Introduction Towards a history of evangelical histories
Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones
Historical writing about evangelicalism, a burgeoning global movement, has undergone a radical transformation since the 1960s. Previously dominated by what David Bebbington calls ‘denominational apologias, edifying biographies and missionary hagiographies’,1 evangelicalism has more recently begun to figure in mainstream historical literature and academic research. Nonetheless the older forms still endure, as ministers, clergy and missionaries narrate evangelical history for a popular audience, to teach and encourage the contemporary church. Debates about the rights and wrongs of historical method, and what approach to the past might be appropriate for evangelicals, continues to generate heated debate and opinion amongst both scholars and lay Christians.
History and historiography
Within the academy, the ‘history of histories’ is a comparatively recent and growing discipline, as proponents pay closer attention not only to the content of historical writing but also the philosophical ideals and worldviews which have shaped such literature. When history became a professional academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, a process most closely associated with Leopold von Ranke, understanding of the historian’s task was somewhat different.2 Ranke’s famous dictum, which first appeared in his history of the Latin and Teutonic nations, that the historian’s task was to write about ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ (‘what really happened’), cast a long shadow over the subsequent practice of the writing of history.3 Facts
1 David W. Bebbington, ‘The Evangelical Discovery of History’, in The Church on Its Past, edited by Charlotte Methuen and Peter Clarke (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), 363.
2 For an introduction to this process, see Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline, edited by Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield (London: Routledge, 2004), part 1.
3 Quoted in Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers on History (third edition, London: Routledge, 2015), 259.
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were what mattered, and those facts were to be found awaiting discovery in the archives. The historian’s task was to locate the sources – the ‘facts’ –and subject them to critical analysis. By using these raw materials, it was asserted, the historian would be able to reconstruct the past in an almost ‘scientific’ fashion, objectively and impartially. Serious study of the past was decreasingly the preserve of leisured gentlemen amateurs, now supplanted by trained professionals, usually working within a university setting. This ‘historical method’ was applied chiefly to political history, and it remained the norm until at least the second half of the twentieth century.4 As James Kirby argues, however, there was no ‘linear transition from literary élan and popular appeal . . . to academic specialization and dryness’, but a complex, overlapping evolution of genres: ‘Though scholarly history grew with the growth of university history, it was not created by it; nor did its growth stifle literary and popular historical genres’. Many of the leading scholars in the Victorian and Edwardian periods moved seamlessly between university research and church ministry, so simple dichotomies are inaccurate, though the approach of ‘academics’ and ‘amateurs’ did become increasingly polarised.5
By the time E. H. Carr dismissed this fetishising of facts as a ‘preposterous fallacy’ in his famous Trevelyan Lectures on the nature of history at the University of Cambridge in 1961, he was reflecting another transformation beginning to take place within the historical profession.6 There had been attempts to challenge the hegemony of ‘statist’ historical writing, with the rise of social and economic history, and not least by the Annales School which sought to combine insights from the disciplines of economics, geography, anthropology and even psychology in an effort to write ‘total history’.7 Carr himself argued that our understanding of the past owed more to the presuppositions of historians, than it did to their discovery of objective truth(s) about the past. While still highlighting the importance of detailed archival research, Carr stressed that the historian’s choice of which ‘facts’ to use – which were important and relevant, and which were not – was decisive. All accounts of the past, he argued, ‘were
4 J. D. Braw, ‘Vision as Revision: Ranke and the Beginning of Modern History’, History and Theory 46 (December 2007), 45–60.
5 James Kirby, Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 5–7; William D. Rubenstein, ‘History and “Amateur” History’, in Making History, edited by Lambert and Schofield, 269–79; Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London: Profile Books, 2002).
6 E. H. Carr, What Is History? (second edition, London: Penguin, 1987), 12.
7 For the rise of social and economic history in America and Germany in particular, see Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), chs 3 and 4. For the Annales, see Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–1989 (London: Polity, 1990); Michael Roberts, ‘The Annales School and Historical Writing’, in Making History, edited by Lambert and Schofield, 78–92.
refracted through the mind of the recorder’.8 While early professional historians did not see much point thinking about the nature of history, still less of asking the question ‘What is history?’, Carr asserted, ‘History means interpretation’.9
While there remained plenty of voices defending the older approach – that history was all about the search for objective truth about the past10 – by the second half of the twentieth century, history had become an enormously diverse profession. Historians not only began to take up and use the new theoretical tools of the social sciences11 but also grappled with their own time-bound limitations. It brought upon historians what Michael Bentley has called ‘an embarrassing sense of self-consciousness’.12 While this did not amount to a full-blown crisis of confidence, at least in the short term, it did raise the question of what exactly can be known about the past with any degree of accuracy, if all histories are shaped so fundamentally by the presuppositions of the historian. Furthermore, the postmodern turn of the 1980s left historians, in the words of Richard J. Evans, ‘haunted with a sense of gloom’, wondering not so much about the nature of history, but whether it was possible to access the past with any degree of certainty at all.13
Alongside the diversification of the historical profession has been the growth of the study of historiography, or the history of history writing. The discipline has sometimes been regarded with suspicion – as the aphorism goes: some historians write history, others write about the writing of history. Nevertheless, an awareness that all history is shaped by the preoccupations of individual historians is now taken for granted. The autobiographies of historians, both recent and of older vintage, reveal their awareness of how their own lives influenced the histories they wrote.14 Edward Gibbon’s memoirs, an account to which he returned time and time again eventually producing at least six separate iterations, show the same determination to impose order on the personal chaos of his early life as his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) did upon its sprawling subject matter. Gibbon’s historical writing reflected his own personal story,
8 Carr, What Is History?, 23.
9 Carr, What Is History?, 16.
10 The classic riposte to Carr was G. R. Elton’s The Practice of History (London: Fontana Press, 1967).
11 John Harvey, ‘History and the Social Sciences’, in Writing History: Theory and Practice, edited by Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (second edition, London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 81–107. For the religious history context, see Mark A. Noll, ‘“And the Lion Shall Lie Down With the Lamb”: The Social Sciences and Religious History’, Fides et Historia 20 (1988), 5–30.
12 Companion to Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997), xiii.
13 Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 1997), 3.
14 Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Becoming Historians , edited by James M. Banner Jr and John R. Gillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
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character and predilections.15 A similar, though perhaps less dramatic, pattern can be observed in Patrick Collinson’s autobiography. His scholarly interest in Elizabethan Puritanism, those ‘hotter sort of Protestants’, was seemingly the product of the no less hot evangelical piety he experienced first at home from his missionary parents, and then in the Cambridge InterCollegiate Christian Union during the 1950s.16
The study of historiography is now de rigueur. Undergraduate and postgraduate courses on the history of historical interpretation are commonplace, and regarded as an essential component in the training of budding historians. Volumes tracing the development of historical writing from earliest times to the present weigh down the shelves of most historians engaged in university faculties. John Burrow’s A History of Histories (2007) is typical of the genre. Beginning with Herodotus and Thucydides, he brings together in one volume examples of various types of historical literature – Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries – from ancient Greece to the present day, some of which the nineteenth-century fathers of the modern historical profession might have struggled to regard as history at all.17 The sophistication and prestige in which the field is now held is reflected in the five volumes of The Oxford History of Historical Writing (2011–12) which not only chart the development of history writing over time but also across the globe. Acknowledging that the study of historiography has tended to be dominated by Eurocentricism, the series editors suggest that the historical enterprise must be viewed on as wide a canvas as possible. Approaches to the past from Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe have always been deeply interconnected, and can only be fully understood when studied in conjunction with one another.18
Unsurprisingly, the place and study of religion within the academy has undergone equally profound change during the last generation. In the early twentieth century, professional academic historians in the Rankean tradition wrote about the past within an overarching narrative of progress. Reason and science, it was assumed, had pushed matters of faith and religious belief to the margins, and beyond the expertise and concern of empirical
15 Charlotte Roberts, ‘The Memoirs and Character of the Historian’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon, edited by Karen O’Brien and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 203–18.
