The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735-1811
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The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735-1811
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783165056 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 307 |
| File size: | 658 KB |
About the Author
Dr Eryn Mant White is Senior Lecturer in Welsh History at Aberystwyth University.
Dr Boyd Stanley Schlenther received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, and is Emeritus Reader in History at Aberystwyth University.
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The Elect Methodists
Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735â"1811
By David Ceri Jones, Boyd Stanley Schlenther, Eryn Mant White
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2012 David Ceri Jones, Boyd Stanley Schlenther and Eryn Mant WhiteAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7083-2502-5
CHAPTER 1
'A sweet prospect' for the gospel: the origins of Calvinistic Methodism, 1735–1738
Calvinistic Methodism had its roots in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Historians increasingly regard the Reformation as a long process drawn out over three centuries. The final phases of this process began with the ending of confessional conflict at the conclusion of the Thirty Years War in 1648. The signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in that year set the pattern for the future: neither Roman Catholicism nor Protestantism would prevail. The easing of religious tensions, as states gave up on the policy of creating comprehensive churches within their territories, created space for alternative strains of popular spirituality to develop, pieties that tended to be more individualistic and experiential, stressing the cultivation of an inward religion of the heart. These included Catholic Jansenism, Hasidic Judaism, Lutheran Pietism and Evangelicalism, one of whose offshoots was, of course, Methodism; and these groups tended to encourage what has been called religious 'enthusiasm'. What united them was a desire for a more emotive and practical spirituality: one that preferred action over passivity, feeling over intellect, and informality over order, and where the clergy encouraged lay participation. Each new tradition, in its own way, endeavoured to bring about religious renewal through persuasive rather than the more coercive state-driven methods of Christianisation that had been customary.
In the British Isles, strategies aimed at securing total confessional uniformity can be seen to have been gradually abandoned during the seventeenth century. The religious conflicts that had resulted in the execution of a king in 1649 and the attempt at godly reformation by the Puritans during the 1650s had been an abject failure. The restoration of the monarchy, and with it the established Church of England, largely settled religious questions; a Protestant succession was guaranteed in 1689, as was the hegemony of the Anglican Established Church. But, significantly, its monopolistic hold on the religious life of the nation had certainly been loosened: a measure of toleration was granted to the Dissenters, a move which made confessional pluralism the order of the day. The decades between 1660 and the beginning of the evangelical revival in the mid-1730s have often been seen by historians as a religiously quiescent period. In comparison with the turmoil of the Civil War and Interregnum this may certainly be so, but these were decades of slow gestation, when important – if sometimes subtle – changes in the religious landscape of England and Wales took place; they were developments which created the context necessary for the emergence of the Calvinistic Methodist movement.
It was no accident that both George Whitefield and Howel Harris chose to define themselves deliberately as Calvinists. They were proud of the fact that they stood within a Calvinist tradition that, in Harris's words, stretched back to the 'good old orthodox Reformers and Puritans'. But the spirituality and vigour of the contemporary descendants of the Puritans, the Dissenters, was a pale reflection of what had been normative in the seventeenth century. The persecution that had accompanied the re-establishment of the Church of England in the early 1660s had taken its toll, and many Dissenting congregations emerged numerically small and inward looking, preoccupied with maintaining their doctrinal purity and defending their legal status. Many of them had also become enmeshed in constricting theological debates over the nature of genuine Calvinism, a strict and increasingly popular version of which elevated predestination to such an extent that evangelism was rendered superfluous. But there were also flickers of life and vitality and evidence that attitudes within the Dissenting community were becoming more fluid. Both Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge had warned against the dangers of theological precisionism and the application of detailed doctrinal tests which tended to alienate genuine Christians from one another. Instead, they stressed the importance of what they called 'heart-work', evangelical conversion, the cultivation of the life of the soul and the necessity of affirmative spiritual nurture. These emphases were supported by a growing body of affordable and accessible devotional literature, featuring such writers as Joseph Alleine, John Bunyan and Richard Baxter himself, as well as a commitment to preaching specifically for conversions among some of the more missionary-minded members of the Dissenting community.
