15
drawing the conclusion that in theological literature, the Evangelical Revival was a movement in
continuity with spiritual movements of preceding generations.
vi. The terminology of "evangelical" had clearly been attached to persons and movements of
earlier centuries.
It has been important to leave this consideration until the last place. Had it been reviewed
earlier, we would have begged the question of what
kind of movements had used the terminology; the
mere or bare use of such terms would have been thought to have some decisive import. But this is not
what we maintain. What we do maintain is that when a 16
th
century Reformer or 17
th
century Puritan-
Pietist used or had applied to him the language of "evangelical", it did refer to conversionist,
Christocentric, and biblicistic emphases remarkably like (though not identical in every respect to) the
spiritual movements of the 18
th
century.
We must make something of the recurrence of the terminology "evangelical" in the two hundred
years prior to the dawn of the Evangelical Revival / Great Awakening. We have noted that Bebbington
himself acknowledges polemical use of the term in England as early as 1531 (by Thomas More of William
Tyndale).
62
The major modern biographer of the reform-minded archbishop, Thomas Cranmer (1489-
1556) Diarmid MacCullogh, has used the terminology "evangelical" freely to describe the theological
tendency of his subject.
63
The modern editors of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion have used
the term "evangelical" to describe those French Protestants he defended against the slanders and
persecutions of King Francis.
64
The same term is used by the German Calvin scholar, Alexandre Ganoczy,
to describe the young Calvin and his associates at the stage of his career when the chief influences upon
him were the Reformation writings of Luther.
65
When all allowances have been made for the liberties
taken by modern translators, we are still driven to a conclusion that allows for the durability of this
terminology from the 16
th
century onward.
62
Bebbington, p. 1
63
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: a Life, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996). See, for instance
pages 2-3, 59-60. MacCulloch goes so far (p.2) as to insist that in the 1520-30 era "evangelicalism....is a
conveniently vague catch-all term which can be applied across the board, except to the very small minority of
English religious rebels who proceeded further to Continental radicalism (i.e. Anabaptism). In the 19
th
century the
word was appropriated in the English-speaking world to describe a party within Protestantism and within the Church
of England, but it can be liberated once more to perform a useful task for the religious history of Tudor England."
64
"Preface to King Francis" in The Institutes of the Christian Religion Vol. 1 John T. McNeill, ed.,(Philadelphia,
Westminster Press, 1960). p. 11.