Roots and Reformations

‘Evangelical Churchmen’, wrote Balleine, in his History of the Evangelical Party, ‘trace their pedigree to the Puritans, the Reformers, and the Lollards, to all within the National Church who have learned to love simple worship and spiritual religion, but as a party their existence dates from the Great Revival of the eighteenth century,1. I am more concerned in this paper with pedigree than with party. I am concerned to isolate those distinctive features of evangelicalism which can be traced in men of that persuasion in every age of the church. A few years ago the question of evangelical identity exercised our minds. The problem has not now gone away because the phrase is not heard so often. Most of our difficulties arose from our failure to identify our roots clearly, and to own them when they were identified. I want therefore to consider our pedigree and for that we must go back to the Reformers. That is not to suggest that evangelical religion began with them, it did not. The Reformers were the first to claim that what they were teaching was no novelty of their age, but was itself the revival of primitive, apostolic Christianity....

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