With the hegemony of strict predestinarian Calvinism being challenged in some quarters, a more moderate version which attempted to square the sovereignty of God with human accountability was gaining in influence. In provincial Baptist circles, the steady stream of ministers produced by the Bristol Baptist Academy under the leadership of Bernard Foskett were committed to an outward-looking evangelical Calvinism, which gave priority to evangelistic preaching and experiential piety. It is surely no coincidence that some of Howel Harris's earliest supporters included some of the many Welsh Baptist ministers who had passed through the doors of the Bristol Academy. Their priorities were reflected in what remained of the Calvinist Internationale, a network of correspondence which brought together experiential Calvinist ministers in the American colonies, Scotland, Ireland and England. When news of the outbreak of a revival at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734 first reached the British Isles, it was this network that became the vehicle for the transmission of such apparently surprising news. For Whitefield and the Calvinistic Methodists it was this embryonic tradition of evangelical Calvinism, with its twin emphases on conversion and heart nurture, which proved to be so compelling. Indeed, in many respects, Whitefield was to be the most energetic champion of evangelical Calvinism in the eighteenth century, with the result that by the end of his life it had become the dominant expression of Reformed orthodoxy favoured by Calvinist-inclined evangelicals almost everywhere.
In a sense these changes in emphasis within the Reformed tradition in England can be seen as an outworking of some of the insights of Lutheran Pietism. Recent scholarship has shown how intimately the religious life of the British Isles was connected to Continental Europe during this period. W. R. Ward has shown how many of the features of what later became Methodism can actually be traced directly to central and southern Germany during the later part of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth century. Pietists like Philip Jakob Spener, whose Pia Desideria (1675) had a genuinely international impact, stressed such things as a return to the scriptures, lay participation in small fellowship groups and the living of lives of active and practical godliness. Among groups like the Huguenots, the Salzburghers and later the Moravians, field preaching, camp meetings and periodic community revivals became common. When groups such as these came under persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, many of them were forced to become religious refugees. Their dispersal in the early decades of the eighteenth century led to the extensive dissemination of their ideas and practices, as many of them settled in the southern American colonies, stopping off en route in England.
Pietistic ideas can first be detected in England during the second half of the seventeenth century largely among Anglicans whose religious monopoly in England, while still impressive, had nonetheless been curtailed in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. Taking their lead from August Herman Francke's pietist reformation at Hallé, organisations like the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Society for the Reformation of Manners and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, as well as a large number of private devotional societies, tried to raise the spiritual temperature through voluntaristic means like education, the publication of devotional literature and the inculcation of godly standards of behaviour. At Oxford, the 'Holy Club', formed in 1729 by Charles Wesley, and whose members included John Wesley and George Whitefield, was merely another expression of this desire to recapture the spirit of primitive Christianity through a rigorous lifestyle of ascetic piety and good works.
However, it was the Moravians, who had first arrived in England in 1728 basking in the warm glow of a revival that had taken place on Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf's estate at Herrnhut in Saxony the previous year, who provided the most attractive and compelling form of heart religion. The two strands of pietism, Lutheran and evangelical, were to come together in a remarkable way in 1735. The Holy Club had run its natural course; both John and Charles Wesley, as well as George Whitefield, had found its regimen of devotional exercises, self-denial and sacrificial charity overly burdensome, leaving a legacy of disillusionment and despair. The Moravians taught many of the members of Holy Club about the nature of genuine saving faith, which began a process by which many of them moved towards more decided evangelical convictions.
However, by this stage there were already inklings of much more exciting times ahead. Griffith Jones, who became rector of Llanddowror, Carmarthenshire, in 1716, had for seven years engaged in extensive field preaching. He had witnessed dramatic conversions among many who flocked to these revivals as well as among parishioners in his previous parishes, perhaps especially at Laugharne. Refusing to be confined by parish boundaries, he had engaged in a widespread itinerant ministry throughout south-west Wales with considerable effect. In the American colonies, according to the calculations of Michael J. Crawford, there had been at least fifteen local religious awakenings in New England between 1712 and 1732. At the same time, Theodore Frelinghuysen had been stoking the fires of revival among Dutch and English settlers in New Jersey since 1720. The expulsion of 25,000 Salzburgher Protestants in 1731, on account of their aggressive open-air evangelism, seemed to intimate a decisive advance for the kingdom of God. The principles and techniques of revivalism were being honed and perfected well before the beginning of Methodism.