16 The History of a History Man, or the Twentieth Century Viewed from a Safe Distance: The Memoirs of Patrick Collinson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011).
17 John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries From Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 2007). A similar approach is taken in Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, edited Kelly Boyd (London: Routledge, 1999); The Modern Historiography Reader: Western Sources, edited by Adam Budd (London: Routledge, 2008); A Global History of History, edited by Daniel Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
18 The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600, edited by Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ix.
scientific history. Religion was not entirely absent from professional historical writing, but it tended to figure in a subordinate role, only featuring as it stimulated or constrained the rise of British parliamentary democracy, the emergence of modern European nation-states, and the growth of American Exceptionalism. The history of religion was therefore left to ecclesiastical and denominational historians, often preoccupied with the merits and distinctiveness of their own particular confessional community – early networks, as Stella Fletcher has chronicled, included the Wesley Historical Society (1893), the Congregational Historical Society (1899), the Catholic Record Society (1904), the Baptist Historical Society (1908), the Presbyterian Historical Society (1913) and the Unitarian Historical Society (1915). However, the launch of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History in 1950 and the formation of the Ecclesiastical History Society in 1961 were evidence of a renewed public confidence amongst historians of religion. Both institutions encouraged cutting-edge research on the whole history of the church, eschewing any denominational or confessional bias, in step with the optimistic ecumenical spirit of the post-war decades.19
The unexpected resurgence of global religion in the late twentieth century, not least the rise of Islam, forced historians to sit up and take note of the importance of faith and religious belief.20 The ‘cultural turn’ of the early 1970s proved especially important in alerting historians to the role of religion in constructing meaning. The writings of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who argued that religious practices were symbols by means of which believers made sense of the world, were influential in this respect.21 His work encouraged the study of mentalities or worldviews and provided a generation of historians with the tools necessary to take religious belief and practice seriously, on its own terms. Keith Thomas’s reconstruction of early modern English cosmology in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) became the model of this new approach. The proliferation of new perspectives, women’s and gender history, the history of race, and a fascination with questions of national identity, has encouraged scholars to study religious communities with fresh eyes, eager to investigate a whole new range of research questions.
Also important has been the rise of intellectual history. The centrality of religious ideas and theological concepts, not least in the development
19 Stella Fletcher, ‘A Very Agreeable Society’: The Ecclesiastical History Society, 1961–2011 (Southampton: Ecclesiastical History Society, 2011).
20 Miri Rubin, ‘Religion’, in A Concise Companion to History, edited by Ulinka Rublack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 317–30. Compare also, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith Is Changing the World (London: Allen Lane, 2009); Is God Back? Reconsidering the New Visibility of Religion, edited by Titus Hjelm (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
21 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). For the importance of his ideas for the study of religion, see Henry Muson Jr, ‘Geertz on Religion: The Theory and the Practice’, Religion 16 (January 1986), 19–32.
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of political thought, has forced historians of ideas to grapple afresh with the religiously infused worldviews of influential thinkers.22 Seeing Things Their Way (2009) challenged the reductionism that can often characterise treatment of religious belief in past societies, even amongst those who purport to take those beliefs seriously. Rather than explaining religious belief according to secular assumptions, Brad Gregory suggests, historians should attempt to represent the religious ideas of historical actors in ways which they themselves would recognise. Not to do so runs the risk of historical anachronism.23
If religious agency is now taken seriously within academic historical writing, the advent of memory studies has encouraged historians to take an interest not only in how individuals, but also how whole communities or societies relate to the past. Drawing on the work of sociologists from the interwar period, historians began to adopt theories surrounding so-called ‘collective memories’ or group remembering.24 Whether through communal or personal memory, ritual or commemoration, the past has been used by numerous cultures to legitimise and give meaning in the present.25 In a much referenced collection of essays with global reach, The Invention of Tradition (1983), Eric Hobsbawm showed that many cultural practices once assumed to be ancient were often in fact of comparatively recent origin. They were, in effect, deliberately invented traditions.26 The past has regularly been plundered to meet contemporary needs, often in the geo-political realm as nations have been continually made and remade. Taking a broader perspective, David Lowenthal’s The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985) laid bare many of the ways in which ‘the remade past continuously remoulds us’, not least in the highly processed form beloved of the heritage industry.27 Religious communities have been especially adept at using history to justify their existence, and to locate themselves within a particular historical succession of faithful followers of Christ. The past has been used, and sometimes
22 On the rise of intellectual history, and especially the role of Quentin Skinner and the ‘Cambridge School’, see Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History, edited by Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), chs 1 and 2.
23 Brad S. Gregory, ‘Can We “See Things Their Way”? Should We Try?’, in Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, edited by Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad S. Gregory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 24–5.
24 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (1952), edited and translated by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
25 Introductions to the genre include Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject , edited by Joan Tumblety (London: Routledge, 2013); Writing the History of Memory , edited by Stefan Berger and Bill Niven (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
26 The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
27 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1.
misused and abused, for political and ecclesial ends. Far from being a neutral pursuit of objective truth, certain narratives are always privileged over others. The manipulation and moulding of the past have thus become one of the central concerns of contemporary historians.28 The diverse ways in which some of evangelicalism’s most influential historians, from the eighteenth century to the present, have shaped our understandings of the evangelical narrative, are explored in the essays in this volume.
The contested methodologies of evangelical history
Far from being immune to these developments, the writing of the history of evangelicalism has been impacted by the transformation of the historical discipline in the second half of the twentieth century. The history of evangelicalism has become a contested narrative, retold from a variety of perspectives. It is a battleground of competing methodologies. Jay D. Green delineates five ‘rival versions’, including historical study as ‘Christian apologetic’ or as ‘search for God’.29 Arguments over the most legitimate evangelical approach to the past have been dubbed the ‘history wars’.30
Questions relating to how evangelical historians who practise their craft within the secular academy should reconcile their religious commitments with their determination to write history according to the ‘standards of the professional guild’ have generated a considerable literature.31 The quandary was succinctly put by David Bebbington in Patterns in History (1979): the historical community ‘has not permitted references to God for nearly 200 years’, so if the Christian historian ‘makes plain his religious commitment in his writing, will he not be excluding it from general notice and certainly from academic attention?’32 At the heart of debates on this issue has been the North American Conference on Faith and History (CFH), with its journal Fides et Historia (founded 1968), and its activities have been mirrored in the United Kingdom by the smaller-scale Christianity and History Forum (previously known as the Historians Study Group under the auspices of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship), and in Australia by the Evangelical History Association.33 The main pioneers in the rapprochement between evangelical historians and the academy were George Marsden, Mark Noll and
28 See, for example, How the Past Was Used: Historical Cultures, c.750–2000, edited by Peter Lambert and Björn Weiler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
29 Jay D. Green, Christian Historiography: Five Rival Versions (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015).
