering much dust in libraries in the foreseeable future. Fernando Cervantes University of Bristol Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press

Conflict and crisis in the religious life of late Victorian England

Contrary to its popular image as dull and stodgy, the Victorian period was one of revolutionary change. In its politics, its art, its economic affairs, its class relationships, and in its religion, change was constant. A half-century after Queen Victoria's death, it was said that she was born in one world and died in another. The most interesting and valuable studies of the period take the long view, as does Schlossberg, in his fascinating analysis of religious life in this period. For the Victorians, religion was not cordoned off from the push and shove of real life. The early evangelicals got off to a shaky start, beset by hostility, but the movement spread within the churches despite the suspicion in which it was held. Evangelicals, frequently called Puritans by those who opposed them, called for fundamental reforms in both the Church and the society; a social ethic was part of their program of religious renewal. Their moral sense explains the social activism of both Church of England Evangelicals and Dissenters, including the half-century crusade for the abolition of slavery. Schlossberg shows how religion in England dealt with such issues as science and the effect of German scholarship on religious thinking. Church history cannot simply be explained by its response to external forces as much as by the internal responses to those challenges. The nature of the religious enterprise itself, its theologians, clergy, lay people - like all people and all institutions - all responded with alternatives. Schlossberg helps us understand the Victorian period, as well as the increasing secularity of English life today.

Calvin in Lithuania: from the correspondence to the first publication

This paper deals with two topics: Calvin’s efforts to guide the course of the Reformation in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) from 1549 until his death, and Calvin’s reception in the Lithuanian Reformed Church at the end of the 16th century and during the first half of the 17th. The paper also discusses the publication of Calvin’s works in the GDL during that period. The relationship between Calvin and the Reformation process in Lithuania can be divided into three periods. The first period was that of early Evangelicalism, when the Lithuanian Reformation was guided (until his death in 1565) by Mikołłaj Radziwiłł the Black, who entertained a controversy with Calvin concerning the Trinity. The second period witnessed the formation of the Reformed orthodoxy after the schism in the Lithuanian Protestant community; the development of doctrine was influenced by Andreas Volanus (ca. 1531-1610). During this period Lithuanian Evangelical Church started to maintain a clear distance from the Anti-Trinitarian communities and made a declarative turn towards Reformed orthodoxy. The third period marked a stronger link toward Calvin and Calvinism at the beginning of the 17th century. In that period the first translation of Calvin was published in the GDL. Nauka o Sakramienciech Świętych Nowego Testamentu. Wzięta z czwartych ksiąg Institucij nabożeństwa krześcijańskiego Jana Kalwina i na polską rzecz przeniesiona (A Teaching on Sacraments taken from Institutio of Calvin) was published in 1626 in Lubcz by Radziwiłł’s printer Petrus Blastus Kmita. The book was prepared by one of Radziwill’s clients, Piotr Siestrzencewicz (Petrus Sestrencius, + 1655), an early student in the Academy of Sedan (France) who started his activities as an author of some published funeral speeches (one of them, dedicated to Volanus, did not survive) and other occasional works. It is right from the fifth decade of the 17th century that one can spot that in the popular discourse of GDL Protestants the Lithuanian Reformers started to call themselves Calvinists and identify themselves with “the Calvinist faith.” Until that moment GDL Protestants referred to themselves only as “Christians” and “Evangelicals” (the latter name was first used in the letters from 1567 to 1573).

Response to Reviews of, In Jesus' Name

AbstractThis article is a response by Reed to two reviews of his book. Both reviewers write as Oneness or "Apostolic" Pentecostals, Millner from an African-American tradition and French from a predominantly white organization. Reed briefly examines three issues raised in the reviews based on their implications for race within OP identity: the historical roots of OP theology in early evangelicalism, OP's heterodox beliefs and tenuous relationship with other Christian bodies, and Reed's historical-theological methodology.

