As the sidebar shows I am reading around Puritanism as a movement at once pastoral, polemical and theological. The recently published Emeregence of Evangelicalism has the subtitle, Exploring Historical Continuities. It is a collection of essays which enter into critical and appreciative conversation with David Bebbington's contention that Evangelicalism properly understood is the movement that began in the early 18th Century Awakenings, an argument supported by evidence shaped around the accompanying defining quadrilateral. Bebbington's thesis is that biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism and activism, represent a cluster of defining characteristics which indicate Evangelicalism was something new in the 18th Century, related to but not continuous with such other movements as Puritanism, Reformed Scholasticism and Continental Pietism.
The question of assurance is a central and contentious theological debate, important in Bebbington's case, where he argues that, for the 18th Century Evangelicals, the search for personal assurance of salvation came to its conclusion in the experience of conversion and regeneration which became itself evidence of salvation. The Enlightenment privileging of empirical experience as evidence rationally interpreted, can be detected in the use by Evangelicals of such words as 'I feel', and 'I know', with reference to personal spiritual encounter.
Following widespread adoption of Bebbington's quadrilateral and its accompanying corollaries, his treatment and defintion of Evangelicalism has become a standard benchmark, broadly received by historians. But there are now other voices questioning whether the discontinuity between earlier movements and Eighteenth Century Evangelicalism are as clear cut and historically certain as Bebbington argues. Several important articles have appeared in recent years, and now this collection of essays throws the debate much more widely open. The resulting statement and restatement of continuities and discontinuities gathers a fascinating, at times persuasive, at other times frustrating chorus of voices. Part of the frustruation is that several of the essays accuse Bebbington of caricaturing earlier expressions of 'evangelical' faith, but come near to caricaturing the position they critique. The fascination comes from many of the essays which undoubtedly raise important questions which require at least a re-alignment of emphases, or a redrawing of the chronology of developments and features.
The response chapter written by David Bebbington is characteristically gracious, and acknowledges the validity of some criticisms, agrees certain emphases need restating, but overall holds to the general proposal that Evangelicalism was something new in the 1730's, but with strong historical continuities with Puritanism and Pietism, that it was strongly influenced by Enlightenment categories, and that it has a remarkable capacity for reflecting and adapting to, the cultural moods of the age, whether the age of Reason, Romanticism or Modernity - and now post-modernity?. In any case, Evangelical historiography is alive and well, and is an essential source of inspiration and education for contemporary Evangelicalism which is in danger of losing continuity with its own historical precedents and values.
This weekend I'm looking forward to being with the Baptist Union of Wales at their Annual Assembly in Carmarthen. I have the great privilege of being invited to be the keynote speaker for the Assembly on the theme 'Hopeful Imagination'. Readers of this blog will recognise the name of a blog hosted by Andy Goodliff; the phrase is from one of Walter Brueggemann's earlier books on the exilic prophets. There he introduces hopeful imagination as the faith stance of those who, with 'the God who makes all things new' on their cognitive horizons, imagine a different world into being, by giving themselves to serve the new actions and purposes of God in their generation. Here are his words from 1985:
These new actions of God were discernable and spoken precisely by these persons with their enormous prophetic imagination. These poets not only discerned the new actions of God that others did not discern, but they wrought the new actions of God by the power of their imagination, their tongues their words. New poetic imagination evoked new realities in the community.
It may be that preaching today (is it nearly a quarter of a century later?) requires this kind of proclamatory conversation, enabling the community of Christ to discern the new actions of God, and with prophetic imagination, to enter into the new work of God as agents of His kingdom, as witnesses of the Gospel of Christ and as those who confront the growing pessimism and cynicism of a culture afraid of its own dissolution. Hopeful imagination is bold enough to conceive of a different future.
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