30 See Mark Noll’s four-part series on ‘History Wars’, Books and Culture 5 (1999).
31 ‘Afterword: The Generations of Scholarship’, in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1700–1990, edited by Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 411.
32 David W. Bebbington, Patterns in History (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1979), 186.
33 Bebbington, ‘The Evangelical Discovery of History’, 344.
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Nathan Hatch in the United States, George Rawlyk in Canada and David Bebbington in Britain. Each championed a move away from ‘confessional’ history, with its ‘popular and unscholarly’ publications, towards ‘markedly higher standards of scholarship’.34 The achievements of this trans-Atlantic network were given institutional expression by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College, Illinois, between 1982 and 2014, and the conferences and publications it initiated. The sophistication of much of the scholarship generated by this community was amply illustrated by the five-volume global History of Evangelicalism, published by InterVarsity Press between 2004 and 2016 with Noll and Bebbington as series editors. Many younger evangelical scholars were trained by this group, usually as doctoral students, and Timothy Larsen spoke for many of them in his ‘conscious desire to follow in the path mapped out by the Noll-Bebbington generation’.35
Providentialism has been the typical evangelical approach to the past. For example, John Wesley’s A Concise History of England, from the Earliest Times, to the Death of George II, published in four volumes in 1776, adopted a richly providentialist interpretation. He viewed the history of England’s monarchs as a display of ‘morality in action’, echoing classical models like Tacitus as well as the Book of Kings in the Old Testament, with its account of repeated divine intervention in the lives of Israel’s leaders.36 Wesley stood in a long historiographical tradition, stretching back to Reformation historians like John Foxe and beyond. Drawing analogies between scriptural history, and tracing the hand of God in the recent past, have been an evangelical stock-in-trade. The reluctance of some modern evangelical historians to follow suit aroused stern criticism. The admission by the editors of Evangelicalism (1994) that they had ‘abandoned the providentialism that characterised most early histories of evangelicalism’,37 drew the rebuke of Iain Murray who regarded this as too high a price to pay for academic respectability, tantamount to a ‘surrender to pressure from the unregenerate mind’ and akin to a ‘down-grade of true evangelical faith’.38 In reality, evangelical historians within the academy have rarely abandoned belief in the general superintendence of providence over the historical process, but they have been unwilling to identify God’s action in any particular historical situation. Bebbington explained, ‘If God does intervene in specific events,
34 Bebbington, ‘The Evangelical Discovery of History’, 333.
35 Timothy Larsen, ‘Evangelicals, the Academy, and the Discipline of History’, in Beyond Integration? Inter/Disciplinary Possibilities for the Future of Christian Higher Education, edited by Todd C. Ream, Jerry Pattengale and David L. Riggs (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2012), 109.
36 Jeremy Black, ‘John Wesley and History’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 9 (2017), 4.
37 ‘Afterword: The Generations of Scholarship’, in Evangelicalism, edited by Noll, Bebbington and Rawlyk, 411.
38 Iain H. Murray, ‘Explaining Evangelical History’, The Banner of Truth no. 370 (July 1994), 13–14.
how can we discern what is happening? God’s way must be complex, and human beings are fallible. Claims to understand God’s dealings with men seem bold or even ridiculous’.39 Many have followed the example of the English historian Herbert Butterfield who, though he argued in favour of a providentalist approach to the past, in reality relegated providence to the status of an unspoken presupposition, rarely, if ever, referencing it as a causal factor in his historical writing.40
In a short postscript to his Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980), George Marsden (the ‘pontiff of evangelical history’ according to Leonard Sweet)41 summarised what he saw as the appropriate evangelical approach to the past. Divine actions in history, he declared, ‘are always intertwined with culturally conditioned factors’.42 Outside of biblical revelation, the historian cannot know God’s ‘precise purposes in permitting particular historical developments’.43 Therefore, Marsden distinguished the historian’s task from that of the theologian. The latter had to establish scriptural criteria for deciding what may or may not be the activity of God; the former must stick to ‘observable cultural forces’ and ‘refrain from explicit judgements on what is properly Christian’.44 Put simply, the historian’s remit was to explain the past according to what Larsen has termed ‘methodological naturalism’ –that is using social, economic and cultural tools, and abiding by the rules of the mainstream academy.45
Avoiding references to divine agency, and not invoking special providence as an explanatory factor, has left some advocates of the ‘new evangelical historiography’ open to the charge that there remains little that is ostensibly Christian about their history writing. In an analysis of the Conference on Faith and History, D. G. Hart argued that by the mid-1980s many participants had become sceptical about whether there was in reality a Christian view of history at all. In its place, Hart advocated a ‘Christian historical agnosticism’, which recognises that God is in overall control of the historical process, but admits that without special revelation like that given to the apostles in the New Testament, we simply ‘cannot know the meaning from
39 Bebbington, Patterns in History, 66.
40 Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1950), ch. 5. See further, Keith C. Sewell, Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Michael Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science, and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
41 Leonard I. Sweet, ‘Wise as Serpents, Innocent as Doves: The New Evangelical Historiography’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56 (Autumn 1988), 398.
42 George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of TwentiethCentury Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 230.
43 George Marsden, ‘A Christian Perspective for the Teaching of History’, in A Christian View of History? edited by George Marsden and Frank Roberts (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975), 38.
44 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 230.
45 Larsen, ‘Evangelicals, the Academy, and the Discipline of History’, 110.
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God’s perspective of any historical event’.46 So what remains of a Christian approach to historical writing? Marsden suggests three factors: Christian perspectives will shape the research topics chosen by Christian historians, inform the questions which they ask about their subjects, and dictate their methodological approaches. As a consequence, Christian historians ‘are likely to be interested in a different set of issues than are other scholars and to see different things’.47 Far from undermining a Christian understanding of the past, Marsden insists, refraining from speculative readings of divine providence should liberate the Christian historian, forcing him or her ‘to deal only with those aspects of the picture for which human abilities are competent’.48
Often these two approaches – the providentialist and the naturalistic –have been seen as mutually exclusive, with evangelical advocates of each treating one another with at best suspicion and at worst downright hostility. Some have challenged what has been termed ‘the Marsden settlement’.49 Steven Keillor returned to the subject of divine providence, making the case for God’s judgement as a potentially fruitful category of historical analysis. Complaining at the reluctance of evangelical historians to interpret the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 as an act of divine judgement, he chided them for being afraid of the hard and unpopular dimensions of biblical theodicy, suggesting their reticence stemmed from a desire ‘to gain professional status and a hearing in the public square’.50 Other evangelicals resisted such accusations, continuing to maintain that providence had ‘no place in the toolbox of the historian’.51 Mediating between the two poles, one group of Christian historians (nearly all trained by the ‘Marsden generation’) have called for a return to a confessional history, questioning the wisdom of approaches that seem to subordinate the Christian worldview to wholly secular methodologies. In Confessing History (2010), they ask, ‘Is the mainstream historical profession truly the locus of the deepest wisdom and brightest hope for the
46 D. G. Hart, ‘History in Search of Meaning: The Conference on Faith and History’, in History and the Christian Historian, edited by Ronald A. Wells (Grand Rapids, MA: Eerdmans, 1998), 85–6.
