For many years British evangelicalism has lacked an adequate history. It has consequently been easy to generalize from a slight acquaintance with the sources and then to fit evangelicalism into an interpretation which had much more to do with the perspective of the writer than with a careful examination of the evidence.

Thanks to David Bebbington’s classic study, a landmark has been laid down which must be a definitive point of reference for any future work which claims to be informed. Dr Bebbington is an outstanding historian with an unrivalled knowledge of the primary and secondary sources, an empathy with his subject-matter and a capacity to write in crisp, lucid prose. His work is made much sharper because it is undergirded by a simple thesis, namely that evangelicalism, far from being an unchanged phenomenon, has ‘altered enormously over time in response to the changing assumptions of Western civilization’ (p. 19).

Evangelicalism, he argues, is a distinct phenomenon of the last 250 years, owing of course much to its heritage, in particular the Reformation and Puritanism, but also in sharp discontinuity with that past. It was distinct most of all, at the time of its origins, in that it proclaimed a confident doctrine of assurance. It was based on an experience of God (to quote Jonathan Edwards, ‘a supernatural inward sense, or insight’, p. 49). Confidence in experience as the fount of knowledge was an Enlightenment characteristic. Indeed, argues Dr Bebbington, evangelicalism in its initial eighteenth-century dress, far from being anti-rationalist, was a product of the Enlightenment. John Wesley is no anti-Enlightenment hero who can provide ammunition for twentieth-century critics of the Age of Reason. Rather, his faithful followers imbibed a ‘rational religion that deprecated visions and revelations’ (p. 52).

The mood however changes in the nineteenth century. Within evangelicalism there was ‘a heightened supernaturalism’ (p. 81). This was typified in the belief that the preaching of the gospel would not gradually bring the millennium. Only the second coming of Christ would inaugurate the new age. Supernaturalism was evident too in the emphasis on tongues and healing, the underplaying of reason (and hence of natural theology) and the development of a much ‘higher’ view of biblical inspiration. This mood change was, Dr Bebbington urges, a product of Romanticism. In its reaction to the Enlightenment it rejected arid reason and gave centrality rather to feeling, intuition and awe before the glories of the natural world. Thus the great annual inspirational event for so many late nineteenth-century evangelicals was the convention held at Keswick, which blended ‘all the attractions of mountains and lakes, remoteness and grandeur, artistic associations and memories of the Lake Poets’ (p. 158).

Dr Bebbington might also have used Romanticism as an explanation of the distinctive characteristics of twentieth-century evangelicalism. There are, after all, obvious affinities between the nineteenth-century holiness and the twentieth-century charismatic movements. There are also differences, the product, he maintains in keeping with his thesis, of twentieth-century culture and, in particular, of modernism, which remains sceptical about the possibility of arriving at any objective reality. Rather than engage in such a fruitless search, it seeks to express the spontaneity of the self, delving back to the unconscious and, in art, deliberately defying ‘good taste’. Within the charismatic movement (as in the Oxford Group before it) the emphasis on spontaneous expression, the apparent preoccupation with healing (especially psychological), the exaltation of the non-rational and the anti-structural bias all have, he contends, their roots in modernist culture.

Is Dr Bebbington right? In broad outline surely yes. From its earliest days the church has realized that gospel truths will be expressed differently according to cultural heritage (see Acts 15). All are the products of their culture, and evangelicals can be no different in this respect; they should not be surprised at how much they have changed through this period. Whether Dr Bebbington does not sometimes over-schematize and produce, for example, turning points in history which are improbably precise (e.g. pp. 47, 88, 94, 233), giving insufficient attention to the overlap of cultures (for example the Enlightenment in the twentieth century), will occupy historians in much constructive debate. How far any particular cultural formation has obscured the heart of the gospel is a proper question for the historical theologian but one which Dr Bebbington, the historian of religion, scarcely addresses. In the end the gospel can never be merely a reflection of its culture. Though it cannot communicate if there is no reflection, it must also stand over against that culture. In that respect it would be encouraging to see contemporary evangelical Christians becoming as sharp in their critique of aspects of modernism as they are dismissive of the Enlightenment.

This is a very important book for any Christians (and not only evangelicals) who have a serious desire to understand their origins. It is scholarly, but its good organization, frequent sub-headings and its admirable (and sometimes memorable) one- or two- sentence summaries at the end of each section should carry any readers equipped to read this journal through many issues, controversies and personalities which may be unfamiliar to them. They will emerge in the end with a more profound self-awareness, and that is high praise indeed.