ABSTRACT

This comprehensive investigation into the involvement of ordinary Christians in Church activities and in anti-clerical dissent, explores a phenomenon stretching from Britain and Germany to the Americas and beyond. It considers how evangelicalism, as an anti-establishmentarian and profoundly individualistic movement, has allowed the traditionally powerless to become enterprising, vocal, and influential in the religious arena and in other areas of politics and culture.

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From the issues surrounding the re-establishment of the doctrine, attention shifts in Part II to the coincidence between its eighteenth-century flowering and the Age of Enlightenment. To what extent was this a necessary relation-ship, with the two movements intimately connected? How far did the coincidence depend upon accidental factors and even demonstrate contra-dictions? The individualism expressed in the work and writings of the early Methodist preachers, class leaders and Sunday school teachers may have been consonant with Enlightenment values, as recent scholars suggest, but it seems unlikely that there was any significant intellectual debt. The new vein of evangelical self-awareness had less to do with contemporary secular indi-vidualism than with the corporate identity of the emerging community of faith.

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Notes

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PART I The priesthood of all believers: from principle to practice

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Reformers, puritans and evangelicals

The lay connection
ByCarl R. Trueman

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swiftly modified to suit circumstances, the deep concern for all Christians and for individual religious experience, which remained at the centre of Reformation and post-Reformation thinking, paved the way for the rise during the eighteenth century of what can be recognized as modern evangel-icalism. The importance of Martin Luther

The choice of Martin Luther as a representative reformer requires no justifi- cation. It is obvious that much of the Reformation agenda was set by his theology. Equally, it is well known that his distinctive eucharistic views con- tinued to determine the hostile relations that existed between Lutheran and Reformed communions long after his own demise. For later evangelicalism

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itself as theologically significant as the underlying ideas. The year 1520 was in many ways make-or-break for the Lutheran Reformation. After inconclusive meetings with the church authorities at Augsburg and Leipzig and while awaiting the inevitable bull of excommunication, Luther published his three greatest treatises: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation; The Babylonian Captivity of the Church; and On the Freedom of the Christian. In these works he stated his emerging Reformation theology in a sharply polem-ical manner and made a last (somewhat unconvincing) attempt to appeal to the Pope. It was in this climate that the language of universal priesthood came to the fore, though this did not in itself represent an underlying change or radical development in theological perspective. It was rather an attempt to give full expression to the content and implications of salvation by grace through faith which had been developing in his mind since approximately 1515, while at the same time making a sharp polemical criticism of the Roman church’s priestly pretensions. In the early 1520s, therefore, the rhetor-ical power of the term was in many ways as significant as the theological point being made – a point which had in effect been made by Luther on ear-lier occasions without using this kind of language.

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This is an extremely important point. Luther’s thought is more subtle than many have given it credit for. The two kingdoms idea, with its strict demar-cation between the world of social discourse, public righteousness, and daily life and the world of individual salvation, righteousness before God, and spiritual life, effectively serves to demarcate the bounds and the application of the teachings embodied in the notions of universal priesthood and Christian freedom. These are ultimately categories which refer to the spiritual and not the material world. Thus their strict democratizing tendencies, in Luther’s mind at least, are restricted to that sphere. What he is doing is to allow for a universal, egalitarian attitude to grace and conversion, while setting up bar-riers which prevent this Reformation programme being carried across into the secular field. Failure to spot this subtlety, or fear that others might fail to spot it, lay behind much of the early Catholic opposition to Luther. Indeed, in the con-text of a discussion of the priesthood of all believers, David Bagchi makes the following observation concerning Luther’s early Catholic opponents: [T]he controversialists in general were much less antagonistic to Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers than might have been sup-posed. Their objection, as with some of Luther’s other teachings, was prompted largely by the possibility that the rabble might understand it out of ignorance or malice . . . Cochlaeus, Fisher, Bartholomeus Usingen, Eck, Arnoldi Von Chiemsee, Johannes Gropper, and Jodocus Clichtoveus all accepted the universal priesthood, provided that it did not detract from the special priesthood.

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institutional church’s pretensions, both political and theological. Yet, as his later opposition to the fanatics demonstrates, he had no intention of putting the Bible into the hands of the laity simply for each believer to do with it as they would. His emphasis upon the fundamental perspicuity of scripture did not deny a role in the church for theological professionals nor did it insist that each person was as competent to discern the meaning of scripture as every-one else. Thus, the need for proper theological education was maintained by

Luther’s Reformation, then, was a combination of two separate and, to an extent, incompatible ideological emphases. On the one hand, the notions of individual conversion, justification through faith and the authority of a per- spicuous scripture, all served, potentially at least, to empower the laity: to place the individual, outside formal, institutional frameworks, in the theo-

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distinctive character of eighteenth-century evangelicalism, the focus has to be upon the ways in which these four elements were changed, modified or dif-ferently understood, or how they were given an altered significance during this period. Here, the seventeenth-century historian moves beyond his strict sphere of competence and into the realm of speculation. However, it would seem that one key discontinuity between the puritan theology of the seventeenth cen-tury and much of the evangelicalism of the eighteenth is that of the university context. Certainly in the form of English and Dutch puritanism, seventeenth-century Protestantism represented a successful marriage between academic theology and pastoral concern, whereby supremely accomplished learning connected with the life of the everyday believer through the media of ser-mons, catechisms and the pastorates of men who were well versed in scholastic theology. As such, it held two apparently incompatible strands of Protestant thought and life together: the need for a responsible, learned and theological approach to the biblical text and the belief that every individual, from the greatest to the least, had the responsibility to believe in God for their own salvation. Events in the latter part of the seventeenth century, however, served to rupture this relationship. In England the Restoration of 1660 and the subsequent imposition of the Clarendon Code effectively terminated puritanism as a movement and excluded not only serving puritan ministers but also subsequent generations of Nonconformists from both the Anglican ministry and, more importantly, from the universities. When nearly 2,000 puritan ministers left the established church in 1662, they took their theological tradition away from its academic roots in a university culture which stemmed from the Middle Ages and had been modified by the Renaissance. Their heirs in English Nonconformity were often men of formidable intellect – the names of Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge spring immediately to mind – but they were not university men. They were not schooled in the language and thought forms of their puritan forebears and the theology they expounded did not coincide with that of their heritage in some of its most important aspects.

