DAVID HEMPTON is an Irish church historian who has taught for many years in the United States, most recently at Harvard. He is best known for books on the history of Methodism and Evangelical Christianity more generally. The present book under review (originally Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 2021) adopts a rather different perspective, in a move beyond his past and more conventional historical writing to historiography and the question of the undergirding of historical change in the modern era.
Hempton suggests that, in considering such foundations from the Reformation onwards, we think in terms of chains of interconnections: what he describes as working through nuclei, nodes, and networks. Fortunately, applying his proposed terminology is less important than taking on board its wider implications.
For instance, following Reformation historians such as Andrew Pettegree, he emphasises how important the network of newly established printing houses was, in their desire to make significant profits from Luther’s writings. More than 5000 editions were created, as well as pamphlets (both for and against) numbering one for every two people in the empire. In addition, in those early years more than two million recently written hymns became available.
Again, the Catholic response owes its greatest debt to the newly founded Jesuit system of education (roughly 600 schools across the Continent). By the death of Ignatius Loyola in 1556, the Society already had 1000 members, while even after its suppression it was to recover roughly its former numbers, at 15,073 in 1900.
Likewise, in his account of developments within Evangelical Christianity, he maintains that the renowned Reg (W. R.) Ward (1925-2010) failed to go far enough in challenging “Anglican chauvinists”, including Owen Chadwick’s “magisterial, but smugly Anglican” approach. Interconnections were securely based without any need to rely on the colonial Establishment, thanks not least to mostly unacknowledged female webs of contact. “Pentecostalism, like Methodism before it, was predominantly a women’s movement, even if women were rarely given access to leadership positions or established pulpits.”
Again, it would be a mistake to make Azusa Street (1906) the sole reference point for the rise of Pentecostalism. Even at the time, there were similar movements in Australia and Wales. More importantly, there had been anticipations almost a century earlier in the focus of Edward Irving and J. N. Darby on the gift of tongues and millenarianism.
So, today, in considering our present context, we need to take account of how the web works in encouraging much greater focus on individual choice, and how extraordinarily successful some can be in manipulating such resources. Rick Warren (b. 1954) is quoted as a case in point. Fourteen million sales of one of his books were achieved through connexions in six thousand churches from 80 denominations in 12 countries.
Equally, more attention needs to be paid to influences in opposite directions from those commonly assumed. After the Second World War, South Korea helped to transform the nature of American Evangelicalism, while, more recently, Nigerian megachurches have now generated their own networks that span the world. So, a challenge has been set, to read “the facts” differently.
The Revd Dr David Brown is Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture at the University of St Andrews.
Christianity at the Crossroads: The global Church from the print revolution to the digital era
David N. Hempton
Cambridge University Press £35 (978-1-009-59743-2)
Church Times Bookshop £31.50
