Evangelicalism an International Enterprise

Cover photo by Jeff Folger

The development of Evangelicalism was a transatlantic enterprise. Many of those who became its early leaders and proponents crossed the ocean, some of them several times, cross-pollinating the emerging movement with ideas and practices from one shore to the other. What we now identify as Evangelicalism is that much richer for the experience.

In The Emergence of Evangelical Spirituality, a recent volume in Paulist Press’s Classics of Western Spirituality series, Tom Schwanda, a Reformed pastor and scholar out of Wheaton College in Illinois, presents an extensive and varied selection of writings by Evangelicals from both sides of the Atlantic.

While the selections range from sermons to hymns, from letters to treatises, they are helpfully grouped not according to genre but by theme. Here Schwanda has identified six major themes—New Life in Christ, Holy Spirit, Scripture, Spiritual Practices, Love for God, and Love for Neighbor—prominent in and dear to these early authors and has classified their writings accordingly, so that under any given theme a hymn by John Newton may rub shoulders with a sermon by Gilbert Tennent, an essay by Anne Dutton with a letter by John Fletcher, and so forth, and the reader is thereby given a sense of the variety of ways in which a particular theme was expressed by an author.

Authors as well as texts range from the very familiar (especially such hymns as “Rock of Ages” and “Amazing Grace”) to the familiar (selections by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield) to the less familiar and even texts that are probably published here for the first time since they originally appeared in the eighteenth century. In his fine Foreword, prominent scholar on Evangelicalism Mark A. Noll observes that the volume points up “the substantial contribution of women to early evangelicalism,” and that socially the authors range from aristocrats to former slaves and racial minorities.

Schwanda has also provided a concise but extremely valuable introduction that (among other things) explains the importance of his choice of themes and defines the evolution of the terms evangelical (which, from the time of the Reformation, referred to all Protestants but eventually was refined to denote specifically the Evangelicals as we now identify them) and, in that context, spirituality. Brief introductions to each theme fill out that information. A section on “The Authors in This Volume” generously provides biographical information of each of the writers who speak to us across the centuries through this book.

The Emergence of Evangelical Spirituality is highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of Evangelicalism and the history of spirituality as an academic study as well as for anyone wishing to enrich their own life of prayer and meditation with selections from this great treasury of texts.

A related volume in this series is Mark Granquist's Scandinavian Pietists. Read my review here.

Provocative New Volume of Readings in Moral Theology

The Sensus Fidelium and Moral Theology, edited by Charles E. Curran and Lisa A. Fullam, Readings in Moral Theology 18 (New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2017).

First, a disclosure: It has been a privilege and my pleasure to have worked editorially with Fr. Curran on his Moral Theology volumes since 2004.

In The Sensus Fidelium and Moral Theology Charles Curran and Lisa Fullam have given us the eighteenth volume in the invaluable series Readings in Moral Theology, which Fr. Curran inaugurated thirty-eight years ago with coeditor Richard McCormick.

John Henry Newman was the theologian best noted in the nineteenth century for his views on the sensus fidelium, which he explored in his seminal work on the topic, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine. On being asked by his bishop, William Ullathorne of Birmingham, “Who are the laity?” Newman, by his own account, “answered … that the Church would look foolish without them.” The concept of sensus fidelium did not start with Newman, however; its roots go back to the biblical tradition, and the process is traced in the book’s first chapter, “Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church,” prepared by the International Theological Commission and published by the Vatican in 2014.

The rest of Part One is taken up with historical and theological interpretations and features a multinational group of expert authors ranging from the USA (such as Paul Crowley, who expands on Newman) to Europe (including Myriam Wijlens of Germany on the ecclesiology of Vatican II) and beyond (including the Australian Ormond Rush’s finely nuanced account of “Sensus Fidei: Faith ‘Making Sense’ of Revelation”).

Part Two sets out “Moral and Practical Issues in Light of the Sensus Fidelium” and, in the wake of Pope Francis’s revival of the synod process and its consultation of the Catholic laity in preparation for the 2015 Synod on the Family, stamps this volume as especially timely. In presenting viewpoints on the sensus fidelium from a wide range of theologians and pastors, it makes an outstanding contribution by widening its application to ethical and not only doctrinal issues. Chapter 14, “Experience and Moral Theology: Reflections on Humanae Vitae Forty Years Later” by Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler, is only one of the gems to be found in this section of the book.

The Sensus Fidelium and Moral Theology is an invaluable resource not only for students and professors but also for all educated and involved laypersons who want to see how the concept of the sensus fidelium, championed by one of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century, is experiencing a deserved revival after years of being consigned to limbo by those who would prefer to equate authentic Catholic teaching with the hierarchical magisterium.