Revival and Resurgence in Christian History.

Marty, Martin E.

Revival and Resurgence in Christian History. Edited by Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory. Studies in Church History 44. Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society. Chippenham, Wiltshire: Boydell. xviii + 401 pp. $90.00.

Numbers of substantial and useful individual historical essays on Christian revivals, resurgences, renewals, recoveries, reanimations, rebirths, rejuvenations, revivications, resuscitations, and many other "re's" are assembled in this book that is less useful than it ought to be or might have been. Should sober-minded historians--and aren't we all such?--be thrown off by the jaunty, almost ornery-seeming choice of words in the above introductory sentence, let me say that I conceive of it as a conceptually appropriate response to the second line of the assignment to reviewers in this journal: "A brief summary of the contents of the book." That follows the first line of direction, which is more difficult to provide: "a presentation of the author's [here, "authors'] thesis, argument, ... etc."

Why is there a problem here and why is it important to point to it? As for "the contents," in this book one can find essay-length examples of Christian historical moments or topics which fit one or another of the "re-" words mentioned above. Among the twenty-nine essays by members of or presenters at two meetings of the Ecclesiastical History Society, there are numbers of contributions which one set or another of historians would profitably enjoy reading, perhaps storing, and some day reusing. The problem is that they would be lost among a dizzyingly varied mound of essays which only specialists in each field could love.

Who, for example, would have interest in and devotion to essays on the Clerical Society Movement and Spanish Dominicans and Ugandan Revivals and Grenadan Seventh-day Adventists and the 1762 Revival in Wales, plus two-dozen more, as different in topic as those five, and methodologically, conceptually, and stylistically still more different? So the reader must do the asking: what about "Saint Francis of Assisi's Repair of the Church," meaning literal repair, and one of my favorites, which uses or implies any kind of definition of "revival and resurgence" that will tie in with "The Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Movement Revival in the West Midlands, 1875-1890?" Both are valid topics for ecclesiastical historians, but the editors offer little help in tying together more than very few interests that animate them or that would attract a variety of readers.

And one must ask what quantitative norms accompany qualitative assessments to lead historians to speak of "evangelical revival," as Mark Smith does at Christ Church Chadderton, where the churches grew from 300 on the electoral roll to 330 ten years later, after having declined from 470 in 1976. Those statistics could have been grist for a very interesting sociological and theological analysis of growth and decline and growth again, but they do not impress in this "resurgence" essay and context. And the word "revival" in "'The Revival' in the Visual Arts in the Church of England, c.1935-c.1956," demands single quotations for all the evidence of revival author Peter Webster found.

I may have trouble convincing the authors and editors that I am not deriding them or belittling their subjects and evidences. Personally, I would no doubt have found much satisfaction and reasons for supporting the agents and beneficiaries of "re-" endeavors written about here. Small phenomena can suggest great meanings. But I do want to use this kind of occasion to rethink and, I hope, help others rethink the ways of packaging and presenting information between hard covers and after society meetings in the day when access to information is so much more convenient, focused, satisfying, and efficient than where it appears less accessibly. Evidences of good research and writing get obscured in this kind of inherited but--ask most publishers of Feschriften!--increasingly obsolete format and package. At least we need more help from programmers of historians' meetings and stronger editorial midwifery.

doi: 10.1017/S000964071000096X

Martin E. Marty

Emeritus, University of Chicago