5
IV.
The new
activism of 18
th
century Evangelicalism was nowhere better exemplified than in
the rise of the missions movement in the time of William Carey (circa 1792).
16
Bebbington is quite correct to indicate that earlier English-speaking Protestantism on both sides
of the Atlantic had been quite remiss in their neglect of world mission. Richard Baxter had been a quite
solitary exception to this pattern.
17
Yet again, Christians of the continent were in advance of the English.
The Moravians had sent missionaries to the Caribbean by 1732, to Greenland by 1733, Lapland and
South America by 1735 and South Africa by 1736.
18
The simple point is that the Evangelical Revival did
not originate this missionary impulse but was able to follow a pre-existent pattern.
V.
There was "a shift in the received doctrine of assurance (of faith) with all that it
entailed". The novel assurance...discovered in Evangelicalism was greeted with
relief"
19
"Received Puritan practice would have been to encourage them to wrestle
through their own doubts and fears over a protracted period".
20
Here, to this writer's mind, Bebbington has raised the single most fascinating item demonstrating
a new direction taken by the spiritual movements of the 18
th
century. I confess myself to be substantially
the wiser for having read his description of the interplay of Enlightenment thought and Christian
experience. In consequence, I have little doubt that assurance of salvation was enjoyed more widely and
thought less presumptuous in those who claimed to possess it then, than in previous ages. But in
fairness, the issue is highly complex. The Reformed theology of the Westminster Confession of faith
(1647) had emphasized with John Calvin that the Christian believer should enjoy assurance of salvation
by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, with the Word. Yet in the pastoral situation created by the effects
of Tridentine teaching (the Council of Trent had warned that an insistence that the believer was granted
assurance of inclusion among the predestined was presumption
21
) and the long campaign to evangelize
the still nominally-Protestant Britain, the Westminster divines had tried to allow that assurance of
salvation was not necessarily the automatic consequence of faith nor so constant in the believer that no
fluctuation of confidence would be experienced. It is not clear that the 18
th
century teaching on the
16
Bebbington p. 41.
17
Bebbington p. 40.
18
s.v. "Moravian Brethren" in the J.D. Douglas, ed. New International Dictionary of the Christian Church ,(Grand
Rapids, Zondervan, 1974)
19
Bebbington pp. 42.
20
p. 47.