47 George Marsden, ‘What Difference Might Christian Perspectives Make?’, in History and the Christian Historian, edited by Wells, 15–16.
48 George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95.
49 Eric Miller, ‘A Tradition Renewed? The Challenge of a Generation’, in Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation, edited by John Fea, Jay Green and Eric Miller (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 4.
50 Steven J. Keillor, God’s Judgments: Interpreting History and the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 15.
51 Carl R. Trueman, Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 167. See also John Fea, Why Study History? Reflecting on the Importance of the Past (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2013), 82.
practice of history?’52 Contributors to the volume urge new generations of Christian historians to ‘redefine their vocation in terms of history being useful for life’. William Katerberg writes, ‘Gathering accurate knowledge about the past and understanding why things happened is merely the means. The defining goal of history should be the service of life’.53 Eric Miller exhorts,
If we are to fulfil our callings to bless the church and the world, we must devote ourselves to the costly process of re-rooting our thinking about the ways of God, his creatures, and his creation in the rich soil of deep, expansive Christian reflection.54
Theology and historical scholarship should, in other words, be meshed together, the first informing the second in an explicit way. A similar case has been made, albeit from a different theological standpoint, by Rowan Williams. In a series of four lectures titled Why Study the Past? (2005), he argued that history is never ‘just a catalogue of things that happen to have happened’. The Christian, Williams observes, should ‘trace the ways in which the church has demonstrated its divine origin – or at least has tried to avoid formulae and practices that obscure the claim to divine origin’.55 Surveying polarised approaches to the past, Andrew Atherstone has urged evangelicals to embrace both the ‘confessional’ and ‘professional’ styles. Both, he suggests, ‘have particular strengths and weaknesses’ not least because they ‘speak to different audiences and serve different functions’. One addresses a wide readership and pays particular attention to the social and cultural context of historical events; the other seeks primarily to encourage the Christian believer and be an aid to Christian devotion.56
Evangelicals and biography
One area where these differences of approach have been especially pronounced is in the writing of biography. Biography has often been the go-to genre for evangelical authors, including many of those analysed in this volume, but amongst academic historians it has sometimes been regarded as
52 Miller, ‘A Tradition Renewed?’, 9.
53 William Katerberg, ‘The “Objectivity Question” and the Historian’s Vocation’, in Confessing History, edited by Fea, Green and Miller, 102.
54 Miller, ‘A Tradition Renewed?’, 16.
55 Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2005), 1–2.
56 Andrew Atherstone, ‘Hagiography and History’, in Truth at Any Cost: Papers Read at the 2012 Westminster Conference (Stoke-on-Trent: Tentmaker Publications, 2013), 58. For further reflection on this theme, see Ian Hugh Clary, ‘Evangelical Historiography: The Debate Over Christian History’, Evangelical Quarterly 87 (July 2015), 225–51.
12 Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones history’s ‘unloved stepchild’.57 Often the most accessible entry point for many readers into an appreciation of the past, biography has been viewed with disdain as a less scholarly enterprise. This was not always the case. Before the nineteenth-century professionalisation of history, there was an assumption that biography was both livelier and more instructive than the bland factual chronicles of mere ‘historians’. Biographies were subjective history, affording not only insight into the real lives of historical actors, but furnishing readers with examples of virtuous behaviour to be emulated. The English Restoration historian Gilbert Burnet preferred to use biography because ‘no part of history is more instructive and delighting, than the lives of great and worthy men’.58 Others have preferred biographies to be ‘wartsand-all’ treatments of their subjects. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) famously debunked many of the myths that had accrued around four prominent exemplars – Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon. The lives and reputations of other figures have been fought over by rival biographers, some seeking to burnish a reputation, others to pick apart legend from reality. In recent decades, particularly since the advent of the new histories in the 1970s, the genre has enjoyed a surprising resurgence of respectability within the academy, with what Barbara Caine calls a ‘biographical turn’ within the humanities and social sciences.59 Biography is increasingly acknowledged as an especially fruitful way of integrating marginal voices into historical discourse.
Amongst evangelicals, old-style didactic biography remains supremely popular. Derek Prime (minister of Edinburgh’s Charlotte Chapel from 1969 to 1987) advocated Christian biography as ‘a true gift of God’ because of its spiritual stimulus.60 Martyn Lloyd-Jones (minister of London’s Westminster Chapel) was engaged in the second half of the twentieth century in a grand project of retrieval and reinterpretation of the Protestant past, as John Coffey has shown.61 The Puritan Studies Conference, and its successor the Westminster Conference, encouraged historical interests amongst a generation of Reformed pastors and Lloyd-Jones’s love of biography, especially the puritans and evangelical revivalists, was apparent in his many keynote
57 Quoted in Barbara Caine, Biography and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 7.
58 Gilbert Burnet, The Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale, Kt., Lord Chief Justice of England (London: W. Baynes, 1805), iii. See further, Sara B. Varhus, ‘Lively Examples: Gilbert Burnet’s Use of Biography’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 11 (Spring 1987), 18–30.
59 Caine, Biography and History, 1. See also, Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
60 Derek Prime, ‘Christian Biography: A Neglected Christian Resource’, The Banner of Truth no. 586 (July 2012), 2.
61 John Coffey, ‘Lloyd-Jones and the Protestant Past’, in Engaging With Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Life and Legacy of ‘the Doctor’, edited by Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones (Nottingham: Apollos, 2011), 293–325.
