Evangelicalism, Piety and Politics

The Selected Writings of W.R. Ward

Andrew Chandler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317138570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

W.R. Ward was one of the most influential historians of modern religion to be found at work in Britain during the twentieth century. Across fifty years his writings provoked a major reconsideration by historians of the significance of religion in society and its importance in the contexts of political, cultural and intellectual life. Ward was, above all, an international scholar who did much to repudiate any settled understanding that religious history existed in merely national categories. In particular, he showed how much British and American religion owed to the insights of Continental European thought and experience. This book presents many of Ward's most important articles and gives a picture of the character, and extraordinary breadth, of his work. Embracing studies of John Wesley and the development of Methodism at large, the ambitions of Evangelicals in an age of international mission, the place of mysticism in evolution of Protestantism and the relations of churches and secular powers in the twentieth century, Andrew Chandler concludes that it was in such scholarship that Ward 'quietly recast the picture that we have of the past and drew our attention towards a far greater, more difficult and more interesting, landscape.'

PART I
The Realm of the Imagination

Chapter 1
The Making of the Evangelical Mind (2004)

The most quoted sentence in the whole historiography of evangelicalism is Professor Bebbington’s magisterial definition of what evangelicalism is, or at any rate was to start with:¹ ‘There are four qualities that have been the special marks of Evangelical religion: conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Together they form a quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of Evangelicalism’. This formula has been of great service to otherwise hapless students as a help to distinguish eighteenth-century evangelicals from other religious activists, and, together with the date to which it was attached, the decade of the 1730s, clearly underlies the latest (excellent) contribution to the global history of the evangelical movement.² There are, however insuperable difficulties with both the definition and the dates. All Christians are in some sense Biblicist; the difference between the early evangelicals and the Orthodox comes out in the difference between the publishing history of Wittenberg and Halle; the former believed that the Bible was a guarantee of Protestant Orthodoxy, the latter clearly intended to put a copy of the scriptures in the hands of every literate Christian, and to apply systems of interpretation to them unheard of by modern evangelicals. Conversionism had a long history in the Puritan literature, and in the eighteenth century was deeply affected by the experience and propaganda of August Hermann Francke. Neither conversionism nor activism as drafted by Bebbington offer the early evangelicals the defence they knew they needed against the Orthodox reproach that they substituted piety for faith and fanaticism for reason. On the score of dates, there was an evangelical kinship recognized across the world well before 1730; what happened in the 1730s was not even the beginning of revivalism, but the beginning of its continuous history. But, of course, though most Protestant revivalists have been evangelicals, only a minority of evangelicals have ever been revivalists. Finally, no account of what evangelicals stood for will suffice without some reference to the things they would not stand for, and this takes the discussion outside the field of theology and religion as at present understood. The rest of this chapter attempts to elucidate these questions so far as is possible within the limits of space.

Evangelicalism in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term and Lutheran Pietism have sufficient in common to be considered as part of the same spiritual ‘mix’, notwithstanding that the former came off a mainly Reformed root.³ There are two asymmetric ways of approaching the origins of Lutheran Pietism. The first is from the widespread recognition that the Lutheran world at the beginning of the seventeenth century was faced by a ‘crisis of piety’⁴ even before it faced a massive political crisis. It was the case that Catholics were analysing their blues to much the same effect. Both parties perceived their troubles in a failure in the flock to anchor the truths purveyed in sermon and text in the heart, and both prescribed the moving of meditation out of the monastic cell into the private chamber; there was much exchange of devotional texts between the two sides. A characteristic as well as dominant figure in all this was Johann Arndt. His Four (later Six) Books of True Christianity first published in 1605 went through 95 editions up to 1740, including 6 in Latin, 5 in English, 4 in Dutch, 3 each in Danish, Swedish and French, 2 in Czech and one each in Russian and Icelandic. Clearly Arndt was read and prized well outside the German and Lutheran area, and oddly enough achieved his maximum rate of republication in it during the decade 1730–40, the decade in which Anglo-Saxon revivalism began its continuous history.⁵ A publishing success of this magnitude shows clearly enough that Arndt was the possession of no one church party among his successors, and certainly did not constitute the Pietist party which emerged in the late seventeenth century as the battered remnant of a great conflict with the Orthodox. But the Pietists laid a very strong claim to his heritage. All the Pietist leaders except Francke wrote introductions to Arndt editions, Spener’s principal programmatic work, the Pia Desideria, appeared as a preface to Arndt’s lectionary sermons, and in Francke’s parish of Glaucha outside the walls of Halle, Arndt was regularly read and preached on.⁶ In Wurttemberg where Pietism penetrated more deeply than anywhere else Arndt was highly prized, and it was reported that at Neckargroningen in 1736 there were more Arndts than Bibles.⁷ Like others, the Pietists used Arndt in their own way; what made him important to them was his resolute turning away from doctrinal polemic to improvement of life. Moreover to a Protestant public for whom sufficient devotional literature had never been provided, Arndt reopened the door to the mystical literature of the past. He reedited the Theologia Deutsch several times and translated the Imitation of Christ. True Christianity became the standard work of Lutheran spirituality and provided a Lutheran editing for a rich vein of medieval mysticism. The power of these sources was reinforced by his own reputation for sanctity – his face in prayer was said to be bathed in brilliant light like that of Moses and the saints – and by his other best-seller, the Little Paradise Garden (1612) in which he sought to establish a school of prayer.⁸ Arndt was by no means the only writer of this kind, but he was the most important, and the market which he revealed drew in resources from elsewhere, including that great flood of Puritan practical divinity memorably described by Hans Leube as ‘the victory march of English devotional literature in the Lutheran church’.⁹ And long before Bunyan’s pilgrim progressed triumphantly through north Germany and Scandinavia, the medieval mysticism mediated by Arndt and the puritan tracts had become an essential part of the evangelical makeup.

