Soundings in the Evangelical Doctrine of Scripture 1700-1850:
a Re-examination of David Bebbington's Theory
© Kenneth J. Stewart, Covenant College, Lookout Mountain GA. 30750
Contact the author at: kstewart@covenant.edu
Prolegomena
When, in 1989, David Bebbington released his impressive volume, Evangelicalism in Modern
Britain: A History from the 1730's to the 1980's, he was providing not simply an account of British
evangelical origins but of the origins of the movement across the English-speaking world. This
acclaimed volume put forward a novel interpretation of the genesis of Evangelicalism i.e. that it had
emerged around 1730 through a coalescing of factors, such as biblicism, crucicentrism and
conversionism , which had hitherto existed individually, and in isolation from one another.
The book also posited hypotheses regarding theological developments within evangelical
Christianity at or around the century mark of 1830: i) that an until-then `moderating' pan-
evangelical Calvinism rapidly grew more belligerent, ii) that expectations of a non-material, spiritual
second advent gave way to a firm belief that Christ's return would be physical and visible, and iii)
that the somewhat elastic views of biblical inspiration signaled by the earlier usage of the term
`plenary', subsequently gave way to the stricter views associated with the term 'verbal', a concomitant
element of which was a belief in Scriptural inerrancy.
1
The purview of this paper is purely the third of these suggested theological developments
within Evangelicalism. Here, we will aim to show the following:
1.
The view of inspiration termed `verbal', rather than following the `plenary' view as an early
nineteenth century development (so, Bebbington), in fact co-existed with it from the
seventeenth century and then had a parallel existence with it well into the nineteenth
century.
2.
That an important feature of the plenary view of inspiration (as opposed to the verbal) was
not that it could, by design, countenance Scriptural error whereas its alternative would not;
thus another, more admirable motivation must be located to properly explain the increasing
support for the plenary view in the eighteenth century.
3. In consequence, we are left to ponder the nineteenth-century developments to the verbal and
plenary views of inspiration on another basis than that provided in Evangelicalism in
Modern Britain, i.e. that the upsurge of interest in verbal inspiration represented something
novel and that the first substantive defense of an errorless Bible was provided by Louis
Gaussen in 1840.
1
Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London, Unwin Hyman: 1989) , 77-91.