Reviews Of Books -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 74:1 (Spring 2012)
Article: Reviews Of Books
Author: Anonymous


Reviews Of Books

Jonathan Yeager, Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 208 + indices. $74.00, cloth.

With the release of his Enlightened Evangelicalism, Jonathan Yeager, recently named Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, has served notice that he will be a voice to be heard in future discussions about the transatlantic evangelical world of the long eighteenth century; the latter has proved to be a thriving field of studies over the past two decades. His book, the revision of a doctoral dissertation produced at Stirling University under the supervision of the well-known D. W. Bebbington, takes as its subject the Scottish minister John Erskine (1721–1803), a figure whom Yeager shows to have been what we might call the great “influence-broker” on the international evangelical Calvinist network binding together Holland, Scotland, England, and young America in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Such a claim for such a man at first seems incongruous; how could Erskine of Edinburgh be a person at the hub of links binding together so many important Christian leaders (we may name Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Davies, Jonathan Dickinson, John Witherspoon, Andrew Fuller, and John Ryland as examples) and have gone virtually unnoticed since the biography produced by his colleague Henry Moncrieff Wellwood in 1804? The answer to this conundrum is two-fold. First, it was the nature of Erskine’s leadership to be the literary encourager, the supplier of theological literature, and the editor for a vast body of theological literature (none more important than the posthumously-published writings of Jonathan Edwards) on both sides of the Atlantic. This work was carried out behind the scenes, largely through long-distance correspondence with persons distant from major cities, libraries, and booksellers. Second, Yeager’s work in important respects has been that of pursuing “threads” laid down by earlier researchers of this period of transatlantic Christian cooperation; in point of fact, very many of these threads were observed to lead to and from Erskine.

But what kind of a man was this John Erskine, Church of Scotland minister first of country charges and from 1758, minister within the city of Edinburgh? Yeager portrays him as well-born, one well on his way to a distinguished law career. Erskine was also favorably disposed to the preaching of itinerant George Whitefield, who was in western Scotland in connection with the evangelical awakenings at Cambuslang and Kilsyth in 1742. Heartily approving of the Awakening and Whitefield’s influence, Erskine set a new course: he took up the study of divinity within his university, Edinburgh.

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