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  • "End of Faith as Its Beginning":Models of Spiritual Progress in Early Evangelical Devotional Hymns
  • Bruce Hindmarsh (bio)

One of the best titles for a research paper I have seen from my students was from a paper on John Bunyan: "Does the pilgrim progress?" It raised the question of whether any real spiritual development could be discerned in the character of the pilgrim in Bunyan's famous allegory. With a strong doctrine of justification, affirming the believer is simul iustus et peccator (at once justified and a sinner), is it even possible to speak of progress? In this article I would like to take up my student's question in the context of early evangelical spirituality. What does the early evangelical movement have to contribute to our understanding of the whole spiritual life as it progresses from conversion to consummation? I have written about conversion during the transatlantic evangelical awakening in the age of John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards,1 but what can be said about that long period that followed initial conversion to Christ? Given the evangelical focus upon climactic conversion, one might expect that there is not much concern with this question. Evangelicals expend great energy getting people through the door, converted and signed up, but they surely don't have much to say to them afterward, do they? One thinks of evangelicals as keen about Alpha courses, not Omega courses.

The origins of modern evangelicalism are to be found in the North Atlantic region in the early eighteenth century as antecedent movements of devotion such as Pietism, Puritanism, and the Anglican holy living tradition coalesced to generate a general spiritual awakening on both an Anglo-German and Anglo-American axis. The new evangelical piety evident in this spiritual awakening was international and interdenominational, and it was characterized by its focus upon "true religion" over against nominal affiliation to church establishments and a religion of law and custom. The movement had some of the mobility and democratic appeal of its modernizing context, and it gained many of its adherents through itinerant preaching in open public spaces. Across this whole region, evangelical devotion centered on the atoning death of Christ and the necessity of personal conversion, and it drew lay people into practices of bible reading, small group fellowship, extempore prayer, personal testimony, and hymn singing. We might think of the rise of evangelicalism in the modern period as akin to the beginnings of a religious order in the Catholic church, [End Page 1] a sodality or confraternity which arises with a particular charism or purpose within the wider church. Evangelicalism seems to have arisen on the trailing edge of Christendom and the leading edge of modernity as a spiritual movement concerned to spread "real Christianity" among a populace that thought of itself as Christian even as social change was devolving more weight upon individual agency in spheres such as commerce, the press, and politics.

Though evangelicals stressed the imperative of personal conversion as the key to true religion, they did in fact sustain an ideal of spiritual progress. Certainly, they had sharp disagreements among themselves, but still, taken together, their distinctive contribution was their Christ-centred focus upon real spiritual progress in the midst of real weakness, holding together the beginning and the end of the spiritual life in a deepening experience of faith. Jesus Christ was, in Charles Wesley's words, "End of faith as its beginning."

These words just quoted from Charles Wesley come from a hymn, and hymns are probably one of the best sources for evangelical spirituality. Indeed, many hymns in common use today can be read as short classics of Christian spirituality that capture in a compressed form the spiritual ideals and teachings of the past and mediate these to the present. Prudentius's hymn, "Of the Father's Love Begotten," for example, when it is sung at Christmas, communicates to a congregation so much of what Christ's incarnation meant to the early church, to a generation that had struggled fiercely to articulate in its creeds the nature of Christ as both God and human. Again, the words of "Jesus the very thought of thee," or "O Sacred Head now wounded," convey...

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