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the condition of the dog and toad . . . yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weights of hell for sin, as mine was like to do.

At the forefront of this radical movement within puritanism were the mil- lenarian and open-Baptist Independent congregations with which John Rogers and John Bunyan were involved. Born only a year apart, Rogers and Bunyan occupied very different places among the radical Independents in 1653. Rogers was an experienced pastor with a university education; Bunyan

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Bullinger combined. Nevertheless, Bunyan’s Mapp exists in direct lineal descent from Calvin’s work and from the work of his most prolific Reformation apologists. One must hesitate, then, in accepting Gordon Wakefield’s claim that Bunyan was ‘a signal example of Lutheran influence on English Protestantism, tempering Calvinism’. The scholastic treatment of conver-

In these two instances, as in many others, puritan conversion narratives effected an emancipation of the laity. Laypeople found a voice within the ecclesiastical institutions of the burgeoning Independent movement. Without formal theological qualifications they were encouraged to testify what God had done for their soul and were given the means publicly to negotiate with

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The Pietist laity in Germany, 1675–1750

Knowledge, gender, leadership
ByHans Otte

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passage of time it is no longer possible to tell if this information was correct, but there was certainly a group of people in Wildemann that belonged to a radical Pietist movement. Its members were convinced that true Christians possessed two characteristics: a contrite and humble spirit, which was the prior condition for God to dwell in the soul, and a brotherly love to one’s neighbour. Parsons seemed to them to lack both characteristics. Therefore the writer of the letter asked his addressee to change his heart and mind. He should alter his manner of life completely in order to find the way of salva-tion. The miner mentioned two exemplars of true Christianity: St Paul and Martin Luther. For him St Paul was a simple craftsman who knew his craft well. There was no need for him to ask the faithful for money in the way the parsons do. Instead he looked after their souls. He called them brethren and did not receive honour from men.

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between the ordained clergy and the laity, the so-called laypeople could scarcely avoid being lazy. The result of this was a woeful ignorance leading to irreligion. Such neglect of the spiritual priesthood also meant that ministers were able to do whatever they pleased without fear of effective control or even criticism. Yet it was the duty of Christians to edify their neighbours and for the parson to play a part in this. If the clergyman were negligent he should be admonished in a brotherly way. Spener’s third proposition was intended to remind his readers that ‘for Christian people it [was] not enough to have some knowledge about Christianity, but they should rather put it into prac-tice’. Consequently, he believed that religious controversies should not be

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sufficient for him. Despite this apparent similarity with the miner Frisch he represents a different type of Pietist layman. He had been well educated and was a member of the bourgeoisie in a large town within the Holy Roman Empire. He had travelled widely through western Europe and had many rel-atives living in various countries. It was comparatively easy for him and his friends to reject the ordinary Sunday services and the eucharist in a large city such as Frankfurt. No sanctions need be expected, but in smaller places it was more difficult for Pietists not to take part in public worship. Nevertheless, there were also lower-class Pietists in Frankfurt besides pious members of the bourgeoisie. Even servants attended Spener’s collegia pietatis. But their par-ticipation was so extraordinary that it was regarded as a peculiarity. The barriers between the social classes remained, although they had lost much of their separating character, but when Schütz withdrew totally from Spener’s collegia pietatis and formed his own conventicle he referred to the illiterate people who were in the practice of attending. It appears that he believed that he could gain no further edification from Spener’s groups. Schütz’s relationship with Spener shows the importance that parsons had as experts within the Pietist movement. They were able to circulate devo-tional texts. Many of these texts were examples of pious literature written not by orthodox Lutherans but by authors from other denominations represent-ing various theological schools. During the second half of the seventeenth century the publication of heterodox literature grew rapidly. In the promotion and distribution of this literature Spener played a major part. He refused to dissociate himself from pious authors simply because they espoused certain heterodox opinions. He preferred to take advantage of the outstanding piety of their writing. Its spirituality emphasized the practical aspect of belief rather than dogmatic rigidity and its associated dryness. Spener advised his disciples to ignore any heterodox views they encountered in their reading or, even better, to revise their texts, erasing the heterodox parts according to Lutheran orthodoxy. His promotion of devotional and mystical literature

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Part II Lay religious activity during the Enlightenment

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Reshaping individualism: the private Christian, eighteenth-century religion and the Enlightenment

The private Christian, eighteenth- century religion and the Enlightenment
ByBruce Hindmarsh

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Locke with his sensationalist psychology and his description of the mind as a tabula rasa, or as wax to be moulded and fashioned as one pleased, and Adam Smith with his picture of the competitive individual, ever ambitious, ever striving to better his own condition. So, another way to construe the task is to ask whether there was an ideol-ogy of Enlightenment individualism that underlay the popular practices of an involved evangelical laity in the eighteenth century. The lay followers of Wesley and Whitefield, the motivated laity within the Anglican parishes of evangelical ministers such as Henry Venn or John Newton, the lay members of Moravian communities, and the lay members of Dissenting congregations touched by revival – all of these laypeople were typically active not only in public religious observance but also in hearing and speaking of personal reli-gious experience, hymn-singing, exhorting or even preaching, extemporaneous prayer, and also in private religious practices such as devotional reading, prayer, meditation, fasting and diary-keeping. These practices constituted a culture of lay activism which was new to many evangelical converts. John Pawson wrote that before being introduced to Methodism, ‘Going constantly to church and sacrament included the whole of religion, as far as I knew.’

