by Brian Stanley
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York. 818 pages.
It is impossible these days to write a fair-minded history of evangelicalism without a global perspective. The new style of Christianity that emerged from the 18th century Methodist revival in England and the Great Awakening in North America has now spread around the world, reaching beyond its base in the U.K. and U.S. to former mission fields in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Brian Stanley, professor of world Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, highlights this new reality in the fifth and final volume of IVP’s History of Evangelicalism, which continues the story from 1945 to the present.
In the great roll call of evangelical scholars and preachers in this book, the predictable names are emphasized — Billy Graham and John Stott heading the list. Though evangelicalism is often accused of being intellectually shallow, Stanley has no trouble calling up important evangelical scholars of the past half-century who have made significant contributions, often gaining acceptance beyond evangelical circles. These include such well-known names as F.F. Bruce, J.I. Packer and Francis Schaeffer, as well as African scholars such as Nigerian Byang H. Kato and Ghanaian Kwame Bediako.
What informed readers may find new and compelling is the growing influence of non-Western evangelicals on the evangelical movement. This is nowhere more apparent than in the famous International Congress on World Evangelization held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, where it was the influence of non-White, non-affluent participants from Africa and Latin America who insisted that the Lausanne Covenant include a definition of mission that embraced both social action and evangelism.
Given how much evangelicalism is a product of the Enlightenment, Stanley ponders how evangelicalism will fare in a post-modern world. Hence he considers the post-evangelicals or post-conservative evangelicals such as those in the emerging church movement, the “apostolic” churches in Britain, and scholars in the academic community such as N.T. Wright whose reinterpretation of Paul and New Testament eschatology emphasize God’s transformative work in the world. He considers whether the influence of the Majority World, with its proclivities for Pentecostalism and the Prosperity Gospel, might move evangelicalism in directions that would make it unrecognizable to its founders. Finally, he suggests that the global diffusion of evangelicalism might be its undoing in that it will cease to cohere as a definable movement.
This is an important and engaging crow’s-nest view of a movement that has touched the lives of millions of people all over the world. It has excellent sections on neo-Pentecostalism, modern worship — the familiar Cadences of praise songs can now be heard in San Paulo, Accra, and Ho Chi Minh City — and the relevance of such popular writers as C.S. Lewis and Lesslie Newbigin to evangelicals. Stanley, however, does not provide comforting solutions for the many questions he raises. Wisely, he leaves these for the reader to ponder.
MICHAEL PARKER is a professor of church history in a Presbyterian seminary in the Middle East.
