Methodist Revolutions: Evangelical Engagements of Church and World focuses on the interrelation of revival, reform, and revolution within Methodism. Edited by Joerg Rieger and Upolu Lumā Vaai, the volume’s contributing writers argue that those edified by Wesley’s notion of social holiness resist Methodists’ complicity in the capitalist exploitation of workers, certain evangelicals’ homophobic paranoia, and the perpetuation of the ecological dysfunction that the technological ravishing of the earth has wrought. Rieger and Vaai have organized Methodist Revolutions in terms of ‘Historical Perspectives’, ‘Contemporary Challenges’, and ‘Ecological Perspectives’. Allow me to share what I have found compelling about these sections.
Radicalizing workers Christologically and eschewing their pacification, eighteenth-century British Methodist ‘field preaching’, qua revival, has exemplified ‘the very public performance of revolutionary fervor’. It was not, therefore, an ‘antidote for asocial revolution’ (12). On the other side of the pond, twentieth-century Brazilian Methodism has yielded insights into atonement theory that complement...
