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526 John Coffey 526 book reviews John Coffey (Ed.) Heart Religion. Evangelical Piety in England and Ireland, 1690–1850. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York 2016, xiii + 232 pp. isbn 9780198724155. £65; us$105. This impressive collection of essays had its genesis in the seventh and final one- day conference of the DrWilliams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, which closed in 2015. John Coffey’s Introduction on ‘Sources and Trajectories in Evangelical Piety’ sets the context for the book and adds significant value to the volume. Coffey shows how the ‘introspective turn’ of early Puritan, Pietist, and evangel- ical spirituality along with stress on the necessity of the experience of conver- sion created a rich transconfessional movement centred on heart religion. Con- tinental and Anglican Pietists and early evangelicals were all indebted to the devotional literature of Puritanism with its emphasis on religious experience. The new evangelicals emerged within an established and widespread Euro- pean culture of heart religion that had been steadily disrupting confessional boundaries. Given the centrality of heart religion to the evangelical revival, unsurprisingly a trend can be observed in recent scholarship of viewing early evangelicalism as part of the wider Pietist movement that preached conver- sion from nominal or formal religion to heart religion. If polygenesis applies to the origins of Pietism, the same is true of evangelicalism. Inevitably, the diverse tributaries of evangelicalism (Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic; Puri- tan, Anglican, and Pietist) contributed to its pluralism (e.g. Wesleyan, Calvin- istic Methodist, and Moravian). The shared emphasis on religion of the heart was central to early evangelicals recognizing one another as participants in a transconfessional and transatlantic revival. In his chapter on Dissenting communion hymns between 1693 and 1709, John Coffey documents the renewal of Puritan heart religion in the genre of Dissenting hymns, which helped to transmit this spirituality to early evangel- icals. The hymns aimed to promote “Trinitarian and Reformed orthodoxy at the same time as fostering Jesus-centred devotion” (p. 46). They urged inward piety through exhortatory prefaces, rapturous love language of intimacy with Christ, encouragement to visualise Christ, and use of first person language. By showing that the themes of Dissenting communion hymns “were the themes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism: Trinity, Atonement, Union with Christ, Wonder, Love, and Praise” (p. 47), Coffey connects the spirituality of the hymns to evangelical piety. Complementing Coffey’s chapter, Patricia Ward and Daniel Brunner focus on heart religion before the evangelical revival and how it was mediated to and helped create evangelicalism. Ward concentrates on British Protestant readers © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/18712428-09703033 book reviews 527 and promoters of popular devotional writings of Continental authors, most prominentlyThomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi. Readers and advocates of such works shared the goal of seeking transformative spiritual encounters through the reading of tried and trusted guides on the inner spiritual life. Analysed through the ‘Bebbington quadrilateral,’ Daniel Brunner concludes that the writings and translations of the German Pietist Anthony William Boehm reveal him to be “an evangelical before the revival” (p. 91), although his work lacks the evangelical emphasis on substitutionary atonement. Boehm’s publishing activity was the primary means of meditating and anglicizing the theology and practice of Halle Pietism to the English-speaking world. Chapters by David Ceri Jones and Tom Schwanda draw attention to the most influential clerical and lay evangelist of the early evangelical revival in Britain: George Whitefield and John Cennick. Jones argues that Whitefield’s preach- ing on the necessity of experiencing the new birth was foundational to the emphasis placed on inner conversion of the heart in early evangelicalism. He also explains how Whitefield’s moderate Calvinism, particularly the doctrine of election, was integral to his stress on holy living. Schwanda elucidates the sources of Cennick’s use of blood and wounds imagery in the Bible, Book of Common Prayer, emblem book of Jesuit priest Herman Hugo, and through his relationship with the Moravians. This graphic imagery encouraged the radical experientialism of imaginative participatory contemplation of the salvific sac- rifice of the Lamb of God. The difficulty of evaluating inward religious experience is explored by Isabel Rivers and Phyllis Mack. In John Wesley’s edition of à Kempis’s The Christian’s Pattern (1735), Philip Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745), and Henry Venn’s The Complete Duty of Man (1763), inward and out- ward religion are seen to be essential; however, Wesley’s emphasis on purity of intention and wilful affectionate embrace of Christ contrasts with Doddridge’s and especially Venn’s caution towards the spiritual value of feeling and emo- tion. Mack analyses the relationship between dreaming and emotion in early evangelicalism illuminating the confidence placed in dreams as revelatory of character and therefore a potential catalyst for transformation of heart and life. In the case of Hester Ann Rowe, her vivid experience of spiritual dreams and visions was embraced by John Wesley and David Simpson as a model of their theologies of religious experience and to support their own seeming lack of such experience. The two final chapters by Andrew Holmes and David Bebbington move us into the nineteenth century. Holmes’s essay—the only one on Ireland (Ul- ster)—traces the influence of evangelicalism on the Synod of Ulster and Suc- cession Synod leading to the formation of the General Assembly of the Pres- Church History and Religious Culture 97 (2017) 453–528.
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