Evangelizing the South: a social history of church and state in early America

Although many refer to the American South as the Bible Belt, the region was not always characterized by a powerful culture. In the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, religion-in terms both of church membership and personal piety-was virtually absent from southern culture. The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, however, witnessed the astonishingly rapid rise of evangelical religion in the Upper South. Within just a few years, evangelicals had spread their beliefs and their fervor, gaining converts and building churches throughout Virginia and North Carolina and into the western regions. But what was it that made evangelicalism so attractive to a region previously uninterested in religion? Monica Najar argues that early evangelicals successfully negotiated the various challenges of the eighteenth-century landscape by creating churches that functioned as civil as well as bodies. The evangelical church of the late eighteenth century was the cornerstone of its community, regulating marriages, monitoring prices, arbitrating business, and settling disputes. As the era experienced substantial rifts in the relationship between church and state, the disestablishment of colonial churches paved the way for new formulations of church-state relations. The evangelical churches were well-positioned to provide guidance in uncertain times, and their multiple functions allowed them to reshape many of the central elements of authority in southern society. They assisted in reformulating the lines between the religious and secular realms, with significant consequences for both religion and the emerging nation-state. Touching on the creation of a distinctive southern culture, the position of women in the private and public arenas, family life in the Old South, the relationship between religion and slavery, and the political culture of the early republic, Najar reveals the history behind a heritage that remains a distinguishing mark of American society.

TRADITIONAL CHANGE: EVANGELICALS, MUSLIMS, AND PLURALISM IN AMERICA

The dominant narrative for immigrant religious groups in America has been one of success, Muslim-Americans included. Two factors explain this unique environment. Unlike Europe, the U.S. has a participatory—not assimilationist—model of immigration. And it has a pluralist civil society in partnership with secular government, education, and law. Historically, early evangelicalism, the frontier economy, and the immigrant experience all contributed to America's pluralistic society. This led to a familiarity with difference—regular exposure to and tolerance of practices and beliefs that are different from one's own. “Traditional change” in a religious community can proceed in such a pluralist environment.

Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789 By W. R. Ward

HistoryVolume 93, Issue 311 p. 427-428 Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789 By W. R. Ward BRUCE HINDMARSH, BRUCE HINDMARSH Regent College, VancouverSearch for more papers by this author BRUCE HINDMARSH, BRUCE HINDMARSH Regent College, VancouverSearch for more papers by this author First published: 28 June 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.2008.431_30.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume93, Issue311July 2008Pages 427-428 RelatedInformation

Is Evangelical Ecclesiology an Oxymoron? A Historical Perspective

This article traces the emergence of evangelicalism as an international and transdenominational movement under the uniquely modern political, material, and social conditions of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and then expounds the new understanding of the Church evident in the writings of the early evangelicals, using the well-travelled George Whitefield as the principal case study. As evangelicals identified with one another across national and denominational boundaries, they imagined the Church in new ways, subordinating church order to evangelical piety in an unprecedented way. There was no distinctively evangelical doctrine of church order and yet they seemed to see in their wider fellowship, a manifestation of the mystical Church, discernible among the divided visible churches. Tragically, though, the movement was itself dogged by separatism, even as it sought to bear witness to the deeper spiritual unity of the truly regenerate.

The Reasons of Misrule Revisited: Evangelical Appropriations of Carnival in Tudor Revels

The argument here synthesizes an evangelical strategy statement, costume inventories and performance records, a treatise by Martin Bucer, studies of revels at the inns of court, and descriptions of Edwardian Lord of Misrule George Ferrers by an ambassador and a diarist to demonstrate that Tudor occurrences of such Lords emerged and appeared most frequently at court, colleges, and the inns under the zealously iconoclastic influence of Thomas Cromwell and Edward VI. Evidence in fact reveals a marked anti-papist polemical focus in misrule of the Reformation era, belying stubborn, anachronistic applications of a proto-puritan sobriety to the often raucous entertainments of early evangelicals. Consistent with these findings, much evidence reflects a crackdown on misrule under Mary I. Such an examination ultimately complicates our understanding of when, how, and why many puritans subsequently came to reject misrule and laughter alike.

