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Did Evangelicalism Predate the Eighteenth Century?
An Examination of the David Bebbington Thesis
© 2001 by Kenneth J. Stewart, Ph.D., Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Georgia, 30750
Email: kstewart@covenant.edu
I. The Long Reign of Evangelical Successionism
If you or I had asked this question in polite evangelical company prior to 1989, we would
certainly have drawn very blank looks. For until that year, it was taken as an elementary truth that not
only the evangelical Christianity we associate with the century of the Wesley brothers, George Whitefield
and Jonathan Edwards but for that matter with the next century of George Muller, D.L. Moody and J.C.
Ryle , or the century just past the Billy Graham era, stood in an unbroken succession of vital
Christianity extending backwards to
at least the Reformation of the sixteenth century and perhaps
beyond.
Senior evangelical theologian J.I. Packer was only giving expression to
this view of evangelical
history which could be called
gospel successionism when he spoke of it approvingly in 1978 as:
"the Christianity, both convictional and behavioural, which we inherit from the New Testament
via the Reformers, the Puritans, and the revival and missionary leaders of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.......The reason why I call myself an evangelical and mean to go on doing so
is my belief that as this historic evangelicalism has never sought to be anything other than
New Testament Christianity, so in essentials it has succeeded in its aim".
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Packer had not invented this conception; he had merely inherited it and taken it up with
gusto. The
same conception of evangelical Christianity as a hardy perennial, cropping up in every century with
loyalty to Christ, Bible and gospel could be found in the twentieth century in the conception of an E.J.
Poole-Connor , a John Stott,
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, a Christianity Today (founded 1956) magazine or the journal, The
Evangelical Quarterly (founded in 1929). It is not difficult to trace the existence of something resembling
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James Packer, "The Uniqueness of Jesus Christ: Some Evangelical Reflections" in Churchman, Vol. 92, No. 2, p.
102. The Packer essay had been delivered as an address the year previous in the annual Islington (London) Church
of England pastoral conference.
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One can find the conception readily in Poole-Connor's Evangelicalism in England, (London, Henry Walter, 1966)
see especially chap. 8; it is explicitly present in John Stott's "A Plea for Evangelical Christianity" in Christ the
Controversialist (Downer's Grove, IVP, 1972). Pp. 27-46. Stott was still sounding this note in his Evangelical
Essentials (Downers Grove, IVP, 2000). Christianity Today magazine has constantly identified itself on its masthead
as "a magazine of evangelical conviction" while the venerable Evangelical Quarterly discloses its own
understanding of the concept by adding the subtitle to each title page "An International Review of Bible and
Theology in Defense of the Historic Christian Faith". Contributors to the quarterly are said to "enjoy reasonable
liberty in the reverent exposition of the Reformed faith".