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Is Evangelical Ecclesiology an Oxymoron? A Historical Perspective

Abstract This article traces the emergence of evangelicalism as an international and transdenominational movement under the uniquely modern political, material, and social conditions of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and then expounds the new understanding of the Church evident in the writings of the early evangelicals, using the well-travelled George Whitefield as the principal case study. As evangelicals identified with one another across national and denominational boundaries, they imagined the Church in new ways, subordinating church order to evangelical piety in an unprecedented way. There was no distinctively evangelical doctrine of church order and yet they seemed to see in their wider fellowship, a manifestation of the mystical Church, discernible among the divided visible churches. Tragically, though, the movement was itself dogged by separatism, even as it sought to bear witness to the deeper spiritual unity of the truly regenerate.