RIP, historian Donald Dayton, creative contrarian in religion and politics. https://twitter.com/CTmagazine/status/1260401883174375430

A work of history and a tract for the times, Dayton’s Discovering an Evangelical Heritage first appeared as a series of magazine articles in Jim Wallis’s Post-American, the forerunner to Sojourners.

Confessing its autobiographical roots, he wrote, “This book is a product of the author’s struggle to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable in his own experience: the Evangelical heritage in which he was reared & values bequeathed to him by the student movements of the sixties.”

A second-generation academic, Dayton was strategically located in evangelicalism’s master-pupil chains. Though a Wesleyan educator, Dayton’s father studied with Carl Henry at Northern Baptist Seminary, internalizing the “Reformed Scholasticism” of post-war evangelicalism.

Despite deep roots in the Wesleyan Church, the younger Dayton first encountered John Wesley at Yale in a course with Paul Holmer, the Swedish pietist. Rejecting neo-evangelicalism’s Calvinist influence, Dayton reclaimed the theological heritage of his forebears.

I first read Dayton's Discovering an Evangelical Heritage in preparation for a lecture at my alma mater Wheaton College. https://books.google.com/books?id=LndyCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA54&dq=schmalzbauer+donald+dayton&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwja2v6X8q_pAhVS2qwKHd-BDa0Q6AEICDAA#v=onepage&q=schmalzbauer%20donald%20dayton&f=false

In Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, Dayton began with a chapter on abolitionist Jonathan Blanchard. Comparing the radicalism of Wheaton’s founder with the quietism of his successors, he condemned evangelicals for abandoning their roots.

Later Dayton criticized Wheaton President V. Raymond Edman for ignoring the radicalism of Charles Finney. In his book Finney Lives On, Edman had deleted resistance to social reform from Finney’s list of twenty-four obstacles to revival.

He was not alone. Active in the Evangelical Women’s Caucus, Lucille Sider Dayton was an advocate for gender equality. In “Women in the Holiness Movement,” the Daytons located the origins of feminism in their own tradition. Their coauthor was Nancy Hardesty.

As Christian Collins Winn notes in his profile for @CTmagazine, "Don was idiosyncratic, even eccentric, and unafraid to hold his ground. He endured many personal tragedies, but as the old Pietist saying (attributed to August Tholuck) goes: 'The heart makes the theologian.'"

Much of this tweetstorm appeared in piece published in volume edited by Roger Lundin of blessed memory. https://books.google.com/books?id=LndyCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA54&dq=schmalzbauer+donald+dayton&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwja2v6X8q_pAhVS2qwKHd-BDa0Q6AEICDAA#v=onepage&q=schmalzbauer%20donald%20dayton&f=false