Why Newman Looked Backward, but Simpson and Nardi Moved Forward
John Henry Newman’s famous dictum, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant,” continues to seduce superficial forms of evangelicalism, especially among those drawn by the language of “coming home to Rome.” The phrase sounds profound, but it often reveals a fixation on a particular Western theological canon rather than a truly biblical engagement with history. It mistakes Rome’s managed memory for the depth of the church’s story and often substitutes ecclesial nostalgia for valid gospel contextualization rooted in biblical exegesis.
A generation later, two no less historically minded and no less sophisticated churchmen moved in a very different direction. Albert Benjamin Simpson, the Canadian-American founder of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, and Michele Nardi, the Italian-American evangelist, pressed forward through what Simpson called “the old faith.” They did not move backward into Roman absorption. They moved outward in mission, proclaiming Jesus Only to peoples who had yet to hear the announcement of the end of ungodliness through the gospel: Jesus saves, sanctifies, heals, and is coming again as King.
At fifteen, John Henry Newman was a convinced evangelical. By his forties, however, his assumptions concerning the superiority of the Western canon and the development of doctrine had shifted dramatically. His younger brother, Francis William Newman, provides an intriguing contrast. Francis participated in a short-term mission journey to Baghdad in 1831 to meet Anthony Norris Groves, the Plymouth Brethren missionary pioneer, brother-in-law of George Müller, and a man associated with those who questioned the audacity of John Nelson Darby’s emerging dispensationalism. Francis eventually donned llama wool and became a crusading vegetarian; John eventually wore scarlet. They were two gifted and eccentric sons of a failed banker, both shaped by the religious ferment of the nineteenth century, but moving in very different directions.
At fifteen, A. B. Simpson was also a convinced Protestant, formed as a Presbyterian and capable of arguing for covenant paedobaptism from within the Scottish high-church diaspora in Canada. Though he later became a historic premillennialist and was certainly affected by the eschatological currents of his time, including Darbyism, Simpson remained deeply resistant to postmillennial confidence in human progress. Educated at Knox College in Toronto, he had also been shaped by John Geddie, the missionary-minded Presbyterian pastor from Prince Edward Island, where Simpson was born. Geddie’s passion for missions eventually carried him to the foreign field, and years later he challenged the young Simpson to take up the torch of world evangelization.
After pastorates in Canada and the United States, Simpson arrived in New York City, where he welcomed the new waves of Italian immigrants and made his Presbyterian parishioners uncomfortable by insisting that the gospel belonged to them as much as to the respectable pew-holders. This missionary collision eventually helped push him beyond denominational limitations and toward the founding of the Christian and Missionary Alliance between 1884 and 1887.
Michele Nardi’s path was different but convergent. At seventeen, he fought with Giuseppe Garibaldi in the struggle for Italian unification, helping bring an end to the Roman Catholic Papal State’s domination of the Italian Peninsula. He received medals for bravery at the Battle of Mentana outside Rome while still barely more than a boy. At nineteen, he went to Florence to study classics, learned English, encountered foreigners, and began to imagine life in the New World. In Pennsylvania he became a labor leader among skilled Italian workers, demonstrating courage, flexibility, and a keen instinct for people. There he read the New Testament and was converted.
Simpson and Nardi’s Missio-Eschatology
A decade before Simpson and Nardi met, the Breccia di Roma — the breach of Rome in 1870 — had altered the political and religious imagination of the age. Nardi participated in the struggle that ended the temporal power of the Papacy. Simpson visited Rome shortly afterward and witnessed the aftermath of Romanism’s loss of political power. As Daryn Henry shows in A. B. Simpson and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, these events helped shape Simpson’s mission-fueled eschatology. He read the fall of papal temporal power not merely as a political event, but as a sign of transition in the providential ordering of history.
Nardi later followed this eschatological missionary impulse into action. He became a spiritual warrior among Italian immigrants and, under Simpson’s influence, an evangelist to his own people. When Nardi died in 1914 in Italy, Simpson remembered him with deep affection.
