Across the (Many) Dividing Lines: Evangelicalism and the Spirit of Interdenominational Co-operation

Across the (Many) Dividing Lines:Evangelicalism and the Spirit of Interdenominational Co-operation Chad P. Stutz (bio) Readers of the present forum are doubtless familiar with unflattering depictions of evangelicals in the pages of Victorian fiction and non-fiction prose, from the comical Drusilla Clack in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) to the stern and tragic paterfamilias of Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907). What's more, certain kinds of Victorian evangelical novelists can themselves at times inadvertently reinforce stereotypes of [End Page 172] evangelicals as fanatical, rigid, gloomy, uncultured, sentimental, or sanctimonious. Although worlds apart, novels such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood (1841) and R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858) share an unmistakable "preachiness" that differentiates them even in an age known for its moral earnestness and theological pontification. There are, to be sure, a handful of sympathetic evangelical characters scattered throughout the Victorian canon—Edgar Tryan in George Eliot's "Janet's Repentance" (1858) or the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris in Eliot's Adam Bede (1859)—but the sparsity of such examples seems to confirm Valentine Cunningham's observation, borrowed from Primitive Methodist founder Hugh Bourne, that evangelicalism (particularly its Dissenting varieties) was, among the literary elite, "everywhere spoken against" (v). Yet while these caricatures reveal something important about how one segment of the Victorian public perceived evangelicalism (see Bradley 14), they fail to capture the complexities of this influential movement. The word "evangelical" derives from the Greek euangelion, meaning "good news." The movement's theological roots lie in the Protestant Reformation, English Puritanism, and Continental Pietism, but it is to the series of religious revivals that swept across Britain and the New England colonies in the 1730s and 1740s that evangelicalism traces its modern origins (Noll; Bebbington, Evangelicalism; cf. Haykin and Stewart). Disheartened by what they saw as the stale ritualism, moralistic preaching, deistical leanings, and aristocratic sensibilities that had come to plague British Christianity (Noll 38–49; Schlossberg 13–27), figures such as George Whitefield and John and Charles Wesley sought to inject fresh life into the church through a renewed emphasis on personal piety, or "vital religion," and the message of Jesus Christ's sacrifice for sinners. Unlike Unitarianism or Roman Catholicism, evangelicalism does not refer to a single denomination or sect. It is, rather, a development within Protestant Christianity that from its outset was interdenominational in scope, permeating both the Established Church and Dissent. Foremost among the latter were Independents (or Congregationalists) and Baptists, and to a lesser extent in England (but more so in Scotland), Presbyterians. Among prominent eighteenth-century Dissenting bodies, only Unitarians and Quakers remained untouched by evangelical principles, though by the mid-Victorian period, Quakerism, too, had an evangelical contingent. Evangelicalism, moreover, spawned a variety of new denominations throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Methodism, with its myriad offshoots, was the most significant of these new sects, but other important examples include the Plymouth Brethren and Churches of Christ (Bebbington, Dominance 62–63). Given the movement's denominational diversity, the problem of definition has, not surprisingly, garnered much attention. Many historians, in fact, have affirmed some version of Boyd Hilton's observation that "the term 'evangelical' … is seriously frayed at the edges" (26). Even so, as Timothy [End Page 173] Larsen notes in his essay on Low Church Anglicanism, over the last few decades, David Bebbington's definition has achieved widespread scholarly consensus. According to Bebbington, evangelicals have historically exhibited four key attributes: conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism (Evangelicalism 2–17). Despite these central tenets, however, evangelicalism has never been monolithic; rather, it has always been marked by internal divisions. One of the oldest of these, dating back to the early days of Methodism at Oxford, was that between Calvinism and Arminianism. Indeed, George Eliot's Adam Bede captures something of this tension in recounting his own period of theological exploration as a young man: "I've heard a deal o' doctrine i' my time, for I used to go after the dissenting preachers along wi' Seth, when I was a lad o' seventeen, and got puzzling myself a deal about th' Arminians and the Calvinists" (182). A shared crucicentrism notwithstanding, evangelicals could...

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