Chapter One
Evangelical Identity in the Eighteenth Century W. R. WARD
The title which I have been given might well be thought otiose, for it is an orthodoxy
among many of us that the whole matter was clarified long ago by
our good friend David Bebbington; indeed the famous Bebbington Quadrilateral
has become the most quoted sentence in the whole literature and was
for long virtually the only beacon the suffering student had to distinguish
men walking like trees in the gloom (Mark 8:24). The beacon illuminated the
four marks of evangelical religion: "conversionism, the belief that lives needed
to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular
regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on
the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross." None of these marks would in itself distinguish
an evangelical from a great range of other Christians, but where all
four were found together in one time and place a new religious movement or
party might be identified; and conveniently enough that was in the 1730s, precisely
when Lewis's Dictionary of Evangelical Biography was to begin. My
thankless assignment is to have another look at a guide to the undergrowth
that has served so many so well. Unlike David Bebbington I want to elicit not
the continuities but some of the discontinuities in evangelical history, ways in
which the marks of evangelical identity opened the door to globalization but
laid up problems for the future.
Look first at the dates. When Donald Lewis and I were discussing the
planning of the dictionary, we were in agreement that its scope would have to
be limited to the English-speaking enterprise if it was to be feasible at all;
there was no suggestion that evangelicalism was defined by this consideration
of feasibility. Moreover, even if the definition is to be an Anglophone one, the
1730s are the time when revivalism does not indeed begin, but commences a
continuous history. But no one, I think, would wish to equate revivalism and
evangelicalism. Finally we want if we can to get a definition of evangelicalism
in terms of its inner religious content rather than from the outside; the
Bebbington Quadrilateral approaches mostly from the outside. Thus the New
Birth was one of the standard counters of the mystics among the contemporaries
of the early evangelicals, and it was not respect for the Bible per se
which was peculiar to the evangelicals, but their determination to put a copy
in the hands of every literate Christian. It is said that the original Luther Bible
cost the equivalent of half a cow and was clearly not meant for the masses;
even in the eighteenth century only 300,000 Bibles and parts of Bibles were
printed at Wittenberg, while three million were produced at Halle; and even
before the Halle presses began to roll Spener had established a distinguishing
mark of the stiffer sort of evangelicals, that they brought their Bibles to meetings
in order to follow the readings and check the texts. This quirk of evangelical
correctness lasted until the Fall of Man in the last generation, when
some evangelicals developed a postmodern conviction that it was utterlypassé to expect even students to hold a book of any kind when the bright light
of the overhead projector was at hand. Moreover, if Spener, having proposed
"to spread word of God more richly among us," did not go into the publishing
business, he did get around the limitations of the Lutheran lectionary
readings by pressing daily Bible readings for the heads of families, by establishing
public Bible reading classes for those not able to read, and, most dramatic
of all, by establishing class meetings after the pattern of 1 Corinthians
14, where members of the congregation, under the direction of the preacher,
should read and expound the Scriptures in public. Finally, if a definition of
evangelicalism from the outside were wanted, it would be simpler and more
inclusive to replace the Bebbington Quadrilateral with a Ward Watchtower
and define eighteenth-century evangelicals as those who felt spiritually
bound to create Orphan Houses. But it is not external definitions that we
need, and here the difficulties arise.
The result of exhaustive and often acrimonious discussions in Germany
has been to leave no doubt that what became the Pietist party derived from
Lutheran Orthodoxy, or at any rate that wing of it known as the "movement
for piety" whose fountain-head was Arndt. Our definition of evangelical
identity has somehow to embrace this party, if only because eighteenth-century
evangelicals did so in a way that the modern commentators have not.