The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (review)

Reviewed by Jennifer Petrafesa McLaughlin Sacred Heart University The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys. By Mark A. Noll. [A History of Evangelicalism: People, Movements and Ideas in the English-Speaking World, Volume 1.] (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press. 2003. Pp. 320. $23.00.) The first in a five-volume series on the 300-year global history of evangelicalism, Mark A. Noll's informative The Rise of Evangelicalism presents the world and work of early evangelicals in Britain and North America from 1734 to 1795. His book provides both a synthesis of scholarship in the religious history of Protestantism in the English-speaking world and an introduction to the most significant primary sources written or read by evangelicals during the era of revivals and awakenings on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1700's. Evangelicalism arose during an era when men and women sought to revitalize religion, to encourage godliness in a world expanding under the pressure of industrial and economic growth. Early evangelicals were reformers who set out primarily to better themselves spiritually. The consequence of conversion, however, was often the betterment of the wider society. And sometimes, as in the case of African Americans and slavery, evangelicals played an important role in altering the ways people thought about this world, not just the next. Noll introduces both the series and his own work by defining evangelicalism, associating the term first with the Protestant Reformation. Theological emphases introduced in the sixteenth century, such as justification by faith rather than works and salvation through Christ's sacrifice on the cross rather [End Page 638] than ecclesiastical mediation or the sacrifice of the Mass, were also associated with the early evangelical movement in Britain and America. However, Noll stresses that there was no one unified evangelical code of beliefs or practices. Yet, while conflicts sometimes flared between different evangelical groups (most notably Calvinists and Arminians), what was more amazing was the ecumenism that generally existed among the various evangelicals at this time. The goal was not to encourage competition among evangelicals, but to inspire spiritual conversion among all believers. The book begins with the physical and mental geography of evangelicalism, linking Britain and her North American colonies through their common history and religious traditions. These links are central; Noll never loses sight of the intimate connection between evangelicalism on the British Isles and in the American colonies. Noll also uncovers the international influence on the development of evangelicalism through Puritanism, continental pietism (especially the Moravians) and High-Church Anglicanism. Four central chapters cover the years 1734 to 1795. They include an examination of the transatlantic nature of British revivals and the American Great Awakening; the expanding role of the laity; the central figures of the revivals including Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and Charles and John Wesley; the growing "theological differentiation" among evangelicals; the development of evangelization and voluntary societies; hymnody; the role of women; and the movement of evangelicalism beyond both established churches and the borders of the British Isles and North America. Along with tracing the development of evangelicalism, Noll also considers why the movement began in the first place. Early evangelical preachers "created evangelicalism" (p. 142) by recognizing first their own spiritual needs and then addressing the needs of others within and outside their own communities in England, Scotland, Ireland, and the colonies. Emphasizing once again the diversity of the evangelical experience, Noll outlines the political, social, economic, and religious circumstances that "awakened" men and women on both sides of the Atlantic to revitalize religion in their own lives. Evangelical leaders were men willing to look outside the box, whether as preachers, theologians, publicists, or publishers. These innovators, such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, recognized a society in flux as the Enlightenment, the growth of empire, and early industrialization changed their world and the lives of ordinary men and women who longed for something more. Noll divides evangelicals "in the world...

