In considering the origins of the 1730s Evangelical Revival or Great Awakening, evangelical Protestants have been reluctant to credit the Anglican theological tradition with contributing much of anything. The reviewer himself followed such an approach in research carried out ca. 1990. Why have we collectively taken such a line of interpretation? We allow that Church of England figures provided notable leadership after they had been influenced by writers and groups beyond their communion. George Whitefield relied on the Commentary of the Presbyterian Matthew Henry; he learned preaching methods from Thomas Cole, a Gloucester-area Independent minister. John Wesley was deeply influenced by Moravians on a transatlantic voyage; he eventually visited their headquarters at Herrnhut, Saxony.

Jake Griesel of George Whitefield College, Cape Town, helps us to see that we have inclined toward such views under the influence of authors of several types. On the one hand, we have followed the interpretations of authors such as G. R. Cragg (From Puritanism to the Age of Reason [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950]) and Roland N. Stromberg (Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth Century England [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954]), who described the English Protestant theological tradition as advancing steadily towards a reason-exalting theology as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth. In the same period, C. F. Allison (The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter [New York: Seabury,1966]) drew attention to the drift from Reformation orthodoxy to moralism. We have been more heavily influenced by an essay by the Methodist scholar, John Walsh (“The Origins of the Evangelical Revival,” in Essays in Modern Church History, in Memory of Norman Sykes, ed. G. V. Bennett and J. D. Walsh [New York: Oxford University Press, 1966], 141–44), who, noting the decline of the Puritan theological tradition, proposed that we consider the work of writers such as William Law and various gathered religious societies as contributing influences.

Simultaneously, since the 1950s, we have been extensively influenced by the massive republication program of Puritan theological works produced by those whose ministries preceded and extended beyond the ejection of Puritans from the Church of England in 1662. We have been led to accept that the Great Ejection achieved the almost total removal of evangelical Reformed theology in the Established Church. Aggregately, such lines of interpretation led D. W. Bebbington (Evangelicalism in Modern Britain [London: Routledge, 1989]) to a too-easy supposition that the awakening, when it came, was something largely new. In England at least, Puritan Nonconformity was itself, at first, largely a spectator of the awakening.

John Edwards (1637–1719), the central character of Griesel’s work (the fruit of a Cambridge dissertation), has not been unknown to the interpreters mentioned above. His unfortunate fate has been that of being treated as an interesting and only briefly influential exception to the general dissolution of Anglican Reformed theology, which we have been assured took place. This line of approach is still maintained in the otherwise fascinating work of Dewey Wallace (Shapers of English Calvinism: 1660–1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011]).

Griesel has not so much originated a reassessment of Edwards and this period as he has accelerated and fortified it. Griesel traces the turning point (if we may call it that) to the writing of the Methodist historian Gordon Rupp (Religion in England:1688–1791, Oxford History of the Christian Church [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986]); Rupp called for a reassessment of the assumption that Reformed Anglicanism ended with the ejection of the Puritans in 1662. Griesel’s Cambridge research supervisor, Stephen Hampton, accelerated the process of reassessment with his volume Anti-Arminians:The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Now, Griesel, focusing specifically on Edwards, has shown us that this Cambridge graduate and don (a fellow of St. John’s College) was an able scholar and preacher in that same university setting. Having taken an early retirement at the age of 49 because of poor health, the independently wealthy Edwards spent the rest of his life completing 30 major publications.

In these, Edwards successfully assailed the rational theology of John Locke (which Edwards asserted was associated with Socinianism), the undermining of the Reformed theology of the 39 Articles of Religion in the published exposition of Bishop Burnet (Arminian in tendency), and the Arian tendencies of Daniel Whitby. These writings brought Edwards acclaim from many sources. Edwards also authored a fine guide to pastoral ministry, The Preacher, and a multi-volume theology, Theologia Reformata.

Notably, for such work, Edwards was acclaimed by theological scholars at Oxford and (to a lesser degree) Cambridge. The latter was, sadly, increasingly Arminian in orientation. His admirers included numerous bishops of the Church of England (who, like him, were still loyal to Reformation theology) and his many former students influenced in his years as a Cambridge fellow of St. John’s.

Not only was Edwards’s work approved at multiple levels in the then-contemporary Church of England, but it was also praised by English Nonconformists, Scottish Presbyterians, and New England Independents (such as Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards). As for Anglican evangelicals associated with the Evangelical Revival, Griesel demonstrates that notables such as George Whitefield, James Hervey, William Romaine, and Thomas Scott were all influenced by and expressed praise for Edwards’s writings.

All in all, Griesel has—by his indefatigable sifting—altered the landscape not only in our understanding of the roots of the awakening but also of the eighteenth-century Church of England. While rational theology, moralism, and Arminian teaching did make a marked advance in the Restoration era, vigorous Reformed theology did not lack advocates or followers in this same period. It is now beyond doubt that the Evangelical Revival drew on indigenous Reformed theology from within as well as beyond the Church of England.

Griesel has raised at least one question that is deserving of further investigation. That is the question of the sources of Edwards’s own Reformed theology. It emerges that Edwards, raised in a Presbyterian home and graduating from Cambridge in 1658, was influenced by Cambridge faculty members who had served in the Westminster Assembly. These held their academic posts through the Protectorate period to 1659. Some of these, though not all, maintained their posts at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 by doing as Edwards soon did: conforming to the regulations of the reconstituted Church of England. Not only Edwards’s Calvinism, but his attitudes to the Prayer Book, the Articles of Religion, the role of episcopacy, and the place of ritual in divine worship were indistinguishable from the attitudes of many who participated in or informed the Assembly. Further inquiry into the persistence of these convictions within the Church of England may yet force on us a fresh consideration of who were the most reliable maintainers of the Reformed tradition in the post-1662 period. Clearly, Puritan Nonconformity did not monopolize it.