The Disruption of Evangelicalism

The Age Of Torrey, Mott, Mcpherson And Hammond

Geoffrey R. Treloar

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783595587
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

This volume provides the first comprehensive account of the evangelical tradition in the English-speaking world from the end of the nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. It offers fresh perspective on conversionism, the life of faith, reflection on the Bible and theology, and social engagement. These trajectories, through a period of great turbulence in world history, furnished the setting for the deepening diversification of the movement. This led to the fragmentation of the once broad evangelical spectrum into various (and often competing) strands.

PART 1: FIN DE SIÈCLE (C.1900–1914)

1. THE EVANGELICAL WORLD C.1900

At the Ecumenical Missionary Conference in 1900 the American President William McKinley, a devout Methodist, asked rhetorically in relation to Christian missions, ‘Who can estimate their value to the progress of nations?’ His own answer to the question was already something of a commonplace:

Their contribution to the onward and upward march of humanity is beyond all calculation. They have inculcated industry and taught the various trades. They have promoted concord and comity, and brought nations and races closer together. They have made men better.1

McKinley’s celebration of the impact of missions was part of a larger panegyric to the nineteenth-century achievements of evangelicalism as an uplifting force in the world and eager anticipation of its prospects for the new century to come.2 Turn-of-the-century commentators looked back on an era of unprecedented scientific and technological development, immense material advancement and increases of wealth. To these secular advances they added their own grounds for satisfaction – progress of evangelism at home and abroad, the spread of the holiness movement, and the success of their many philanthropic and social-service activities. Viewing the world as a field for the transformative effects of the Christian gospel, and swept along by fin de siècle fervour, evangelicals entered upon the new century confident that it would be ‘the great religious and Christian century’ extending the ‘forward movement’ they discerned in recent history.3

Evangelicalism as a global movement

The buoyancy of the turn-of-the-century commentators assumed the spread and rise to ‘dominance’ of the evangelical movement traced in the three previous volumes of this series. Over the century and a half since its beginnings, evangelicalism had spread with the expansion of the British Empire and the westward movement of the American frontier to become a distinctive feature of English-speaking civilization. Following the rediscovery of the Great Commission by evangelicals in the 1790s, missionary activity had also established an evangelical presence in Asia, the Pacific and western and southern Africa.4 By 1900 there were some 80 million people who were at least nominally evangelical Christians – approximately 60% of all Protestants – distributed over all the main regions of the world.5

Because of the number and spread of its adherents, evangelicalism in 1900 was a genuinely global religion.6 Yet the great concentration of evangelicals was in the English-speaking regions. Of the approximately 35 million evangelicals in Europe, some 20 million lived and worked in Great Britain and Ireland. Similarly, of the 2.5 million evangelicals in Oceania, about 2 million were in Australia and New Zealand. In the United States around 32 million evangelicals represented 42% of the population, while in Canada 1.5 million evangelicals made up 25% of the total. Numerically and proportionately evangelicals were a significant presence in the English-speaking world.

The great majority of these evangelicals belonged to recognized Protestant churches. By 1900 this adherence evinced two main patterns.7 From the first, evangelicals were a presence within denominations. Thus there were evangelical Anglicans throughout the Anglican communion, and Presbyterian evangelicals in the churches of Scotland. The churches of the ‘old dissent’ that began in the seventeenth century – Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers – had also become increasingly evangelical in orientation. Lutherans remained somewhat distinct but had much in common with evangelicals because of their shared origins in the Reformation. As it gathered momentum, evangelicalism also created its own denominations. The Methodists were the first. They in turn divided into numerous subgroups – Primitives, Bible Christians, and many more. In the nineteenth century the Brethren, the Churches of Christ, holiness churches and the Salvation Army emerged. Black churches also appeared in southern Africa and in America.

Most evangelicals were able also to look beyond their own church grouping to the larger connection with other evangelicals. Not itself a church with a set order, as a new development in the history of Christianity during the eighteenth century, evangelicalism engendered an ‘ecclesial consciousness’ that embraced churches and other Christian organizations.8 For evangelicals ‘the church’ was the body of true believers, united by a common experience of grace and devotion to Christ as saviour, wherever they were to be found. Unity consisted in a shared openness to the Bible and its teaching, spiritual friendship and cooperation in common causes, especially mission. This ecclesiology was the basis of the ‘ecumenism’ that characterized the movement. In addition to being transnational, evangelicalism was transdenominational.

