The History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland: From the First Century to the Twenty-First

Gerald Bray is a distinguished church historian—Research Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, and author or editor of numerous books. His History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland is an assured account of Christianity in the Atlantic archipelago over twenty centuries, written with a strong and explicit Christian commitment and produced to a very high standard by InterVarsity Press. Readers of Wesley and Methodist Studies will be particularly interested in the discussion of the Wesleys and the Evangelical Revival in chapters 10 and 11, and there they will find reference to Samuel Wesley’s role in the reforming agenda of the 1710–11 Convocation and a concise account of the eighteenth-century revival, including the tensions between the Wesley brothers, George Whitefield, and the Moravians. Bray thinks that John Wesley misunderstood Calvinism and Arminianism, a view that will not persuade all scholars of the period, and his description of Wesley’s soteriology as...