Evangelical Devotion and the Transition to Modernity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Bruce Hindmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
Group Experience

The “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” was critical to the emergence of modernity as an idea in the eighteenth century, and evangelicalism appeared in the midst of this cultural debate over the authority of things past and things new. This chapter explores the question of the extent to which evangelicalism was “modern,” with special reference to John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards. Both participants and critics understood there to be something new about the evangelical experience in its intensity and immediacy, and its public presence. The modernity of evangelical devotion was evident above all, however, in its dynamic social forms, uniting small group experience within wider, transnational networks. It had precedents in radical congregationalism, Pietist small groups, and the transdenominational fellowship of Moravians, but these were merged in a new evangelical “connexionalism” under the modern conditions that produced the democratic public sphere. In this respect it shared many of the characteristics of a modern social movement.

Inward Baptism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baird Tipson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Evangelical Christian ◽  
New Birth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
George Whitefield

Inward Baptism describes theological developments leading up to the great evangelical revivals in the mid-eighteenth century. It argues that Martin Luther’s insistence that a participant’s faith was essential to a sacrament’s efficacy would inevitably lead to the insistence on an immediate, perceptible communication from the Holy Spirit, which evangelicals continue to call the “new birth.” A description of “conversion” through the sacrament of penance in late-medieval Western Christianity leads to an exploration of Luther’s critique of that system, to the willingness of Reformed theologians to follow Luther’s logic, to an emphasis on “inward” rather than “outward” baptism, to William Perkins’s development of a conscience religion, to late-seventeenth-century efforts to understand religion chiefly as morality, and finally to the theological rationale for the new birth from George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards. If the average Christian around the year 1500 encountered God primarily through sacraments presided over by priests, an evangelical Christian around 1750 received God directly into his or her heart without the need for clerical mediation, and he or she would be conscious of God’s presence there.

The Outbreak of Evangelicalism

2020 ◽  
pp. 140-172
Author(s):  
Baird Tipson
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
British Isles ◽  
New Birth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
George Whitefield

This chapter first describes the theology of the leaders of the evangelical awakening on the British Isles, George Whitefield and John Wesley. Both insisted that by preaching the “immediate” revelation of the Holy Spirit during what they called the “new birth,” they were recovering an essential element of primitive Christianity that had been forgotten over the centuries. Both had clear affinities with the conscience theology of William Perkins, yet both distanced themselves from it in important ways. In New England, Jonathan Edwards explored the nature of religious experience more deeply than either Wesley or Whitefield had done, and Edwards proudly claimed his Puritan heritage even as opponents found him deviating from it.

Evangelical Thought: John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards

1987 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192
Author(s):  
Frederick Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Proper Time ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Intellectual Influence ◽  
The Times ◽  
Do So

Historians suppose that men are ultimately to be understood in terms of their own time. If the age in which people live makes no difference to the way we perceive them, then historical explanation becomes superfluous. The evangelical revival, however, is often regarded as a event that occurs out of its proper time. It is the step-child of eighteenth century studies. For Peter Gay it belongs not to the eighteenth century but to the twelfth. Leslie Stephen denied all affinity between the evangelicals and their enlightened contemporaries: “There could scarcely be said to exist even the relation of contradiction.” To be sure, an affinity with the age was not a claim that the evangelicals insisted upon. No one would wish to number Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley among the philosophes. The merit claimed by the evangelicals was the merit not of thinkers but of believers. Yet, like it or not, the revival is still one of the facts of eighteenth century history. It cannot be wished away or passed off onto some other period. It started in the eighteenth century and it prospered in the eighteenth century. In any census of the times, it is a fair presumption that the saints will out-number the sceptics. Moreover, the revival is something that has to be analyzed in contemporary terms. What John Maynard Keynes once said of ranting politicians in the twentieth century works for ranting preachers in the eighteenth: “Mad men in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” Faith, like thought, is an historical event that occurs in a specific historical context and ultimately it must be explained in terms of that context. It may be our deepest wish to think like St. Paul, but it is hard to do so in ways that St. Paul would have understood. Few men can insulate themselves against the intellectual influence of their time. In the case of John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, the recognition of that influence is critical for the interpretation of their thought.

The Pilgrim’s Progress in the Evangelical Revival

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
History Of ◽  
George Whitefield

This chapter is concerned with the ways in which evangelicals of various persuasions in the later eighteenth century—Methodists (both Arminian and Calvinist), Church of England evangelicals, and evangelical Dissenters (both Congregationalist and Baptist)—adopted The Pilgrim’s Progress as one of their key texts and made it speak to their own situations. It focuses on three main topics: first, how, in the hands of its editors, The Pilgrim’s Progress became a polemical text, especially from the 1770s onwards, one hundred years after the book’s publication; second, how it was used as a guide to Christian experience as lived by evangelicals; and third, how it became a means of writing the history of Dissent and evangelicalism. The key figures discussed include John Wesley, George Whitefield, John Newton, Richard Conyers, William Shrubsole, William Mason, George Burder, John Bradford, and Thomas Scott.

