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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Protestantism & Protestant Churches > Other Protestant & Nonconformist Churches > General
David Bebbington is well known for his characterization of the
Evangelical movement in terms of the four leading emphases of
Bible, cross, conversion, and activism. This quadrilateral was
expounded in his classic 1989 book Evangelicalism in Modern
Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. Bebbington
developed many of the themes in that book in articles published
from the 1980s to the present, but until now most of those articles
have remained little known. The present collection of thirty-two
essays makes readily available these important explorations of key
aspects in the history of Evangelicalism. The Evangelical movement
arose in the eighteenth century in Britain and America as a
revitalization of Protestantism. Sharing much with the Puritans who
preceded them, the Evangelicals nevertheless adopted a fresh stance
by making revival rather than reformation their priority. Coming
from diverse denominations, they formed a zealous united front.
Over subsequent centuries they grew in number and carried their
message throughout the world, giving rise to many of the churches
in the global South that have come to the forefront in world
Christianity. The essays in this work deal chiefly with Britain,
though a few place the British movement in a world setting. Because
Evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic interacted, reading much
of the same literature and visiting each other, there was a great
deal of common ground between the British and American movements.
Hence many of the topics covered here relate to developments
mirrored in the American churches over the last three centuries.
The two volumes of The Evangelical Quadrilateral address different
aspects of the Evangelical movement. The first volume deals with
issues in the movement as a whole, and the second volume examines
features of particular denominational bodies within Evangelicalism.
Each volume contains an introductory essay reviewing recent
literature in the field, and then a series of related essays.
Volume 1, Characterizing the British Gospel Movement, begins with
an overview of the nature of the movement. The essays cover such
representative areas as the affinity of early Evangelicalism with
the Enlightenment, the impact of Americans Jonathan Edwards and
Dwight L. Moody, the advent hope and the experience of conversion
as key doctrines of Evangelicalism, the growth of academic
historical studies of and by Evangelicals, Evangelical attitudes to
science, and widespread trends in the movement and its shifting
patterns of public worship in the twenty-first century. The first
volume also provides detail on many of the main features that
British Evangelicals displayed in common.
Christian Science is one of only two indigenous American religions,
the other being Mormonism. Yet it has not always been examined
seriously within the context of the history of religious ideas and
the development of American religious life. Stephen Gottschalk
fills this void with an examination of Christian Science's root
concepts-the informing vision and the distinctive mission as
formulated by its founder, Mary Baker Eddy. Concentrating on the
quarter-century preceding Eddy's death, a period of phenomenal
growth for Christian Science, Gottschalk challenges the
conventional academic view of the movement as a fringe sect. He
finds instead a serious and distinctive, though radical, religious
teaching that began to flower just as orthodox Protestantism began
to fade. He gives a clear and detailed account of the rancorous
controversies between Christian Science and the various mind-cure
and occult movements with which it is often associated, and
contends that Christian Science appealed to disenchanted
Protestants because of its pragmatic quality-a quality that relates
it to the mainstream of American culture. This title is part of UC
Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of
California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest
minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist
dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed
scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology.
This title was originally published in 1973.
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