The Waters of Rebirth: The Eighteenth Century and Transoceanic Protestant Christianity

Abstract

In a provocatively titled 2005 book, Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom wonderedIs the Reformation Over?While not presuming to answer their query, the present essay argues that a self-understanding of European Protestants inherited from the Reformation had to die in the 1740s in the process of giving birth to the rapidly spreading version of western Christianity that became known as evangelicalism. Protestants, of both the radical and magisterial sort had cherished since the sixteenth century a sense of themselves as the true, ancient, and apostolic church. The Reformation, however, in its theological, as well as its socio-political and economic dimensions, had long “left its heirs no settled comprehensive system, only with many unresolved questions of principle and usage, not least in decisions relating to the body.”