Here is what Mark Noll has to say on the subject
Quote:
Yet evangelicalism was always constituted by the convictions that emerged in those revivals and drove its adherents in their lives as Christians. In this sense, evangelicalism designates a consistent pattern of convictions and attitutes that have been maintained over the centuries since the 1730s. Many efforts have been made to summarize those convictions and attiuttes. One of the most effective is offered by David Bebbington, who has identified four key ingredients of evangelicalism:
* Conversion, or 'The belief that lives need to be changed'
* the Bible, or the 'belief that all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages'
* Activism, or the dedication of all believers, including laypeople, to lives of service for God, especially as manifested in evangelism
* Crucicentrism, or the conviction that Christ's death was the crucial matter in providing atonement for sin.
|
Also, Noll on the Puritans and Evangelicalism
Quote:
|
In England the Puritan movement featured many themes that eighteenth-century evangelicalism would later promote as well, especially intense preaching about the needs for a saving Christ and calculated opposition to the merely formal religion that the Puritans saw infecting the Church of England. In most general terms, the Puritan movement had represented a desire to finish the English Reformation, to completee the work of purifying church, society, and self... As the movement(Puritanism) gathered strength in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Puritans produced a spate of devotional writing that deal directly with the experiential work of God among the redeemed... in all of these expressions, Puritans anticipated the later preoccupations of many evangelicals
|
Quote:
|
By the late 1730s, when modern evangelicalism emerged, the traditions of experiential Calvinism had weakened considerably throughout all parts of the British empire |
It sounds like the day was ripe for an awakening, for a return to the Puritan emphasis on 'heart religion' over against 'head religion', something that Edwards saw to be at the heart of the debate between the New Lights and Old Light, prompting him to write
Religious Affections. Did it do a blow to hierarchical institutionalized Christianity? Yes. And if we can look at the Christianity that was non-evangelical in Europe, we should want to distance ourselves as far as possible from that institutionalized, almost Romish Protestantism that killed Christianity in Europe.