Attempts to analyse the origins of Methodism have preoccupied historians ever since Elie Halévy published his essay 'La naissance du Methodisme en Angleterre' ('The birth of Methodism in England') in 1906. Much of this work has focused predominantly on the birth of Wesleyan Methodism. While Calvinistic Methodism certainly drew from the same tap-roots as what was to become its much larger Wesleyan counterpart, its own origins reflected the stronger rooting of its leaders in the Reformed tradition. While the pietist stress on heart religion was certainly influential and Anglican High Church spirituality was important in jolting the revivalists out of a dependence on legalistic religion, it was the moderate Calvinist tradition, emerging in England after the Restoration, that can be said to have had the most decisive impact. When the individuals who became the leaders of Calvinistic Methodism resolved their spiritual odysseys in the experience of conversion or the new birth, it was this moderate Calvinism to which they turned: to them it gave coherence and sense to the religious upheavals they had faced.
Beginnings of revival in England
The actual beginnings of Calvinistic Methodism in England are overshadowed by the powerful narrative of Methodist origins refined by John Wesley and perpetuated by subsequent generations of Methodist historians. This narrative centres on the experience of John Wesley himself, locating the origins of English Methodism at Aldersgate Street during May 1738. Until 1740 English Methodism consisted of a fairly unified network of societies in a number of locations throughout England, with its headquarters at a Moravian-dominated society which met at Fetter Lane in London. From their arrival in England, the Moravians had contented themselves with working through the London religious societies, until Zinzendorf established a small society for German émigrés during his visit to London in 1737. This society was the genesis of the Fetter Lane Society, which came into existence after Peter Börder's arrival in England the following year. Böhler struck up a friendship with James Hutton, a London bookseller, who had been holding a society in his home, and the two agreed to turn Hutton's society into a formal Moravian-style band. Through his connections with former Oxford Methodists, Hutton developed the society into a rallying point for many of the most religiously earnest who happened to find themselves in London during the later 1730s.
Among these was a newly ordained Anglican clergyman, George Whitefield. Whitefield had become an Oxford Methodist after joining the Holy Club in 1733; he was the first of its members to reach settled evangelical convictions. Having almost killed himself by the strict regimen of holy exercises he followed during these years, Whitefield experienced an evangelical conversion while still at Oxford in 1735. He quickly became the leader of the Holy Club in 1736, after the Wesley brothers' decision to go to the newly established Georgia colony as missionaries. Whitefield was ordained deacon at Gloucester Cathedral in June 1736 and almost immediately preached his first sermon at St Mary de Crypt in the city, reportedly driving fifteen people mad in the process. The following month he deputised for his friend, and former Holy Club member, Thomas Broughton, at the chapel in the Tower of London. The predominant theme of his sermons was the new birth, but it was Whitefield's youth (he quickly acquired the sobriquet 'the boy parson'), which attracted most hearers. For the next two months Whitefield relentlessly preached the new birth at the Tower, gaining both large audiences and ever greater notoriety. For much of the next eighteenth months, he deputised for a number of clergy friends, first in Hampshire and then Gloucestershire, but his decision to follow the Wesley brothers to Georgia towards the end of 1736 increased his public profile still further as pulpits were thrown open to him to preach charity sermons on behalf of the new colony.
Despite the initial goodwill of the London clergy, Whitefield did not reciprocate, and his sermons during this period were filled with denunciations of those clergy who failed to preach a full-throated evangelical message. The effect of the sermons was quite startling; allowing for his youthful exaggeration and hyperbole, Whitefield's Journals bristle with such observations as: 'The doctrine of the new birth ... made its way like lightning into the hearers' consciences.' Much of his time during these months was taken up with responding to invitations to preach and talking with ever increasing numbers of people 'under soul concern', a pattern that was to mark much of the remainder of his life. The fame which he attracted – and he was preaching in various locations in London at least ten times a week – resulted in the publication of his first sermon, The Nature and Necessity of our New Birth in Christ Jesus, in Order to Salvation (1737). Recent biographers of Whitefield have attempted to understand his sensational impact during these months. Whitefield himself, of course, attributed his success solely to the superintendence of God's providence, but there were also other reasons why his preaching had the impact it did. Harry Stout has argued that Whitefield's sermons were 'dramatic scripts'; when Whitefield preached he performed, his sermons resembling theatrical events rather than theological or devotional homilies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Elect Methodists by David Ceri Jones, Boyd Stanley Schlenther, Eryn Mant White. Copyright © 2012 David Ceri Jones, Boyd Stanley Schlenther and Eryn Mant White. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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