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.