Whether it is Jonathan Edwards including them as pioneers of the final consummation,
or Wesley declaring himself "thoroughly convinced it might be
of more service to the cause of religion were I barely to translate his Gnomon
Novi Testamenti [of "that great light of the Christian world" Bengel] than to
write many volumes upon it," or even Bengel himself acclaiming Arndt and
Spener as the first and second angels of the Apocalypse (he himself being the
third), there is no mistaking the sense of international kinship among the innovators
in the evangelical world for some two generations before the conventional
dates of the beginning of the revival. The differences between
Spener and the Orthodox milieu from which he sprang amount to two, one
internal and one external: the internal factor was his eschatology, succinctly
portrayed as his "hope of better times," and his patronage of informal, small group
religion, the collegium pietatis or class meeting, which had hitherto
been taboo in the Lutheran tradition but henceforth was perhaps the most
enduring external mark of the whole evangelical tradition. There was a degree
of paradox in all this. Spener was aiming at a program for the renewal of
a decayed church establishment, and had rather wearied of his class meetings
before he went to Berlin at the end of his career; but the essence of what he
wanted was stumbled upon almost of necessity by heads of families in the
Protestant farm kitchens of Silesia, Austria, and Salzburg where there was
now no Protestant church to revive; and it caught on too in some of the Reformed
churches, especially in Germany, where a variety of small meetings
had existed, usually for purposes other than the mutual edification and conversion
envisaged by Spener. Moreover, Spener's gatherings marked a new
turn in religious strategy. What had always been understood by reform had
been action from above by the state; and although Spener was not under the
extreme pressure to get results quickly experienced by those who became revivalists,
he knew he could no longer wait for state action. Reform as traditionally
understood had involved the public disciplining of the irreligious;
Spener's scheme was to improve those who were religious virtuosi in the sense
that they were prepared to do more than their churches required as a minimum,
and to do it not for their own sake but for the well-being of the establishment
as a whole. There was indeed rather less ambiguity about whether
holiness was a public or a private virtue in the Spenerite collegium pietatis
than there was about the Wesleyan class meeting. And it is significant that
when the revivalists came along, they everywhere made a beeline for the little
groups of religious virtuosi who, though excluded from traditional ecclesiastical
history by virtue of their informality, acted as the sort of leaven Spener
had envisaged.
As Davidson pointed out years ago, the inflation which had overtaken
millennial logic in America by the time of the War of Independence simply
eliminated the problem of state which Spener was trying to circumvent, by
assuming (for example) that there would be no need for standing armies
when regenerate kings put aside their dreams of aggrandisement. There
was, therefore, a fitness in the fact that Spener was distinguished doctrinally
from the Lutheran Orthodox by a turn in eschatology. At the end of his life
Luther had lived in the expectation of an imminent Last Judgment that would
be ushered in by the fall of Rome and the defeat of the Turks, and in radical
Protestantism the expectation of an earthly millennial kingdom remained
vigorous. This notion was rejected for Lutheran Orthodoxy by Article 17 of
the Confession of Augsburg, and the Münster troubles of 1535 had given no
inducement to change that view. By the later-seventeenth century the Lutheran
Orthodox were trying to sustain a belief in the imminence of the end,
and to use it as a scourge of conscience; they disappointed many by perpetually
deferring the end, and especially the radicals whose hopes of imminent
earthly fulfillment had revived during the Thirty Years War. In the mid-seventies,
however, Spener adopted what became famously known as "the
hope of better times." In this view the end would not come until all God's
promises to the church had been fulfilled. The scourge to conscience now was
not that repentance tomorrow might be too late, but that it was possible in
the power of the Spirit to make a real improvement in the state of the church;
and the millennial question gave particular urgency to one special field of
study. One of the signs of the end according to Romans 11 was to be the conversion
of the Jews, and one of the extraordinary features of the history of
seventeenth-century Lutheran Orthodoxy was that it gave itself to rabbinic
studies with an intensity paralleled at no other time. Spener followed a train
of other Lutheran theologians over to the Reformed world at Basel to improve
his expertise in Hebrew and Hebraic studies. And, as Senior of Frankfurt
with a major Jewish ghetto on his doorstep, he concluded that the great
obstacle to the conversion of the Jews was the decayed state of the church.
