The British Jesus, 1850-1970

Meredith Veldman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000565959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The British Jesus focuses on the Jesus of the religious culture dominant in Britain from the 1850s through the 1950s, the popular Christian culture shared by not only church, kirk, and chapel goers, but also the growing numbers of Britons who rarely or only episodically entered a house of worship.

An essay in intellectual as well as cultural history, this book illumines the interplay between and among British New Testament scholarship, institutional Christianity, and the wider Protestant culture. The scholars who mapped and led the uniquely British quest for the historical Jesus in the first half of the twentieth century were active participants in efforts to replace the popular image of "Jesus in a white nightie" with a stronger figure, and so, they hoped, to preserve Britain's Christian identity. They failed. By exploring that failure, and more broadly, by examining the relations and exchanges between popular, artistic, and scholarly portrayals of Jesus, this book highlights the continuity and the conservatism of Britain's popular Christianity through a century of religious and cultural transformation.

Exploring depictions of Jesus from over more than one hundred years, this book is a crucial resource for scholars of British Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

1 THE VICTORIAN JESUS AND THE GERMAN CHALLENGE

DOI: 10.4324/9781003241140-2

The Victorians were religious. Very. Never were so many churches built and never did so high a percentage of British men, women, and children attend church or chapel than in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹ Both Anglicans and non-Anglicans could claim victory: Within the Church of England, the opposing forces of Evangelical revival and High Church transformation, as well as thoroughgoing institutional reform, reinvigorated both parish and pulpit.² At the same time, the various denominations clustered under the Nonconformist umbrella moved into the mainstream of religious life and exerted a powerful political impact.³ This century also saw the explosion of the global missionary movement, the product of an energetic faith and an absolute confidence in Christian truth.⁴

Many Victorian leading lights did, of course, undergo personal religious crises; many emerged from these crises shorn of their Christian belief and many felt compelled to describe their loss of faith in print. Yet the power of the emotional anguish revealed in J. A. Froude’s Nemesis of Faith or of the despair behind Matthew Arnold’s inexorably receding sea testifies not only to the depth of these religious crises but also, as Frank Turner has argued, to the strength of the religious culture from which these men were breaking.⁵ Similarly, while Victorian Christianity was, to use Timothy Larsen’s terminology, contested—“forcefully and vehemently attacked from without and given to rancorous disputes between different factions and versions of Christian thought within”—these contests bear witness to the vitality and importance of Victorian religious life.⁶ The very fact of the fracturing of the Church of England into High, Low, and Broad factions; of Scotland’s Presbyterian upheaval of 1843—the Disruption—that resulted in the formation of the Free Church;⁷ of the constant splintering and grafting of various Methodist branches;⁸ all bear witness to the high priority placed by Victorians on Christian belief, on getting Christianity, right. And by the later Victorian decades, getting Christianity right meant getting Jesus right.

Focusing on Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth had always been a figure of central importance to Christian theology and culture, but during the nineteenth century, a series of developments came together to make this figure a crucial focus of Victorian attention. New technologies such as the steam-powered rotary printing press (invented in 1843), combined with innovations in distribution systems (e.g., the opening of the first railway station branch of W. H. Smith’s circulating library in 1848) ensured that new ideas about Jesus could reach a growing and increasingly literate population through affordable and appealing publications.⁹ The British became readers—and much of what they read was religious. Although the proportion of religious to secular works steadily declined in the second half of the century, religious works still constituted the largest class of books published in England in 1870,¹⁰ and many of these religious works focused on Jesus.

Liturgical changes also led to a greater emphasis on Jesus. The ritualist movement helped spark liturgical revival and innovation, first, in High Anglican circles, then throughout the Church of England, and over time in Scottish Presbyterianism and throughout Nonconformity as well. This “veritable ‘Second Reformation’ in the spiritual life of Great Britain,” as Horton Davies describes it, not only worked to enhance the dignity and beauty of churchgoing, it also directed the worshipper’s gaze toward Jesus. Davies notes that “it became increasingly common to celebrate the birth, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ,” while far more frequent communion services made Jesus’s death a central part of the churchgoer’s life.¹¹

Wider cultural developments also came into play. All around them Victorians saw clear evidence of what they regarded as physical and indeed moral progress. Such evidence was hard to reconcile with the doctrine of atonement dominant in British Christianity in the first half of the nineteenth century.¹² Centering on the concepts of substitution and satisfaction, the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement held that Jesus substituted himself for sinful human beings when he went to death on the cross; his sinless nature thus satisfied the punishment demanded by God’s perfect justice. The idea that God required a blood sacrifice—and of his own son, no less—seemed to many Victorians morally repulsive, the sort of primitive belief that missionaries throughout the Empire were seeking to eradicate rather than propagate.¹³ The Christian Socialist F. D. Maurice declared that such an understanding of atonement “outrages the conscience” and the Oxford don Benjamin Jowett agreed; “our moral feelings revolt” at such a teaching, he explained. Exemplars of Broad Church Anglicanism, Maurice and Jowett did not speak for all Anglicans and certainly not for Nonconformity.¹⁴ Not all Anglicans rejected the doctrine of substitutionary atonement and it remained central to Evangelical religiosity—and to the much of Nonconformity—throughout and beyond the nineteenth century.¹⁵ Nevertheless, by the 1850s, debates over the meaning and mechanism of the atonement forced even the most evangelical of Victorians to think anew about the meaning of not only Jesus’s death but his life as well.¹⁶