This capacity for wider affinities had important organizational consequences. Apart from sympathizing with one another, the men and women of the evangelical diaspora came together in parachurch organizations that became a distinctive feature of the movement. The first was the British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804 for the printing and distribution of Bibles at home and abroad. Missionary organizations such as the Church Missionary Society (CMS) established branches in all the main English-speaking lands. The Evangelical Alliance, the YMCA, and the YWCA, began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and rapidly created global networks. In the second half of the nineteenth century both the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and Francis E. Clark’s Christian Endeavour followed their example. The globalizing effect of these endeavours was enhanced by the tendency of the evangelical churches also to organize internationally.9 By 1900 the globe was populated by evangelical organizations and churches that facilitated the circulation of literature, reproduced patterns of piety and served common causes across national and physical boundaries.

This spread of evangelical culture created a natural unit, what would now be called a sacriscape.10 Its development and operation were facilitated by rapidly improving communications and travel technologies. A striking illustration is Southern Cross, a weekly published in Melbourne (almost as far away from the major metropolitan centres as it was possible to go) by the Methodist W. H. Fitchett, renowned author of Deeds That Won the Empire (1897).11 While the primary focus of this pan-evangelical newspaper was the state of Victoria, it also reported extensively on news throughout Australia and the evangelical world beyond. A large part of the substantial content was material reproduced from a wide range of northern-hemisphere periodicals such as The Christian, The Sunday School Times and The Outlook. Fitchett’s presentation of the evangelical experience in the Antipodes as part of the global evangelical culture through acquaintance with the literature and events of the evangelical world at large was made possible by the telegraph. Fitchett also travelled periodically between Australia and England. In doing so, he was like other evangelical leaders who moved around a growing constituency at increasing speeds and in ever greater comfort. More and more evangelicals operated extensively within a domain they regarded as a coherent whole.

The transnational and transdenominational aspect of evangelicalism is the first indication of its nature. It was primarily a movement, an increasingly connected and integrated, but still a loose assemblage, of people, organizations and denominations.12 This impulse arose from a combination of doctrinal convictions, a common heritage, similar aspirations and tendencies, and similar practices. Human sinfulness, salvation by faith in the atoning death of Christ and the authority of the Bible furnished a pool of essential beliefs. The heritage incorporated the Reformation, Puritanism, Pietism and, by 1900, the 150-year history of evangelicalism itself. Aspirations and tendencies included the desire to lead a holy life and to win the world for Christ. Practices included hymn singing, personal Bible study and similar styles of worship. Easily transportable as evangelicals moved across borders and from one community to another, these commonalities engendered the capacity to create the cross-denominational organizations that sought to turn aspiration into achievement. Such organizations in turn fostered a sense of belonging to a community committed to social service and, above all, to evangelism and mission. In the American context the movement has been described as ‘the evangelical denomination’.13 As a loose agglomeration held together globally by similar commitments, it is perhaps more fittingly described as ‘the evangelical coalition’.14

Evangelicalism as a tradition of belief

Because of the amorphous character of the movement, evangelicalism as it existed in 1900 may be understood as a widespread and highly influential tradition of Protestant Christianity descending from ‘the evangelical impulse’ of the eighteenth century.15 ‘Tradition’ has not been used much in discussions of evangelicalism, probably because of its ambiguity and possible confusion with the Roman Catholic usage, which sees ‘tradition’ as the teaching of the church (as opposed to the teaching of the Bible). However, it is also a broad sociological concept that refers to the creations of human thought and action handed down from the past to the present. These creations may change over time but retain the essential elements. Thus a tradition is ‘a temporal chain . . . a sequence of variations on received and transmitted themes. The connectedness of the variations may consist in common themes, or the contiguity of presentation and departure, and in descent from a common origin’.16 Such a conception is readily applicable to evangelicalism as a pattern of Christian belief and practice intentionally reproduced by its adherents across the generations.

