Prompted by my last post I have dug into Elliott-Binns Religion in the Victorian Era. It confirms my understanding that the re-moralising, and re-spiritualising, of Victorian Britain was quite complex in causation, but did indeed seem to begin with Nonconformist and Anglican Evangelicals campaigning on the abolition of slavery. Maybe Asa Briggs just read Elliott-Binns and took the credit.
One interesting observation, that I may have vaguely noticed before, was that although the strength of Methodism provided a lot of the grass-roots support for this revolution, the Great Awakening itself, for all its spectacular manifestations, had not in its generation of the previous century affected society to anything like the extent of the Victorian changes. It would appear that in terms of numbers turning to Christ, the renewal of the culture, and the long-term benefits through to the mid-twentieth century, the latter has a much better claim to be termed a national revival than the Awakening does. Perhaps Evangelical and Pentecostal revivalists, longing for another Wesley-Whitefield-Edwards re-run, would do well to consider that.
Another feature of Victorian Christianity, though, struck me as of possible relevance to today’s situation. That is the rise of Anglo-Catholic Tractarianism, otherwise known as The Oxford Movement. This involved leaders like John Keble, Edward Pusey, and John Henry Newman, but a glance at the Wikipedia entry shows a long list of those involved which includes a remarkable number of familiar Victorian names.
Newman was unusual in actually “going over to Rome,” and eventually becoming a Cardinal. Most of the others rejected the more controversial doctrines of Roman Catholicism, and believed that they were renewing the ancient teachings of the Church, as represented in the Anglican tradition. Obedience to the Pope was by no means on their agenda. Their rather questionable position was that Anglicanism was the third branch of “primitive” Christianity on an equal footing with the Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy that split in the 11th century. Accordingly, they set great store on the authority of bishops, on apostolic succession, and on infant baptism.
In thus tracing their historical roots to the mediaeval period, presumably regarding traditions up to that time as truly reflecting the New Testament Church, they championed the liturgical and architectural features of that period. Hence the pejorative appellation in my own lifetime of “Bells and Smells.” On the face of it, this seems highly antithetical to Evangelical faith, as represented by the Reformed theology that generated British Nonconformity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
I remember attending a course organised by Dick Lucas’s preacher-training Proclamation Trust, into which an Anglo-catholic curate had somehow strayed. In that context, his assertion that the chasuble was much to be recommended to clergymen as “it is a very comfortable garment” seemed not so much irrelevant as bizarre. Did Jesus, or Paul, turn up to preach in a chasuble? And did they have any thought whatever of dividing the Church into priests in embroidered robes and a laity in mufti?
Yet what gave me pause in Elliott-Binns’s account was how many of those attracted to the Oxford Movement began their lives or ministries as Evangelicals in the Church of England. Now, as YouTube demonstrates regularly, occasional individuals will be found to convert from anything to anything. Noted Baptists will become atheists, Catholics will become gnostics, Orthodox priests will become Lutherans, and so on. It’s sometimes hard to fathom the reasoning involved, say in exchanging Charismania for Papal infallibilty and acceptance of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven, but it happens.
But when, in the nineteenth century, large numbers of people moved from what purported to be the biblical purity of Evangelical churches to a movement whose fundamentals clearly originated in a particular age far removed from New Testament times, one needs to ask the reasons. Although the Reformation consciously or unconsciously retained some of the baggage that had accreted in the Western Church over 1500 years, it nevertheless was surely right to attempt to base its teaching and practice on the pattern taught by Christ and the apostles in Scripture, and to reject mediaeval innovations. In particular, it was well aware how sacerdotalism, based on mimicry of the Old Testament, had infiltrated the Church around the time of Constantine, for the very reason that Constantine made Christianity his imperial cult, and the Church needed the pagan trappings and the social preferments to function as such.