Simpson wrote widely, yet he left only one biography of another servant of the Lord. That book, Michele Nardi, The Italian Evangelist: His Life and Work, was published by Nardi’s widow, Blanche, one of Simpson’s early secretaries. This compilation became the basis for Francesco Toppi’s important Italian study, Michele Nardi: Il Moody d’Italia, published by ADI-Media in 2002. Toppi, a major Italian Pentecostal leader, saw in Nardi a pioneer of a movement combining holiness, evangelistic action, discernment, and evangelical unity. Leonardo De Chirico gave the book a positive review, noting its significance for Italian evangelical history.
Nardi attended Simpson’s Missionary Training Institute as one of Simpson’s early students and began ministry in his early thirties. People said of him, “There goes the man with the golden heart.” As the “Moody of Italy,” Nardi did not build schools, broadcasting networks, or publishing empires like D. L. Moody of Chicago. Simpson himself had a more enterprising and institutional genius. Nardi, though ordained as a Presbyterian, possessed a special relational touch. He moved among people, preached Christ, encouraged workers, and helped inspire other Italian-American gospel efforts. One of those influenced within this world was Luigi Francescon, who later went to Brazil and helped pioneer a major Italian Pentecostal movement.
Nardi’s importance is seen especially in the Italian evangelical and Pentecostal worlds that later published Simpson’s works. Simpson and Nardi became integral to the early history of Italian evangelical Pentecostalism, especially in its urgency to reach the newly formed Italian nation-state and the Italian diaspora. Many others after Nardi attempted to impact Italy enterprisingly. Yet Nardi’s distinctive mark was his genuine love for people and his direct concern for their spiritual need.
His gospel proclamation reflected the strengths and limits of his era. The emphasis was often word over deed, personal salvation over cultural transformation, and eschatological urgency over social engagement. That imbalance sometimes produced a hyper-spiritual emphasis that did not adequately challenge the Roman Catholic cultural dominance of Italy. Yet Nardi’s witness also embodied remarkable unity, as De Chirico observed in his review of Toppi’s work — no small thing in a regionally diverse modern nation-state.
Nardi’s return to Italy brought him into contact with the Waldensians, that ancient and long-persecuted stream of believers whose history fascinated Simpson and helped frame his idea of “the old faith.” Sadly, the Waldensian Church today struggles under the weight of ecumenical compromise, Catholic embrace, higher criticism, and theological liberalism — the same forces that decimated much of mainline Protestantism. Such compromise remains common among Italian denominations and continues to complicate the people’s understanding of why evangelical witness must stand clearly upon Scripture.
Simpson’s Fourfold Gospel and the Missionary Engine
Simpson’s Fourfold Gospel was more than a slogan, and it was certainly not a speculative Christology. It was a missionary proclamation: Jesus saves, sanctifies, heals, and is coming again as King. This message shaped twentieth-century evangelicalism and flowed into fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements, many of which later siphoned away early Alliance members. That transfer reveals a watershed moment. The global missionary vision often gave way to inward spiritual fascination, emotional sensationalism, tongues-centered boundary marking, and later Word of Faith distortions. A deeper life, yes — but too often without a corresponding vision of godly transformation and disciplined community.
Still, Simpson’s missionary force was inspired by spiritual need, the urgency of world evangelization, and the eschatological expectation of Christ’s return. He used the eschatological tools of his era, including certain dispensational categories and the Scofield Bible’s influence, even when he remained ambivalent toward more rigid systems. The Bible college movement he helped start was designed for missionary enterprise, though much of that movement has now faded. Today, the older eschatological drive for mission has often been replaced by holistic motivators, some of them necessary and good. Yet the division between dispensationalism and other eschatologies remains an open wound in Italian evangelicalism.
Simpson on Romanism
Simpson predicted the eventual Catholic ecumenical turn from the political fall of Rome he had witnessed after 1870. In his weekly missionary magazine and later writings, he offered sharp interpretations of Romanism, modern thought, higher criticism, and the social gospel. He published A. J. Gordon’s critique of Cardinal Newman and shared the common historicist Protestant reading of the Papal system as the “whore of Babylon” and Antichrist.
