Wesley and the Anglicans

Political Division in Early Evangelicalism

Ryan Nicholas Danker

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830899647
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Why did the Wesleyan Methodists and the Anglican evangelicals divide during the middle of the eighteenth century? Many would argue that the division between them was based narrowly on theological matters, especially predestination and perfection. Ryan Danker suggests, however, that politics was a major factor throughout, driving the Wesleyan Methodists and Anglican evangelicals apart. Methodism was perceived to be linked with the radical and seditious politics of the Cromwellian period. This was a charged claim in a post-Restoration England. Likewise Danker explores the political force of resurgent Tory influence under George III, which exerted more pressure on evangelicals to prove their loyalty to the Establishment. These political realities made it hard for evangelicals in the Church of England to cooperate with Wesley and meant that all their theological debates were politically inflected. Rich in detail, here is a book for all who seek deeper insight into a critical juncture in the development of evangelicalism and early Methodism.

1

Identity and Challenge

Defining Early English Evangelicalism

In 1799 John Newton wrote a biography of his late friend and colleague William Grimshaw, one of the great Evangelical leaders in Yorkshire, in the form of six letters to Henry Foster. In these letters Newton captures much of Grimshaw’s passion and eccentricity. In one he describes a visit by George Whitefield. The scene, perhaps unique in its bluntness, was characteristic of the passion behind the Evangelical Revival in England. Whitefield had been invited by Grimshaw to preach in his church and began his sermon, as G. R. Balleine recounts, “in his suave and conciliatory way,” with kind words to the congregation.1 This, as Newton records, “roused Mr. Grimshaw’s spirit, and, notwithstanding his great regard for the preacher, he stood up and interrupted him, saying with a loud voice, ‘Oh, sir, for God’s sake do not speak so. I pray you do not flatter them: I fear the greater part of them are going to hell with their eyes open.’”2

All these men—Newton, Grimshaw, Foster and Whitefield—were clergy in the Church of England and participants in the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival. Grimshaw’s behavior would have been distinct among the Evangelicals in the Church—he was known for his unique methods—but his desire to promote a message of conversion, or New Birth, would not have set him apart from his fellow Evangelicals.3 Like them, he was convinced that the experience of the New Birth lay at the heart of authentic Christianity, and he used any number of means to convey that message, even interrupting visiting preachers. That uniformity of intention, however, could not mask the complexities of the larger revival, which was anything but uniform. At the same time, as Carla Gardina Pestana has noted, “the revivals created a sudden and intense sense of linkages” across numerous divides.4 Unity and diversity met within the revival, however, with varied results. The Evangelical Revival, trans-Atlantic in scope, was a volatile world composed of localized revivals, old and new practices sometimes embraced for their efficiency and other times opposed as zealotry, and leaders from across the theological spectrum.

This diversity of practice and theological persuasion, despite core convictions about the need for conversion, marked the earliest period of the Evangelical Revival in England and was one of the primary contexts in which Wesley and his Methodists engaged Evangelicals in the Church. The context often defies characterization. The term Methodist, for example, could be applied to those connected to Wesley or even those who had no connection to him at all.5 Although the term Methodist is now thought to be synonymous with Wesleyanism, at the beginning of the Evangelical Revival in England it was an elusive term.6 The title was often used as a derogatory term to slander anyone who espoused aspects of an evangelical theology or who participated in “methodistical” activities such as field preaching or attendance at evangelical society meetings.7 In his Force of Truth: An Authentic Narrative (1778) Thomas Scott writes, “Methodist, as a stigma of reproach, was first applied to Mr. Wesley, Mr. Whitefield, and their followers; and to those who, professing an attachment to our Established Church, and disclaiming the name of Dissenters, were not conformists in point of parochial order, but had separate seasons, places, and assemblies of worship.”8 The designation Methodist, however, was regularly applied outside Scott’s parameters not only to the followers of John and Charles Wesley or Whitefield but also to evangelicals both Arminian and Reformed, regular and irregular, Anglican and dissenting.

The elastic nature of the term Methodist, for those in England’s evangelical uprising, is fitting to describe not only a movement whose parameters are often muddled and whose adherents included a unique breadth of classes, professions and religious backgrounds, but also whose leaders spanned a spectrum from the mentally unstable enthusiast to members of the aristocracy.9 The Evangelical Revival in England included leaders as divergent at the establishmentarian Thomas Adam and the self-made prophet Thomas Maxwell. The revival included recognizable figures such as the Wesleys and Whitefield but also the little-known but influential headmaster of the Truro Grammar School, George Conon.10

In this chapter I will attempt to describe the Evangelical clergy within the Church of England in order to begin to understand their relationship to John Wesley. The historiographical difficulty of categorizing persons and movements in this period complicates the picture but also highlights the reality that singular causes are not sufficient to describe the complex relationship between Wesley and his Evangelical Anglican colleagues within the Church.11 Peter Nockles writes that in the eighteenth-century Church “neat categorizations and labels ought to be curbed, if not avoided.”12 There were distinctions in the ­eighteenth-century Church between those evangelical leaders who were ordained and those who were not, those who worked within the parish structures of the Church, the “regular” clergy, and those who chose to work via “irregular” means. A “regular” could become “irregular” or vice versa. He could dabble in a mixture of regular and irregular methods, but the distinction between an ordained priest in the established Church and an ordained minister of one of the dissenting bodies is easily identifiable. Likewise this is generally true of laypersons, although scholars have shown that attending Church services did not always preclude attendance at chapel meetings, and some, such as the early Wesleyans, were categorized subjectively based on differing perceptions of churchmanship.

From the beginning evangelicals could often be identified by their vocabulary. The experience of evangelical conversion, and particularly descriptions of those experiences, provided a common experiential framework or language that united the various arms of the revival both within and outside the established Church. An “evangelical language” arose to describe the experience of conversion. But even this common language did not overcome issues of polity and politics entrenched in England’s ecclesiastical soil. After centuries of often bloody ecclesiastical and political dispute, shared experience alone was not sufficient to conquer entrenched patterns of social life.

The English Civil War of the previous century had not been forgotten. Memories of the war were connected with ecclesiastical and political issues common to English life since the Reformation. Presbyterian George Lawson rightly captured the intertwined nature of secular and religious interests when he wrote that “Poltiks both civil and Ecclesiastical belong unto Theologie, and are but a brand of the same.”13 John Locke captured the sentiments of the period, writing that “all those flames that have made such havoc and desolation in Europe, and have not been quenched but with the blood of so many millions, have been at first kindled with coals from the altar.”14 The preface of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer makes reference to the “late unhappy confusions” and connects the Interregnum’s disruption of English ecclesiastical and political life and the zealotry that ensued to the need for liturgical uniformity accompanied by the restoration of the monarchy.15 As ­Evangelical initiatives gained popular notice in the 1730s, many saw the movement as another form of the same religious enthusiasm that threw the nation into disarray under the banner of Puritanism and brought on those “unhappy confusions.”16 Whether this particular form of religious enthusiasm came from the altar, the pulpit or in small, secretive meetings was of little importance.

The Eighteenth-Century Context

The eighteenth century has been judged for many years in light of ­nineteenth-century expectations, and only recently has it come to be understood in its own terms.17 The negative assumptions of later low church Evangelicals and their high church Tractarian adversaries in the nineteenth century came to dominate eighteenth-century studies.18 Through the 1740s eighteenth-century England was coming to terms with the political and social turmoil of the previous century. At the same time, however, great effort was made by both Whigs and Tories under newly defined versions of the “divine right of kings” to secure the new Protestant dynasty. Within this context, eighteenth-century leaders actively fought against continued efforts by the Stuarts and their Jacobite allies in both 1715 and 1745 to undermine what in many ways was the ascendency of the Church over the monarchy, a shift in the ancien régime that would last until the Reform Acts of the late 1820s. The English approach to governance in the eighteenth century, while cautious early on with a focus on restorationism by the later part of the century, had embraced an expansionist policy both economically and geographically. Despite the loss of the American colonies, and seven large-scale conflicts with the expansion of British imperialism,19 by century’s end the Hanoverian dynasty was secure and with it a Protestant England ready to compete with Roman Catholicism in a colonizing race safely situated outside the British Isles.

Within the Pax Anglia the Church of England flourished. Recent historians such as Jeremy Black, J. C. D. Clark, William Gibson and Nigel Yates, among others, have begun the long process of correcting the perception that the Church in the eighteenth century was decrepit. Black notes that “there is copious evidence both of massive observance of the formal requirements of the churches and of widespread piety.”20 Echoing Black, Yates claims that religion in England, and its established Church, was much healthier than has been previously acknowledged.21 With the cooperation of what Clark terms the Church-Whig alliance under the first two Georges, he asserts that “in the face of an assertive Anglicanism, the number of Dissenters and Roman Catholics in England was each roughly halved in the years c. 1690–1740.”22 At the same time, the Church of England understood, as much of Europe did after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the repercussions of theologically inspired warfare. The resulting caution that such knowledge engendered has been misinterpreted as weakness but produced growing toleration and stability. Revolutionary sentiments on the Continent and the phantom of Oliver Cromwell with the image of a beheaded Charles I, however, represented lasting images of zealotry in the imagination of English churchmen.

The English Civil War and its repercussions continued to haunt the Church for over a century after the regicide of Charles on January 30, 1649. Despite the complexity of the war, or even wars, and its multiple causes—which had as much or more to do with power struggles between king and Parliament as it did between Laudian and Reformed “parties” within the Church—on the ground the nuances of history were regularly overlooked. Often the complexities of the Civil War period were replaced in the eighteenth century by a common fear of any real or supposed challenge to the Pax Anglia. Clark has written extensively on the struggles faced by Church and society not only because of the Civil War but also after the Glorious Revolution and the ramifications of a potentially resurgent Catholic dynasty.23 Alan Harding writes that although the Church of England was the “victor” of seventeenth-century struggles, it came away from that victory with definite scars.24 Within this context the uprising now known as th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Identity and Challenge: Defining Early English Evangelicalism
• 2 Movement and Conversion: Wesley in the Trans-Atlantic Revival
• 3 Propaganda and Power: The Revival Under Fire
• 4 Politics and Polity: Methodist Structure and the Question of Dissent
• 5 Enclaves and Incursions: The Geography of Evangelicalism
• 6 Eucharist and Ethos: The Formation of Methodist Identity
• 7 Hegemony and Casualties: The Oxford Expulsions of 1768
• 8 Vision and Divergence: A New Anglican Historiography
• Conclusion: Constrained to Deviate
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Praise for Wesley and the Anglicans
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright