ABSTRACT

It is a truism that the immediate theological and cultural roots of modern evangelicalism lie in the world of the Enlightenment and beyond. In America the democratization of Christianity witnessed by the rise of field meetings, the different kinds of revivalism associated with figures such as Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney, and the importance of the Scofield Reference Bible, is a well-documented phenomenon.1 In Britain the impact of the Wesley brothers and George Whitefield in the eighteenth century, the Welsh revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the rise to prominence of various parachurch organizations, such as the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (now the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship), the Evangelical Alliance, and the British Evangelical Council, have all helped to shape British evangelicalism at its deepest level.2 Nevertheless, to study evangelicalism simply in terms of the developments which have taken place since the early eighteenth century is inadequate. To attempt an explanation of the movement purely in terms of monoglot Anglo-American sources and categories, which take no account of important trajectories stemming from the broader European traditions of Protestant theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is surely as short-sighted a move as the old-fashioned attempts to explain the Reformation as a complete intellectual and cultural break with the Middle Ages. At the very least, the conflicts between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants in Holland, the appearance of Socinianism as a challenge to orthodoxy, the rise of German Pietism, the impact of the Moravian movement and, above all, the Reformation, must be taken into account if a full-orbed understanding of modern evangelicalism is to be achieved.