The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism: True Religion in a Modern World. By D. Bruce Hindmarsh
This sophisticated analysis of eighteenth-century evangelical spirituality is remarkable for its breadth of engagement. Bruce Hindmarsh takes us beyond the constricting boundaries of ecclesiastical history, to an interdisciplinary immersion in natural philosophy, criminal law, music, and literature....
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2020
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| In: |
The journal of theological studies
Year: 2020, Volume: 71, Issue: 2, Pages: 956-957 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This sophisticated analysis of eighteenth-century evangelical spirituality is remarkable for its breadth of engagement. Bruce Hindmarsh takes us beyond the constricting boundaries of ecclesiastical history, to an interdisciplinary immersion in natural philosophy, criminal law, music, and literature. He aims to show how evangelical devotion was ‘a potent and disruptive force in Anglo-American society’ (p. 3), not just within the churches, but across the entire culture. Since faith is a lived experience, not easily compartmentalized, it flowed into all areas of life and thought. As modernity began to establish its dominance, evangelicals arrived on the scene ‘right on the crest of this rising intellectual wave’ (p. 104). They shared, for example, in public excitement at new scientific discoveries. John Wesley wrote not only on justification by faith, but on electricity and medicine, and his Primitive Physick (1747) was enduringly popular. Jonathan Edwards’s notebooks on nature reveal deep wrestling with Newtonianism. The artist John Russell, converted as a teenager in the 1760s, had his devotion to the gospel stirred by long hours watching the sky at night. His numerous paintings of the moon, 180 in total, survive at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford. Evangelicals used these expanding scientific frontiers as a springboard to doxology and apologetic. Science was ‘the very best possible praeparatio evangelica. Lift high the cross and the slide rule’ (p. 166). |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4607 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The journal of theological studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jts/flaa069 |