Kenneth J. Stewart - In Search of Ancient Roots: The Christian Past and the Evangelical Identity Crisis

Evangelical Christianity is now a surging global phenomenon. Such writers as Philip Jenkins, David Martin, and David Aikman have reported that Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asias Christian future looks increasingly evangelical in the sense of embracing Biblicist, Christ- and cross-centered, conversionist, and Holy Spiritoriented Christianity. But in western Europe and North America (the regions from which pietistic and evangelical expressions of Protestant Christianity were transmitted to the global church), the current era is one of increasing introspection and self-doubt.

This introspection and self-doubt has not to do with any sheer loss of momentum, for church planting goes on apace in western Europe and in North America, and the evangelical knack for adaptation to emerging circumstances and cultural change is still alive and well. No, the introspection and self-doubt are the result of three principles still being worked out.

The run-down factor . These are, first, the increasing distance of space and time from the period of evangelical origin and a resulting run-down. Original ideals and guiding principles can lose their edge over time. I hold that todays evangelical movements are the linear descendants of the popular late-medieval religious movements that eventually gave rise to the various Protestant movements of the sixteenth century (Anabaptist, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican). Many of the early Protestants had first been agitators for spiritual religion in the years before Luthers protest of 1517. These initially regional movements (not all of which entered Protestantism at its emergence) were both diffused over wider regions than those they initially affected and in turn were modified through adaptation to new cultures and contexts. In the early modern period, evangelical Christianity went global. But this gradual and natural adaptation, when combined with a gradual loss of momentum, also provoked second thoughts about the need to recover earlier evangelical ideals.

Thus, by the closing decades of the seventeenth century, Dutch and German Pietists as well as the Puritan inhabitants of New England were noting and lamenting the running down of evangelical religion and praying for its recovery; this in fact occurred in waves beginning in the 1680s and 1690s on both sides of the Atlantic. The better-known period of the eighteenth century, which we have come to call the Great Awakening or Evangelical Revival, extended this recovery of momentum until the dawn of the next century.

The nineteenth century, especially, witnessed Protestant attempts to recover afresh the original purity of apostolic Christianity. The emulation of the Christianity of the Acts of the Apostles became all the rage circa 1830; whatever had happened