Simpson’s later works — The Coming One, The Old Faith, and The New Gospels: Special Addresses on Christianity and Modern Thought — are especially instructive. They show his mature suspicion of Romanism, his historicist premillennialism, and his concern that the “old faith” was being displaced by new gospels. For Simpson, Romanism stood alongside higher criticism and the social gospel as a competing religious system. His neighbor in Hell’s Kitchen, Walter Rauschenbusch, the German Baptist pastor associated with the social gospel, embodied for Simpson the danger of replacing evangelistic and eschatological urgency with political activism.
Yet Simpson should not be dismissed as a narrow polemicist. His suspicions have proved perceptive. He foresaw the spiritual anemia that can overtake a church captivated more by cultural prestige, political influence, or institutional sophistication than by the presence of Christ. Unfortunately, Simpson is often reduced to a devotional writer rather than treated as a theologian, missionary strategist, and cultural exegete. This is a deeply flawed mischaracterization. His devotional work was not divorced from theological depth; it was its outflow. Simpson wrote from the center of an integrated vision of the Fourfold Gospel, in which Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King offered not only personal renewal but cosmic and covenantal recalibration. He read the signs of his time with prophetic clarity, refusing to separate doctrine from mission or piety from eschatological urgency.
Simpson also understood Rome’s systemic function. He anticipated the Papal system’s later lamb-like transformation, which Vatican II would present in ecumenical form. In The Old Faith, he wrote: “In the Church of Rome, the movement is typified by men like Father Tyrrell, and he is nearer to the spirit of the New Theology than those Protestants who pin their faith to external standards of belief.” This statement shows remarkable contextual discernment. George Tyrrell, a Jesuit modernist, had been excommunicated for theological subjectivism only a few years before Simpson wrote. Simpson saw that philosophical subjectivism, modern theology, and Rome’s elastic institutional instincts could converge.
Vatican II later absorbed much of this subjectivist and ecumenical impulse, even as many evangelicals misread the event as simple renewal. Simpson saw a different danger: the loss of the old faith, the rejection of the Bible and the cross, and the blurring of the line between the church and the world. He perceived Romanism not merely as a set of doctrinal errors but as a usurped incarnational ecclesial system — a religious kingdom of this world.
For Simpson, the old faith precedes any so-called “deep church” return to Rome. It is deeper because it is simpler: Jesus Only.
David Wells’s essay “The Prophetic Theology of George Tyrrell” remains helpful for interpreting this modernist trajectory. It also provides a key background for Leonardo De Chirico’s analysis of Vatican II and its many dimensions.
Simpson’s Old Faith
Simpson’s “old faith” was not a romanticized return to medieval Christendom. It was the recognition of faithful biblical witness preserved amid ecclesial corruption. In The Coming One, reflecting on the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl, Simpson wrote:
“Both find their historical fulfillment in the faithful few who have ever existed in even the darkest ages of medieval corruption; the Albigenses and Paulicians, the Hussites and Moravians, the Waldenses and Vaudois, the Wycliffites and Huguenots, the Reformers and Covenanters, and the pure and true ones who have before and since dared to be faithful to God and His holy Word.”
This is Simpson’s trail-of-blood instinct: not institutional possession, but remnant fidelity. Newman’s dictum still rings with a certain truth, but it must be turned against his own conclusion. To be deep in history is not to cease to be Protestant. To be deep in history is to realize that Rome’s official canon is not the whole story. Simpson and the classically trained Nardi knew that victors write history. Rome has executed narrative control with unmatched precision — through political power, theological absorption, opposition to grassroots movements, and the quiet assimilation of dissent.
Newman’s “deep history” remains too shallow because it is too Western and too Roman. It mistakes the continuity of an institution for the continuity of biblical faith. The Reformation itself must also be examined honestly. Its political dimensions and later manifestations cannot be ignored. Yet it still represents a significant recovery. Simpson’s inclusion of the long and historically verifiable Anabaptist, Waldensian, and persecuted evangelical streams broadens the picture beyond the magisterial Reformers and their political patrons.
