Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-atlantic World, 1500-2000

This book offers the first complete overview of the intellectual history of one of the most significant contemporary cultural trends. In the early seventeenth century, European evangelicals recovered those expectations of an earthly golden age that had been deemed heretical by medieval and reformation theologians. Throughout early modernity, and across the spectrum of evangelical belief, these millennial expectations were deployed to mount a series of radical critiques of church and wider culture. In modernity, these expectations were appropriated by religious and cultural conservatives, who found in millennial theology the frame-work of their hostility to an unbelieving world and a rationale for their critical engagement with it - a critical engagement that ranged from an attempt at the wholesale reconstruction of a Christian society to an expectation of its imminent and catastrophic demise. This account guides readers into the origins, evolution, and revolutionary potential of evangelical millennialism in the trans-Atlantic world.

Crawford Gribben is Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Print Culture in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and Adjunct Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies, Escondido, and a Fellow of the Centre for Baptist History and Heritage, Regent's Park College, Oxford.