The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism: True Religion in a Modern World by D. Bruce Hindmarsh (review)

If the eighteenth century was the century of "Enlightenment," it also witnessed the rise of "Evangelicalism." Both abstract nouns still function in public discourse as umbrella terms that disguise the complexity beneath, and both are still pitted against each other. We do well to remember that eighteenth-century English-speakers talked of neither "the Enlightenment" nor "Evangelicalism." Yet the terms have proved indispensable to historians, and the book under review is necessary reading for students of each. Bruce Hindmarsh is one of the leading authorities on eighteenth-century evangelical religion, having published two important monographs in the field: a study of the eminent Anglican preacher, hymnodist and spiritual director John Newton, and a brilliant comparative analysis of different models of conversion—Methodist, Moravian, Scottish Presbyterian, and Evangelical Anglican. This book, dedicated to John Walsh and Mark Noll, is a magnum opus, the culmination of thirty years of deep reflection on eighteenth-century religion and culture. Crucially, it is not a narrow exercise in ecclesiastical history. Instead, it situates evangelicals in relation to the history of reading, science, law, and art—and to the emergence of an even grander abstraction, "modernity."

In the Introduction, Hindmarsh describes evangelicalism as "a distinctive form of Christian spirituality" that first appeared in the midst of the transition from the authority of the ancients to the authority of the moderns, and "a profound turning towards nature and natural knowledge" (3–4). It "emerged on the trailing edge of Christendom and the leading edge of modernity" and can be defined as "a protest against the idea that adhering to Christian civil society as a nominal Christian was sufficient for salvation" (100). In chapter 1, Hindmarsh scrutinises the manuscript journals of the most famous evangelical preacher of the era, George Whitefield, highlighting the fear that "religion had cooled" (9). The world was full of "nominal Christians," who needed to become "serious Christians," "real Christians," Whitefield's evangelical fire fed on various combustible materials: the discipline of Oxford Methodism, the fearlessness of Lutheran Pietism, the Calvinism and biblicism of English Nonconformists, and an emphasis on the indwelling Holy Spirit arising from personal experience. Evangelical spirituality, Hindmarsh argues, "was part of the story of modern agency, or one of the 'sources of the self'" (42).

Chapters 2 and 3 develop one of the book's main arguments, that evangelical devotion was "a form of traditional Christian spirituality expressed under modern social conditions" (48). Chapter 2 emphasises the modernity of evangelicalism: its exploitation of markets, trans-Atlantic communications, the periodical press, the advent of celebrity, religious toleration, and urbanization. "The dominant forms of social organization among evangelicals were not traditional, based on the territorial and hierarchical parish, but modern, based on voluntary gatherings" (49). Evangelical religion was "surprizing" and "new"—it promoted personal narratives, small cell groups, and ecumenical ideals. It has thus become—and here Hindmarsh paraphrases Martin Marty—"the typical Protestant way of relating to modernity" (60). At the same time, evangelicalism was "ancient and modern." Chapter 3 explores "the classical sources of evangelical devotion": Scripture, Anglican formularies, and Puritan and Reformed theology. There are case studies of key texts appropriated by evangelicals: The Life of God in the Soul of Man (1677) by the Scottish Episcopalian Henry Scougal, and The Imitation of Christ (c. 1441) by the medieval mystic Thomas à Kempis. Evangelicals naturalized, simplified, and popularized both, though their libraries were dominated by seventeenth-century authors, especially Puritans.

Chapters 4 through 8 explore how evangelicals related to new developments in science, law, and art. Chapters 4 and 5 argue that English evangelicals, like German Pietists, created a "culture in which scientific literacy was fostered and new natural knowledge was widely disseminated" (120). There remained traces of older Platonic and alchemical philosophies, but the evangelical intelligentsia broadly "accepted Locke's sensationalist epistemology and Newton's union of terrestrial and celestial mechanics" (115). John Wesley was a keen reader of scientific literature and...