Abstract
In this excellent book, Hindmarsh deploys profound scholarship accessibly presented to provide an important re-evaluation of early evangelicalism in its spiritual and cultural context. He challenges a widespread stereotype of evangelicals as obscurantists who turned their backs on the Christian past and the intellectual life of their own day, by showing how their spirituality drew on the riches of Catholic as well as Protestant texts and how they engaged at the forefront of Enlightenment scientific and philosophical advances.
The book opens with a detailed analysis of the formative years of George Whitefield, as a seminal leader of early evangelicalism. Hindmarsh shows that, alongside the writings of the non-juror William Law, the German Pietists Hermann Francke and Johann Arndt and the Presbyterians Matthew Henry and Henry Scougal, Whitefield’s spirituality was also shaped by the leading Catholic devotional writers Thomas à Kempis and Lorenzo Scupoli. Nevertheless, Hindmarsh argues in the next chapter that, despite strong theological continuities with the past, evangelicalism still emerged as a novel form of Christianity ‘highly adapted to the modern world’ (p. 68). The argument is then further substantiated in a discussion of wider evangelical use of earlier devotional works, noting in particular John Wesley’s dissemination of such texts – including Thomas à Kempis – to his followers in abridged editions.
Hindmarsh then turns to set evangelicals in their wider intellectual and cultural context. John Wesley’s ‘compendium’ of 1763, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation, and Jonathan Edwards’ writings on natural philosophy show these leading evangelicals to have been well versed in the science of their day. For them, as for Charles Wesley in his hymns, scientific knowledge enhanced their ‘wonder, love and praise’ for God the creator. Devotion to the natural world was also to be found in other diverse evangelical sources such as the poetry of the African American Phillis Wheatley and the painstaking studies of the moon by the artist John Russell. In subsequent chapters, Hindmarsh locates evangelical attitudes to divine law in the context of a wider society preoccupied with the rule of law. Then, in a bold move, he draws parallels between the Calvinist-Arminian controversies that divided Whitefield and Wesley and the divergent views of the purposes of art that separated the two greatest painters of the age, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.
Hindmarsh’s overall conclusion is that ‘evangelicals had a foot in both worlds, ancient and modern’ and that evangelicalism should be understood as ‘a distinctive form of traditional Christian spirituality … highly responsive to the conditions of the modern world’ (pp. 275–6). This interpretation offers a valuable springboard for analysis of evangelicalism in later periods beyond the scope of Hindmarsh’s own research, for example in contextualizing the alacrity with which contemporary evangelicals have adopted modern methods of communication while often adhering to a highly conservative theology and morality. The primary importance of this book, however, lies in its rescuing eighteenth-century evangelicals from what E. P. Thompson in a different context called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, understanding them on their own terms as men and women of their time, freed from the distorting lens of hindsight. It is an impressive achievement.