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explained by the rise of a new individualism in the Enlightenment? It can safely be assumed that she had not read Descartes’ Discourse on Method or John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It will be necessary to take the long way around and tell the larger story of the rise of individualism if the significance of Margaret Austin’s experience is to be appreciated. The rise of individualism: the Renaissance

The nineteenth-century cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt established what has been the standard account of the rise of individualism in the Renaissance, sharply contrasting the medieval and modern sense of self-identity: In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness – that which was turned within as that which was turned without – lay dreaming or half

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Martha Claggett

Another woman’s experience serves to illustrate in more detail the private and personal narrative identity of countless evangelical laypeople. One of the Wesleys’ first converts was a woman named Martha Claggett. On 24 July 1738, exactly two months after John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience, she wrote her spiritual autobiography in a letter to his brother Charles.

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identity squarely in the modern period. Indeed the genre emerges uniquely in the mid-seventeenth century on the cusp of the modern period. It is not Luther and Calvin who write conversion narratives – we have to piece together the details of their spiritual biographies from fragments in their the-ological writings – but their later descendants. Conversion narrative as a popular genre emerges in the mid-seventeenth century in the context of what Ernest Stoeffler calls the post-Reformation experiential tradition. Early examples include August Hermann Francke in

The genre itself reflects a high level of individuation. This is what might be expected under the conditions of the early modern world as the individual begins to count in all sorts of ways. As already suggested, the origins of indi- vidualism are contested and it is dangerous to take a narrow intellectual view

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of reading and writing not only allowed for the rise of autobiographical dis-course, it also encouraged the development of interiority and the practice of communing with one’s own thoughts in private. At precisely this moment in the acculturation of individualism in England, the evangelical narrative of conversion can be discovered flourishing among a numerous laity. Commonplaces, biblical tropes and narrative conventions occur in evangelical autobiography but this is not hagiography, at least not usually. The emphasis again and again in stories such as that of Martha Claggett is that people were surprised to find that the gospel was for them personally. Martha Claggett discovered that the gospel was not merely about playing a role in a pre-determined world – through nominal adherence to the established church and participation in communal ritual – but that it had to do with a deeply personal story that could make sense of her fears in child-birth, her guilt for having contemplated abortion, her grief over her dead brother, her depression, her vanity, as well as her dreams and hopes. After John Wesley’s own conversion, he wrote with wonder that God had taken away, he writes, ‘my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death’, and he put all these personal pronouns in italics in his journal.

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humble station of a journeyman shoemaker, by great industry, amassed a large fortune and now lives in a splendid style in London containing among other curi-ous and facetious anecdotes, a succinct account of . . . the Methodists. Written by himself. A part of what made his book so successful was his witty (indeed scur-rilous) exposé of the Methodists as one who had been an insider. The cover hinted of kiss-and-tell revelations in the book. For example, he tells a story of the famous Methodist preacher, George Whitefield, out field-preaching. A young woman in the front of the crowd fell backwards, just under the great evangelist, and lay there kicking up her heels. Seeing her in a kind of convul-sion some of the crowd moved to help her and the women drew her petticoat and apron down over her feet, but Whitefield cried out, ‘Let her alone! Let her alone! A glorious sight! A glorious sight!’ meaning of course that it was wonderful to see a soul overwhelmed by spiritual emotion. But the young men construed his meaning somewhat differently and, when the audience could not stop laughing, Whitefield had to dismiss them. According to Lackington, it became a saying among the young men ever after, when reel-ing home from the pub, ‘A glorious sight, A glorious sight!’

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but at the same time the self-identity of evangelicals contrasted sharply with the secular individualist self which has often been taken as the normative development of the Enlightenment. It remains to make a few observations linking this distinctive evangelical self-understanding to the appearance within evangelicalism of an active and vocal laity. The narrative identity of evangelicals expressed through stories of conversion was embraced by a wide spectrum of society, including women as well as men, laity as well as clergy, and all orders from the lowest to the highest in social rank. If we take into view contexts such as Sierra Leone at the end of the century, we can add that this narrative identity included people of different races as well. Conversion was a central emphasis within evangelicalism and the genre of conversion narrative is correspondingly and surprisingly broad in its sociological reach. One of the implications is that the concept of the laity within evangelicalism, under the impetus of conver-sionism, became something more like the apostle Paul’s use of the term laos to refer to the whole people of God, comprehending both clergy and non-clergy. In the eighteenth century this came into focus in certain debates about call to the ministry, ordination and what constituted a legitimate min-istry. As Jerald Brauer writes, ‘The moment one argues for the illegitimacy of a minister because he has not had a genuine conversion experience, one opens the possibility of ministry to any who have had such a conversion experience.’ Thus, the narrative identity of evangelicals, expressed through

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A spiritual aristocracy

Female patrons of religion in eighteenth-century Britain
ByHelen M. Jones

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were not suggesting the ending of female propriety, and were themselves sus-picious of women who overstepped the mark. This suspicion, together with the praise lavished on women who were more properly influential from behind the scenes, meant that it was women who adhered to these boundaries and attempted to use their influence in legitimate ways who could achieve sig-nificant power and authority. The mid-eighteenth century, the first period of evangelical revival in Britain, saw certain women able to exercise an apparently unprecedented degree of authority in religious affairs, yet without overstepping the accepted boundaries of women’s influence. The most famous was Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who founded her own religious connexion. Lady Betty Hastings was also known and respected for her practical support of ‘godly’ clergy and for her moral authority and example. Two Scottish peeresses, Lady Darcy Maxwell and Willielma, Viscountess Glenorchy, like Lady Huntingdon, built chapels for their own chosen clergy to preach in and expected to control these without the interference of the established church of which the build-ings were nominally a part.

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parish division and church building failed to keep pace with sharp rises in population. Lady Glenorchy had in 1775 explicitly rebuked the Edinburgh Presbytery over the failure of the establishment to cater for the religious needs of the city’s poor. Her chapel was intended to address those needs and was, despite her arguments, a rival to the existing parish churches. And, although herself neither preacher nor priest in her chapel, she could be regarded as equivalent to a bishop, or overseer, at least in the exercise of some of the supervisory and authoritative functions of that office. It was by buying the land on which to build a chapel that Ladies Glenorchy and Maxwell were able to claim the right to religious authority over the build-ing, because this accorded with the authority over private chapels which had always been legitimately exercised by female aristocrats. The Countess of Huntingdon used the same argument to justify the building of many chapels in which she retained the right to appoint clergy of her own choosing, arguing that she was merely appointing private chaplains. That Lady Huntingdon’s argument finally collapsed, obliging her to remove her connexion from the Church of England and license her chapels as Dissenting places of worship, was due to the greater scale of her religious activity in comparison to other female patrons. But it is significant that she avoided this outcome for so long. Her first chapel was built in 1761, but only in 1783, when she possessed over 60 places of worship, was she finally forced into separatism.

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religious tenor of the times, which made the exertion of their authority easier? Certainly, some aspects of the religion of the Evangelical Revival made pecu-liarly possible the exercise of religious and moral authority by individuals who might not normally have aspired to such leadership. Evangelicalism stressed the religion of the individual at the expense of that dictated by the establishment – although the established clergy were nonetheless still recognized and respected as part of God’s ministry. But the Reformation emphasis on the individual’s faith, relationship with God and right to read and interpret scripture was renewed at this time. Educated women of high sta-tion were amongst those who could most easily take advantage of that renewal. Evangelical religion, moreover, was often described as a religion of the heart: highly emotive rather than rational or dogmatic. Such religion

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authority by female patrons. Patronage inevitably operated from a higher towards a lower rank in society. Only a woman of high social status could patronize a clergyman. The importance attached to exalted rank when it came to circumventing restrictions can be demonstrated by comparing any of these aristocrats with Hannah More, who just attained the lower ranks of the gentry. Although she achieved considerable moral authority through her own efforts, the opposition she faced was greater than anything Ladies Huntingdon or Glenorchy had to endure. The Blagdon controversy of 1800–3 was a serious challenge by a Church of England clergyman to More’s attempt to appoint her own schoolmaster within his parish on no authority but her own. It demonstrates the difficulty which a woman of lesser rank faced when she tried to exercise the kind of religious authority that Lady Glenorchy defended with such panache against the Edinburgh Presbytery.

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Taming the Spirit

Female leadership roles in the American Awakenings, 1730–1830
ByMarilyn J. Westerkamp

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century was followed by the arrival and prosperity of Methodism, particu-larly on the western frontier, and the appearance of a less dramatic form of evangelical religion in the eastern states. As the evangelical movement devel-oped and changed from 1730 to 1850 the leadership of women changed as well. In the earlier decades women led small prayer groups and, in some com-munities, served on lay committees directing congregational affairs. During the early decades of the nineteenth century a few women, including several especially gifted African-Americans, followed the Spirit’s call and built repu-tations as lay preachers and exhorters. Although socially and politically subordinate, they experienced the immediate power of the Holy Spirit and discovered in it their own charismatic authority. Beginning in the 1720s and continuing until interrupted by Revolutionary fervour in the 1760s, a Great Awakening swept British America. The first stir-rings appeared in the mid-Atlantic colonies with the new immigrants and itinerant preachers. From there the spiritual vitality spread north and south. Communal rituals of intense, emotional revivalism, with their animated, frightening preachers and shrieking, weeping, fainting participants appeared everywhere. Throughout the colonies clergymen took sides for or against the Awakening. Its supporters, the New Lights, saw the essence of true faith as holy love – a religion of the heart. They believed the revivals to be the work of the Holy Spirit and understood the extreme physical manifestations as nat-ural outcomes of an enlightened soul responding to the real threat of damnation. The culture of the Great Awakening represented the first appearance of the evangelicalism that came to shape Protestantism in the United States. This culture grew out of two roots, blossoming into a single harvest. From the puritan and Congregationalist side came the emphasis upon the spiritual journey and conversion of the individual and the deeply emotional, some-times passionate, but always personal, connection with God. Through the Scots-Irish Presbyterians were added communal rituals, understandings and language that facilitated those individual journeys. The intensity of the believer’s personal relationship with God was acted out at a group level so that all could witness and appreciate (or decry) the excessive tribulations and joy experienced by the truly saved.

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upon disciplinary committees investigating both black and white members, occasional black men were recognized as preachers, and white church mem-bers, including masters, were sometimes called to account for sinful dealings with their enslaved or free black men and women. Moreover, in their accep-tance and even encouragement of black preachers evangelical churches were implicitly (if not explicitly) encouraging the formation of smaller prayer and study groups among, and sometimes led by, African-Americans. By the nine-teenth century these separate networks and communions led by community members would serve as a source of personal strength and spiritual and political power for African-American Christians. Within this climate of increasing lay authority women arose as active par-ticipants in New Light communities. They formed their own private groups where they found extraordinary spiritual counsel and nurture. The poet Phillis Wheatley maintained a correspondence with her friend Arbour Tanner, confiding her religious hopes, worries and pleasures, while Esther Edwards Burr and Sarah Prince kept up a three-year correspondence through which they admonished and encouraged one another. Sarah Osborn found a true spiritual companion in Susana Anthony, while Deborah Prince joined a female society ‘for the most indearing Exercise of social Piety’. In Philadelphia it was reported that after Whitefield had first preached there ‘four or five godly women in the city, were the principal counsellors to whom awakened and inquiring sinners used to resort, or could resort, for advice and direction’.

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upon the actions of grace within the heart. The futility of intellectual study as a spiritual method led New Light preachers to highlight the simple yet intense piety of the child as a model for faith. In the thinking of the new Enlightenment, bound by traditional assumptions about gender and race, the attainments of the adult mind were associated with European men, while women and African-Americans were judged to be simpler. In their childlike-ness both the woman and the African-American came to represent the quintessential spiritual convert. In Edwards’ Faithful Narrative his two exam-ples of Awakening converts were the young, unmarried Abigail Hutchinson and the irritating four-year-old Phebe Bartlet, who spent most of her time praying, listening to ministers and instructing other children.