'Who Wants Authority?': Ruskin as a Dissenter

This article explores John Ruskin's relations with cultural authority in terms of his religious history. Early evangelicalism and Romanticism, and an intense training in biblical interpretation, established a questioning and inward approach to knowledge that he never lost, though was always supported by a deference to what he considered to be divine truth. The article argues that hostility to dogmatic Protestantism in his later years, and a more sympathetic understanding of Catholicism, did not erase this dissenting habit of thought, and that the fundamental literary paradigm of Ruskin's mature social polemic continues to be that of the sermon. ********** 'Who wants authority?' Ruskin put this question in 'Science in her Cells', a pamphlet published in 1885 as part of his serial textbook on botany, Proserpina (1875-86). His challenge reflects the deepening hostility towards the scientific establishment that characterizes his years as Oxford's Slade Professor of Fine Art (1869-85), a period in which he combined his work as an art historian with a polemical defiance of social and scientific progressive thought. Recommending that his readers should buy a copy of a French botanical reference book, Louis Figuier's Histoires des plantes (1865), he remarks: The botanists, indeed, tell me proudly, 'Figuier is no authority.' But who wants authority? Is there nothing known yet about plants, then, which can be taught to a boy or girl, without referring them to an 'authority'? I, for my own part, care only to gather what Figuier can teach concerning things visible, to any boy or girl, who live within reach of a bramble hedge, or a hawthorn thicket, and can find authority enough for what they are told, in the sticks of them. If only he would, or could, tell us clearly that much; but like other doctors, though with better meaning than most, he has learned mainly to look at things with a microscope,--rarely with his eyes. (1) This is characteristic of Ruskin's writing on natural history in the 1870s and 1880s--belligerent, personal, sceptical of the prestige of professionalized science. But is not just an old man's fit of temper. The pedagogic values of Proserpina are those that direct Ruskin's work throughout his long writing life. The emphasis on learning from 'things visible'--what can be seen of the material world, and what can be seen with human eyes, without artificial help--runs throughout his criticism. Equally consistent is his claim that the learning that matters most is not gained from the exceptional or dramatic or spectacular, but from everyday experience, available to all: 'a bramble hedge, or a hawthorn thicket'. Contempt for the botanists who 'proudly' condemn Figuier as being 'no authority' also reflects a long-standing principle in Ruskin's work. In the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853), thirty-four years before he published those remarks on Figuier, he wrote about what he called 'The Pride of Science'. There he makes clear that he approaches these questions in moral terms. Not only organized knowledge or modern science, but all knowledge, is defined as a danger. In the characteristically provocative terms of The Stones of Venice, Ruskin claims that knowledge might become the foundation of pride, the first of sins. He notes that 'Of knowledge in general, and without qualification, is said by the Apostle that it puffeth up; and the father of all modern science, writing directly in its praise, yet asserts this danger even in more absolute terms, calling a venomousness in the very nature of knowledge itself.' (2) Though this is a startling moment, given Ruskin's constant commitment to learning, is also a characteristic one. He persistently argues that the authority of science, knowledge, and scholarship has no value if is not felt and lived by its possessor. 'Be assured,' he tells us, 'there is no part of the furniture of a man's mind which he has a right to exult in, but that which he has hewn and fashioned for himself' (XI, 72). …

Family Dynamics and the Great Revival: Religious Conversion in the South Carolina Piedmont

