This importante study offers a new and critical way of understanding Wesley and the larger phenomenon of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival. Campbell argues that Christian antiquity functiones for Wesley as an alternative cultural vision for religious renewal, much in the same way that clasical antiquity served as a cultural model for secular enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century.
Campbell examines the thouught of John Wesley against the background of classical and Christian revivalism in the eighteenth century and shows how "classical antiquity" had become a focus of controversy in British religious conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century, as well as a source of renewal for the Chruech in the later seventeenth century.