The Fire Divine

This attractive volume is intended as a companion to Michael Reeves's The Unquenchable Flame: Introducing the Reformation (IVP, 2009), and picks up the story of evangelicalism from the revivals and awakenings of the 1730s to the philanthropic crusades and missionary endeavours of the mid-nineteenth century. David Ceri Jones is an accomplished guide, well known for his studies of George Whitefield and Calvinistic Methodism, and here distils the best and latest scholarship into a brief overview. Where many introductions focus on just a few major personalities and the famous narratives of dramatic conversions and triumphant preaching, Jones instead provides an even-handed analytical survey. He ranges widely across Britain and North America, demonstrating the creation of a complex web of transatlantic evangelical networks, and offers well-chosen illustrations of the movement's theological and social impact. The volume is easily accessible, written clearly, and without technical jargon, and should win an avid readership among evangelicals themselves in local churches. But it is also far more scholarly than the Reeves companion because Jones is a specialist in the historical literature, and so it deserves to find its place on undergraduate reading lists. It is of the academic calibre of the Very Short Introductions published by Oxford University Press, and a handy primer for IVP's own five-volume History of Evangelicalism series

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