by Michael A. G. Haykin

When did Evangelicalism as a movement emerge? Is it a relative newbie, as some would assert, a creation of the 1940s out of the ruins of Fundamentalism or is it even more recent, a product of the Sixties? Or does it have much older roots?

An Evangelical Pentagonal

One commonly-accepted analysis of Evangelicalism is that made by David W. Bebbington, known as the Bebbington Quadrilateral. He essentially argues that Evangelicalism emerged in the matrix of the Evangelical Revivals of the 18th century and was marked by four main characteristics:

1)    Biblicism—a trust in the final authority of the Bible for life and thought;

2)    Conversionism—the necessity of the new birth;

3)    Crucicentrism—a focus on the cross-work of Christ as the key event of salvation;

4)    Activism—a commitment to mission and good works.

Personally, I would add a fifth element, following evangelical historians Richard Lovelace and Thomas Kidd, namely, an emphasis on the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, what one might call pneumaticism. But what is striking about Bebbington’s analysis is that it is grounded in an inductive approach stretching over four centuries and encompassing in its thorough analysis letters and diaries, tracts and polemical texts, hymns and patterns of worship. It makes a powerful argument for the existence of a distinct stream of Christian thought and reflection that has been termed Evangelicalism by a multitude of first-class historians.

Evangelicalism and Puritanism

Bebbington distinguishes Evangelicalism from one of the main streams of spirituality and Christian thinking that fed into it, namely seventeenth-century Puritanism. And while I am not fully convinced that his analysis of the differences is entirely correct, there is little doubt in my mind that the two movements need to be distinguished. Puritanism began as a renewal movement within the Church of England, but after eighty or so years of labouring for a thorough-going reformation of the state church, it splintered into a variety of groups that eventually became denominations, such as the English Presbyterians, Independents (or Congregationalists), and the Particular Baptists.

On other hand, Evangelicalism knew the revival that the Puritans longed for, and initiated the modern missionary movement and a vast array of philanthropic enterprises, the chief of which the abolition of the slave trade.

Evangelical Weaknesses

Like every Christian tradition, Evangelicalism has some substantial weak points. Recent critiques of Evangelicalism in America have taken aim at what has been called an unbiblical patriarchalism as well as the fostering of a celebrity culture and the politicizing of Evangelicalism. But what these critiques, and other more recent American critiques of this tradition, assume is that the contours of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Evangelicalism define the characteristics of this Christian tradition. I, for one, vigorously deny this.

My counter-critique is that Evangelicalism cannot be judged solely, even mainly, in terms of its manifestation in one geographical locale and one temporality, namely, twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. That would be like defining the Patristic world by what took place solely in Alexandria or solely in Carthage.

Global Evangelicalism

Moreover, many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century roots of Evangelicalism lie in the Protestant world of the British Isles and Ireland. They are not to be found simply on the American continent. And Evangelicalism may have crystallized in the Anglophone world of the North Atlantic in the 1730s, but it is now a global phenomenon.