The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism ed. by Ryan P. Hoselton et al. (review)

Reviewed by: The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism ed. by Ryan P. Hoselton et al. Mark Dixon The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism. Edited by Ryan P. Hoselton, Jan Stievermann, Douglas A. Sweeney, and Michael A. G. Haykin. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. 296 pp. Pietism and evangelicalism were historically much more closely related than they have been historiographically. With important exceptions (for example, W. R. Ward's The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, 1992), they have been treated as distinct areas of study. End Page 105 The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism proves how much work has been done to bridge that gap both at the level of individual scholarship and also institutional support. Three of this volume's editors have past or current connections to Heidelberg University in Germany and its Jonathan Edwards Center which has been admirably active in seeking and hosting conversations on both sides of the Atlantic with diverse academic and theological partners. This work is notable for bringing to publication a good sample of the work that has been happening at conferences and workshops in recent years. It includes fourteen essays as well as an introduction and conclusion written by the editors. Contributors include leading scholars of the evangelical and Pietist fields playing to their respective strengths with contributions that are not mere abridgments of work done elsewhere. Every essay well engages this volume's thematic interest in "the prevalence, variety, and complexity of pietist and early evangelical biblical practices" (1). Douglas Shantz's essay on Bible editions and commentaries in German Pietism and Bruce Hindmarsh's on Bible reading among early evangelicals come to mind. These more focused approaches are complemented by exciting comparative works like Ryan Hoselton's chapter on the importance of the Bible in early Pietist and evangelical missions and Jan Stievermann's on awakened Protestant readings of Revelation (and revelatory readings of scripture more generally) in the eighteenth century. Readers of Lutheran Quarterly will perhaps be more immediately drawn to chapters like Shantz's where they will find familiar friends from seminary syllabi like Philip Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke, but there is arguably more of relevance for the American context in Crawford Gribben's chapter on John Owen's early evangelical biblicism or Douglas Sweeney's study of Cotton Mather's and Jonathan Edwards's treatment of the supernatural. The former skillfully outlines a seventeenth-century approach to scripture that became all too common in eighteenth-century evangelicalism and persists stubbornly to this day—a pretense of biblical engagement utterly stripped of confessional loyalties and unsullied End Page 106 by scholarly dogmas. For the learned Owen this sometimes served a rhetorical purpose, since "a direct appeal to Scripture carried more weight than a reference to confessional traditions when addressing audiences that no longer found that tradition authoritative" (86). Later figures retained the rhetoric but lacked Owen's considerable scholarly rigor. Sweeney's essay (perhaps unintentionally) offers one profound answer to a question Lutherans have been asking since the eighteenth century: what is the appeal of evangelicalism? It will also help Lutheran clergy empathize with and appreciate the evangelical commitments they are likely to find in their own pews on Sunday morning. In simple terms, there will always be an appetite for the supernatural. Sweeney correctly observes, I think, the important historical shift between Luther's sixteenth-century context, in which he warily proclaimed "the day of miracles is past," and the eighteenth-century American context in which figures like Mather and Edwards cautiously embraced the supernatural, especially the biblical miracles of Jesus. Sixteenth-century reformers shied away from the Roman Catholic culture of miracles and signs, which bolstered the church's authority through untestable claims to power. Later state-church Protestants were more existentially threatened by a "tepid Christian faith" (132). A faith without the supernatural threatens Christians with a world in which God is not involved except through the cold processes of history and evolution. These essays individually and collectively invite the reader to consider the Bible not just as object or text but as an alternative methodological device for doing history. It was refreshing to read a history...