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Jonathan Yeager, Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine. New York: Oxford University Press, 201 1. Pp. xii + 321. $74.00.
Jonathan Yeager has provided us with a helpful link in our understanding of how to get from Jonathan Edwards to nineteenth-century evangelicalism. John Erskine (1721-1 803) will be familiar to many students of colonial American history, if for no other reason than his appearance as a correspondent of virtually every leading minister in the American colonies and a promoter of the transadantic evangelical revival. By providing an insightful portrait of his life and thought, Yeager has illumined the way in which Enlightenment thought shaped and directed the evangelical movement in the eighteenth century.
One of the few members of the Scottish aristocracy to enter the ministry, Erskine switched from the study of law to the ministry through the impact of the Cambuslang revivals of 1742. Upon his return to the University of Edinburgh, he defended the character of George Whitefield in a vigorous debate with his classmate, William Robertson (later one of the leaders of the Moderate party in the Church of Scodand). Erskine argued that it was not Whitefield but the regular preaching of the parish ministers that had the most significant impact in the revivals.
In his central chapters, Yeager traces Erskine's convictions regarding the importance of maintaining traditional content and modern "style" in "enlightened evangelicalism." Yeager shows that Erskine continued the...