Yet many earnest believers abandoned Evangelical convictions for the Tractarian position. To be clear, I am not talking about those who spurned the heterodox beliefs that had steadily crept into the old Nonconformist denominations, such as Socinianism and Arianism. These people were not rationalists or Unitarians, but Anglicans who believed in the centrality of Scripture, in personal conversion, and in “heart religion” over dry intellectual faith.
Let me suggest two reasons for Evangelicals moving to Anglo-Catholicism, mentioned by Elliott-Binns and, I think, highly plausible. He points out that the strong Evangelical wing of the nineteenth century Church of England was, in the main, the product of the Methodist awakening.
The Restoration had purged Reformed Puritanism from the Established Church, exiling it to the marginalised Nonconformists. The later Methodism was, of course, initially an Anglican movement, and many clergy converted under its influence would have been among those most averse to seceding to form a new denomination, as happened after Wesley’s death. Accordingly, the Evangelicalism they embraced was a long way from the model of the Magisterial Reformers, instead being after the pattern of Wesley’s Moravian pietism. Powerful experiences of conversion and inner holiness were the thing, together with a simple evangelistic pulpit ministry, accompanied by a new focus on enthusiastic congregational singing.
No doubt the parish churches were less noisy than the Primitive Methodist assembles my own maternal ancestors seemed to favour – after all, they were still “church” rather than “chapel” folk – but the basic theology was from the same root-stock.
Elliott-Binns notes how some of the Evangelicals attracted to the Oxford Movement began to regret the replacement of holy awe, thoughtfulness and reverence – actually rather apparent in the New Testament – with superficial emotionalism, as I have noted even from the experience of Jonathan Edwards himself in the Great Awakening. Furthermore, and probably from a related cause, these people noticed how, despite the claim to be Bible-based, Evangelicals were concentrating on only some of the Bible’s teachings, those that served the immediate evangelistic agenda, rather than teaching “the whole counsel of God” in its unfathomable spiritual depth.
I don’t know what led to these disillusioned Evangelicals preferring to take their model from mediaeval Catholicism, rather than returning to the teaching of the Reformers. The latter, after all, honoured the intellect without neglecting heart, but sought its strong “spiritual affections” in the truths of God’s word, in its entirety, rather than in emotional mysticism. Reformed faith was also rooted in the history of theology, so did not ignore the Church Fathers.
Perhaps all that had been forgotten, and the Tractarians offered spiritual depth and the missing sense of reverence over excessive informality and superficiality. Perhaps the incense and chasubles were seen as a small price to pay for those things, rather than constituting nostalgia for an imagined golden age, at least for the ex-Evangelicals.
This story seems relevant, if there is any truth in the claim that young men, in particular, are now finding faith in traditional, rather than contemporary, churches. It is certainly the case that in Evangelical churches, “Evangelicalism” as it was understood during the Reformation, is hard to find.
This is not so much about particulars, such as strict adherence to one of the historic Reformed confessions of faith, or using a catechism, and still less following the forms and vestments of Calvin’s church in Geneva, let alone Cranmer’s Prayer Book. Rather, the superimposition of Charismatic Pentecostalism on to Wesleyan pietism (both from the same root, but greatly compounded in confusion in the new stream) has made emotion (now branded “passion”) not just a marker, but the raison d’etre, of many Evangelical churches.
Exposition of Scripture, in a rigorous manner, is uncommon, and often subordinated, in practice, to “folklore doctrine.” For example, a friend was telling me of hearing a sermon, in which the Charismatic vicar held up a colander to show how the Holy Spirit leaks out of us, so that we have to replace “it” regularly by a new experience of filling. Such a concept, let alone such a colander, is nowhere to be found in Scripture, of course. But that seems not to matter.
Nor is it to be found in many Anglo-Catholic churches, I hope – though I have no knowledge of how that movement has developed, and perhaps deviated, since the emergence of the Oxford Movement. But for the life of me I can’t see why it’s so hard, or even undesirable, to make sola scriptura our actual basis for doctrine and practice, rather than something to which we give a nod as we make up Christianity on the hoof and label it “Evangelical,” as if it really were.
