The Story of Bristol Baptist College

Three Hundred Years of Ministerial Formation

Ruth Gouldbourne, Anthony R. Cross

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781532662539
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Dénominations chrétiennes

Bristol Baptist College is the oldest continuing Baptist College in the world, and has a rich story of faith, service, challenge, and people. As the College moves into its fourth century, this book explores the story of the first three centuries.

1

To begin at the beginning

To tell the story of an institution over time is first of all to ask the question, to what extent is this the same institution? What, if any, are the enduring characteristics that allow us to speak of an identity that reaches from then, whenever then is, to now, whenever now is.

So, we want to consider to what extent there are characteristics that are recognizable, and that stretch from the Academy of 1720 through to the Bristol Baptist College of 2020 and beyond?

After all, we cannot point to a continuing physical presence—the College has occupied several different buildings and has existed in various physical forms in these three hundred years.

In order to grasp something of how it is the same institution, we will be using the themes represented by The Bristol Tradition; the formation of lively, zealous, able, and evangelical preachers of the gospel, if anything, has been the identity that has held together through the years, and the differing patterns of community life and learning and formation.

The themes have taken different patterns in different contexts, but they do, together with a commitment to a breadth of sympathy and engagement both within the denomination and across denominations, offer us a continuity of identity, when other aspects are changing.

To explore the way the themes have been shaped, addressed, and expressed, we will tell a roughly chronological story in three parts that correspond (more or less) to the three centuries of the College history, together with some reflections on particular aspects of ongoing features.

College life is the life of people brought together in particular roles and for particular purposes. Therefore, we will be navigating this story by means of the people who have lived it: for each century, we will use the succession of presidents and later principals as a framework, and we will also be looking at the stories of tutors and, more significantly, students. And since this is specifically a history of the College as an institution as well as accounts of those who have formed it, we will, insofar as we can, tell something of the educational process and content.

Inevitably, there are easy bits of the story to tell, and harder bits. Some parts are hard because there is little documentation or records are incomplete. Other parts are hard because of the story itself—controversy, broken relationship, distress, and anger. This is always true when telling history—as is the complexity that arises when we move from history as recorded in the archives into history as we remember it . . . and we will remember different parts and remember it differently. We trust, especially as you read the sections that deal with parts of College life you remember, that you will recognize the story we tell. We also trust that you will recognize that we are telling a story as we are able; it may not be what you remember, but in all things, we have tried to be true to the documents, records, and accounts that we have.

At the heart of all of the life of the College has been the city of Bristol—the institution started in the centre of the city and has remained in the city ever since. This in itself is unusual, and points to something about a commitment to stability that has been significant in the ongoing life of this community.

However, Bristol was not always what it is now.

In the beginning . . .

Context

In 1720, Britain had a population of just over eight million. England and Wales together had a population of about five million. Over the next century, the national population was to grow to about nine million, as economic, agricultural, and social conditions improved enough to support a growing populace. At the beginning of the century, Bristol was a port city of a little over twenty thousand inhabitants, the second city of the country, though by the 1740s, it was to be overtaken by Liverpool. Cities on the whole at this time were young places; as they grew, and they grew fast in this century, it was because young men and women moved in from the country to become apprentices and to seek work. Cities were not particularly pleasant places, but they were the places of engagement and possibility. One of the possibilities that they offered—and which the Academy took up—was that of greater religious freedom, simply because of greater numbers of people.

Nationally, the Parliaments of Scotland and England had been brought into Union in 1707, and the new United Kingdom was still trying to work out who it was. In 1715 and 1745 there had been uprisings in an attempt to restore the Stuarts to the throne, but now George I was King, and there was a determined effort to build a ‘British identity’. This was to be Protestant—but Protestant by a particular definition. The established church in England, the episcopal Church of England was in power and protective of its position. The link between crown and church was perceived to be important to the stability of both.

