Making Evangelical History

Faith, Scholarship and the Evangelical Past

Andrew Atherstone, David Ceri Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317138631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This volume makes a significant contribution to the 'history of ecclesiastical histories', with a fresh analysis of historians of evangelicalism from the eighteenth century to the present. It explores the ways in which their scholarly methods and theological agendas shaped their writings.

Each chapter presents a case study in evangelical historiography. Some of the historians and biographers examined here were ministers and missionaries, while others were university scholars. They are drawn from Anglican, Baptist, Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Fundamentalist and Pentecostal denominations. Their histories cover not only transatlantic evangelicalism, but also the spread of the movement across China, Africa, and indeed the whole globe. Some wrote for a popular Christian readership, emphasising edification and evangelical hagiography; others have produced weighty monographs for the academy.

These case studies shed light on the way the discipline has developed, and also the heated controversies over whether one approach to evangelical history is more legitimate than the rest. As a result, this book will be of considerable interest to historians of religion.

1
John Gillies and the evangelical revivals

David Ceri Jones

The early leaders of the evangelical revivals in Britain and America shared an acute sense of history. Conscious that the religious awakenings in which they were caught up seemed to be occurring on a grand scale, they spilt much ink charting their progress, considering their significance and understanding how they fitted into the overarching story of the progress and development of the Christian church. In September 1740, as the English revivals inspired by George Whitefield a few years earlier flagged a little, a London printer, John Lewis, began producing a new evangelical magazine.¹ The Christian’s Amusement was far from being an overnight success, but it included in its pages one of the first attempts to place the evangelical awakenings in their historical context. Alongside letters charting the latest revival breakthroughs in various parts of the British Atlantic world, Lewis, perhaps the revival’s first historian, wove together an account of the Waldensians and Albigensians, late medieval French and Italian religious communities who faced brutal persecution and repression because of their criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church.

Drawing his material from a range of contemporary histories, Lewis focused on the Waldensians and Albigensians because they were ‘people that never fell into the Popish Errors, but retain’d the Truth of the Gospel from the Time of the Apostles, under all the Popish Persecutions down to the Reformation’.² Providing his readers with numerous instances of revivals amongst them, as well as regaling them with gory details of their resistance to persecution, Lewis deliberately drew analogies between these groups and the revivals of his own day. The ‘Truth of God’, he wrote, ‘hath been in all ages of the World persecuted and oppressed, even by those who shou’d have defended the same’. The analogy barely needed spelling out. While he hoped that he would soon hear ‘the Doctrine of Christ, according to the Institution of the Church of England, commonly taught in our pulpits’, he was clear that this would not take place without the ‘scoffings of some, and the threatenings of others’.³ Lewis’s foray into late medieval ecclesiastical history is an illustration of the way in which the early evangelicals drew upon the past to understand and interpret the exciting contemporary circumstances in which they found themselves. For Lewis, vital piety tended not to be found in the visible institutional church, but at the margins, amongst those persecuted and harassed for challenging the lethargy of the spiritual status quo. Sometimes those at the margins had moved to the mainstream, effecting wider Reformation, something he evidently hoped the revivals of his own day might achieve, but at other times they remained despised, rejected and more often than not the focus of suspicion, or the subjects of persecution. In the pages of the early editions of The Christian’s Amusement, the magazine that would soon become the mouthpiece of George Whitefield’s Calvinistic Methodists, Lewis set the contemporary revivals within a long tradition of resistance to the deadening effects of institutional Christianity. ‘God hath never left himself without Witness’, he wrote,

but from time to time raises up Instruments to publish his Grace, enriching them with Gifts necessary for the Edification of his Church, giving them his Spirit for a guide, and his truth for a rule, whereby they may distinguish the church begun in Abel, from that which commenc’d in Cain; as also teaching them to define the church by Faith and Faith by the Word of Truth.⁴

It was to be an approach to the past taken up with enthusiasm by other writers as the revivals continued to unfold.

Within the broader evangelical movement, historical reconstruction of this kind was developed to its full extent by the Glasgow Presbyterian minister John Gillies. John Lewis might have been one of the first historians of evangelicalism, but Gillies proved to be the master of the craft. Having been involved in the Scottish revivals at Cambuslang in 1742, he became one of the foremost advocates of evangelical religion, and a leading member of the popular party within the Church of Scotland, by the middle of the eighteenth century.⁵ He managed the Scottish preaching tours of both John Wesley and George Whitefield, his championing of the former courting no little controversy.⁶ However, it was his friendship with Whitefield that turned Gillies into what Michael Crawford has called ‘the focal point of the British-American evangelical connection for collecting and publishing religious intelligence’.⁷ Whitefield was an avid user of the eighteenth-century press, utilising it to publicise his activities, pass on news of the latest revival advances, and thereby keep the flames of the revival suitably stoked. No one produced more copy than Whitefield; partnering with Gillies ensured that this material reached the widest possible audience. It was this gathering of evidence in support of the legitimacy of the revivals that was, according to W. R. Ward, the ‘characteristic achievement’ of the early evangelicals.⁸

