Böcker av Martin Spence

In nineteenth-century Britain, a large number of prominent Anglican and Presbyterian Evangelicals rejected the idea that salvation meant "going to heaven when you die." Instead, they proposed that God would establish his kingdom on earth, renewing the creation and reanimating embodied humans to live in a world of science and progress. This book introduces the writings and activities of these women and men, among whom were counted the ardent social reformer Lord Shaftesbury, the highly-respected clergyman Edward Bickersteth, the popular author Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and the General Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, Thomas Rawson Birks. The book shows that the catalyst for such theological revisionism was the end-times doctrine known as "premillennialism." While commonly characterized as a gloomy and sectarian belief, the book argues that premillennialism in Victorian Britain was actually an optimistic and often liberalizing creed. It dissolved older Evangelical assumptions about the dissimilarities between time and eternity, body and soul, heaven and earth. The book demonstrates that, far from being eccentric pessimists, premillennialists were actually pioneers of trends in nineteenth-century Christian theology that stressed the importance of the incarnation, prioritized social justice, and even entertained the idea of universal salvation.

This book is the first major study of the constellation of evangelists, mission halls, tent revivals, children’s clubs, Bible institutes, musicians, advertising strategies, publishing enterprises, and philanthropic activity that constituted a vibrant substratum of British Evangelical Christianity between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. This populist Protestant subculture has been well-charted in North America but virtually ignored in Britain. This lacuna is part due to a common assumption that secularization corroded traditional religious communities during this era. By contrast, this book argues that this panoply of pan-denominational affinities and endeavours in fact represented an adaptation of the British Evangelical Protestant tradition to the age of mass democracy. In exploring the beliefs, worship and spirituality, gender roles, mission networks, revival events, material culture, and social protocols and taboos of popular Evangelicalism, the book presents a religious movement well-attuned to an age of popular politics, metropolitan culture, demotic advertising, and mass entertainment.