By providing a lens through which to view the movement as a whole, the leading advantage of attending to ‘the evangelical tradition’ is the coherence it affords to the feature that most strikes (and sometimes frustrates) scholars, the seemingly endless variety within evangelicalism. In the recognition of endogenous factors, ‘changes which originate within the tradition and are carried out by persons who accept it’, and exogenous factors, changes ‘in response to changed circumstances of action’,17 it provides a method to explain this variety as the result of the interaction of the internal dynamics of evangelicalism itself with different settings and changing circumstances. Perhaps most importantly, tradition also provides a framework for tracing filiation from the eighteenth-century root, a process that intensified during the fin de siècle years.

While there have been many attempts to identify the conceptual content – the ‘endogenous factors’ – of the evangelical tradition, the set of characteristics adopted for this series is what is now widely known as ‘the Bebbington quadrilateral’. Four interlocking characteristics are posited by David Bebbington as the enduring qualities of evangelicalism over the near 300 years of its history.18 Conversionism (the belief that lives need to be changed by coming to faith in Christ for salvation), biblicism (reliance on the Bible for knowledge about God, salvation and the nature of the world), crucicentrism (trust in the self-sacrificial death of Christ on the cross for the redemption of the world and its people) and activism (the insistence that commitment is properly expressed in action) have been its defining features. These four components embrace smaller, local and even factious groups of Christians as well as the evangelical mainstream. These other groups add colour, variety and complexity to an already diverse phenomenon. Timothy Smith compared the movement to a kaleidoscope; Bebbington himself refers to ‘the evangelical mosaic’.19 Both metaphors aptly describe the motley assemblage of evangelical organizations, denominations, churches and individuals linked by an underlying pattern of belief, attitudes and conduct in the turn-of-the-century anglophone world.

Of the many responses to the Bebbington quadrilateral,20 perhaps the most valuable came from the Canadian historian George Rawlyk, for whom it was not so much the four components themselves that are important as the way they have interacted.21 Ever present, the four components have not always been equally determinative of evangelical culture. Their ebb and flow goes a long way towards explaining how evangelicalism – in a way always the same, yet frequently appearing in different lights – changes over time. To some extent Rawlyk had been anticipated by George Marsden’s notion of ‘conflictual priorities within pan evangelicalism’ in America. As ‘competing priorities’, ‘they are elaborated, emphasized and combined with considerable variation by diverse evangelical groupings, producing significant internecine rivalry’.22 What is true within the movement in America is true of the movement as a whole. The prevailing balance of the different components largely determines the character of the movement at any one point in time.23 As well as describing the phenomenon of evangelicalism, the Bebbington quadrilateral has become a heuristic for understanding the fluctuations of its history.

The Rawlyk–Marsden proposal gives salience to a suggestion from the sociologist Rob Warner for how evangelicalism has been driven by its own inner forces. For the period 1966 to 2001 in England, he posits a ‘biblicist-crucicentric axis’ and a ‘conversionist-activist axis’ as ‘twin and rival axes . . . that energise the dynamic of evangelical rivalries, experiments and evolution’.24 Whatever the merits for the context to which it is applied, Warner’s suggestion shows how the components of evangelicalism not only wax and wane but also combine to produce varying emphases and changing permutations within the movement. While other combinations are also possible, for individuals and collectively,25 identification of these two axes greatly a...

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• PART 1: FIN DE SIÈCLE (C.1900–1914)
• 2. REVIVAL, REVIVALISM AND MISSIONS
• 3. THE LIFE OF FAITH
• 4. THEOLOGICAL NARROWING AND BROADENING
• 5. A SOCIAL GOSPEL?
• PART 2: EVANGELICALS AT WAR (1914–18)
• 7. FAITH UNDER FIRE
• 8. THE WAR WITHIN
• PART 3: EVANGELICALISM AT THE CROSSROADS (1919 – C.1940)
• 10. REMEMBERING THE REFORMATION
• 11. EVANGELISM AND MISSIONS IN THE MODERN WORLD
• 12. A GREAT REVERSAL?
• EPILOGUE
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• SEARCH TERMS