Here the exercise of the general spiritual priesthood, the deferment of the
Last Days, and the cultivation of the largest domestic mission field of the
church hung rationally together.
So far, so good. But to postpone the Last Day did not solve for Spener a
problem which Christian orthodoxy had long carried within itself, and which
was pointed out almost at once by the Petersens, husband and wife, whom
Spener married, and supported against church hostility; it was also explored
by the little group of English Behmenists led by Pordage, Bromley, and Jane
Leade. One side of Christian doctrine had generally maintained an original
sympathy between man and the universe: man was the microcosm as well as
the image of God, and it was the sin of man which destroyed this harmony and
left the whole creation groaning after redemption. When therefore God's purposes
were accomplished among men, there should also be a "restoration of all
things" to their original sympathy. The Western churches, however, had always
fought against this conclusion in the interests of legal justice. At the consummation
of all things not only should there not be a general restoration of sympathy,
but even the race of men should be finally and eternally divided into the
redeemed devoted to the adoration of God, and the damned sentenced to eternal
punishment. But this involved a logical problem which orthodoxy and in
the end much of evangelicalism expended considerable energy in ignoring.
What were the relations of these two kingdoms of men? Either they knew
nothing of each other or they knew something of each other. The first assumption
would imply that the redeemed would know God only as eternal love, and
not as justice. The damned would know God solely as justice. But the story of
Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) suggested that the damned had some perception
of the kingdom of bliss, and the Latin fathers heavily worked the idea
that this was an essential part of their punishment. To make this more bearable
it was suggested that the saved were spared the view. In short in the end the triumph
of justice in Western theology destroyed the humanity of men; even the
redeemed were robbed of obligation to love their enemies and to have sympathy
with them, let alone the rest of creation. When Petersen and his wife embarked
on questions of this kind, the church speedily got rid of them. But
Spener's eschatology and Petersen's restorationism had a deep influence in
Württemberg. Bengel put the one on a sounder biblical basis, and it came
home to roost in John Wesley; Oetinger endeavored to solve the problems of
the other with a large dose of mysticism and created a map of knowledge
which was very inaccessible but was not rivaled by any later evangelical.
Meanwhile, were the Last Days nearer or farther away in the Reformed
tradition? The Reformed tradition had been vexed by a curious mixture of
vagueness and precision. Calvin had been embarrassed by the speculative use
made of eschatology by the Catholics, and by the apocalyptic use of it by the
radicals; indeed, he went so far as to say that even if Paul had known by special
revelation the date of the Last Day, he would still have had to affirm to his
flock human ignorance of it, to guard them from a sense of false security and
unholy curiosity. J. H. Olsted (1588-1638) defended the premillennialism of
the Early Church Fathers and looked forward to the binding of Satan; this
would allow the Church peace for a thousand years, and permit the conversion
of multitudes. There would be a victorious struggle with Gog and
Magog, and the millennium could be expected in 1694. Later in the century
many of the northern Reformed churches went over to the federal doctrines
of Coccejus which were the real domain of eschatology. He divided the history
of the Kingdom of God since the ascension into seven periods. The sixth
would be a period of judgment and purification of the people of God during
the Thirty Years War, and the seventh, heralded by the imminent seventh
trumpet, would see the general conversion of the peoples, and would wind up
with the return of Christ in glory and the general resurrection and judgment.
(Coccejus was not interested in the restoration of all things.)
So much ink has been spilt in the study of the eschatological ideas of Puritans
on both sides of the Atlantic that it is not necessary to repeat much here.
The Westminster Confession maintained the usual Orthodox stance of keeping
a grip upon conscience by insisting that the time of the end was unknown
but might be imminent, and Cotton Mather, believing to the end that the Second
Coming was imminent, postponed it continually but always to a date just
around the corner. What he would not have was Mede's belief that Gog and
Magog, who would harass the saints in the end, would originate in America.
Baxter too spent the last years of his life trying to resolve the question whether
Christ would return to inaugurate the millennial rule of his saints in the imminent
future.
Continues.