addresses between the 1950s and 1970s.62 On the other side of the Atlantic, John Piper (pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis from 1980 to 2013) also promoted the use of Christian biography as a tool for spiritual growth. One of the ways in which he ‘pursued wisdom’ as a young pastor was by reading popular biography, such as the collections in Warren Wiersbe’s Walking with the Giants (1976) and Listening to the Giants (1980), and by listening to audio cassettes of conference addresses by Iain Murray (assistant to Martyn Lloyd-Jones and co-founder of the Banner of Truth Trust), ‘a master life-storyteller’.63 Piper had a hunger for life stories which would ‘charge my spiritual batteries’ and provide guidance and encouragement. For example, he testified that biographies of John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards ‘inspire me to break out of mediocre plodding’, while George Müller’s Autobiography (1906) was ‘an orchard of faithbuilding fruit’, especially as a ‘pacesetter’ in prayer. Good biography, Piper declared, was ‘the most powerful kind’ of theology ‘because it bursts forth from the lives of people’.64 It was ‘one of the most enjoyable, edifying, and efficient ways to read history’.65 Therefore, he encouraged other pastors to read biography – pointing to Hebrews 11 (the heroes of faith) as ‘a divine mandate’ – and urged them to present ‘an inspiring biographical study of some great Christian’ to their congregations at least once a year.66
Piper put his own advice into practice at the annual Bethlehem Conference for Pastors, where for 27 years in succession between 1988 and 2014 he delivered a biographical address. All his subjects were men, and the vast majority were evangelical pastors and missionaries, alongside a handful of reformers and puritans, with a pair of early church fathers (Athanasius and Augustine) and non-evangelical authors (George Herbert and C. S. Lewis) thrown into the mix.67 These addresses were ‘unashamedly hortatory’, seeking to encourage pastors by focusing upon ‘God-centred, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated saints’.68 At times, they ‘taste like preaching’, Piper confessed, since he was not ‘a disinterested scholar’ and made no attempt at ‘dispassionate distance’ from his subjects. He acknowledged that he brought ‘huge Christian assumptions’ to the task (such as that ‘the Bible is true’) and paid
62 D. M. Lloyd-Jones, The Puritans, Their Origins and Successors: Addresses Delivered at the Puritan and Westminster Conferences 1959–1978 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987).
63 John Piper, 21 Servants of Sovereign Joy: Faithful, Flawed, and Fruitful (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 7.
64 John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor, 2004), 90–1, 93.
65 Piper, 21 Servants, 8.
66 Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, 89, 96.
67 For analysis of Piper’s approach to heroic biography, see Justin Taylor, ‘John Piper: The Making of a Christian Hedonist’ (PhD thesis, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 208–37.
68 Piper, 21 Servants, 9, 248.
Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones
little attention to wider historical and cultural context.69 His methodology was explicitly providentialist, as he repeatedly affirmed, ‘In search of God’s providence and grace, I ransack the sources for evidences of what makes a person tick spiritually’; ‘There are life-giving lessons written by the hand of Divine Providence on every page of history’; ‘How great are the wonders laid up for us in the God-wrought, sovereign sequences of history!’70 At the annual Evangelical Ministry Assembly in London, a conference for pastors and preachers under the auspices of the Proclamation Trust, a similar experiment in biographical ‘pen portraits’ was pioneered by Vaughan Roberts (rector of St Ebbe’s, Oxford). His study of Charles Simeon in 2009, was followed in subsequent years by George Whitefield, Francis Schaeffer, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and John Newton. Again, the key methodology was to draw out contemporary lessons from the historical literature to edify pastors today.71
Characters and case studies
This volume is a contribution to the ‘history of ecclesiastical histories’, with a fresh analysis of representative historians and biographers of evangelicalism from the eighteenth century to the present. In a dozen case studies, it examines the contrasting ways in which they wrote evangelical history, their methodologies, theological agendas, readership and reception. The chapters are not mini-biographies, but investigations of evangelical historiography, critical reassessments of each historian’s contribution to shaping and interpreting the evangelical past. Some wrote for a popular Christian readership, emphasising spiritual edification; others have produced weighty monographs for the academy. Taken together, analysis of these diverse historians and biographers sheds light on the way the discipline has developed, and the perennial controversies over whether one approach to evangelical history is more legitimate than the rest.
The chosen case studies focus on the shaping of historical narratives about evangelicalism over the three centuries since the revivals, not on evangelical histories of the church more broadly. Therefore, some good candidates have been excluded, such as the eighteenth-century Anglican evangelical, Joseph Milner, whose magnum opus The History of the Church of Christ, published in five volumes between 1794 and 1809, surveyed the whole scope of Christian history from the time of the apostles, before the coalescing
69 Piper, 21 Servants, 126, 248.
70 Piper, 21 Servants, 38, 235, 248.
71 For published versions, see Vaughan Roberts, ‘A Ministry of Word and Prayer: What Can We Learn From Charles Simeon Today?’, in Serving God’s Words: Windows on Preaching and Ministry, edited by Paul Barker, Richard Condie and Andrew Malone (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2011), 196–215; Vaughan Roberts, ‘Martyn Lloyd-Jones: A GodGlorifying Ministry’, Churchman 129 (Autumn 2015), 227–41.
15 of evangelicalism as a distinct movement.72 Other eighteenth-century evangelicals who dabbled in historical writing, such as Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley, have not been considered. Neither has the Calvinistic Methodist Thomas Haweis, whose An Impartial and Succinct History of the Rise, Declension, and Revival of the Church of Christ (1800) takes in a broad chronological sweep.73 Likewise, the influential French Protestant historian, Merle D’Aubigné, is excluded. His five volumes, published between 1835 and 1853, examined the sixteenth-century Reformation not the Evangelical Revival.74 Nevertheless, the number of case studies might have been multiplied many times over to encompass individuals who do fit the criteria. For example, from the twentieth century alone, the roster might have included L. E. Elliott-Binns, Marcus Loane, John Pollock, Faith Cook, W. R. Ward and many more.
Anglican clergyman Leonard Elliott-Binns spent most of his ministry in parishes in the West Country, retiring in 1950 as canon residentiary of Truro Cathedral. His steady stream of publications on biblical and historical subjects covered a remarkably wide range, including commentaries on the Old Testament, the Hulsean Lectures for 1921–22 at the University of Cambridge on Erasmus of Rotterdam, and histories of early Western Christendom, the medieval papacy, the English Reformation and Victorian theology. During the modernist/fundamentalist controversies of the interwar period, Elliott-Binns personally identified with Liberal Evangelicalism, as laid out in his passionate manifesto The Evangelical Movement in the English Church (1928) urging evangelicals to adapt to the modern age.75 But one of his last books, The Early Evangelicals: A Religious and Social Study (1953), was a significant compendium of patient research covering the years to 1789, described by the Church Times as ‘a kind of “Who’s Who” of the revival’.76 Published on the eve of Billy Graham’s arrival in Britain for the Harringay Crusade, it marked the dawn of a wider national interest in evangelical roots and trajectories. At the same period, though from a conservative perspective, Marcus Loane (vice-principal of Moore Theological College in Sydney,
72 John Walsh, ‘Joseph Milner’s Evangelical Church History’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 10 (October 1959), 174–87; Paul Gutacker, ‘Joseph Milner and His Editors: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Evangelicals and the Christian Past’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 69 (January 2018), 86–104.
73 For more on each of these figures, see Darren W. Schmidt, ‘Reviving the Past: EighteenthCentury Evangelical Interpretations of Church History’ (PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2009).
74 John B. Roney, The Inside of History: Jean Henri Merle D’Aubigné and Romantic Historiography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
75 See, for example, L. E. Elliott-Binns, ‘The Future of Evangelicalism: Its Place in the Church’, The Guardian (16 March 1923), 238; L. E. Elliott-Binns, The Evangelical Movement in the English Church (London: Methuen, 1928); L. E. Elliott-Binns, ‘Evangelicalism and the Twentieth Century’, in The Church and the Twentieth Century, edited by G. L. H. Harvey (London: Macmillan, 1936), 347–90.
76 ‘Evangelical Revival’, Church Times (22 January 1954), 52.
Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones and later archbishop of Sydney) began to publish biographical vignettes in the classic mould.77 Oxford and the Evangelical Succession (1950) traced a golden chain of influence from George Whitefield, through John Newton, Thomas Scott, and Richard Cecil, to Daniel Wilson, showing ‘the remarkable line of descent from one generation to another as God raised up spiritual sons to carry on the work age by age’. This providentialism was explicit, as Loane exhorted modern evangelicals to ‘reverence their memory’ and ‘emulate their example’, noting especially their moderate Calvinism and their love for the Reformation formularies of the Church of England.78 The same pattern was repeated with Cambridge and the Evangelical Succession (1952), linking William Grimshaw, John Berridge, Henry Venn, Charles Simeon and Henry Martyn. Evangelical readers in the 1950s found themselves included as part of that ‘still unbroken’ succession, charged to keep the gospel candle burning in their own generation.79 Loane’s love of biography bore further fruit with Masters of the English Reformation (1954), Makers of Religious Freedom (1960), Pioneers of the Reformation in England (1964), Makers of our Heritage (1967) and They Were Pilgrims (1970). Though written from Australia, Loane’s Anglophilia was apparent. His overarching thesis was of one coherent evangelical family, populated by heroic exemplars from the reformers and puritans through to the twentieth century.80
Another popular biographer who might have been included in this volume is John Pollock. He experienced evangelical conversion in February 1940, aged 16, as a pupil at Charterhouse in Surrey, and was nurtured by the Scripture Union evangelist E. J. H. Nash, founder of the ‘Bash Camps’ for public schoolboys.81 After studies in Cambridge, Pollock was ordained in the Church of England in 1951 but he suffered from deafness so left parish ministry for literary pursuits, including as editor of The Churchman and as a regular contributor to Christianity Today, the leading magazine of ‘neoevangelicalism’ in the United States. Multiple volumes of evangelical history poured forth from his pen, often based on privileged access to archive collections, including authorised accounts of several evangelical institutions – A Cambridge Movement (1953) on the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, Shadows Fall Apart (1958) on the Zenana Bible and Medical
77 Allan M. Blanch, From Strength to Strength: A Life of Marcus Loane (Melbourne: Arcadia, 2015).
78 Marcus Loane, Oxford and the Evangelical Succession (London: Lutterworth Press, 1950), 11–13.
79 Marcus Loane, Cambridge and the Evangelical Succession (London: Lutterworth Press, 1952), 10.
80 For the popularity of this evangelical successionism, see Kenneth J. Stewart, ‘Did Evangelicalism Predate the Eighteenth Century? An Examination of the David Bebbington Thesis’, Evangelical Quarterly 77 (April–June 2005), 135–53.
81 John Pollock, ‘The Ambassador for Christ’, in ‘Bash’: A Study in Spiritual Power, edited by John Eddison (Basingstoke: Marshalls, 1983), 107–17.
Mission, The Good Seed (1959) on the Children’s Special Service Mission and the Scripture Union, and The Keswick Story (1964) on the Keswick Convention. These were sympathetic surveys, seeking to ‘catch the spirit and vision’ of the evangelical movement, though he attempted objectivity, refusing to gloss over weaknesses in the manner of an obituary: ‘The true portrait of a living body is of far more value than a fulsome tombstone’.82 But it was as an evangelical biographer that Pollock was best known – between 1955 and 1993 he published lives of the Cambridge Seven, General Havelock of Lucknow, Hudson Taylor, D. L. Moody (who Pollock called ‘the Billy Graham of the nineteenth century’),83 George Whitefield, William Wilberforce, John Newton, Lord Shaftesbury, John Wesley and General Gordon of Khartoum, amongst others.
These accounts of the illustrious dead were generally well received by an eager evangelical readership, though when in 1966 Pollock published the authorised biography of Billy Graham, still very much alive, he entered difficult territory. He was granted unique access to Graham’s private papers and to the archives of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and conducted scores of interviews in the United States, Britain and Australasia (including 20 hours with Graham himself), producing a detailed chronological compendium without critique.84 Christianity Today observed that ‘biography of living personalities is a hazardous art’. It welcomed the book as ‘masterly’, especially Pollock’s detailed and thorough checking of facts which supplied useful ‘ammunition’ for Graham’s defenders. Though Pollock’s ‘admiration and affection’ for his subject ‘shines through every chapter’, the review suggested, he had resisted the ‘temptation to idealise’ and his ‘devotion’ fell short of ‘idolatry’.85 However, Frontier magazine thought the biography ‘hagiographical’.86 The Scottish Bible commentator and liberal theologian, William Barclay, branded it a failure, curiously ‘defensive’ and lacking proper evaluative analysis of Graham’s theology.87 This was echoed by Calvinist critics such as Erroll Hulse (pastor of Zion Baptist Chapel in Cuckfield, Sussex, and manager of the Banner of Truth Trust) who objected to Graham’s repeated ‘call for decisions’ and co-operation with non-evangelicals as unbiblical.88 Writing in The Christian’s Pathway, the journal of the Strict and Particular Baptists, Hulse criticised Pollock as ‘the
82 John Pollock, The Good Seed: The Story of the Children’s Special Service Mission and the Scripture Union (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1959), x.
83 John Pollock, Moody Without Sankey: A New Biographical Portrait (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963), ix.
84 John Pollock, Billy Graham: The Authorised Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1966).
85 David H. C. Read, ‘This Side Idolatry’, Christianity Today 10 (19 August 1966), 33–4.
86 William Gordon Wheeler, ‘Billy Graham: A Roman View’, Frontier 9 (Summer 1966), 144.
87 William Barclay, ‘Men and Affairs’, Expository Times 77 (July 1966), 320.
88 Erroll Hulse, Billy Graham: The Pastor’s Dilemma (Hounslow: Maurice Allan, 1966).
18 Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones
writer of success stories’ with a ‘tendency to hero-worship’. He suggested that the biographer had ‘a fatal weakness’:
He adulates everything – everything; the good and the bad is wonderful and romantic. The essential salt of the prophets and apostles is missing. A gloss which is hard to define seems to cover the narrative. This is typical of our effeminate twentieth-century, anaemic Christianity in which we have developed our own type of religious Hollywood, replete with heroes, crooners, films and success to order.
Hulse dismissed Pollock as ‘essentially a “hack” writer’.89 Even those who generally approved of popular, even adulatory, history written for the evangelical market were discontent if that adulation was focused on the wrong people. Despite such fierce criticisms, Pollock continued unperturbed as the authorised biographer of the Graham family. Graham invited him to write the life of his father-in-law, Nelson Bell, a former medical missionary in China, followed by further chronicles of Graham’s global impact.90 Pollock’s multitudinous writings, therefore, helped to shape the received narrative not just of British evangelicalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but of the post-war transatlantic ‘neo-evangelical’ resurgence in which he himself played a part.
