Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology
242
Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781602581777 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Baylor University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2004 |
| Pages: | 242 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Contested Christianity
The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology
By Timothy Larsen
Baylor University Press
Copyright © 2004 Baylor University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-918954-93-0
Chapter One
Gender Egalitarianism The Baptist Women of the Mill Yard Church
The Mill Yard Seventh Day Baptist Church, founded in the seventeenth century, had by the 1820s dwindled to a group of just seven women without a minister. One of their seventeenth-century forebears, Joseph Davis, a wealthy linen draper, had established a charitable trust for the purpose of perpetually supporting the cause of Seventh Day Baptists. He had entrusted to it the Mill Yard property in London, which gave the congregation its name, and the task of paying the minister's salary, as well as listing some other suitable beneficiaries. In 1830, however, the trustees at that time resolved to give the property to another congregation on the grounds that the historic Mill Yard church had ceased to exist. The members (all women) protested that they were a true church, and all parties agreed to take the case for arbitration to the General Body of Protestant Dissenting Ministers-a ministerial society comprised of the bulk of the Independent, Baptist, and Presbyterian ministers in London and its vicinity. Thus, for several days in 1831, many of the most prominent Nonconformist ministers of that era gave themselves to passing judgment on the theological legitimacy or otherwise of the unusual situation arrived at by a remnant of this obscure religious group, providing us with a unique opportunity to discover Dissenting attitudes during that period toward the relationship between gender and the very nature of the church itself.
Curiously, those who have written the history of the Mill Yard church have uniformly failed to mention that there was a period in its history when it continued to function in the absence of male members and the case that this provoked. Indeed, the account given by the noted Baptist historian, W. T. Whitley, shows signs that he consciously chose to obscure the stand these women took. F. H. A. Micklewright, who explored the church's history in considerable detail, also gives the impression that the congregation did not gather for worship during the period when there were no male members, as does the sketch of the congregation's history recently made by Bryan Ball, although it seems certain he is simply unaware of these events.
It is particularly surprising that historians of the congregation would fail to record the case of these seven women because accounts of it have been included in other published sources, beginning with the biography of Josiah Conder. Conder, the editor of the Eclectic Review, represented the trustees before the General Body. His lifetime of work as a writer and editor provided a great literary service to Nonconformity, which offered ample material for a sketch of his life; and his advocacy on behalf of the Joseph Davis trustees was in no sense a significant event in Conder's career. It would appear that his biographer (who was also his son) took five pages to recount the case merely to bring some light diversion into his tale. His son tells us that when Conder was preparing the case, he happened to meet a Baptist minister whom he probed on his opinions of the issues at stake by using as his opening gambit the question: "How many sisters make a brotherhood?" The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine took the uncharacteristic step of reprinting several pages of this biography, the account of the Mill Yard case. One imagines that the magazine, which made few concessions to the human need for light diversion, was making a subtle point on the defects of Congregational polity as a small contribution to the ongoing debate on theories of church government. Nevertheless, others seemed to agree with the apparent view of Conder's son that the Old Dissent was large and powerful and secure enough by the mid-Victorian era to be able to afford to laugh at an anomaly of its own making. The Independent John Stoughton also recounted the case in his history of Dissent during these decades (citing Conder's biography), although it is doubtful that he would have mentioned the Seventh Day Baptists at all, were he not tempted to amuse his readers with this curious episode. So it is possible for us to be pointed toward the primary sources that provide a fresh view of attitudes toward gender and Nonconformity during this period because the Mill Yard women have been allowed to remain visible in the published historical record after all-albeit as jesters at the Dissenting feast.
Seventh Day Baptists officially distinguish themselves from other Baptists only by their belief that it is God's will that Saturday rather than Sunday be set apart for worship. The willingness to break from the mainstream of Nonconformist thought that this necessarily implied, however, seems to have freed them throughout their history to adopt other minority positions as well: some Seventh Day Baptists of the Civil War generation had links with the Fifth Monarchists. During part of the Victorian era, the Mill Yard church adopted Unitarian beliefs, and an early twentieth-century minister of that congregation combined his Seventh Day convictions with being a zealous antismoker, vegetarian, Freemason, and Orangeman. While a certain temperament undoubtedly revels in this kind of defiant witness, after the heady days surrounding the Cromwellian era, fewer and fewer people were willing to do so for the cause of the Seventh Day Sabbath. By the 1810s the Mill Yard minister, William Slater, was the sole male member of the church; his three nephews, including Joseph Slater, Jr., who was the leader of the trustees, had all "apostatized" and gone to the Church of England. William Slater died in 1819. Joseph Slater, Jr., was now the sole surviving trustee, and he gained permission from the Court of Chancery to appoint some new trustees of his own choosing, none of whom were Seventh Day Baptists. Reading between the lines, one senses that perhaps public decisions might have been colored by a personal squabble within the Slater family. Nevertheless, the new trustees ensured that the Mill Yard building, which had fallen into disuse, was repaired and reopened; and they undertook to find a suitable minister for the little flock. Thomas Russell, an Independent minister, agreed to spend his Saturdays supplying the Mill Yard pulpit in the interim, beginning in March 1826.