‘Women may preach but men must govern’: Gender Roles in the Growth and Development of the Bible Christian Denomination

1998 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 309-322
Author(s):  
David Shorney
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Planting ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
The Bible ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
Christian Denomination

When the Cornish lay evangelist, William O’Bryan, founded the first Bible Christian societies in the late autumn of 1815 he was responding, in the main, to female initiatives. This is not altogether surprising. For several decades before 1815 women had been playing a much larger role in English evangelical Christianity than they had done in the early years of the Evangelical Revival. The informal groupings which came into existence in its second phase, c. 1790-c. 1830, gave women opportunities to initiate, organize, and exhort on a much more extensive scale. As cottages and farmsteads became centres of worship, women were well placed to play a more important role as initiators and organizers, especially in those areas barely affected by John Wesley, George Whitefield, and their travelling preachers. The more articulate went even further and followed the example of some eighteenth-century Quaker women by speaking in their own localities and further afield. Before the eighteenth century came to an end a number had acquired the reputation of being gifted preachers and ‘holy women’, ‘owned by God’, and called to instruct others, both men and women, in the Christian faith. For a short while women were poised in Wesleyan, and later, Primitive Methodism to play a major role in evangelism and church-planting; but it was only amongst the Bible Christians that they, for a time, played perhaps an even more significant role as evangelists than their male colleagues. As such they were in no way inferior to men; but when the denomination acquired a governmental structure copied from Wesleyan Methodism the patriarchal ordering of contemporary society set limits to their Bible-based notions of sexual equality.

scholarly journals The Life of The Life of David Brainerd: Agency, Evangelicalism, and Book History

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Snead
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Book History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Material Texts ◽  
Editorial Practices

This article describes the editorial practices that Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley brought to their respective editions of The Life of David Brainerd, explains how those practices were informed by their opposing theological stances towards salvation, and traces the circulation and reception of each edition back to those theological stances. Finally, the article invokes classic models of the methodology of book history and recent work on the circulation of nineteenth-century evangelical publications, arguing that an understanding of the kind of theological editing eighteenth-century figures like Edwards and Wesley took can better help us to articulate nineteenth- and twentieth- (and twenty-first) century attitudes and assumptions about agency and material texts.

The Nonconformist Inheritance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
The Many ◽  
John Owen

This chapter analyses the editions, abridgements, and recommendations of texts by seventeenth-century nonconformists that were made by eighteenth-century dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England evangelicals. The nonconformist writers they chose include Joseph Alleine, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, John Owen, and John Bunyan. The editors and recommenders include Philip Doddridge, John Wesley, Edward Williams, Benjamin Fawcett, George Burder, John Newton, William Mason, and Thomas Scott. Detailed accounts are provided of the large number of Baxter’s works that were edited, notably A Call to the Unconverted and The Saints Everlasting Rest, and a case study is devoted to the many annotated editions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the ways in which they were used. The editors took into account length, intelligibility, religious attitudes, and cost, and sometimes criticized their rivals’ versions on theological grounds.

Principal Booksellers and Publishing Outlets

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Religious Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
The Church

This chapter covers the publishing history of some of the main authors discussed in the book, the Congregationalists Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, and Elizabeth Rowe, the Methodists John Wesley and George Whitefield, and the Church of England evangelicals James Hervey, John Newton, and William Cowper; the publications of the major London dissenting booksellers, Edward and Charles Dilly, and Joseph Johnson; the printers and sellers for the smaller denominations, the Quakers and the Moravians; and some important provincial printers and sellers of religious books, Joshua Eddowes, Samuel Hazard, Thomas and Mary Luckman, Robert Spence, William Phorson, and John Fawcett.

Tom Jones

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Fielding
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fourth Edition ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
History Of

Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery'. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians. At the centre of one of the most ingenious plots in English fiction stands a hero whose actions were, in 1749, as shocking as they are funny today. Expelled from Mr Allworthy's country estate for his wild temper and sexual conquests, the good-hearted foundling Tom Jones loses his money, joins the army, and pursues his beloved across Britain to London, where he becomes a kept lover and confronts the possibility of incest. Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. This carefully modernized edition is based on Fielding's emended fourth edition text and offers the most thorough notes, maps, and bibliography. The introduction uses the latest scholarship to examine how Tom Jones exemplifies the role of the novel in the emerging eighteenth-century public sphere.

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