Every Leaf, Line, and Letter: Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present

Every scholar and student of evangelical Christianity since 1989 has had to engage with the definition of evangelicalism crafted by David Bebbington in his massively influential Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. The ‘Bebbington quadrilateral’ of evangelical characteristics—conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism—has been adopted, debated, nuanced, inflected, and sometimes rejected as the study of evangelicalism has flourished over the past thirty years. This volume picks up the third strand of the quadrilateral, offering a series of twelve vignettes to illustrate how evangelicals have received and used the Bible in a wide variety of settings from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are each considered in three essays. Kristina Benham draws on sermons and newspaper correspondence to discuss the Exodus narrative in the years around the American Revolution, tracing themes of oppression, divine judgement, providential victory, and the emergence of a portrayal of the United States as a new people of God. Bruce Hindmarsh examines the compatibility of evangelicalism and the Enlightenment, challenging both David Bebbington’s assertion of complete compatibility and the claim of the ‘eclipse of biblical narrative’ in the work of Hans Frei. Hindmarsh sees evangelicals like the Wesley brothers and those early Methodists who described their spiritual experience in letters to Charles Wesley as people who assimilated their life story to the narrative of scripture, re-enchanting a scientific universe through a figural reading of the Bible. Hindmarsh looks in detail at Jonathan Edwards’s understanding of typology. Edwards is also the focus of Jonathan Yeager’s essay on ‘Faith, Free Will, and Biblical Reasoning’, comparing themes of faith and human volition in the work of Edwards and John Erskine. Yeager shows that friends and fellow-Calvinists could reach quite different conclusions from their reading of scripture.The nineteenth-century section of the volume begins with K. Elise Leal’s case study of Sunday schools in two New England towns, observing that these institutions gave significant agency to children and young people. Mark Noll examines the ‘crisis for sola Scriptura’ posed by American debates over slavery, showing that staunch opponents of slavery, like Freeborn Garrettson and Daniel Coker, were able to deploy detailed biblical citation to make their case, but also that Southern polemicists increasingly insisted that to oppose slavery was to oppose scripture. This section concludes with Mary Riso’s exploration of the spirituality of Josephine Butler, based on a close reading of her biography and writings.The twentieth century merits four essays, beginning with a contribution by David Bebbington on ‘The Bible Crisis of British Evangelicalism in the 1920s’. This offers a taxonomy of militant conservatism, based on an analysis of support for the Bible League’s 1923 call for missionary and other evangelical societies to take a public stand against modernism. In a companion piece Timothy Larsen looks at liberal evangelicals in the Church of England, focusing in particular on Vernon Storr, effectively the leader of the Anglican Evangelical Group Movement from its inception in 1923 until his death in 1940. Malcolm Foley, in a powerful case study of the sermons of Francis Grimké between 1898 and 1919, considers how a shared biblicism did not mean a common evangelical identity between Black and white Americans, because of white silence in the face of lynching. Grimké’s conclusion was that the gospel demanded active resistance to racial injustice and violence. John Maiden’s essay comparing the charismatic movement in Britain and New Zealand concludes this section.For the twenty-first century there are two longer essays. Catherine Brekus looks at The American Patriot’s Bible, published in 2009, and reflects on its reading of biblical narratives in juxtaposition with American history—or, rather, with the history of white, male, Protestant Americans. Brian Stanley offers an overview of David Bebbington’s historical oeuvre as a presentation of ‘the evangelical Christian mind in history’, and then turns to consider how the ‘quadrilateral’ plays out beyond the North Atlantic world.Every Leaf, Line, and Letter is not quite a Festschrift, but the introduction and concluding acknowledgments by Thomas Kidd and the chapters by established and newer scholars pay generous tribute to David Bebbington’s gifts as historian, mentor, and friend. The tribute is richly deserved, and by continuing to develop ‘the evangelical Christian mind in history’, this stimulating volume admirably and aptly fulfils its purpose.

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