The church belonged to the atrophied General wing of the Baptist family, and the task of finding an Arminian Baptist who believed that the Christian Sabbath was Saturday proved a daunting one for the trustees. There was only one other Seventh Day congregation in all of London and it was small and Calvinist. When its minister died in 1826, this congregation called John Shenston to replace him and thereby deprived the trustees of their one reasonably promising applicant. Another candidate, Dr. Whitehead, applied in the summer of 1827, but it emerged through further communication that he was a Calvinist. Nevertheless, the trustees agreed to allow him a trial series of five sermons.
The result was that the existing members intimated to the trustees an entire disapprobation of the matter and manner of Dr. W-'s addresses from the pulpit, and a determination not to attend on any repetition of them.
There followed another couple of years of Russell's ministry. Two of the seven members from the time of William Slater had now died, and another had withdrawn from the congregation; but the clear leader of the faithful remnant, Elizabeth Slater, the minister's widow, had shored up the ranks by having those remaining receive into membership three of her daughters, restoring their number to seven.
In short, the congregation was comprised largely of Slaters, as indeed it was even during the final years of William Slater's ministry. His great-grandfather, Thomas Slater, had been one of the original trustees, and his grandfather and father had each in turn inherited this responsibility, passing it on to him. In terms of social position, William Slater was a Dissenting minister in a small and peculiar sect who supplemented his income by working as a schoolmaster. The couple lived in a house that was part of the Mill Yard property, and Elizabeth Slater continued to live there, together with their three daughters, after her husband's death. She noted in a letter to the trustees that it had been agreed in 1823 that a future Mill Yard minister could be paid a salary of u70 per annum. This figure gives some indication of the amount of income her husband might have earned from his ministerial dutes. One of the daughters, Harriot, eventually married an Assistant Keeper of the Public Records who was also a Seventh Day Baptist minister. His income from his secular occupation was u260 per annum in 1844.15 No other occupations or incomes related to the Slaters have been discovered. Nevertheless, these details do paint a likely picture of the family's social position: it seems probable that men from lower middle-class occupations such as schoolmasters, shopkeepers, or small masters would have been considered suitable matches for the other daughters.
In the fight that was to come, Elizabeth Slater proved to be a formidable opponent. Her actions are a telling case study of the way in which some women from this period might have been able to use the very roles allotted to them by contemporary notions of femininity as a base from which to extend their influence into spheres usually reserved for the male gender. In her case, the duty of a mother to see that her children are established in the faith was harnessed to affect chapel politics and a legal dispute. The supposed greater religious sensitivity of the female sex was arguably expanded into a public championing of these women's spiritual fidelity against the dulled spirituality (from the perspective of Dissent) of the leader of the trustees, and the derived status of a minister's wife was transmuted into an independent authority once she became a minister's widow.
Thus the matter stood when in June 1830 the trustees resolved to hand the property over to Shenston and his congregation of Calvinist Seventh Day Baptists. This decision was explained to the General Body in this way:
These Resolutions were adopted under an opinion [...] entertained by the trustees, that in the absence of any indications of revival, after a trial of five years, it was impossible to consider the remaining members of the Mill Yard as constituting a church, or even the nucleus of a church [...].
Elizabeth Slater responded defiantly, writing to the trustees:
How very painful it will be to me and my family to be compelled to become hearers of Mr. Shenston, whose preaching would, we feel, be unprofitable to us all. It is, I submit to you, clearly contrary to all Dissenting principles to force any minister upon a congregation; for, although small in numbers, a congregation and church we still form.
There followed a series of letters between the two parties and the establishment of Shenston's congregation in the property, before the persistent complaints of Elizabeth Slater and Thomas Russell led to an agreement to submit the matter for a binding judgment to the General Body. The ministers agreed to determine the answer to the question: "Whether the existing members of Mill-Yard Sabbatarian meeting are or are not a church, with the power of choosing a pastor?"
The General Body called a special series of meetings in order to hear the case, convening for a full day once a week for three consecutive weeks. Dr. John Pye Smith, Principal of Homerton College and one of the most respected Nonconformist theologians of his day, chaired the meetings. There were about fifty ministers present at each of the sittings, including such notable figures as the scholarly Independents Robert Halley and Robert Vaughan, the philanthropist Andrew Reed, the popular preacher Thomas Binney, and Baptist worthies such as Dr. F. A. Cox and the former president of Stepney Academy (now Regent's Park College, Oxford), Dr. William Newman. Several provincial ministers were also invited to add their weight and wisdom to the proceedings. Josiah Conder, who in the following year would become the editor of the Patriot newspaper, had consented to plead the case of the trustees. Thomas Russell, whose own literary efforts-already achieved by this time-would secure him an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, represented the Mill Yard seven. It is hard to imagine a gathering more qualified to articulate the mature theological convictions of English Dissenters during this period.