However, Gillies was not as indispensable to the gathering of revival intelligence in the early days of the awakenings as he was later to become; he was not involved in the production of the Scottish revival magazine, The Glasgow Weekly History, for example, but his gradual rise to prominence amongst the Scottish evangelicals by the late 1740s, in the aftermath of the Cambuslang awakening, placed him at the intersection of a network of information exchange that knitted together London, Glasgow and Boston, and many other smaller locations besides.⁹ With the revivals beginning to wane, he was ideally placed to reflect on what had taken place and engage in a more systematic analysis of the excitement of the previous decades. Gillies, therefore, embarked on an ambitious project that dominated the remainder of his life and that saw him construct both an evangelical view of the past, and an interpretation of the contemporary revivals that fitted them neatly into the unfolding drama of redemptive history. The first element of his project continued from where John Lewis had left off in The Christian’s Amusement; making use of many of the contemporary accounts of awakenings that had circulated so freely within the evangelical movement, he wove them into a comprehensive history of the success of the gospel from the time of the closing of the Book of Acts in the New Testament down to the end of the 1740s. His two-volume Historical Collections Relating to Remarkable Periods of the Success of the Gospel first appeared in 1754 and was supplemented by an appendix in 1761 and a smaller posthumous volume in 1796.¹⁰

Alongside this compendium, Gillies became George Whitefield’s official biographer and the custodian of Whitefield’s literary legacy. Always careful to manage his public persona and defend his preaching against charges from various quarters, Whitefield became increasingly concerned with his post-humous reputation as his health began to falter in the 1750s. Consequently, he enlisted Gillies to write an account of his life, giving him access to the mass of papers he had accrued during the course of his public ministry.¹¹ Gillies published a biography of Whitefield,¹² but not before he had also collected together all of Whitefield’s papers, and issued a six-volume edition of the evangelist’s works in 1771, just a year or so after Whitefield’s death. Consisting of three volumes of Whitefield’s letters, all his published sermons and many of his shorter controversial writings, the works, together with Gillies’ biography which drew extensively from Whitefield’s own journals, furnished the evangelical reading public with a detailed picture of the quintessential evangelical – in many respects the ‘father’ of the evangelical movement.

Through these two literary projects Gillies provided the evangelicals, especially those of a Calvinistic mind-set, with both historical contextualisation and compelling evidence of their central role in God’s activities in the world. This chapter explores Gillies’ work as an historian, paying particular attention to his interpretation of the life and career of George Whitefield, and argues that his approach to the past and his contextualising of the mid-century revivals made him one of the most influential voices in the shaping of early evangelical identity.

A revival-shaped past

Although it purported to be an account of the success of the gospel from the era of the New Testament until the middle of the eighteenth century, in reality John Gillies’ Historical Collections was no such thing. Across its more than 1,000 pages, Gillies devoted barely 40 to the period prior to the sixteenth-century Reformation, while the whole of his second volume covered the first half of the eighteenth century, and even there the focus was narrowed down to the years between 1729 and 1750. Subsequent volumes merely added more detail: the 1761 appendix provided further evidence of the success of the gospel from the 1750s, while the posthumous volume added material from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that had been unearthed in Gillies’ manuscript notebooks following his death.¹³ Gillies’ voice is heard relatively sparingly in these volumes, with little more than an introductory explanation of the purpose of the collection and the occasional editorial gloss. His skill lay rather in the piecing together of accounts of the success of the gospel from many of the sources at his disposal. For earlier periods these sources were the histories written by others, and there were a few favourite authors to which he turned most frequently, including Samuel Clark’s A General Martyrologie (1651), Robert Millar’s A History of the Propagation of Christianity (1723) and Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans (1732–38). For the contemporary sections, which made up the majority of the work, he used material he had gathered as a result of his relationship with George Whitefield and the correspondence networks in which he participated. Gillies, therefore, acted more like an editor than an author, selecting accounts that served his purpose and weaving them together to create his own grand narrative of the progress of the gospel.¹⁴ All of which begs the question, what did Gillies mean by ‘the success of the gospel’, and what criteria did he use to select material for his volumes?

In the introduction to the first volume of Historical Collections (1754), Gillies cast himself in the mould of a latter day Apostle Paul. ‘All who are acquainted with the New Testament’, he wrote, ‘know what a considerable part of it is employed in historical narrations of the success of the Gospel’. Paul ‘is made to set us a pattern of seeking information’ about the success of the gospel ‘in the ordinary way of moral or historical evidence’. Such accounts, he continued, ‘have had very good effects even before they were recorded in holy Scripture, when spread merely in the ordinary way of well attested report or correspondence’. Gillies placed himself amongst illustrious company by claiming to be carrying on the work of the authors of the New Testament, though he was quick to add the caveat that the ‘ag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: towards a history of evangelical histories
• 1 John Gillies and the evangelical revivals
• 2 Erasmus Middleton’s Biographia Evangelica
• 3 Dissent and religious liberty in David Bogue and James Bennett’s History of Dissenters
• 4 J. C. Ryle and evangelical churchmanship
• 5 Luke Tyerman and the history of early Methodism
• 6 Geraldine Guinness Taylor and the histories of the China Inland Mission
• 7 G. R. Balleine and the evangelical party
• 8 Arnold Dallimore: Whitefield’s champion
• 9 Iain H. Murray and the rise and fall of British evangelicalism
• 10 Ogbu Kalu and African Pentecostalism
• 11 Timothy L. Smith, George Marsden, David Bebbington and Anglo-American evangelicalism
• 12 Andrew Walls, Brian Stanley, Dana Robert, Mark Noll and global evangelicalism
• Select bibliography
• Index