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The new rhetoric of citizenship was a white, masculine language. The social and economic needs of the white moneyed classes, north and south, resulted in a 1787 constitution (and its 1791 bill of rights) that, amidst all its discus-sion of representative government and individual liberties, implicitly excluded African-Americans from that government and explicitly protected the insti-tution of slavery. The racial inferiority of African-Americans was judged to make them mentally and emotionally unfit for citizenship. In similar fashion women were made dependants within the republic. Just as wives enjoyed no legal identity under coverture, but had their being sub-sumed under their husband’s, so women had no political personhood apart from the men who supposedly represented them. As in the case of African-Americans, this was explained in terms of women’s natural mental and emotional unfitness to participate in government. In both cases the concept of childlikeness was invoked, implying that women and African-Americans were not complete adult persons. It was not that the lives of women or African-Americans had changed. Their circumstances had not changed, and that fact pointed up the progress that had been made by non-elite white men in the cause of republican liberty.

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began preaching at 42. Her brief tale chronicles a successful career as a preacher who frequently toured the northern states and travelled as far west as Michigan and back again to Pennsylvania when she was 87. She lived at least 10 more years. Both Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw were born to free par-ents on the mid-Atlantic seaboard. Both were drawn fairly early to the Methodist Church and felt the commission to preach years before embarking upon their first missions at the age of 30. Two themes dominate the stories of all three women. First, each empha-sized the work of the Spirit in her heart. Their exceptionally strong connection with the supernatural first exhibited itself in personal experiences of conversion and sanctification. Elaw experienced conversion while milking a cow: I turned my head, and saw a tall figure approaching, who came and stood by me. He had long hair, which parted in the front and came down on his shoulders; he wore a long white robe down to the feet; and as he stood with open arms and smiled upon me, he disappeared. She originally thought that the vision might only have been in her mind, except that the cow ‘bowed her knees and cowered down upon the ground’.

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perhaps inadvertently, displayed themselves as women actively following the call of grace. In direct response to someone’s citation of the Pauline position, Elaw engaged in a knowledgeable, perceptive scriptural discussion: It is true, that in the ordinary course . . . Paul laid it down as a rule, that females should not speak in the church, nor be suffered to teach, but the Scriptures make it evident that this rule was not intended to limit the extraordinary directions of the Holy Ghost, in reference to female Evangelists, or oracular sisters. This assertion was followed by a catalogue of female evangelists, including Phebe, Tryphena, Priscilla, the sisters of Nereus, the mother of Rufus, and the four virgin daughters of Philip. She noted the prophecy of Joel that God would pour out his Spirit upon his servants and handmaids. In the book of Acts Peter said that this prophecy was fulfilled at Pentecost, and if this was so, she argued, then ‘the Christian dispensation has for its main feature the inspirations of the holy prophetic Spirit, descending on the handmaids as well as on the servants of God’.

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empowerment realized through the Holy Spirit, Truth denounced spiritual and political evils in her own voice. She may have been filled with the Spirit, but by the very act of naming herself Truth proclaimed herself an actor. And the action she took was the advocacy of rights: the rights of African-Americans and of women. Ironically, the inspiration of the Spirit prepared this uneducated woman to challenge the republic within the framework of natural philosophy and the republican paradigm. Human equality and nat-ural rights became her language and the focus of her activism, albeit framed by the fiery millennial vision of evangelicalism. To read Sojourner Truth is to understand that the power of the Spirit was indeed an unpredictable, sub-versive, even dangerous force. Notes

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Part III Tensions surrounding an active laity

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social mores, to agrarian and urban–industrial change and to the rising tide of popular discontent or, at least, indifference. The Anglican Church, in spite of its hierarchy, was a highly decentralized body with each incumbent to all intents and purposes the arbiter of local policy and practice. By contrast the Church of Scotland, especially during the second half of the eighteenth cen-tury under the leadership of the Moderate party, exercised strong centralized control over its parishes and clergy. The General Assembly, meeting in Edinburgh, governed a tiered system of regional synods, presbyteries and, at the lowest level, kirk sessions, all composed of ministers and elders. By the latter part of the eighteenth century the Anglican Church was beset by practical difficulties which seriously compromised the parochial ideal. The 26 bishops were as much political functionaries operating in the House of Lords as they were spiritual leaders of the clergy in their dioceses. They exhibited the vices and virtues of the eighteenth-century aristocracy with whom they were associated. At the local level many parishes suffered from the loss of all or part of their tithe income while parsonage houses were fre-quently in ruin. As a result of these material deficiencies pluralism and non-residence were rife, with parochial duties entrusted to impecunious stipendiary curates, some of whom were compelled by circumstances to serve more than one parish. Even though the picture is far from uniform and recent work by Mark Smith on the industrializing areas of Oldham and Saddleworth has cast doubt on the conventional picture of a static church served by a neglectful clergy, there were numerous weaknesses in the system.