The case turned on the question of whether or not the male gender was essential to the nature of a true church. In order to explain in brief why the women could not be considered a church, Conder prepared twelve "Reasons in the Negative," six of which explicitly related to the exclusively female nature of the group, and two more were preparatory points for those six. The first point cited an established definition of a local church as a group consisting of "a competent number of visible saints." He then proceeded in subsequent points to argue that an entirely female group is inherently a collection of saints of the incompetent variety. The reason this conclusion was sound, according to Conder, was that it was the custom in Dissenting churches to reserve for males alone crucial functions and activities, such as the diaconate and judging disputes between members. The latter function was particularly significant in his argument. In effect, he defined a viable church as enough saints to have a proper fight and, when looked at in this light, it was quite clear why men were essential. From this train of thought he was led to the conclusion that "no particular society can be possessed of entire competency, that consists of fewer than from six to ten male members." He also used the small number of people in the congregation as a point against them, but this was only a side argument for, according to Conder, "no number of women could themselves form a quorum, or an ecclesiastical assembly."
Russell, on the other hand, in his "Reasons in the Affirmative," argued that the congregation was simply functioning according to Congregational principles of church government as it always had done. (Baptists and Independents both adopted this form of polity. In this chapter the term "Congregationalism" and variations thereof are not used in their standard sense to designate the Independent denomination, but instead refer to this pattern of church government and all those who adhere to it.) Russell noted that although it might be true that church officers must be male: "officers are not necessary to the existence of a church. The church is before them; appoints them; and can dismiss them." Moreover, it was spurious to claim that a congregation must have within its own ranks individuals eligible to be officeholders for it was far more typical for a congregation to call a minister who belonged to another church and: "This course can as readily be adopted by a church of females only, as by one of both sexes." Conder's argument allowed for a congregation to be completely deprived of female members without losing anything essential to the nature of a church; in his theological vision only the male gender was indispensable to the existence of a local church. Russell, however, claimed that the nature of the church was not gender dependent: "the abstraction of any given number of males or females, or of the whole of the one or the other, cannot deprive the church of its being [...]."
The Mill Yard case served to lay bare the radical gender implications of Congregational ecclesiology. Maintaining that the government of the church resides with its membership, it was natural enough that some Congregational churches would allow women to vote along with the men when choosing a minister, as no one would deny that women may be members. There was, however, no consensus on this. The eighteenth-century Baptist theologian, Daniel Turner, in his A Compendium of Social Religion (1758), argued that female members should not be allowed to vote on the grounds that this power "seems to imply rule" and that this "appears to me inconsistent with their state of subjection." The eminent Independent minister, John Angell James, however, in his Christian Fellowship (1822), listed the reasons why it could be considered appropriate for women to vote, answering Turner explicitly point by point. Nevertheless, this was not the practice of the congregation that James served, the Carr's Lane Church in Birmingham. The next occasion for the members of this congregation to vote on a minister came in 1854, fifty years after they had voted to receive James. This vote, which led to R. W. Dale, being invited to a copastorate alongside their elderly minister, was one in which only men could participate, although 370 of the silenced and disenfranchised women found an ingenious way to express their opinion by signing a memorial approving of Dale's ministry. The first issue of the Baptist Magazine (1809) included a letter asking whether or not it was proper for women members to vote. It provoked a reply explaining at length why it was indeed appropriate. It also chided those in the correspondent's state of confusion for being so ignorant of "proper principles of dissent" and the "nature [...] of a Christian Church" as not to know why it was proper for women to vote.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Contested Christianity by Timothy Larsen Copyright © 2004 by Baylor University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
IntroductionPart One: The Social Contexts of a Private Faith
1. Gender Egalitarianism: The Baptist Women of the Mill Yard Church
2. Religious Respectability: The Reverend Newman Hall's Divorce Case
3. Spiritual Exploration: Thomas Cook, Victorian Tourists, and the Holy Land
Part Two: The Social Contexts of a Contested Faith
4. Biblical Criticism and the Crisis of Belief: D. F. Strauss's Leben Jesus in Britain
5. Biblical Criticism and the Desire for Reform: Bishop Colenso on the Pentateuch
6. Biblical Criticism and Anti-Christian Rhetoric: Joseph Barker and the Case against the Bible
7. Biblical Criticism and the Secularist Mentality: Charles Bradlaugh and the Case against Miracles
8. The Appeal of Victorian Apologetics: Thomas Cooper and the Case for Christian Orthodoxy
Part Three: The Politics of Free Church Polity
9. Free Church Ecclesiology: Lay Representation and the Methodist New Connexion
10. Free Church Politics and the Gathered Church: The Evangelical Case for Religious Pluralism
11. Free Church Politics and Contested Memories: The Historical Case for Disestablishment
12. Free Church Politics and the British Empire: The Baptist Case against Jamaica's Colonial Governor
Conclusion
Notes