The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century

The I.B.Tauris History of the Christian Church

David Hempton

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857735607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

David Hempton's history of the vibrant period between 1650 and 1832 engages with a truly global story: that of Christianity not only in Europe and North America, but also in Latin America, Africa, Russia and Eastern Europe, India, China, and South-East Asia. Examining eighteenth-century religious thought in its sophisticated national and social contexts, the author relates the narrative of the Church to the rise of religious enthusiasm pioneered by Pietists, Methodists, Evangelicals and Revivalists, and by important leaders like August Hermann Francke, Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley. He places special emphasis on attempts by the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and British seaborne powers to export imperial conquest, commerce and Christianity to all corners of the planet. This leads to discussion of the significance of Catholic and Protestant missions, including those of the Jesuits, Moravians and Methodists. Particular attention is given to Christianity's impact on the African slave populations of the Caribbean Islands and the American colonies, which created one of the most enduring religious cultures in the modern world.
Throughout the volume changes in Christian belief and practice are related to wider social trends, including rapid urban growth, the early stages of industrialization, the spread of literacy, and the changing social construction of gender, families and identities.

 

Preface

Writing a general history of worldwide Christianity in the long eighteenth century (c.1680–1820) is both a sacred responsibility and a fool’s errand. Even a cursory list of some of the century’s great themes and events is an indication of the foolhardiness of the project. These include the Enlightenment, Pietism, the Evangelical Revival, the growth of empires, the zenith (and the beginnings of the demise of) the transatlantic slave trade, the spring shoots of religious toleration, the beginning of the end of the great era of reforms of Catholic Christianity inspired by the Council of Trent, the Orthodox mission to extend Christianity throughout Russia and Asia, the religious implications of the American and French Revolutions, the grand era of baroque Catholicism in Latin America, the remarkable narrative of the rise of black Christianity in Africa, the Caribbean islands and North America, the demise of the Jesuits after two centuries of world-transforming Christian mission, the increasingly global religious competition between Christianity and Islam, the early imprints of secularization of land, thought, and states, and so on, and so on.

My first debt, therefore, is to those who have pioneered these manifold subjects and written about them with such distinction. In the interests of readability, I have tried to simplify very complicated debates and to limit endnotes to direct quotations and to places where unacknowledged reliance on the work of others would be simply unacceptable. I am grateful also to the editors of Yale University Press for permission to reproduce a short section from my book Methodism: Empire of the Spirit.

My second debt, more concretely, is to my colleagues and students at Boston University, Harvard, and beyond, whose profound insights are responsible for much of what follows. In terms of colleagues I am particularly grateful to the late Reginald Ward who first taught me to conceive of the world beyond the British Isles, to Dana Robert who gave me crash courses on Christian missions, and to the participants over many years in the North American Religions Colloquium at Harvard (Ann Braude, Marie Griffith, David Hall, Bill Hutchison, Dan McKanan, Bob Orsi, Jon Roberts, Leigh Schmidt, and many others) whose expertise in the history of religion has rubbed off in incalculable ways. Similarly with Michelle Molina, who helped me understand the Catholic version of the ‘religion of the heart’ in the early modern period in fresh ways. In terms of students, I am particularly grateful to my graduate students at Boston University and Harvard, the early risers who took my course on ‘Encountering the Other’, and most importantly my three student research assistants – Matt Dougherty, Sonia Hazard and Dana Logan – who frequently outshone their teacher in the fine arts of historical research. In addition, David Hall, Brian Clark and Matt Dougherty generously read the manuscript and saved me from some inaccuracies and many infelicities. All remaining flaws are my responsibility alone.

My third debt is to the people and institutions that have facilitated the research for this book, including Alonzo L. McDonald for his generosity, Harvard Divinity School for granting me sabbatical leave, the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard for awarding me a timely research grant, and the National Endowment of the Humanities which believed enough in the project to award me an annual Fellowship. I am also grateful to the librarians and staff at Harvard’s great libraries, the jewel in the crown of the university, especially those at the Andover, Widener, Yenching, Tozzer, Lamont and Fine Arts libraries. This book would be much more limited in scope but for all of these kindnesses. I am also very grateful, far more than mere conventions dictate, to the series editor Gillian Evans and Alex Wright at I.B.Tauris for asking me to write this book and for putting up with my extravagant requests for extensions.

Finally, I wish to thank again my longsuffering family, for their interest, sometimes genuine, in my latest writing fads, and especially to Stephen and Jonney for their sense of humour, and Louanne, who plays the roles of editor and intelligent general reader with remarkable patience and distinction.