These factors help explain why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in both Anglican and Nonconformist theology, in both evangelical and non-evangelical religious cultures, the doctrine of the incarnation increasingly occupied center stage. This focus on the act of God-become-man narrowed the distance between the divine and the human, the spiritual and the material. Moreover, for many Victorians, an incarnational emphasis accorded with their growing perception of the inherent goodness of both the human and the material worlds.¹⁷ In much of British theology, emphasis on Christ saving believers from the world receded as the idea of Jesus revealing God in the world became more important. Such a focus accorded more harmoniously with Victorian confidence; it also shifted attention to the significance of Jesus’s entire earthly life and, more generally, to the fact of his humanness. In a theology centered on substitutionary atonement, Jesus’s earthly life was little more than a preface to the real drama of his death and resurrection; in a doctrine emphasizing the incarnation, all of Jesus’s life on the earth counted as the performance of redemption.

This shift in doctrinal emphasis from atonement to incarnation carried with it important implications for the gendering of Jesus. Two factors within the framework of a theology centered on penal substitutionary atonement tended to paint Jesus in what was for the Victorians feminine hues. First, “God the Father” often appeared as a demanding, angry, punishing, distant authority—rather like many Victorian fathers.¹⁸ In this way, Victorian atonement theology and Victorian family relations reinforced each other, for as John Tosh noted in his study of the ideal Victorian family, “the mother stood for love and the father represented the discipline required for survival in the outside world.”¹⁹ But in Protestant theology there is no mother: instead, it was Jesus who took on maternal attributes.²⁰ Second, substitutionary atonement theology depicted God the Father as the stern parent who must punish his children, and Jesus as his submissive son. Many of the discussions of his filial obedience, however, by using the language of ideal womanhood, often coded Jesus as a dutiful daughter.²¹ Associated with “purity, peacefulness, meekness, and gentleness,” this Jesus evoked images of domestic femininity more than physical masculinity.²² Jesus could even appear as the classic Victorian female invalid. As one popular children’s book described him, “How sorrowful is the countenance of that dear man! How pale and worn his cheeks! How tearful his eyes! How thin and weak his body!”²³ Weak, sad, and pallid as he was, this Jesus preferred quiet conversation to physical activity, peace to conflict.²⁴ The feminine Jesus proved remarkably resilient; as subsequent chapters show, however, the theological shift in emphasis from atonement to incarnation opened up the space for different imaginings of Jesus, for depictions that did not focus on his suffering and that allowed for his overt masculinization.

Clinking hammers and higher critics

The shift in theological focus from Jesus’s redeeming death to his exemplary life occurred at the same time that Victorians were forced to look anew at the central sources of evidence for that life. Well before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, the findings of the new science of geology called into question literal readings of biblical texts.²⁵ The publication of Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–1833) and Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), both presenting geological change as the result of natural processes occurring gradually over enormous stretches of time, brought the “Genesis versus geology” battle to a wide audience.²⁶

So, too, did the discovery of dinosaurs (a term coined in 1844). Although Europeans had been turning up fossils for centuries, it was only in 1822 that the geologist William Buckland theorized that the giant teeth, jaws, and bones he had found pointed to an extinct class of animal, which he called Megalaurus, or giant reptile. By 1854, Victorian dinosaur mania had reached such heights that promoters and scientists joined together to erect a series of life-size concrete dinosaurs in Sydenham Park (where the Crystal Palace had been moved after the Great Exhibition of 1851 shut down). To a twenty-first-century reader, Jesus may seem to have little to do with Genesis or geology, but to Victorian Christians, the connections were clear, and to some, terrifying. John Ruskin’s plea in a letter written in 1851 is well-known: “If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”²⁷ By undermining a literal reading of parts of the biblical text, the Genesis-versus-geology debate raised questions about such a reading of every part of that text.

Yet the damage done by Ruskin’s clinking hammers was sustainable. Even in the early Victorian era, few educated Christians espoused the doctrine of verbal inspiration—the insistence that God inspired, or even dictated, every word of the Bible and that the biblical text is therefore verbally infallible. Instead, most Churchmen and Nonconformists hel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations used in endnotes
• Introduction: Jesus in Britain, 1850–1970
• 1 The Victorian Jesus and the German challenge
• 2 Decade of crisis and opportunity: Jesus in the 1860s
• 3 Jesus in the fifth Gospel
• 4 Visualizing Jesus: artistic and religious controversies
• 5 William Holman Hunt’s quest for a Protestant Jesus
• 6 The spectacular Jesus
• 7 Jesus and British scholarship before World War I
• 8 The apocalyptic Jesus in Britain
• 9 The children’s Jesus
• 10 Jesus on the BBC
• Postscript: continuities—Jesus in the 1970s
• Index