Arndt’s notion of devotional reading was a good deal broader than would be favoured by spiritual writers today. Arndt’s first three books of True Christianity correspond to the classical stages of the mystical way, the via purgative, the via illiminativa and the via unitiva. Book Four, however, was entirely different. Here Arndt confesses himself to the doctrines of Paracelsus, perceives that the light which is in every man signifies the art of magic and considers the Kabbala, the Jewish medieval mysticism, to be a great effort to recover the hidden mysteries under the letter of scripture. ‘Where magic ceases [he writes] the Kabbala begins, and where the Kabbala ceases, there true theology and the prophetic spirit begins’. Arndt had indeed committed himself to a Hermetic kind of hierarchy of symbols, and laid nature and history under contribution long before Book Four. Although all the activities of the stars were subject to the rule of faith and prayer, ‘the great stars often bring great changes. Sicknesses come about for the most part through the stars. It would be foolish to reject the workings of the heavenly bodies on man for the whole firmament is in man’.¹⁰

Arndt was in no way singular in perceiving a close connection between theology and medicine which was then a synoptic rather than an analytical study. Indeed Arndt’s own view of the ‘crisis of piety’ was that it flowed from the severance of polemical theology and practical piety.¹¹ His own model was Theophrastus von Hohenheim, professionally known as Paracelsus (1493 or ’94 to 1541), a doctor Swiss-born and Ferrara-trained, who never left the Catholic Church, and who, starting from the concepts of macrocosm and microcosm, the unity of the universe and its reflection in the small world of man, devoted himself to the arcane cures, and went back to the earliest Greek philosophy. His achievement was to discover a fifth arcane cure, the quinta essentia which was in all growth and life.¹² The vitalism which characterized the whole alchemical tradition was a clear attraction to Arndt and the Pietists of a later generation who were seeking to recover religious vitality, but it had other virtues as well. It seemed, as it seemed much later to Newton, to be an answer to the weaknesses of a mechanical or materialist philosophy. Atoms in constant motion might influence each other like billiard balls, but could hardly cohere, or combine to produce the immense variety of living forms of the real world, or the apparently spontaneous processes of fermentation, putrefaction and so forth. And the light that was God’s creative agent in the beginning could be identified with the active alchemical agent, and by typological exegesis of the scriptures with Christ himself. The mutual reinforcement apparently provided by Scripture, ancient mythology, the desire for a universal science and the longing for the millennium gave this frame of mind remarkable durability. Francke possessed copies of old and rare Paracelsus MSS, and trumpeted the miraculous cures worked by the secret tincture, the essentia dulcis, the formula of which was known only to the Orphan House dispensary. In Germany and Scandinavia this kind of outlook was still influential in the nineteenth century; and in the middle of the eighteenth, the Wurttemberger Pietist Oetinger constructed a Christian map of universal knowledge out of Paracelsian science and Bengelian history. Mark Noll has rightly observed that one of the weaknesses of the western evangelicals was that they gave very little attention to the general intellectual setting of what they professed.¹³ That they did not do so is a tribute to the power of their more distant heritage in the Reformed tradition, one of the great forces trying to get the magic out of Christianity, and more recently of Lockean empiricism; but it was a weakness nevertheless.¹⁴

If there was one thing more needed to complete the attractions of this style of thought for Pietists and proto-Pietists, it was that it was Neoplatonic and very hostile to the influence of Aristotle. Indeed what they (and especially the radical Pietists) tended to say was that there were two types of theology: the first orientated to Aristotle, scholastic theology, moved the understanding only and had no power to move the heart; the second, which had its seat in the will implanted by God, is all experience, reality and practice, it is mystical theology. It is wisdom not science, it casts light on Scripture everywhere, yet is older than Scripture, and, independently of the latter, can be experienced through the illumination of God himself.¹⁵ Spener, cautious on many things, could not look back on Aristotle without a shudder. A radical like Christian Hoburg could find no middle way between the Kraftweg of the mystical theology and the Schulweg of Orthodoxy and Aristotle.¹⁶

The word ‘mysticism’ was invented in France only in the seventeenth century and one of the services of the radical Pietists was to give the term ‘mystical theology’ a historical content, and at the same time to find some answer to the vexatious Catholic polemicists who were always asking where Protestantism was before the Reformation. The radicals managed to combine the mystical theology, the mystical interpretation of the scriptures and an explanation for the inconvenient lack of written evidence for the tradition they wished to postulate:

This orally transmitted theology is the mystical theology which is written by the hand of many holy souls through the impulse of God in many books. That this mystical theology is the common way of God to lead souls to union with him, and to perfect them in it, is made as clear as daylight by the fact that the great and holy fathers of the Old and the New Testament were led by this way; since it is impossible to understand according to the truth and the deep sense of the spirit of God the book of Job, the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, the lamentations of Jeremiah, the epistle of St Paul to the Romans, and the figures of the Revelation of St John, indeed most of the sermons and p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: W.R. Ward and the Study of Modern Religious History in Britain in the Later Twentieth Century
• PART I THE REALM OF THE IMAGINATION
• PART II PIETY AND PRACTICE: ESTABLISHMENTS, DENOMINATIONS AND MOVEMENTS
• PART III INHERITANCES AND ACCOMMODATIONS
• The Historical Writings of William Reginald Ward 1947–2012
• Index