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central feature of Methodism, but a combination of the geographical limita-tions of that movement during its earliest phase, the inertia of traditional Dissent and the absence of a political crisis had lessened its impact upon the consciousness of those who supported the establishment. In spite of sporadic mob hostility and the opposition of individual clergy and magistrates there was little sign of general concern about the spread of lay activity before the 1790s. Traditionally, the employment of lay preaching by English Dissenters for the purposes of evangelism had been extremely limited. Theological con-straints and the effects of geographical isolation had confined the energies of most pastors to the spiritual needs of their own congregations. But from the 1770s the influence of Calvinistic Methodism, especially as mediated through the Countess of Huntingdon’s college at Trevecca, produced a new concern for evangelism. The model of Trevecca spawned a series of seminaries for the training of men who would unite care for a specific congregation with a con-tinuing ministry to the unchurched in surrounding communities. As a new

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schism and the undermining of church order. Anglican polemic against the intruders turned repeatedly to the accusation that by coming uninvited into parishes the itinerants brought schism to the heart of Christian society. The charge of schism did not simply imply the introduction of divisions into the church, it also embraced the concept of a valid ministry. It was no coinci-dence that most of the Anglican strictures against village preaching issued from high churchmen. For them, even in the days prior to the Oxford Movement, any departure from a strict respect for apostolic ordination rep-resented a fatal compromising of the church’s integrity. In a sermon delivered in 1792 in four of the Oxford churches, Edward Tatham, rector of Lincoln College, warned against the contemporary spate of ignorant and self-ordained teachers ‘who, under the appearance of religion, would disturb our happiness in this world by undermining the Church which is apostolical’ and who ‘instead of a Catholic faith uniformly professed, would introduce Heresies and Schisms’. Elaborating on this theme Richard Mant, rector of

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th-century society. If any active role were possible for the lay Christian it was simply that of promoting true religion in the station in life in which God had placed them. Behind the social derision lay the fear of more sinister influences. Legislation had progressively outlawed suspect political activity, but how could those with a vested interest in maintaining constitutional stability be sure that the emerging networks of village preaching and Sunday schools were not being used as cover for the dissemination of republican and atheis-tic ideas? Across a broad swathe of clergy from English high churchmen such as Tatham and Horsley to the General Assembly, and even to those like Porteous within the Popular party, deep suspicions were entertained. A number of writers suggested that among the preachers disaffected elements were working to dissolve the traditional bonds of social cohesion. They despised the king, sought to destroy patriotic feeling and hoped ultimately to overturn the government. In 1799 both the Pastoral Admonition and the rector of Chislehurst in Kent voiced the fear that Samuel Horsley was to develop the following year in his pastoral charge to the clergy of the Rochester diocese: the belief that the associational structure to which many of the preachers belonged was a device to foster subversion and connect apparently innocuous religious gatherings with the world of clandestine pol-itics. In one or two Anglican clerical outpourings there was even a further

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The general movement of evangelicalism as a whole between the awaken-ing of Jonathan Edwards’s Northampton congregation in 1734 and the widely noticed revivals in Ulster and the northern United States at the end of the 1850s was, indeed, from national churches towards gathered churches. Evangelicalism, which began as a series of interconnected renewal move-ments within state–church European Protestant regimes, was being transformed into a series of interconnected denominations defined by the free actions of those who made up those denominations. That movement, how-ever, did not proceed uniformly; nor did it entail foreordained consequences with respect to the place of the laity. As a partial explanation for those com-plexities it is important to sketch the emphases within evangelicalism that helped to redefine the church, even as they also redefined the nature of lay religion. Along the way will be mentioned briefly some of the evangelical adaptations to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture that assisted those redefinitions. In conclusion, some of the reasons will be revisited for suggesting why the general synergy between evangelicalism and the rise of the laity was always variable, often complex, and even occasionally ironical. It is axiomatic that the personal religion of evangelicalism pushed in the direction of heightened lay involvement. Three of the four characteristic marks of evangelical religion that have been helpfully codified by David Bebbington markedly expanded the role of the laity. First, the evangelical

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expanded opportunities for the laity. Among the most important of these practices were itinerancy, voluntary association and disestablishment. Itinerancy

John Mason Peck was a pioneering Baptist preacher in the American Mississippi River valley at a time when it had become obvious that the formal American denominations – Congregationalists, Episcopalians and Presbyterians – were largely failing to keep up with the expanding American population. Yet what Peck concluded about the need of the hour spoke for

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for the Propagation of the Gospel and local associations for promoting dis-ciplined spirituality. Methodist co-option of the form built a bridge to evangelicalism. In Britain the Baptist (1792), London (1795), and Church (1799) Missionary Societies, the Religious Tract Society (1799) and, supremely, the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804) offered Americans well-publicized examples for how rapidly, how effectively and with what reach lay-influenced societies could mobilize to address specific religious and social needs. A few small-scale voluntary societies had been formed in America before the turn of the nineteenth century, but it was only after about 1810 that voluntary societies – as self-created vehicles for preaching the Christian message, distributing Christian literature and bringing scattered Christian exertions together – fuelled the dramatic spread of evangelical religion in America. Many of the new societies were formed within denominations and a few were organized outside the boundaries of evangelicalism, like the American Unitarian Association of 1825. But the most important ones were organized by interdenominational teams of evangelicals for evangelical pur-poses. Charles Foster’s helpful (but admittedly incomplete) compilation of 159 American societies from this era finds 24 founded between 1801 and 1812, and another 32 between 1813 and 1816, with an astounding 15 in 1814 alone. After a short pause caused by the Bank Panic of 1819, the pace of for-mation picked up once again through the 1820s. The best funded and most

