[9] Time and Chance: Evangelicalism and Change

Evangelical religion in Britain has changed immensely during the two and a half centuries of its existence. Its outward expressions, such as its social composition and political attitudes, have frequently been transformed. Its inward principles, embracing teaching about Christian theology and behaviour, have altered hardly less. Nothing could be further from the truth than the common image of Evangelicalism being ever the same. Yet Evangelicals themselves have often fostered the image. They have claimed that their brand of Christianity, the form once delivered to the saints, has possessed an essentially changeless content so long as it has remained loyal to its source. In a Commons debate of 1850 a Unitarian referred to discoveries in theology since the reign of Elizabeth I. ‘Discoveries in theology!’ snorted Sir Robert Inglis, an Evangelical defender of the Church of England:’…all the truths of religion are to be found in the blessed Bible; and all “discoveries” which do not derive from that book their origin and foundation, their justification and their explanation, are worth neither teaching nor hearing.’1

It is no wonder that outsiders, taking Evangelicals at their word, have often treated them as perversely irnpervious to change and so perennially oldfashioned. The germ of truth in that claim is that Evangelical religion has been consistently marked by four characteristics. Conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism have been transmitted down the generations. They have formed a permanent deposit of faith. Each of the characteristics, however, has found expression in many different ways, and one of them, activism, was a novelty that set Evangelicals apart from earlier Protestantism. Other features of Evangelical doctrine and piety, opinion and practice, have varied from time to time. Views on eschatology and spirituality have been particularly subject to change. So the movement did not manage a total escape to a world of eternal truths. It was bound up in the flux of events.