The career of David Bebbington is synonymous with the “evangelical quadrilateral.” He coined the term in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1989) as part of an argument for the coherence and thus significance of the evangelical movement from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Evangelicals in Britain hailed from different churches and traditions and so differed and even feuded on theological, political, and social questions, but they shared four mutually reinforcing characteristics: biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism. Most of the thirty-five essays collected in these two volumes, which are named for his keyword, appeared in the decades after the publication of Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. They allow us to assess how useful it remains as a master key to religion in modern Britain. The essays are impressive in their erudition and range. The first volume traces themes in the theology and spirituality of British evangelicalism across time and space. With total command of a huge corpus of printed materials, Bebbington discusses such subjects as the reception of Jonathan Edwards and Calvin and patterns in eschatology. The second volume takes a denominational rather than thematic approach, exploring the sheer variety of ecclesiastical forms through which evangelicalism coursed, ranging from Methodism to such curiosities as Frank Buchman's Oxford Group and Michael Harper's Fountain Trust. The first volume often operates at an international scale and shows a greater awareness of British evangelicalism's transatlantic (though not Continental) ties than Bebbington's earlier work. The second shows him also to be a gifted, almost Trollopean miniaturist. An essay on Louth Free Methodist Church lucidly sketches how the political and social tensions in a midcentury Lincolnshire market town generated a secession from Wesleyan Methodism, one initiated by Liberal grocers and merchants who chafed against the high-handed Toryism of their absentee ministers.
Once a keyword, the evangelical quadrilateral has become for Bebbington a shibboleth. He prefaces both volumes with introductions, which dutifully survey scholarship on the nature and varieties of evangelicalism since 1989. In his eyes, though, most of this work has simply confirmed and amplified his characterization of British evangelicalism. He gives short shrift to scholars such as Thomas Kidd who have questioned the value of positing a single and broadly united evangelical movement: one which should come with a capital E. One consequence of Bebbington's proprietary zeal for the quadrilateral is that many of the essays, particularly those delivered as anniversary addresses to evangelical audiences, follow a rigid template. Like a skilled preacher, Bebbington organizes his material under a handy four heads. Biographical addresses on the Anglican Bishop J. C. Ryle and the Presbyterian man of science Henry Drummond accordingly labor the commitment of their subjects to biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism. The argument is beguilingly circular: members of the evangelical movement naturally manifested the characteristics of the quadrilateral and in return establish its continued salience.
The essays in the second volume happily move beyond insisting on the importance of the evangelical genus to explore what was unique about its various species. Two essays on the spirituality of Methodists lucidly demonstrate the shaping importance of the theological notions bequeathed to them by John Wesley. The hope of obtaining “entire sanctification” was largely unique to Methodists, even though it assumed different forms over the decades. Methodists also remained loyal to Wesley's optimistic postmillennialism and were then immune to the alarming highs of the “advent hope”: the expectation of Christ's premillennial return, which gripped most evangelicals by the turn of the twentieth century. Bebbington is especially skilled at reconstructing some of the stranger and harsher subcultures of Protestant Dissent. An essay on the Brethren asks why this early-nineteenth-century sect proved so indefatigable in reproducing itself not just throughout the United Kingdom, but the world: there were in the end no less than thirty assemblies in Vancouver, British Columbia, the rocky edge of the British Empire. Bebbington finds the answer in a “cerebral anti-intellectualism” (282) and a primitive ecclesiology, which stoked a logocentric certainty and a fierce puritanism, but also a missionary flexibility long after these characteristics had faded elsewhere. Bebbington concludes that they had “played a distinctive role as Evangelicals of the Evangelicals” (300). Yet this and other essays also remind us that our faith in this collective noun must not excuse us from activism—recovering the idiosyncratic theologies and ecclesiologies that thrived in the United Kingdom and in the British Empire, polities favorable to Protestant Dissent and increasingly favorable to the democratization of Christianity.
Bebbington is a fastidious but committed participant observer of evangelicalism. The primary source for a rich, if Pooterish, essay on trends in evangelical worship are the notebook records he compiled from forty years of weekly attendance at mainly Baptist services—complete with timings for the sermons. His gifts lie more in precise but empathetic description than in explanation. These volumes abound in masterly evocations of pious men and women, but lack an account of how religion anchors itself in society, or a deeper understanding of religious change. They invoke broader cultural shifts—from the enlightenment to postmodernism—to account for modulations in evangelical religiosity. But this usually involves setting up homologies—evangelicals behaving like Romantics—rather than concrete interactions. And there are problems of chronology. The lodestar of George Race, the autodidact hero of an essay on the intellectual life of Primitive Methodists in a Victorian mining town, was the superannuated theology of his fellow Methodist, Adam Clarke. He did discover Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but not until the 1850s. Evangelicals emerge in the Evangelical Quadrilateral as a more various and fissiparious, but also more introverted and belated bunch than the evangelical movement had depicted. Historians of a more secular bent than Bebbington will find them more interesting, but less significant even to the religious history of modern Britain than they might have expected.
