DID YOU KNOW?
This week’s “Did You Know” is excerpted from a soon to be released book titled, “Changed By Grace,” written by a South Bend History Professor: To understand the great debt which both the Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous owed to the evangelicals, we need to go back to the beginnings of that movement, which lay in the period immediately before the American Revolution, and explain some of the most important things which they had discovered.
The modern evangelical movement had arisen during the later 1730s in English-speaking colonies of North America. The two key theologians during the formative period were Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), a Congregationalist pastor in Massachusetts, who was selected as the first president of Princeton University shortly before his death, and John Wesley in England (1703-1791), a priest of the Church of England who taught Greek and Latin classics and theology, including the New Testament, at Oxford University.
Edwards was the best native-born philosophical theologian in American history, and the only one to rank with the truly great names of European theological history. Wesley was a scholar at what had been one of the two most important medieval European theological centers, and was fluent in a number of languages, including classical Greek and Latin, Hebrew, Syriac (classical Arabic of the Koran), French and Spanish. Wesley originally learned the later language to discuss the teachings of the Torah with Spanish Jewish scholars. He had read extensively in the Spanish and French-speaking Catholic spiritual writers of his own era, as well as the ancient founders of Eastern Orthodox spirituality, who had an especially great influence on him.
Edwards and Wesley were both thoroughly conversant with the new Newtonian physics, as well as the writings of John Locke, the founder of modern psychology. Both believed that good theology had to fit in with the best findings of modern science. Neither one saw any necessity for conflict between science and religion, if the theologians were doing their job properly.
I mention these things because there is among many today a tendency to regard evangelicals as nothing but ignorant Bible-thumpers. The founders of that movement did in fact take their Bibles very seriously indeed. John Wesley in particular could probably have recited most of the New Testament by heart, and in the original Greek, which was the way he read it every morning in his meditations. But he and Edwards were both highly educated intellectuals who not only knew the ancient philosophical and theological tradition backwards and forwards, but were right at the forefront of all new developments in thought which were taking place during their lifetimes, which saw the rise of modern science.
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