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Picks up the story of conversion narrative among evangelical Anglicans through a close reading of three case studies. Associated with the town of Olney, John Newton, William Cowper, and Thomas Scott lived near one another in the north-eastern corner of Buckinghamshire, where Newton and Scott were clergymen in the Church of England, and Cowper was a local gentleman-poet living on patronage. Like most evangelical Anglicans, they were moderate Calvinists when they wrote their narratives in the 1760s and 1770s, and the Calvinistic order of salvation provided a model for their self-understanding. However, in their autobiographies we find a vivid display of personality that appears not despite the presence of a model, but because of it. Within a similar theological framework, Newton interpreted his life typologically, Scott intellectually, and Cowper psychologically—each offering a unique expression of personal adherence to a common gospel.

Evangelicalism was the chief factor moulding the theology of most Protestant Dissenting traditions of the nineteenth century, dictating an emphasis on conversions, the cross, the Bible as the supreme source of teaching, and activism which spread the gospel while also relieving the needy. The chapter concentrates on debates about conversion and the cross. It begins by emphasizing that the Enlightenment and above all its principle of rational inquiry was enduringly important to Dissenters. The Enlightenment led some in the Reformed tradition such as Joseph Priestley to question not only creeds but also doctrines central to Christianity, such as the Trinity, while others, such as the Sandemanians, Scotch Baptists, Alexander Campbell’s Restorationists, or the Universalists, privileged the rational exegesis of Scripture over more emotive understandings of faith. In the Calvinist mainstream, though, the Enlightenment created ‘moderate Calvinism’. Beginning with Jonathan Edwards, it emphasized the moral responsibility of the sinner for rejecting the redemption that God had made available and reconciled predestination with the enlightened principle of liberty. As developed by Edwards’s successors, the New England theology became the norm in America and was widely disseminated among British Congregationalists and Baptists. It entailed a judicial or governmental conception of the atonement, in which a just Father was forced to exact the Son’s death for human sinfulness. The argument that this just sacrifice was sufficient to save all broke with the doctrine of the limited atonement and so pushed some higher Calvinists among the Baptists into schism, while, among Presbyterians, Princeton Seminary retained loyal to the doctrine of penal substitution. New England theology was not just resisted but also developed, with ‘New Haven’ theologians such as Nathaniel William Taylor stressing the human component of conversion. If Calvinism became residual in such hands, then Methodists and General and Freewill Baptists had never accepted it. Nonetheless they too gave enlightened accounts of salvation. The chapter dwells on key features of the Enlightenment legacy: a pragmatic attitude to denominational distinctions; an enduring emphasis on the evidences of the Christian faith; sympathy with science, which survived the advent of Darwin; and an optimistic postmillennialism in which material prosperity became the hallmark of the unfolding millennium. Initially challenges to this loose consensus came from premillennial teachers such as Edward Irving or John Nelson Darby, but the most sustained and deep-seated were posed by Romanticism. Romantic theologians such as James Martineau, Horace Bushnell, and Henry Ward Beecher rejected necessarian understandings of the universe and identified faith with interiority. They emphasized the love rather than the justice of God, with some such as the Baptist Samuel Cox embracing universalism. Late nineteenth-century Dissenters followed Anglicans in prioritizing the incarnation over the atonement and experiential over evidential apologetics. One final innovation was the adoption of Albrecht Ritschl’s claim that Jesus had come to found the kingdom of God, which boosted environmental social activism. The shift from Enlightenment to romanticism, which provoked considerable controversy, illustrated how the gospel and culture had been in creative interaction.

This chapter examines, through a close reading of the sermons he published in the late 1730s, George Whitefield’s understanding of the religion of the heart. For a time Whitefield was the undisputed leader of the English Evangelical Revival movement; his preaching, often to crowds in the tens of thousands in London, made him a figure of national fame and notoriety. The central theme of his preaching was the new birth, and his sermon on this subject was finely honed through its frequent repetition. This chapter argues that Whitefield developed a thoroughly Calvinistic understanding of heart religion that stressed the initiative of divine grace in both conversion and holy living. However, his formulation of Calvinism remained both moderate and evangelical, avoiding the pitfalls of fatalism and antinomianism. The chapter argues that Whitefield’s formulation of a Reformed heart religion was to become an important strand in the subsequent evangelical movement.

This chapter traces the emergence and development of Anglican Evangelicalism from the early eighteenth century onwards. It argues that while Evangelicals have always harked back to the first, formative generations of their movement, this has tended to obscure the theological diversity, practical pragmatism, and fluid organization that characterized the new piety. What follows, then, examines the beginnings of an enduring movement, but it also outlines a distinct phase in its existence. The first section considers the gradual emergence of Evangelicalism as a distinct identity in the Church of England; the second, its ramification in clerical associations and among groups of prosperous laypeople; the third, its infiltration of metropolitan officialdom and provincial society via organized philanthropy and patronage. As well as mapping the networks that spread Evangelical influence, it explores the lasting tensions thus generated: above all, what did it mean to be both Anglican and Evangelical?