Fall 2020 · Vol. 49 No. 2 · pp. 205–208
Book Review
The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism: True Religion in a Modern World
D. Bruce Hindmarsh. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018. 354 pages.
In this thoroughly researched study, Bruce Hindmarsh writes a brilliant account of the cultural moment when early evangelicalism first emerged in the eighteenth century to become a powerful force in the Anglo-American world. He investigates a broad cast of characters but appropriately gives special attention to the most prominent representatives of the early evangelical tradition—George Whitefield, John Wesley, Charles Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards—who together were an enduring influence in the history of the movement. Hindmarsh foregrounds the consequential changes in mid-eighteenth-century society involving the rise of modernity, the enlightenment, and the scientific revolution, and he examines advances in science, law, art, and philosophy to show that evangelicalism emerged during an epochal transition when authority was moving away from {206} the ancients and finding a new home among the moderns. The work is wonderfully illuminating and is likely to challenge assumptions about the nature of evangelical origins.
According to Hindmarsh, evangelical devotion was not nourished by Scripture alone. Like all Christian expression, it was mediated and shaped by historical circumstances and conditions. Moreover, early evangelical horizons were far-reaching and wide-ranging. Leaders of the movement were ecumenically inclined and fed by Anglican forebears, Oxford intellectuals, Puritan nonconformists, German Pietists and a host of Catholic and medieval spiritual writers. Evangelicals read their Bibles through the lenses of these varying impulses even as they prioritized the indwelling of the Spirit and personal experience. Such devotion emerged in the context of the celebrated eighteenth-century “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.” On the one hand, early evangelicals appealed to a genealogy of classical sources in continuity with biblical, creedal, and confessional traditions; on the other, they were thoroughly modern in that they emphasized individual and immediate experience as a key starting point for knowledge of God. The importance of novelty, subjectivity, and the experience of “just now” took precedence in the context of voluntary gatherings and democratic public spaces. Organization was often local yet involved transnational and transdenominational connections facilitated through extensive travel and networking.
Evangelicals, of course, were preoccupied with the salvation of sinners, but this did not stop them from engaging with the natural world. They embraced aspects of Newtonianism and became intensely interested in emerging configurations of law, art, literature, and ethics. They participated in these various facets of culture on multiple levels even while exercising caution and epistemological reserve. At times they countered the naturalizing drift of their epoch by infusing it with Divinity, leading to a re-enchantment or reanimation of the world. Adroitly they avoided the split between public science and private belief, nature and grace, or spirit and matter. God was perceived as being in all of creation, thus making the natural world an object of art and science as well as devotion. In the mind of this reviewer, had these early evangelicals lived in the twenty-first century, their seemingly panentheistic inclinations would surely have driven them to the forefront of the environmental movement.
On matters having to do with human nature, early evangelicals expressed their modern inclinations by privileging the personal and the individual. Yet their rhetoric also countered enlightenment assumptions about human progress. Their emphasis on “spirituality and extent of the law,” for example, was intended to sharpen the conscience and reinforce society’s convictions regarding the disordered and fallen human condition. {207} Evangelicals generally supported the rule of law and its administration and looked at the condemned felon as paradigmatic for the fallen state of humanity before the almighty God. The law provided theological clarity concerning the human condition and amplified the evangelical message of Christ’s atonement along with the transforming work of the Spirit.
Regarding eighteenth-century artistic preoccupations, evangelical culture broke new visual and literary ground, but also expressed spiritual ideals that lined up with competing aesthetic visions of morally improving society. On this point, evangelicals could be very much at odds with one another: For Calvinists, spiritual aspirations involved religious versions of the sublime that included a sense of abasement in the shadows of Divine vastness and power. For Arminians, spiritual aspirations encompassed a vision of heroic effort that involved the agony of moral choice and struggle.
Overall, the book does remarkable work in illuminating the evangelical quest for “true religion” during an era that was rapidly becoming modern. According to Hindmarsh, evangelical feet were situated in both ancient and modern worlds, and to understand this religion, observers cannot simply depend on social-scientific theories. “Viewing religion solely in functional or instrumental terms can only ever yield partial insight” (275). In early evangelicalism, the author perceives genuine devotion “adapted to the mobile social order of a voluntary society . . . analogous to a modern social movement, a sodality, or school of thought or opinion.” It is “a distinctive form of traditional Christian spirituality that emerged in the eighteenth century highly responsive to the conditions of the modern world” (276).
There is much to learn from this study. Hindmarsh’s deep research into the eighteenth-century evangelical sources is admirable, as is his strong intention to take seriously the wider world early evangelicals inhabited. He refuses to address his subject matter in isolation and successfully demonstrates the various ways that evangelical devotion in all its hybrid forms profoundly overlapped with eighteenth-century culture. In the exchange, the author convincingly shows that evangelicals were not only shaped by the dynamics of the eighteenth century; they also profoundly contributed to it.
Hindmarsh’s well-studied forays and thick descriptions are about reconstruction, not deconstruction. Like all good historians, he seeks to explain the movement on its own terms, not according to contemporary values. Yet historians always make judgments of some kind even when they pretend not to, and in the case of this book, it is obvious that Hindmarsh is impressed by evangelicalism’s enduring legacy. At the end of his well-studied work, he cannot resist observing that “after all these years, the flame of [evangelical] devotion still burns bright” (277). Here, I wish Hindmarsh’s words would have been more cautious. My qualms lie not {208} with his positive assessment of early evangelicalism as such. In fact, I am drawn to the book precisely because it does not fall victim to the common and by now tiresome hermeneutics of suspicion that unfairly maligns persons of faith of bygone years. Still, my worry is that Hindmarsh might have come dangerously close to succumbing to a “golden age” theory of evangelical origins in which the protagonists can do no wrong. Was there no downside to the seemingly uncritical embrace of certain modern assumptions? And to suggest that the flame of evangelical devotion still burns bright begs the question as to whether the movement today is really without fault. In this regard, discerning readers will be left stranded with many questions. Perhaps this is Hindmarsh’s intent—to leave important questions regarding the evangelical present unanswered.
Regardless of what sort of impression Hindmarsh’s account of early evangelicalism leaves, the book overall does not disappoint. It should be essential reading for religious and nonreligious students alike who are interested in understanding evangelicalism and the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world.
