Was Evangelicalism Created by the Enlightenment?

Abstract

David Bebbington has published a number of influential works arguing that Evangelicalism was created by the Enlightenment. He claims that the new and distinctively Evangelical activism of the 1730s was only possible because of a novel doctrine of assurance. This doctrine was in turn born of the dependence of John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards on Enlightenment epistemology. The following article questions this claim and thus seeks to re-open the case for the identity of Evangelicalism with the Reformation and Puritanism.