Here reductionism must be resisted. The Reformation recovered crucial truths, especially the authority and perspicuity of Scripture and the doctrine of justification. But these recoveries did not emerge in a vacuum. They were entangled with Christendom, political patronage, and modern rational systems. When perspicuity became detached from obedience, and when soteriology became a perch for theological possession rather than a summons to the obedience of faith, evangelicalism inherited new distortions: hyper-grace, antinomianism, personality cults, and propositional systems detached from living fidelity.
Rome cannot rightly accuse biblical evangelicals of fideism if we understand the true axioms: revelation, Scripture, Christ, mission, and the obedience of faith.
Modernity’s Hegemony
Modernity is the wrong destination of the Western canon when faith and reason are allowed to become a governing dichotomy. This false split still shapes theological imagination because modernity provides the conceptual apparatus by which even its opponents think. A more systemic approach is needed. We must act as archaeologists of eras and methods, tracing the genealogy of our evangelical traditions and discerning which elements are biblical and which are contextual artifacts that should not be repeated.
The old faith illustrates the continuity of biblical revelation and evangelical mission. It carries the creation mandate in a spiritual and missionary key, yet not in a way that abandons the world. Scripture itself vindicates this through the righteous ones of Hebrews 11, whose obedient and active faith bore contextual witness in their own times.
The doctrine of perspicuity, recovered and defined in the Reformation, must be ordered toward salvation and obedience, not merely toward doctrinal systems. The material principle is the gospel that leads to the obedience of faith. The formal principle is the justified life acting righteously under Scripture. This is neither hyper-spiritual nor antinomian, but a locally embodied witness joined to creational stewardship.
Are we intimidated by Rome’s hagiography and theological sophistication? We should not be. Beyond Greek philosophy and Roman natural law, Rome usurped revelation through blatant supersessionism, while Vatican II effectively opened the door to a form of easy-believism through its broadened ecclesial inclusivism. The so-called “mother church” has lost much of its credibility. Yet Protestant evangelicals must still wrestle with serious Catholic critiques of the Reformation’s unintended secular consequences. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation are worth pondering, but they require qualification and critique.
Modernity’s reach must be discerned and much of it jettisoned. When the Reformation as an event becomes entangled with political posturing over witness, an unbiblical element has emerged. Rome must not define the Western canon. Yet evangelicals convinced of the Reformation must also reckon with the hegemony of the West and the ways its categories continue to shape our thinking.
Conclusion
Theological imagination must submit to the obedience of faith as the true analogy of faith. Scripture’s revelation and mission — the cultivated olive tree — must govern our reading more deeply than dispensational systems, covenantal abstractions, or metaphysical constructs. All our traditions still “see through a glass darkly.” Simpson’s old faith was not a simplification. It was a spiritual revival of faith and action.
The old faith is not reactionary. Newman’s doctrine of development became a slippery slope into theological nationalism, moving from Anglicanism into Rome and finally being absorbed into syncretized Christendom. Simpson and Nardi show another path. Their way was not retreat into Rome’s managed memory, but forward-looking contextualization rooted in biblical revelation, missionary urgency, and the task entrusted to God’s oracle keepers, the Jews.
Simpson and Nardi’s missio-eschatology was not without imbalance. Its spiritual urgency could underplay cultural transformation. Its later heirs often fragmented into dispensational speculation, Pentecostal sensationalism, and fundamentalist narrowing. Yet at its best, their vision helped recover the gospel as proclamation and action, not escape. Simpson founded not merely a denomination but a global movement, one that influenced many others because it announced Christ himself: Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King.
May we prayerfully and intelligently reinforce that gospel proclamation movement: the announcement of the end of ungodliness to all peoples by grace, through the obedience of faith, according to the infallible and inerrant Scriptures that teach us our Lord Jesus Christ. And may we plant vibrant communities of local witness until “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”
