7
The Letham essay was largely an indictment of Evangelicalism in its contemporary American dress,
replete with its heavy emphasis upon parachurch organizations. Yet it was very telling that he found the
roots of these unsavory contemporary emphases in the very period which Bebbington had marked out as
discontinuous with 17
th
century.
III. Unacknowledged Weaknesses of the Bebbington Thesis
Here, it will be our purpose to draw attention to
six lines of evidence which strongly suggest that
the argument for discontinuity between the Christianity of the 18
th
century and that which preceded has
been grossly over-played.
i. Bebbington has argued that Evangelicalism arose in response to factors unique to the 18
th
century. An older view is that evangelical Christianity arose in light of recurring perennial
factors.
We should give fresh consideration to the issue raised by R.A. Knox in his half-century old work,
Enthusiasm.
26
It is that of recurrence of
pattern in Church History, a pattern which Knox no friend to
Evangelicalism, termed "ultrasupernaturalism".
27
Few evangelicals will take delight in the kinds of
assorted company among which he depicts our tradition. His aim may have been derogatory in binding
together Montanists and Donatists, Quakers and Jansenists, Moravians and Methodists; yet we are
nevertheless left to grapple with the recurrence of similar tendencies of Christian thought and action in
multiple centuries and geographic locations. This line of analysis, when separated from Knox's
undisguised polemical intent, does much to make the idea of evangelical continuities -at least from the
Reformation forward, more likely rather than less so. Recently, this line of thought was revived by
missiologist Andrew Walls when he maintained that the evangelical "pattern" in the European stream of
Christianity
"assumes Christendom, the territorial conception of the Christian faith that brought about the integration
of throne and altar, that began with the conversion of the barbarians of the North and West. Perhaps we
have not fully faced the extent to which all subsequent Western Christianity was shaped by the
circumstances under which the people of northern Europe came into the Christian faith".
28
26
The full title was, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion With Special Reference to the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries, (Oxford, University Press 1950).
27
Ibid. pp. 2,4.
28
Andrew Walls, " The Evangelical Revival, The Missionary Movement, and Africa" in Mark A. Noll, David W.
Bebbington, and George A Rawlyk, eds. Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North
America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1700-1990. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1994). p. 311.