AndrewAtherstone and David C.Jones, eds.: Making Evangelical History: Faith, Scholarship and the Evangelical Past. Routledge Studies in Evangelicalism, London and New York: Routledge, 2019; pp. 288 (original) (raw)

2020, Journal of Religious History

Evangelicals have long evinced a deep interest in their own history. Conscious of occupying an important place in the outworking of God's purposes, in the first few generations of the movement they wrote a lot of history. The founding fathers Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley both occasionally cast their thought in an historical framework. The revival chronicles of the 1740s were salvation histories. John Newton, Joseph Milner, and Thomas Haweis were among those evangelicals who composed narratives of the history of the Church, which authenticated their movement. And the German Pietists accumulated vast archives so that the work of God in history would be properly documented. From about 1815 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, this stream waned and continued as a trickle for the next 150 years. Interest revived in the 1970s and gave rise to an ever swelling second stream of academic writing about the lives of evangelicals and the history of evangelicalism. The outcome was the (sometimes uneasy) coexistence of two approaches to the history of the evangelical movement: one popular and pietistic, the other scholarly and critical. This collaborative volume reflects this structure both in the story it tells and as an addition to the literature of stream 2. Twelve chapters follow the introduction. The first three deal with the formative years in stream 1. David Ceri Jones writes on the Glasgow Presbyterian minister John Gillies and his Historical Collections Relating to Remarkable Periods of the Success of the Gospel (1754-1761) and Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend George Whitefield (1772). Drawing down from a doctoral study of eighteenth-century evangelical historiography, Darren Schmidt attends to the little known London Anglican Erasmus Middleton and his Biographica Evangelica (1779-1786). Robert Strivens analyses the treatment of dissent in David Bogue and James Bennett's History of Dissenters, From the Revolution in 1688, to the Year 1808 (1808-1812) and the update in Bennett's The History of Dissenters, During the Last Thirty Years (From 1808 to 1838) (1839). The final three chapters cover the last half century, during which academic interest in the history of evangelicalism has flourished. Richard Burgess provides an account of the Nigerian historian Ogbu Kalu and his writings on African Pentecostalism. Mark Noll pays tribute to Timothy Smith, George Marsden, David Bebbington, and the historical analysis of Anglo-American Evangelicalism, a development to which he himself is a fourth outstanding contributor. Finally, David Bebbington credits Andrew Walls, Brian Stanley, Dana Robert, and Mark Noll with recognition of the rise of global evangelicalism. The in-between years, when history was not so much 1