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Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan
...So--if Evangelicals are reacting to the enlightenment, who are their earliest progenitors? If, as I suspect, (though do set me straight if I'm wrong) their history begins in the 19th century, then why such a long time after the enlightenment?
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Most point to the Quakers as the real "progenitors" of evangelicalism. Personally, I would set the intellectual roots of evangelicalism in the founding of Princeton University—then Princeton College—and Seminary. Princeton's third president, Jonathan Edwards, is considered by most to be the father of the First Great Awakening, which in turn produced the real beginnings of evangelical activity: circuit preaching, tent revivals, the "holiness" movements and the early stages of the charismatic revivals. For whatever reason, a serious academic challenge to the enlightenment did not take place until much later, when the Princeton Theological Seminary was founded in the early 19th cent., and when the "Princeton theologians" began the most creative and intensive writing. Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, and A.A. Hodge all contributed to the intellectual and philosophical underpinings of what would later come to be a fully developed doctrine of biblical inerrency.
While the Princeton theologians concerned themselves with orthodoxy, there was already a strong tradition of new "orthopraxy" that was essentially adopted from the holiness movements. I think that the convergence between the two was probably natural, and in many ways subconscious. Maybe one of the reasons that evangelicalism did not emerge as a distinct movement until the nineteenth century was because it took some time for rationalism to be so firmly engrained. Remember that the first fundamentalists and evangelicals did not see themselves as part of something new: the were conservatives. Because they were—in their own minds—reinforcing "traditions", they were incapable to see that they were actually using a relatively new system of thought and reason to reinforce their own religious ideas.
The same type of thinking persists to this day. Modern day evangelicals who subscribe to the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrency believe that this is a normative theological position that was no different from Calvin's or Luther's or Augustine's or Justin Martyr's or even Paul's or Jesus'. In their own mind, biblical inerrency is self evident and requires no explanation.
Notre Dame historian George Marsden is the foremost scholar on the evangelical movement, and I heartily recommend
Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
While there are roots of evangelicalism in the Presbyterian and Congregational churches, the real movement was grassroots, and was largely produced through tent revivals and circuit preachers. New England "spiritism" and the holiness movements of the second Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, and later figures such as Billy Sunday, Dwight Moody, and Charles Haddon Spurgeon in the UK were seminal in defining boundaries of evangelicalism as a single movement.