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A Patterned Life: Faith, History, and David Bebbington is Eileen Bebbington’s biography of her husband, David, whom I’d rank as one of the three most influential evangelical historians of the past 40 years, along with George Marsden and Mark Noll. I’m blessed to count David as a mentor and friend, so I will dispense with any pretense of objectivity in this review.

The English-born Bebbington has spent his teaching career at Scotland’s University of Stirling. His influence has sprung from three overlapping factors: his study of evangelicalism, his personal friendships across the evangelical world, and his credentials as a world-class historian by anyone’s standards—secular or Christian. The last point is one that Christians too often neglect: a vital Christian witness requires that certain Christians establish themselves as thought leaders in ways secular observers can readily understand.

Thus, as a Cambridge-trained historian, much of Bebbington’s scholarly output has been with major academic presses, including his seminal political and intellectual history, The Mind of Gladstone (Oxford, 2004). His scholarly productivity has made him an invaluable member of the faculty at Stirling, and enabled him to produce an impressive cadre of PhD students who teach at institutions from Wheaton College to the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

Bebbington is best known, however, for his definition of evangelicalism—the “Bebbington quadrilateral” of conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism. Many (including myself) have debated and attempted to modify the quadrilateral in the years since he offered it in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (Routledge, 1989), but it remains the most common and convincing way of explaining what an evangelical Christian is.

Commitment to Community 

I met David for the first time in 2000 at a Jonathan Edwards conference in Miami, where he gave a keynote address on the international scope of Jonathan Edwards’s legacy. I was a year away from finishing my PhD. To say the least, I was not the most important person in the room. Yet David was eager to know me and learn about my dissertation topic. Reading Eileen’s biography impressed on me how David often shows this kind of interest in people (which I’ve since observed on repeated occasions at Baylor and elsewhere) in spite of the typical kind of social awkwardness with which many academics struggle. He seeks out others as a Christian discipline.

A Patterned Life: Faith, History, and David Bebbington

A Patterned Life: Faith, History, and David Bebbington

Wipf & Stock. 164 pages.
Wipf & Stock. 164 pages.

David’s presence in Miami also demonstrates his remarkable commitment to fostering an international scholarly evangelical community. Like the great English preacher George Whitefield, David has come to America a lot, not to mention his countless trips, talks, and conferences elsewhere in the world. He doesn’t enjoy air travel, not least because of health problems that flights tend to exacerbate. (I’ve picked David up at the Waco airport six or seven times.) As with Whitefield, Americans have tried to convince him to stay here, yet his heart lies with his family and the smaller evangelical academic community in the U.K. He is much needed there.

Illuminating Stories

A Patterned Life is a labor of love by Eileen, who wishes to get the details down about David and his remarkable life. I suspect that many of us wish we had someone like Eileen who could painstakingly save the stories of our lives before we—and our biographies—pass from the scene. For those who don’t know David personally, this book offers an illuminating account of British social and family history since World War II, and of a seminal figure in Anglo-American Christian intellectual life during that period. Anyone who knows David will have the added bonus of getting the backstory on his peculiar, endearing habits, such as why and when he started taking detailed notes on every church service he attends (when visiting Waco, he typically goes at least three times a week, and more if he can find a multi-evening revival meeting). He’s taken those notes since 1965, and they surely represent the world’s largest single-author trove of documentation of post-1960s church practices.

Among the stories I was happiest to learn about in the book was David’s own conversion. His was a splendidly typical experience. He grew up in a (Plymouth) Brethren church, but his parents switched to a Baptist church in Nottingham when he was nine. This was a fateful change, both for David’s own story and for Baptist life in the U.K. About a year after his family started going to the Baptist church, a female representative from the Pocket Testament League spoke. After the service she talked to David, asking him if he was a Christian. He said no, realizing that he had not personally accepted Jesus as his Savior and Lord. She encouraged him to take one of the pocket testaments, read through its plan of salvation, and commit his life to Christ. That is just what he did. “Conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism” were already taking on deep personal significance for Bebbington.

Man of the Church 

Those who know David or who read A Patterned Life will recognize that he exemplifies the life of the Christian scholar not primarily because he knows a lot about religious history, but because he is as much a man of the church as he is of the academy. Many who professionally study theology or the history of Christianity find it difficult to maintain a vital relationship with the church, or with the Lord himself. Not David Bebbington. He is a beloved figure in U.K. Baptist and evangelical church life, and a person of serious piety.

David elucidates his vision of devotion to the church and to the Lord in a sermon that Eileen included among several appended pieces in the volume. In “The Christian Scholar and the Scriptures” (a must-read for anyone who identifies as a “Christian scholar”), David makes the desperately needed point that Christian scholars must, first and foremost, live as faithful Christians. Their work, whether primarily in teaching, writing, or administration, must “serve the purposes of our master, Jesus Christ.”

The significance of David’s scholarship is high indeed, but I suspect his greatest legacy is in the grace-birthed integrity of his devotion to our Lord.

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