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person’s use of the Bible as the most important religious authority was implicitly to devalue the elaborate edifices protecting scriptural interpretation that prevailed in all the historic European churches, Protestant as well as Catholic. The institutions compromised by such logic included established churches defined as authoritative communicators of divine grace through word and sacrament, institutions of higher learning monopolized by the establishment in order to protect intellectual activity from religious as well as rational error, and the monarchy as the primary fount of godly social stabil-ity. British Protestant Dissent moved somewhat more cautiously in this direction. But even after the rise of Methodism and the reinvigoration of the older Dissenting traditions, the strength of evangelicalism among British establishmentarians never permitted the kind of thoroughly voluntaristic ecclesiology that prevailed in the United States. On questions of establishment, post-Revolutionary American evangeli-calism marked a distinct development from the colonial period when the most important evangelical leaders had spoken with opposing voices. Some, like Charles Wesley, whose hymns were being used in America from the 1740s, remained fervent defenders of the status quo. Some, like George Whitefield, gave up establishment in practice but without ever addressing the social implications of such a move and without being troubled by occa-sional relapses into establishmentarian behaviour. Some, like the Baptists in America from the 1750s, renounced establishment with a vengeance and became ardent proponents of disestablishment across the board. Some, like the American Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent, eagerly threw establishment away in the enthusiasm of revival, only later to attempt a partial recovery after enthusiasm cooled. Some, like John Wesley, gave up establishment instincts reluctantly, even while promoting religious practices that others regarded as intensely hostile to establishment. Some, like Francis Asbury, the leader of American Methodists, gave it up without apparent trauma. Many, like Jonathan Edwards and the leading evangelical laymen of the Revolutionary era – John Witherspoon, Patrick Henry and John Jay – never gave up the principle of establishment, even though they came to feel more spiritual kinship with evangelicals who attacked established churches (including their own) than they did with many of their fellow establishmen-tarian Protestant colleagues who did not embrace evangelicalism. By the late 1780s, except in New England, this mixed attitude towards formal church and state ties had been transformed into a nearly unanimous embrace of disestablishment. Even in Connecticut and Massachusetts, where evangelical support of the Congregational establishments could still be found, the tide was running strongly away from mere toleration towards full religious liberty. Methodism was an especially interesting variety of evangelicalism since its connectional system retained characteristics of an establishment (especially the human authority of Wesley, or the bishops who succeeded Wesley). But

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Methodist New Connexionism

Lay emancipation as a denominational raison d’être
ByTimothy Larsen

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Part IV Missions and the widening scope of priesthood

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The missionary movement

A lay fiefdom?
ByAndrew F. Walls

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saw as their mission. Unions could be still more destructive than schisms. The union of the Free Church of Scotland with the United Presbyterian Church in 1900 produced such a vast array of overseas commitments that the emer-gent United Free Church reduced the range, and the Japan field was given up. Union produced retrenchment rather than the expansion to be expected from combining resources. Worse was to follow when the House of Lords settled the resultant property dispute in favour of the remnant of the Free Church which did not join the union. The mission budget of the United Free Church went into crisis just at the time when there was an increased demand for mis-sionaries, for instance in West Africa where the Calabar mission was no longer confined to its creeks.

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not establish missions, even though they sometimes desired to do so. The first necessity was a body of people with the degree of commitment needed to live on someone else’s terms, together with the mental equipment for coping with the implications. Such commitment was in turn most likely to arise in the wake of powerful religious influences. Times of religious renewal were nec-essary for the recruitment of a sizeable company of such people, and the maintenance of a succession of them. A tradition of mental training, how-ever, was also needed; charismatic inspiration alone would not suffice, and indeed the plodder might succeed better with a new language and a new soci-ety than the inspired preacher. The second need was for a form of organization which could mobilize committed people, maintain and supply them, and forge a link between them and their work and the wider church. Since in the nature of things both their work and the conditions in which they carried it out were exceptional, the necessary structures could not readily emerge in very rigid regimes, whether political or ecclesiastical. They needed tolerance of the exceptional, and flex-ibility. The third factor necessary to overseas missions was sustained access to overseas locations, with the capacity to maintain communication over long periods. This implies what might be called maritime consciousness, with mar-itime capability and logistical support. All three factors were present in the first, Catholic, phase of the missionary movement. The Catholic Reformation released the spiritual forces to produce the committed worker, the religious orders offered possibilities of extension and adaptation which produced the structures for deploying them, and the Portuguese enclaves and trading depots provided the communication net-works and transoceanic bases. When in the course of the eighteenth century the Catholic phase of missions began to stutter, it was partly because the three factors were no longer fully in place. The Protestant movement developed as the Catholic movement weakened. It began, not at the end of the eighteenth century (that is a purely British per-spective) but at the end of the seventeenth; not in England, but in Germany and Central Europe. Its main motors were in Halle and Herrnhut, though, just as German Pietism drew on the English puritan tradition, it had a puri-tan prologue. William Carey’s Enquiry did not initiate it; the object of that

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institute a process so flagrantly at variance with that discipline? The catechist proposal was quickly dropped; missionaries must be ordained clergy. Venn had previously toyed with the idea of a special ordination for overseas service, which would be justified on the ground that preaching to people at a low stage of civilization did not demand the social and educational attributes necessary to the place the clergy held in English society. But the counter was obvious: a person ordained for overseas service could not be prevented from returning to an English benefice. The mission field would then become an open invitation to social climbers. It was for this reason that the CMS took five years to get its first mission-aries to the mission field. The office of missionary was a clerical one, not to

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the forge rather than the normal sources of the ministry. Their deficiencies in formal education would not be inhibiting, since a knowledge of the dead languages was not necessary to the communication of the truth in living ones, and their practical skills would be a positive advantage. And find them they did; not less than 30 missionaries, with some wives and children, went off to the Pacific together in 1796. Four were ordained as ministers, one was a surgeon, most of the rest were artisans or labourers. One was so anxious to go that he worked his passage on the ship and was accepted as a missionary on arrival. The voyage took eight months, so the group naturally formed a gathered congregation on board ship (and had the sadness of having to excommunicate some of their number on doctrinal grounds). A short period in the islands produced a drastic thinning of the ranks by death and deser-tion, though one of the labourers went on to devote 48 years to the service of the mission and one of the artisans to give 45. Another group of 23 mis-sionaries was sent to the Pacific in 1798 but never got there, being intercepted by a French warship. By 1799, the year that saw the foundation

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years essentially a clerical society, a network of evangelical clergymen who kept up a correspondence based on their knowledge of their own parishes and congregations. Around 1812 the society began to develop local auxiliaries with a penny-a-week subscription. Not only was there an increase in finances, the society began to receive applications from viable candidates of whom the members of the clerical circle had never heard, and this at a point when missionary work was being identified with the ‘white man’s grave’ and heavy mortality. The broadened base of support, the approach to something like mass mem-bership, necessitated a broader literary appeal. A whole new literature appeared along the trail first blazed by the Baptist Periodical Accounts. Missionary lit-

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Industry, professionalism and mission

The placing of an emancipated laywoman, Dr Ruth Massey 1873–1963
ByClyde Binfield

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to the auxiliary or non-stipendiary ministry. Had she lived a decade longer and been rather younger, she could, as a deacon of Wilmslow Congregational church, have been ordained to the eldership when her church became part of the United Reformed Church. In both cases, though with varying emphases, the word ‘ordination’ was carefully, almost precisely, used. Such developments, sharpened while Ruth was in Wuchang by English Congregationalism’s formal recognition of the ordination of women to the ministry of word and sacrament, were the natural accompaniments of con-stant concern over the nature and expression of ministry, that duty and privilege of all believers. So what of the minister, whom John Angell James, the famous Birmingham Congregationalist, had once called ‘the highest type of Christian’?

