Evangelicalism

Definition

Evangelicalism is a transdenominational Protestant movement, not itself a single denomination or confession, marked by a shared commitment to the authority of Scripture and to the gospel and cross of Christ as its own doctrinal anchor.¹ It traces its modern origin to a transatlantic revival that swept England, Wales, Germany, and the American colonies beginning in the 1730s, an “international and intercontinental phenomenon” that produced the First Great Awakening in the American colonies.²

Historical Origin

The 18th-century revival began earlier than its best-known American figures. In the 1720s, in the Raritan Valley of colonial New Jersey, the Dutch Reformed minister Theodorus Frelinghuysen preached a series of “mini-revivals” that emphasized conversion and demanded a changed life as evidence of genuine regeneration.² George Whitefield later called Frelinghuysen the “beginner of the great work” God was carrying on in the American colonies.² Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian minister in New Brunswick impressed by Frelinghuysen’s example, adopted the same urgent, conversion-focused preaching; Whitefield himself, on first hearing Tennent, wrote that he had “never before heard such a searching sermon.”²

Jonathan Edwards became the movement’s most prominent theological voice through his preaching and writing at Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards traced the beginning of a local awakening there to a 1734 sermon on justification by faith alone, and recorded that by December of that year “the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in, and wonderfully to work amongst us.”² He later described the town itself as changed by it: “there was scarcely a single person in the town, either old or young, that was left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world.”² The same years saw a parallel revival begin among the Moravians in Saxony, Germany, under Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf, part of the same transatlantic movement.²

Core Tenets

Duby locates evangelicalism’s shared theological core not in a single confession but in “what is revealed in Christ, the triune God and the cross of Christ, viewed in the mirror of Scripture,” together with a common “commitment to Scripture’s authority.”¹ This shared anchor coexists with real internal diversity: Duby names “the variety of evangelical subtraditions” that hold this same center while differing on much else, from mode of baptism to church government to the finer points of soteriology.¹ Evangelicals from otherwise divided Protestant traditions, Calvinist, Wesleyan, Baptist, and Lutheran among them, can therefore recognize one another as evangelical while remaining divided on matters their own confessions treat as significant.

Related Doctrines

• Protestant Reformation
• Great Awakenings
• Fundamentalism
• Neo-evangelicalism
• Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy
• The Fundamentals

References

1. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), “Series Introduction.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Steven Tshombe Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 48-50. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