What is an evangelical to do? He knows that a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is central to being a Christian. Yet, he also knows that his relationship with Christ should be evident in everything
that he does to prove the genuineness of his profession and to bring others to Christ. The tension for this evangelical is between a faith that regards forms (e.g., worship practices, man-made creeds, denominational policies) as peripheral to true Christianity, and a kind of devotion that highly regards certain practices as indicative of authentic belief. Most evangelicals are unaware of this tension because evangelical activities spring so naturally from the experiential devotion that targets intimacy with Christ as the essence of being a true faith. Still, trying to harmonize Evangelicalism's repudiation of Christian forms or practices (because of the priority of experience) with the remarkable outward conformity of its adherents is a feat seldom executed.
For those struggling with the demands of this performance, Mark Noll's latest book, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys, should be a welcome aid. It is the first of an ambitious five-volume series to cover the history of evangelical Protestantism in the trans-Atlantic English-speaking world from the eighteenth century to the present. As his subtitle suggests, Noll's volume covers the eighteenth century, the time when Evangelicalism became a distinct manner of Protestantism through the influence of continental pietism, Puritan introspection, and revivalism. He sets a very high standard for subsequent volumes in the series, which will be written by other contributors. The book masterfully surveys evangelical developments in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada, and brims with insights into the nature of born-again Protestantism. For readers unfamiliar with the rigors of academic history, Noll's narrative will not likely pack the dramatic punch or provide the inspiration that some look for in historical writing. But for those with limited knowledge of Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley (for starters) but are uncertain how their efforts fit into a larger whole, this book is the one to read for making sense of eighteenth-century revivals and the way they changed the face of English-speaking Protestantism.
The strength of this book is Noll's grasp of the larger context of English religion and politics and the way revivalism took root in a particular set of circumstances. As he explains, "it was significant for later evangelical developments that the Church of England was laboring under serious difficulties in the early eighteenth century." The revivals commonly known as the First Great Awakening were a response to the problems that spanned the Atlantic world, whether through reports on local affairs in books and newspapers or through the sheer energy of a traveling preacher like Whitefield, were a response to the problems confronting English-speaking Protestants thanks to the inadequacies of the established church.
Noll then proceeds to chart the two main phases of the eighteenth-century revivals, first the local experiences of ministers scattered throughout Scotland, Wales, and the British colonies in North America, and then in the more widely publicized events of Whitefield's travels. Midway through the book Noll breaks from the narrative to address explanations for this newer experiential form of Protestantism, from the revivalists' own claims to have been endowed with the Holy Spirit to intellectual and social factors that created plausibility structures for the particular message and style of evangelicals. He follows with several chapters on the legacy of Evangelicalism for the various denominations within Anglo-American Protestantism, from the Moravians and Methodists to the Church of England and the Scottish Kirk, as well as the particular qualities that contributed to a distinctively evangelical identity, most notably a zeal for holy living (both individually and collectively) and the proliferation of evangelical hymnody. When Noll writes that "Evangelicalism never amounted to a full-blown religious tradition, but was rather a style of personal living everywhere combined with conventional attitudes and actions," he puts his finger on the one aspect that has made Evangelicalism both incredibly pervasive and remarkably difficult to pin down.
Indeed, because of its inability to achieve the heft of a religious tradition but only to add up to a specific spiritual style, Evangelicalism has left many of its adherents in the dilemma posed at the outset: how to practice and persist in a faith that eschews traditional Christian forms while constructing a distinct religious identity. Noll also concedes that Evangelicalism has never been "a hard-edged, narrowly defined denomination" but rather constitutes "a set of defining beliefs and practices easier to see as an adjective … than as a simple noun." In other words, an "evangelical Lutheran" makes more sense than a "Lutheran evangelical" because Evangelicalism invariably modifies an older Christian tradition. It is more akin to a renewal movement within an existing church than a full-blown ecclesiastical identity. The reason is that since the beginning, Evangelicalism has resisted formalism and pressed instead for a religion of the heart rather than one of externals. Here Noll rightly contends that Whitefield's early announcement of his strategy was representative of all subsequent evangelical approaches: "It was best to preach the new birth, and the power of godliness, and not to insist so much on the form: for people would never be brought to one mind as to that; nor did Jesus Christ ever intend it."
Of course, the desire to avoid externals or "going through the motions," cannot do without its own set of practices or externals. One important instance of Evangelicalism turning into something formal was Methodism, which under John Wesley's direction remained a renewal movement within the Church of England, but after his death became a separate denomination prone to the problem of nominal Christianity that has afflicted all Christian traditions. (Readers should recall that Hillary Rodham Clinton, her politics aside, is a United Methodist, a possible example of the ossification that afflicts even those Christians once zealous for "genuine" faith.) But evangelicals have over the centuries devised a number of other ways to indicate belonging to the party of "heart religion," from contemporary Christian music, niche-marketed study-Bibles and the vinyl covers that adorn them. This could be a betrayal of the original genius of Evangelicalism. But the formalism of Evangelicalism could also reveal the naivete of its original proponents. That is, folks like Whitefield, Wesley, and Edwards failed to recognize that as ensouled bodies (or embodied souls if you prefer), human beings cannot avoid forms.
At some very basic level, physical existence requires that Christianity be mediated through external forms, except in those very rare, and impossible to know, circumstances where the Spirit acts directly upon the human soul independently of external stimuli. This kind of conversion may happen, but it is not the normal pattern. The ordinary way that God saves is through the means of his Word, read and preached, and visibly signified and sealed in the sacraments, with the enlivening work of the Spirit. In other words, God instituted forms to mediate grace through the external senses of human existence. Evangelicals implicitly recognize this whenever they publish books, set up preaching tours, arrange Christian rock festivals, or print a new line of T-shirts. These evangelical forms mediate evangelical piety. And they show that the original impulse of Evangelicalism, to escape forms, is as impossible as it is undesirable. The $64,000 question, then, is which are the right forms? Unfortunately, as this book shows, evangelicals have historically questioned the legitimacy of churchly forms because those externals are either too easily faked or because they divide believers into different denominations. The trouble is that evangelical forms, aside from the question of legitimacy, also can be fabricated and separate believers into different camps. The reason is that the heart is impossible to see and may breed spiritual pride to boot.
The Rise of Evangelicalism, to be sure, does not evaluate directly the spiritual worth of born-again Protestantism's drive for sincere faith. Noll's aim is much more academic than theological, though his own sympathies with Evangelicalism come through. Even so, the good historical scholarship on display here does prompt a host of theological questions. For readers who may not be interested in the details of the Cambuslang revival of 1742 or the itinerary of Francis Asbury, The Rise of Evangelicalism will still be of notable assistance in coming to terms with Evangelicalism's fundamental and abiding tension between sincerity and form, experience and embodiment.