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the advance of conservative evangelicalism after the Second World War. Greater attention to the continuities in the policy of evangelicalism towards Oxford and Cambridge during its period of ‘decline’ is clearly overdue. If the objectives of the Pastorate might have been predictable on the basis of long-standing evangelical tradition, its methodology seems rather unex-pected. Shaped by the model of the college tutor, the methods adopted by the Pastorate chaplains were as far away from the popular revivalist image of turn of the century evangelicalism as can be imagined. ‘We are naturally asked what methods we pursue’, noted C.S. Woodward in 1914, reflecting on the previous five years spent as a Pastorate chaplain, ‘the answer may be put in two words – personal influence.’ How was this influence brought to bear

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Part V The church of the laity

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‘The church itself is God’s clergy’

The principles and practices of the Brethren
ByNeil T.R. Dickson

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moved to London in 1880 McKilliam himself entered the movement. The lay spirit of the awakenings has perhaps been underestimated in histories of the Brethren as an important shaping force on its ethos. After 1859 the movement to some extent was remade, with Brethrenism inheriting not only the anti-establishment spirit of mid-century revivalism, but also its lay orientation. The upsurge in lay activity was an important part of the evangelicalism from which Brethrenism emerged and tensions between clerical establish-ments and laypeople became a significant cause of accessions to the new movement. The Brethren developed their own thinking on the laity, but their principles and practices did not arrive fully fledged. The commemoration of the Lord’s supper in Dublin to which Brethren origins are traced, initially had a set order of service, but it gradually came to allow spontaneous participa-tion by attendants. The mature thought of Darby, in particular, slowly

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acter of this corporate commitment has been compared to a marriage. ‘When a split came, it produced the rancor of a divorce because the covenant had all the force of a wedding vow.’

As is well known, Thomas Helwys could stomach neither the Waterlanders’ denial of Christian magistracy nor their avowal of a celestial flesh Christology. He forsook Smyth, returned to England, penned a revolutionary, apocalyptic tract and, like the true martyr, sent a copy to James I. His fol- lowers dropped his apocalyptic language, concentrating on survival instead.

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This frontier of cowboys, vigilantes and entrepreneurs isolated in distant farmsteads gave Henry Ford every reason to develop that ultimate symbol of standardized individuality, the automobile. As Mullins matured, Protestantism dominated America. William Jennings Bryan roused farmers with his populist speeches of a ‘cross of gold’. Woodrow Wilson proved southern gentility could once again lead the Democrat party and the nation. Following their manifest destiny and bearing their white man’s burden, these proud Anglo-Saxons, populist and progressive, were pressured by non-white, non-Protestant advances. Their greatest opposition came from Catholic immigration and philosophical materialism. Their only hope for maintaining Protestant hegemony lay in denying Protestant diversity by reducing theo-logical distinctions among Protestants to the bare minimum.

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freedom and is prefigured in the Anglo-Saxon principle of individualism. It is comparable to Nietzsche’s superman but with a difference: ‘under Christ all is regenerated and spiritualized’. ‘Self-realization’ is the metaphysical end of life while ‘self-assertion’ is the definition of freedom. Even God is con-strained in his dealings with the autonomous individual. Comparing the Divinity to a Master Bowler, he says God must necessarily elect the strategic or ‘great men’ of history as other souls will naturally follow them in great numbers. (Mullins’s wife and colleagues ranked him accordingly.) Ironically, the precious diamond is also fragile. For God or man, more than mention-ing salvation to a person at the appropriate time is ‘doing violence to the will’.

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crown and goal of nature is its highest outcome, man himself’; indeed, ‘the human will is, in a relative sense at least, a first cause’; moreover, ‘man is self-determined’. James and Bowne thus contribute to Mullins’s intoxication

Mullins’s Axioms and The were influential among Baptists. replaced Boyce’s Calvinistic system in 1917, remaining Southern’s authoritative theological text well into the 1950s. revised by ‘the venerable’ Herschel Hobbs, who collapsed all the axioms into ‘self-determination in every area of life’. Hobbs was instrumental in adding
ByChristian Religion Axioms

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The Charismatic Movement

The laicizing of Christianity?
ByDavid F. Wright

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partakers of the Spirit. There are no special classes of Spirit-bearers, no separate groups of Spirit-filled believers. Fullness of life in the Spirit, participation in the abundant life in the Spirit, is a common possession of the whole Church, although not appropriated in equal measure by all . . . The statement stresses the plurality but not equality of charisms. As mani-festations of the Spirit – ‘inseparable but not identical’ – spiritual gifts are constitutive both of the nature of the church and of ‘the nature of the Christian life in its communitarian and individual expression’. In this sense every Christian is a charismatic and therefore has a ministry to the church and the world. A radical equality of charisms and ministries is not a principle of church life. One must also say that the charisms of the Spirit are without number. Finally, one of the bonds which binds laity and the hierarchy is the one Spirit manifesting himself in different service functions. . . . Irenaeus said: ‘Where the Church is, there is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church . . .’ Charism is a principle of order in the Church in such a way that there is no distinction between the insti-tutional and the charismatic Church.

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