Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage: A Tradition and Trajectory of Integrating Piety and Justice. By Donald Dayton and Douglas Strong. Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, Baker Academic 2014. Pp. 208. $20.00.
Donald W. Dayton (PhD, University of Chicago), now retired, taught theology and ethics at North Park Seminary, Northern Baptist Seminary, Drew University, and Azusa Pacific University. Douglas M. Strong is Professor of the History of Christianity and Dean of the College at the Seattle Pacific University School of Theology in Seattle, Washington. Four decades ago Donald Dayton challenged the grand narrative of the Christian Right with Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, which was widely regarded as a ground breaking historical work. The original, first published in 1976, portrayed the notion that being an evangelical does not mean that one has to abandon a concern for social justice. In fact, it showed that the evangelical Christians of the nineteenth century did not distinguish between a personal faith focused on personal salvation and radical concern for the poor and oppressed. Instead, personal piety was connected with works of social reform and justice. As a result, evangelicals were heavily associated with abolition movements, fighting for the poor, and women’s rights. Evangelical revivals called people to personal atonement, but also called them to put faith into action. This newly revised and retitled edition, an expansion of the original book, bolstered by insights from Douglas strong, seeks to convince a new generation of the same: that it is not heretical or “communist” to talk about social justice in the church. On the contrary, a personal faith is orthodox to the extent that it talks about and addresses social justice in the church.
Three incidents illustrate the relevance of this book’s message, according to Strong: the first from 1844, the second from 1975, and the third from 2014. In the 1844, Robert Baird wrote Religion in America, the earliest comprehensive text describing American religion. According to him, American churches were “evangelical” in that they participated in revivals of religion, the voluntary support of churches, had a vital piety, articulated a new birth, possessed an empirical feeling of the supernatural and a perception of the presence of God, and stressed the need for a personal change of heart by God, resulting in holy living. The second event took place in 1975 when Donald Dayton gave a guest lecture at Houghton College, during a time in America in which the apolitical and even regressive social views promoted by some neo-evangelicals, especially with regard to race relations and gender issues, were prevalent. Dayton contrasted the then-current situation of evangelicalism with its concerns of doctrinal purity, biblical literalism, and anti-Communism, with the historical stories of the revival-oriented evangelicals who Baird praised in 1844. The third incident comes from Strong’s son – an alumnus of a Christian college, and a member of a megachurch – who advocates the idea that the concept of evangelical needs to be dropped because it has so much baggage associated with it.
This book, however, indicates that the evangelicals have a rich history, establishing a faith community that many postmoderns are in fact seeking out in different ways. The current generation may not see the need to re-adopt the name evangelical, but they may be nevertheless evangelically minded in the pietistic sense of living out an ethos of scripturally grounded, scripturally passionate, and socially active Christianity. This 2014 re-issue of Dayton’s book highlights three distinct periods of American church history, which represent the three incidents above mentioned. The original chapters of the book chronicle the half-century or so of the nineteenth century when evangelicals provided a powerful witness of biblically enlivened social change. The book also reflects on the “progressive” evangelical leaders who represented a moment in time, after the turbulent 1960s, when Christians sought to reclaim the evangelical heritage for the challenges of a new day. Third, a new generation of evangelicals in the twentieth century has found itself in a different social context, where liberal, mainline Christianity is in serious decline: conservative, neo-evangelical Christianity has become stagnant, and religion in general is on the defensive. Yet young adults desire a form of scripturally based Christianity in which social justice is the natural outworking of faith, alike to that in the 1840s.
The continued relevance of the issues with which this book deals justifies its reappearance years after its first advent challenged countless people to rethink their evangelical heritage. If anything, the challenge is even greater now to follow the example set by the forebears of twentieth and twenty-first century evangelicalism. I recommend this title for those interested in church history in general and its evangelical manifestation in particular.
Bradford McCall
Holy Apostles College and Seminary