UCLA

This dissertation assesses the significance of suffering in the formation of Anglo-American Evangelicalism primarily through the life and legacy of David Brainerd. It is my argument that an emphasis on suffering, specifically the suffering of the individual believer, became a crucial component of Evangelicalism since it stood as the best practical display of the religious activism demanded by Protestant theologies of grace. Scholars have increasingly shown that the religious movement known as Evangelicalism formed in the confluence of Protestant theology that occurred in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century, which created in the movement both a peculiar diversity and cohesion. It is my contention that evangelical beliefs about suffering and the necessity of suffering by the believer was one of the most enduring and binding components of the movement. Suffering figured prominently in almost every stage of the process of salvation, especially conversion and sanctification, and was, in many ways, the most reliable sign of assurance evidencing the work of God’s grace while the believer endured life on earth.

David Brainerd’s life and relatively brief ministry and missionary activity roughly coincided with the sporadic but widespread religious revivals of the early mid-eighteenth century, which scholars widely agree mark the emergence of the modern evangelical movement. More than an influential theologian or captivating minister, Brainerd was also a sickly man and troubled soul who suffered through a mission to the Native Americans in the colonial frontier wilderness of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Brainerd’s place in time, his path to and work as a missionary, and the use of his printed works by later evangelical ministers, make Brainerd a unique lens through which to study the prominence of suffering in evangelical thought and practice from its seventeenth-century origins to its unprecedented diffusion in the nineteenth century. The physical and psychic agony that Brainerd experienced throughout his faith characterized the necessity of suffering and its purpose for generations of Evangelicals.