It is true that being Baptist was easier than it had been forty years previously, but it was still precarious. King Charles II, who became king when the monarchy was restored after the Civil War and the Commonwealth, had undertaken as part of The Declaration of Breda—the basis on which he was welcomed back to the country—to allow “freedom of religion in areas where it did not disturb the common peace.” However, it soon became clear that this did not extend to the kind of freedom that had been enjoyed under the Commonwealth. Between 1661 and 1665 four Acts of Parliament were passed which are known as the Clarendon Code, and which curtailed toleration of religious dissent. The Corporation Act of 1661 and the Act of Uniformity in 1662 excluded Dissenters from municipal and church office respectively, unless they received the sacrament according to the Book of Common Prayer. This act also excluded Dissenters from the Universities—in England, from Oxford and Cambridge. In Oxford, a student could not be admitted without affirming the Thirty-Nine Articles and in Cambridge a student could not be awarded a degree without a similar religious test. The Conventical Act, also of 1662, forbade more than five people to meet together for worship other than according to the Book of Common Prayer and the 5-Mile Act in 1665 made it illegal for Nonconformist ministers to live or visit within five miles of a town or any other place where they had ministered. An Act of Toleration was passed in 1689, but this was not the repeal of these laws, and simply allowed some freedom around them. As far as the universities were concerned, the position did not change until the middle of the 1800s.

So, as the country was working out who it was, and how to be that, those who were religious dissenters were on the outside and unable to take part in the academic, political, and professional life of society. However, as we will see below, this did not mean inactivity on their part. Rather, it encouraged and shaped the development of an alternative and separate culture. This was true in several areas, including educational. That is the context in which we are particularly interested.

Intellectually, the very early flickers of the period we refer to as the Enlightenment, and what contemporaries called The Age of Reason, were emerging. Isaac Newton and John Locke were writing in the 1680s and their ideas were beginning to influence general thought—and theology—as our story begins. So, our exploration of the forms of and intentions behind the training of ministers has its roots in a period in which thinking about thinking was becoming important. The philosophers of the day—René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, John Locke—were concerned to understand how people know what they know, what constituted knowledge and therefore what learning looked like. This was, of course, thinking within a restricted environment, namely those who were identified with the intellectual elite. But the influence of such thinking had its impact in more general thinking about what it is to learn and to teach.

John Locke, for example, who died in 1704, had developed a powerful and influential theory of mind. He argued that, far from having certain ideas inherent within us, people were born as ‘blank slates’, and knowledge was derived from sensory experience and determined by those experiences. This empirical approach to knowledge and therefore to education was one of the new ideas that were part of the cultural context within which the Academy was first mooted and then actually begun. As a theory of knowledge, it raises interesting issues about how things are known and, in particular, how that which is beyond sense experience—for example, the topics of theology—is to be known. As we consider the story of the Academy, one of the themes that emerges in various guises is the necessity for and importance of education. It is possible to misread this discussion and to see it as an opposition between those who valued education and those who had little or no time for it. And it is true that this played a part in the discussion. But there is also a debate taking place, some of the time at least, about what it means to learn; whether learning takes place via books and study, or through experience and the Spirit’s leading. Or, indeed, whether these positions have to be oppositional, or whether the Spirit can be active both through experience and through books.

It was also a time of rapid technological change. It was in 1712 that Thomas Newcomen first unveiled his steam-driven engine, which was to facilitate the pumping of water in deep mines—and when he was not inventing steam-driven machinery, Newcomen was a Baptist minister in Dartmouth. His connections with other Baptist churches, especially in the Midlands, helped spread the word—and the use—of his new invention. In the second half of the century, the new developments in spinning technology eventually led to the foundation of the factories, and many nonconformists, including Baptists, were involved in the owning and management of the new mills which became such a powerhouse of the economic changes in the nineteenth century. The professions still being closed to them, industry became an important part of nonconformist life, and this was just beginning to be the case as the Academy was beginning its life. As well as the importance of technology, the networks and family links that both support and emerge from these activities are important. One of the powerhouses of Britain’s development of new technology in what was becoming the industrial revolution was the networks that allowed ideas and inventions such as Newcomen’s engine to be spread.

It was a time of writing, especially politically. Governmental control of the press had ended in 1695 with the cessation of the Licensing Act, and political battles were often fought out through pamphlets, many of them anonymous. Journalism was a new discipline, with the beginning of the first daily newspaper in 1702. Periodicals were a growing phenomenon, and within their covers, the pattern of the essay grew. Alexander Pope was writing, both review...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: To begin at the beginning
• Chapter 2: The First Hundred Years
• Chapter 3: Controversy over the role of education
• Chapter 4: The second century
• Chapter 5: Physical homes of the College
• Chapter 6: The library
• Chapter 7: Three hundred years, not out
• Afterword
• A Note on Sources