IN JANUARY 1802 THE REVEREND SAMUEL MCCORKLE LED THE DEDICATED core of his Presbyterian congregation across the North Carolina piedmont to a sacramental camp meeting in Randolph County. Such meetings were nearly old Presbyterianism itself, but lately they had come under attack stories of promiscuous assemblies and wild enthusiasm filtered into the Carolinas. McCorkle was concerned. Describing himself a man long enlightened with the rays of science and who was far, very far from enthusiasm, and its constituents, McCorkle was critical of the and chaos reportedly characteristic of camp meetings. Accordingly, he approached the Randolph gathering with caution and skepticism. (1) His worst fears seemed to be confirmed on the second day of the meeting when, as if by an electric shock, a large number in every direction, men, women, children, white and black, fell and cried for mercy. McCorkle initially greeted this scene of seeming confusion with horror and some degree of disgust. As he crossed the grounds, moving from preaching stand to encampment to woods and disoriented by the tangle of fallen, shouting, praying, and pleading worshippers, his mind seemed to be made up of a strange mass of sensations. For the next two days McCorkle struggled to come to terms with the bodily excesses of the camp meeting, and although he concluded that there was no crime in the external disorder of revival worship, he was nevertheless troubled by the spontaneous enthusiasm the revival generated. He remained troubled until the final evening, when his son was religiously impressed. His child's spiritual awakening resolved all of McCorkle's doubts about the efficacy of the revival. McCorkle became an enthusiastic proponent of the revival and described his own transformation in terms resonant of awakened sinners: with joy unspeakable, even raptures, he affirmed the glorious work of the revival and expressed an ardent zeal to promote it. (2) McCorkle's conversion to revivalism was not atypical. The conversions of youth were a prominent feature of early camp meetings and subsequently generated support for the revival from fathers and mothers who, like McCorkle, otherwise feared and opposed its emotional excesses and disorder. While historians have noted this pattern of youth conversions and called attention to the importance of family religion to southern evangelicals, recent studies have made disruption of the family and household the major theme of early evangelicalism. According to this literature, southern evangelicals fashioned a counterculture that rejected the worldly value system based on wealth, status, and honor, instead making piety, humility, and dependence the measure of personal worth. The evangelicals undermined patriarchal households by elevating dependents--wives, children, and slaves--to positions of moral superiority and leading them to act independently in matters relating to their spiritual welfare. Scholars indicate that evangelical Christians threatened and divided southern families, provoking heated and frequently violent conflicts between dominating patriarchs and their dependents. A threat to the hegemony of the ruling gentry, to the authority of patriarchs over wives and children, and to the carefully guarded racial caste system of the South's slave society, evangelicals seemed bent on subverting the social order. As a result they were feared and marginalized until they made peace with slavery, patriarchy, and affluence. (3) As important these issues are, McCorkle's experience reminds us that they tell only part of the story of early southern evangelicalism. In the first place, McCorkle and his evangelical cohort were not stern patriarchs who dominated their households by controlling their dependents; instead these men were often loving, devoted, and compassionate fathers for whom the emotional bonds of family took precedence over the political ties of households. …

Judging the Nation: Early Nineteenth-Century British Evangelicals and Divine Retribution

Long had the ‘still small voice’ been spoke in vain,But God now thunders in an awful strain!Commercial woes brought down our nation’s pride,Our harvest fail’d, and yet we God defy’d:But now the ‘voice’ cries loud to all the Land,The ‘Rod’ is felt, Oh! may we see the Hand.’Tis God who speaks – ’Tis He who ’points the blow,’Tis God who’s laid the pride of Britain low!In these lines, written in November 1817, a lady member of a Newcastle-upon-Tyne Nonconformist congregation unambiguously attributed the death of Princess Charlotte to specific divine intervention. This conviction reflected that of her minister, James Pringle, in a recent sermon preached on an Old Testament text widely expounded at that time, the chastening rod (or voice) of God in Micah 6: 9. Such a perception of adverse national events as divine retribution for sin, comparable to prophetic interpretations of the history of Old Testament Israel, was a noticeable strand in early nineteenth-century British evangelical discourse.

The Young Phillips Brooks: A Reassessment

Phillips Brooks was undeniably one of the most popular preachers of Gilded Age America. Sydney Ahlstrom described Brooks and the liberal Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher as ‘in a class by themselves, envied and emulated the country over’. Unlike Beecher, however, the rector of Trinity Church, Boston, subsequently Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, has attracted remarkably little scholarly attention. His few biographers have rarely attempted to place his thought or career in their social or intellectual contexts. With one recent notable exception, little of scholarly value has been written about Brooks. The older biographies have tended to portray him as initially rooted in the evangelical tradition, even though he subsequently became a leader of the emergent Broad Church party. Alexander V. G. Allen concludes, for example, that by the close of his seminary training, Brooks ‘freely accepted the leading truths which are known as Evangelical’. E. Clowes Chorley asserts simply that ‘Brooks never drifted from the heart of Evangelical religion’. Allen and others stress the evangelical origins of Brooks's thought in order to argue for the continuity between the evangelical and liberal streams within American Anglicanism. This portrayal of Brooks as a churchman who somehow retained the essence of an early evangelicalism while later embracing his Church's liberal future has served what Allen Guelzo has aptly called the ‘myth of synthesis’ in Episcopal historiography. Such an interpretation does not view Evangelicals as being forced out of the Church in the 1870s but posits a benign creative synthesis that enabled the Church to transcend the aberrant party battles of the mid century.