Pollock and Loane deserve comparison with the Reformed author Faith Cook, daughter of missionaries with the China Inland Mission, who first awoke to a love of biography through reading D’Aubigné. She discovered that D’Aubigné’s Reformation history (republished in 1962–63 by the Banner of Truth Trust) was not ‘a merely dry intellectual exercise’ but helped her to see ‘God’s faithful dealings with his people in the past’. Her own popular biographies aimed to narrate ‘the lives of heroes and heroines of the church of Jesus Christ’, drawing out lessons for modern Christians.91 Her collections of vignettes included Singing in the Fire: Christians in Adversity (1995), Seeing the Invisible: Ordinary People of Extraordinary Faith (1998), Sound of Trumpets (1999), Lives Turned Upside Down (2003), Stars in God’s Sky (2009) and Out of the Shadows (2011), but she also published more substantial biographies of the early evangelical leaders William Grimshaw of Haworth (1997) and Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (2001).
89 Erroll Hulse, ‘How My Dilemma Was Solved’, The Christian’s Pathway (May 1966), 123.
90 John Pollock, A Foreign Devil in China: The Story of Dr L. Nelson Bell, a Surgeon in China (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972); John Pollock, Billy Graham, Evangelist to the Word: An Authorized Biography of the Decisive Years (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979); John Pollock, To All The Nations: The Billy Graham Story (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985; updated 2011).
91 Faith Cook, And So I Began to Read: Books That Have Influenced Me (Welwyn Garden City: Evangelical Press, 2016), 20, 22.
Amongst twentieth-century scholars of evangelicalism in a university environment, W. R. (Reg) Ward, Professor of Modern History at Durham from 1965 to 1986, deserves particular recognition. He began his career as a historian of Hanoverian taxation before migrating towards religious history and, in the words of Mark Noll and Bruce Hindmarsh, ‘accomplished more in his retirement than most scholars accomplish in their entire careers’.92 Although Ward’s prose style was notoriously dense, Stewart J. Brown calls him ‘an historian’s historian’, always deep in the archives, conducting ‘exhaustive research among a vast array of primary sources’ and with ‘an impressive grasp of historical detail’.93 Raised within Primitive Methodism, his publications included critical editions of the journals of John Wesley and the correspondence of Jabez Bunting in multiple volumes. Yet Ward’s most significant contribution to evangelical historiography was The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (1992), a study of ‘monumental importance’.94 It offered a groundbreaking pan-European approach, locating the origins of the revivals not with the Oxford Holy Club in the 1730s, or the preaching of Jonathan Edwards in New England, but in the political developments of German-speaking central Europe in the seventeenth century. This radical reorientation of the evangelical story pushed the connections back towards the Reformation era and was a deliberate challenge to Anglophone parochialism, followed in 2006 by Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789. Andrew Chandler suggests that Ward’s internationalism and unusual chronological scope set him apart from other historians of evangelicalism in his generation, too much an individualist to fit into an identifiable ‘school’.95
Many other good candidates could be added to the list of those not included in the present volume. It makes no claims to comprehensiveness, but simply samples the abundantly rich history of the making and shaping of evangelical histories. It aims to stimulate further much-needed research in this fruitful domain. From a wide field, 12 case studies have been selected for detailed analysis. The historians and biographers under investigation in the chapters which follow come from a broad range of contexts, in both Britain and North America, including ministers, missionaries and university scholars. They are drawn from Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Fundamentalist and Pentecostal denominations. Their historical writings cover not only transatlantic evangelicalism but also the spread of the movement across China, Africa and indeed the whole globe.
92 Mark Noll and Bruce Hindmarsh, ‘Rewriting the History of Evangelicalism: W. R. Ward, 1925–2010’, Books and Culture 17 (March/April 2011), 8.
93 Stewart J. Brown, ‘William Reginald Ward, 1925–2010’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 13 (2014), 443.
94 Brown, ‘William Reginald Ward’, 457.
95 Andrew Chandler, ‘W. R. Ward and the Study of Modern Religious History in Britain in the Later Twentieth Century’, in Evangelicalism, Piety and Politics: The Selected Writings of W. R. Ward , edited by Andrew Chandler (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 13.
Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones
Early attempts at evangelical historical reconstruction are examined in a chapter on John Gillies, the Scottish Presbyterian ally of George Whitefield. David Ceri Jones shows that Gillies developed a double-pronged history that located the mid-eighteenth-century revivals within the context of the ebb and flow of experiential Christianity since the closing of the New Testament, and that portrayed Whitefield as the quintessential evangelical to be admired and emulated. Also in the eighteenth century, Darren Schmidt explores the work of Erasmus Middleton, whose Biographia Evangelica (1779–86) was pervaded by a deep-seated anti-Catholicism and English ethnocentrism, as it championed figures who he thought modelled ‘vital Christianity’. Robert Strivens’s chapter on David Bogue and James Bennett analyses how the history of evangelical Dissent was reconstructed to demonstrate the close affinity between nonconformist groups and political and religious liberty. The didactic power of church history is further explored in Andrew Atherstone’s examination of the historical writings of nineteenth-century Anglican bishop J. C. Ryle, who attempted to uncover the ‘facts’ about England’s past in the face of what he regarded as the duplicitous propaganda of the Tractarian revisionists. In contrast to Ryle, professional historiography had a marked impact on the Methodist historian Luke Tyerman. Martin Wellings shows how avid collecting of original documents underpinned Tyerman’s biographies of the main eighteenth-century leaders of Methodism, each of whom he attempted to treat in an unvarnished way. However, his willingness to question and criticise denominational heroes such as John Wesley revealed the limited appetite for ‘objective’ history amongst some evangelical readers. In the twentieth century evangelical historians were keen to record the triumphs of the Victorian missionary pioneers. Alvyn Austin demonstrates how Geraldine Guinness Taylor attempted to stimulate evangelical piety through her histories of the China Inland Mission, but in the process deliberately censored private correspondence and glossed over the awkwardness of theological controversies. A similar pattern is observed in G. R. Balleine’s History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England (1908), assessed by Andrew Atherstone. Balleine’s book subordinated theological and ecclesiastical controversy to his own personal priorities of evangelism, political activism and loyal Anglican churchmanship. His model Anglican evangelicals looked remarkably like himself. Using history to foster theological and ecclesiastical ideals has also informed the writings of Arnold Dallimore and Iain Murray. Ian Hugh Clary explores the ways in which Dallimore’s mammoth study of George Whitefield as well as his shorter studies of Edward Irving, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Charles Wesley and his mother Susannah Wesley, aimed to edify readers and to warn them against false notions concerning conversion, revival and charismatic gifts. David Ceri Jones’s study of Murray’s voluminous writings analyses the construction of a history of English-speaking evangelicalism. He shows how, for Murray, the success or failure of the movement could be evaluated by the degree to which it
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body, while the other limb, the left, is bent at the knee and has the foot raised to clear the ground. The next stage will be to make the first in-between position (D) between the first extreme and the middle position. It is made on a fresh sheet of paper placed over those containing the positions just mentioned. The attitude of the right limb in this new position would be that in which it is about to plant its foot on the ground and the left limb is depicted as if ready to swing into the position that it has in the middle one (C).
Then with the middle position (C) and the last extreme one (B) over the glass, on another sheet of paper, the next in-between one (E) is drawn. This shows the right foot leaving the ground and the left leg somewhat forward ready to plant its heel on the ground. We have now secured five phases or positions of a walking movement.