David Hempton
Harvard Divinity School

Introduction

How should one go about writing a history of Christianity in the long eighteenth century, from about the 1680s to the 1820s? This deceptively simple question is really not very easy to answer. All the obvious caveats apply. The most basic problem concerns perspective. All historians, alas, come with a pre-existing ethnicity, language, gender, social class, religious tradition, scholarly expertise and, perhaps most significantly, acreages of ignorance and piles of unexamined assumptions. Where one stands and when one looks, for good and ill, largely determines what one sees. Moreover, the eighteenth century is a long time, the world is a big place and Christianity is a complex, fragmented and constantly changing religious tradition. One polymath historian who wisely confined himself to writing a mere survey of European Christianity in this period conceded that ‘a God’s-eye view or even a pan-continental perspective is out of reach’ and that the basic historiographical and anthropological foundations for understanding the popular religious observances and lived-religious experiences of Europeans were simply not in place.¹

Without the benefit of ‘a God’s-eye view’, writing survey histories or even constructing course syllabi are dangerous occupations. Those teachers like me who tweak their syllabi from year to year in the light of new knowledge (both absolutely new and more often merely new to them), and who are foolish enough to keep records of the different editions, can testify how steep their learning curve has been and how fortunate they are that syllabi mostly do not get published. Survey histories do, but the same principles of provisionality, selectivity, incomplete knowledge, enforced reliance on the established literature and vulnerability to the fads of the discipline sadly apply.

One way of reducing the occupational danger of survey history is to survey the history of surveys, mostly so as not to repeat both what has already been accomplished and what has been neglected, but also to learn from the choices of others. One of the most distinguished and enduring surveys of the history of Christianity is the Pelican History of the Church, the eighteenth-century volume of which was written by Gerald R. Cragg, published in 1960, and revised in 1970. Taking as his starting point the Peace of Westphalia which brought to an end the Thirty Years’ War, and ending with the French Revolution, Cragg’s main theme was captured by his title, The Church and the Age of Reason 1648–1789. Of his 16 chapters, the great majority deal with the history of Christianity in Britain, France and Germany with particular emphases on the relationships between states and churches, and changes in the history of thought and culture. From this perspective, Cragg appropriately portrays the era as one of a crisis of authority for the churches as they confronted unprecedented challenges from rulers, intellectual elites and popular democratic forces. Cragg’s survey still stands as an elegant tribute to how the history of eighteenth-century Christianity was conceptualized about half a century ago.²

Things have changed fast since then. Generic shifts in intellectual culture associated with post-colonialism, postmodernism and feminism have changed the assumptions and methods of historical discourse of all kinds. The maturing of religious studies as a discipline has opened up new approaches to the study of religious history, and the stunning shift in the centre of gravity of world Christianity in the twentieth century from the north and west to the south and east has made it impossible any longer to envision the history of Christianity as a purely, or even primarily, European phenomenon.³ It is not surprising therefore, that teams of scholars have written many of the best recent surveys of the history of Christianity. Excellent examples include The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, The Cambridge History of Christianity and A World History of Christianity.⁴ Paralleling this development has been the production of magisterial surveys of Christianity in precisely those parts of the world that have contributed most to the global shift in Christianity’s centre of gravity over the past century. Good examples include Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa 1450–1950 (1994), Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia (2005) and Ondina E. González and Justo L. González, Christianity in Latin America: A History (2008).

With these works in place it is paradoxically more difficult for any scholar to set out on a fresh survey history of Christianity for any period, but perhaps especially for the modern periods. Why not simply construct an encyclopaedia or an annotated bibliography and point readers in the right direction to publications already in existence? There have been many occasions in the writing of this book when that seemed a very appealing option. What kept me going were the ringing declarations in the editor’s preface to this series that any new survey of the history of Christianity must be both new and traditional, familiar and unfamiliar; must accept that Christianity has been both imperialist and subversive; must pay attention both to the past’s complexities and to the ways that Christianity has shaped the present; and must recognize at the most profound level that Christianity is in its essence a missionary religion. I have learned over the years that all historians of Christianity must in some way become missiologists, of the kind that take seriously the restless energy in Christianity (often suffused with millennialism) to carry out its founder’s instructions to carry the faith to all nations. These then have been the principles upon which I have gone about the most difficult intellectual challenge involved in the writing of survey history, namely making choices about what to include and exclude within the confines of a strict word limit. Of course, as someone has put it, all expansive histories are necessarily catalogues of omissions, both conscious and unconscious. Alas, that simply comes with the territory.

