ABSTRACT
Michael Watts referred to the British evangelical revival of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as 'an attempt to return, after the spiritual lethargy of the late seventeenth century, to the religious fervour of an earlier age'. This chapter focuses on the 'religious school' of theologically-based interpreters of Christian revivals, and considers a range of social-scientific interpreters who approached this topic with methodologies drawn from the fields of psychology, political science, economics, anthropology and sociology. It also considers a number of historians of Christian revival since the 1950s, including William McLoughlin, Jon Butler, W. Reginald Ward, Mark Shaw, Kenneth Jeffrey, and David Bebbington. The chapter discusses a number of key themes in the study of revivals the question of causation, bodily phenomena in revivals and the global diversity of revivals. It argues that Bebbington's traditions of Christian revival from the early 1700s through the late 1800s need to be supplemented and complemented by additional models distinctive to Pentecostalism.