The two extremes (A and B) spoken of as the outstretched ones have the same contours but differ in that in one the right limb is forward, and the left is directed obliquely backward, while in the other it is the left limb that projects forward and the right has an obliquity backward.
Now, if we make tracings, copying the outlines only, of the three other positions (C, D, and E), but reversing the particular aspects of the right and the left limbs, we shall have obtained enough drawings to complete two steps of a walk.
PHASES OF MOVEMENT OF A WALK
Six phases complete a step.
As a better understanding of the preceding the fact should be grasped that while one limb, the right we will say, is assuming a certain position during a step, in the next step it is the turn of the other limb, the left, to assume this particular position. And again in this second step, the right limb takes the corresponding position that the other limb had in the first step. There are always, in a walk, two sets of drawings, used alternately. Any particular silhouette in one set has its identical silhouette in the other set, but the attitudes of the limbs are reversed. To explain by an example: In the drawing of one middle position, the right leg supports the body and the left is flexed, in its coincidental drawing, it is the left that supports the body and the right is flexed. (See 2 and 3+, of engraving on page 113.)
From this it can be seen that the two sets of drawings differ only in the details within their general contours. These details will be such markings as drapery folds, stripes on trousers, indications of the right and the left foot by little items like buttons on boots. Heeding and taking the trouble to mark little details like these add to the value of a screen image.
One of the most difficult actions to depict in this art is that which the animator calls a perspective walk. By this term he means a walk in which the figure is either coming diagonally, more or less, toward the front of the picture or going away from it toward the horizon. It is obvious that according to the rules of perspective, in coming forward the figure gets larger and larger, and in travelling in the opposite direction it gets smaller and smaller To do this successfully is not easy. Only after a worker has had a great deal of experience in the art is he able to draw such a movement easily.
A PERSPECTIVE WALK
The constant changing sizes of the figures and getting them within the perspective lines in a graduated series are perplexing enough matters. But this is not all. There is the problem of the foreshortened views as the limbs are beheld perspectively. Imagine, for instance, an arm pointing toward the spectator in a foreshortened view Every artist would have his own individual way of drawing this. Those with a natural feeling for form and understanding anatomy solve problems of this kind by methods for which it is impossible to give any recipe. Some would start with preliminary construction lines that have the appearance of columnar solids in perspective, while others scribble and fumble around until they find the outlines that they want.
FOUR POSITIONS FOR A PERSPECTIVE RUN
Below: How the drawings are placed on the separate sheets of paper.
PHASES OF MOVEMENT FOR A PERSPECTIVE RUN
Above: In the last of the series on the right the figure has taken a position nearly that of the first of the series.
Below: How the figures are placed with respect to each other when drawn on separate sheets of paper.
Happily in most of the occasions when a perspective walk is required in a story it is for some humorous incident. This signifies that it can be made into a speedy action, and that but a few drawings are needed to complete a step.
Artists when they begin to make drawings for screen pictures find a new interest in studying movement. In the study of art the student gives some attention, of course, to this question of movement. Usually, though, the study is not discriminating, nor thorough. But to become skilled in animating involves a thoughtful and analytic inquiry into the subject. If the artist is a real student of the subject its consideration will be more engrossing than the more or less slight study given to the planning of the single isolated phases, or attitudes, of action in ordinary pictorial work.
A great help in comprehending the nature of movement and grasping the character of the attitudes of active figures are the socalled “analysis of motion” screen pictures. In these the model,
generally a muscular person going through the motions of some gymnastic or athletic activity, is shown moving very much slower than the movement is in actuality. This is effected by taking the pictures with a camera so constructed that it moves its mechanism many times faster than the normal speed.
RUNNING FIGURE
Above: Six positions complete two steps
Below: Diagram to show that, considered as outlines, the six positions resolve themselves into three silhouettes.
The speed of the ordinary camera, as we know, moves during every second but one foot of film and on which sixteen separate photographs are made. Now, in one type of camera for analysis of motion photography, eight times more film is moved with a corresponding increase in the number of separate pictures taken on it during this same time of one second. To take a specific movement of a model lasting one second: the ordinary camera catches sixteen phases of it, but the extra-rapid camera takes about one hundred and twenty-eight separate pictures of as many corresponding separate phases. In other words, the ordinary camera takes about as much as our eyes appreciate, while the fast camera records on a length of film many more attitudes during the course of the given
activity than the unaided eye can ever hope to see. When this long film of the extra-rapid camera is run through the projecting machine at the normal speed it shows us on the screen, in a period of eight seconds, that which took place in reality in but one second.
PHASES OF MOVEMENT FOR A QUICK WALK.
Lower diagram shows how the several drawings, each on a separate sheet of paper, are placed in advance of each other.
WALKING MOVEMENTS, SOMEWHAT MECHANICAL
Suitable for a droll theme
The animated drawing artist becomes, through the training of his eye to quick observation and the studying of films of the nature immediately noted above, an expert in depicting the varied and connected attitudes of figures in action. Examples for study on account of the clear-cut definitions of the actions, are the acrobats with their tumbling and the clowns with their antics. Then in the performances of the jugglers and in the pranks of the knock-about comedians, the animator finds much to spur him on to creative imagery. The pictorial artist for graphic or easel work, in any of these cases, intending to make an illustration, is content with some representative position that he can grasp visually, or, which is more likely to be the case, the one that is easiest for him to draw. But the animator must have sharp and quickly observing eyes and be able to comprehend and remember the whole series of phases of a movement.
PHASES OF MOVEMENT FOR A LIVELY WALK.
Lower diagram shows how the drawings, on separate sheets of paper, are placed with respect to each other to continue the figure across the scene.
A fancy dancer, especially, is a rich study. To follow the dancer with his supple joints bending so easily and assuming unexpected poses of body and limbs, requires attentive eyes and a lively mental photography. The limbs do not seem to bend merely at the articulations and there seems to be a most unnatural twisting of
arms, lower limbs, and trunk. But it is all natural. It simply means that there is co-ordination of movement in all parts of the jointed skeletal frame. This co-ordination—and reciprocal action—follows definite laws of motion, and it is the business of the animator to grasp their signification. It is, in the main, the matter already spoken of above; namely, the alternate action of flexion or a closing, and that of extension or an opening.
With these characteristics there is also observable in the generality of dancing posturing a tendency of an upper limb to follow a lower limb of the opposite side as in the cases of walking and running.
Very strongly is this to be noticed in the nimbleness of an eccentric dancer as he cuts bizarre figures and falls into exaggerated poses. For instance, when a lower limb swings in any particular direction, the opposite arm oscillates in the same direction and brings its hand close enough to touch this concurrently swinging lower limb.
PHASES OF MOVEMENT FOR A QUICK WALK
This symbolical phenomenon of the activity of living things—the negative quality of a closing or flexion, and the positive one of an opening or extension—is not a feature entirely confined to human beings and animals, but is a characteristic showing in the mechanics of many non-living things.
WALKING MOVEMENT VIEWED FROM ABOVE. Illustrating how the diagonally opposite limbs move in unison