This history is organized around two major categories – Book One deals with the expansion of Christendom and Book Two with the transformation of Christendom. The first emphasizes growth and geographical extension beyond Europe to other parts of the world; the second emphasizes change, mostly within Europe, which had the highest density of Christians in the eighteenth century. The second book contains material that is more familiar and can be read independently (or even first if necessary).

The first chapter seeks to answer three questions. Suppose an interplanetary professor of religion visited the earth in the eighteenth century. What would she most notice about the shape and extent of world Christianity? Second, given that Europe was still the continent in which most of the world’s Christians lived in the eighteenth century how did Europeans ‘map’ other civilizations and how did they think about the non-Christian religious traditions of the world? Third, given that Christian expansion in the early modern period was partly facilitated by the growth of European empires, both Catholic and Protestant, what was the relationship between Christianity and empire?

The second chapter, ‘Heart Religion and the Rise of Global Christianity: New Selves and New Places’, is in the nature of an experiment. The pioneers of Christian missions in the early modern world were, generally speaking, the members of the great Roman Catholic orders, especially the Jesuits, and German Pietists and early Evangelicals who blazed the trail of Protestant missions. Why and how did they do it? What spiritual disciplines and modes of thought persuaded them to launch out into new social spaces to convert new (to them) peoples? What views of themselves and of self-transformation, both for themselves and of the ‘others’ they were seeking to change, did they hold, and how successful were they in propagating those views?

The third chapter, ‘Encountering the Other’, is an attempt to come to grips with the history of the expansion of Christendom through the telling of stories about seminal events and people, chosen because they illustrate the most important themes about the spread of Christianity in the eighteenth century. My chosen events happened in China, India and Latin America; the people were situated in the Caribbean islands, North America and West Africa. The themes they highlight are: the power dynamics involved in the encounters between European Christians and native peoples; the kinds of Christian hybridities that emerged from such encounters; the difficulties involved in determining what was the essence of Christianity as it was exposed to different cultural contexts; the importance of population mobility, especially that associated with the execrable slave trade which carried millions of Africans to the New World on the ships of the Christian empires; the significance of changing political, ecclesiastical and intellectual currents in Europe on the kind of Christianity that was exported overseas; and the ways in which native peoples appropriated, modified, subverted, converted to and resisted the Christianities that were brought to them.

Book Two is a deliberate shift of gear away from the expansion of Christendom to its transformation in Europe and beyond. Chapter 4 deals with the array of intellectual and cultural shifts we have designated with the hotly contested term ‘Enlightenment’. What was being enlightened and what were the consequences for current and future expressions of Christianity? I wish to be clear that I am not advocating here any meta-narrative of progress or decline or anything else; rather, in a case by case way, I seek to explain the convoluted and haphazard roots of some of the most important changes associated with Christianity’s dance with modernity such as the growth of religious toleration and the abolition of slavery, as well as saying something about the respective impacts of the rise of science, the alleged beginnings of secularization and the challenges posed to traditional Christian theology by new knowledge. These are of course controversial issues and my modest aim is to attempt some ground clearing and some elementary construction of possibilities. Those looking for a linear or teleological approach to these issues had better start somewhere else.

Chapter 5 seeks to explain that other great shaper of Christianity in the eighteenth century, namely the remarkable surge in religious revivalism and Evangelicalism from the Urals in the East to the Appalachians in the West, which helped transform the ecclesiastical landscape of the British Isles and North America, and which laid the foundation for the remarkable growth of Anglo-American overseas missions from the eighteenth century onwards. From where did revivalism emanate, and why did it transcend state boundaries to become such a widespread phenomenon? This chapter also seeks to come to terms with the rise of the most significant new religious movement birthed by the Evangelical Revival, Methodism. Who were the Methodists, what did they believe, and why were they more successful than countless other Pietist and revivalist religious movements in the eighteenth century?

Chapter 6 seeks to highlight and explain different patterns of relations between church and state in the eighteenth century which came to have immense influence on the future shape of Christianity. It will look at how traditional pockets of Catholic strength in countries like Ireland and Poland came to be established; it will explore how reforming monarchs and enlightened absolutists tried to subject churches to state control and ordering; it will seek to explain how Russian tsars, beginning with Peter I, tried to su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Map 1: The World in 1783
• Map 2: Europe in the ancien régime 1715–1783
• Map 3: The Spanish–American Empire, 1492–1783
• Preface
• Introduction
• Book One: The Expansion Of Christendom
• Book Two: The Transformation Of Christendom
• Conclusion: Continuity and Change
• Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliography