Reinventing Christianity

Nineteenth-Century Contexts

Linda Woodhead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138712140
• eBook ISBN: 9781351775922
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This title was first published in 2001. 'An age of faith or an age of doubt?'- the question has dominated study of Christianity in the Victorian era. Reinventing Christianity offers a fresh analysis of the vitality and variety of Christianity in Britain and America in the Victorian era. Part One presents an overview of some of the main varieties of Christianity in the west ranging from the conservative - Protestant evangelicalism and 'fortress' Catholicism - to the radical - Theosophy, Swedenborgianism and Transcendentalism; Part Two reviews negotiations between Christianity and the wider culture. The conclusion reflects on general trends in the period, showing how many of these prefigured later developments in religion. This book highlights the creativity and diversity of 19th century Christianity, showing how developments normally associated with the late 20th century - such as the reassertion of tradition and the rise of feminist theology and alternative spirituality - were already in train a century before.

PART ONE
VARIETIES

I
Transcendent Christianity

Chapter One
Evangelical Certainties: Charles Spurgeon and the Sermon as Crisis Literature

Andrew Tate

Όh! that we might all be converted!’ (Spurgeon, 1859, p. 166)

As a successor to the revivalist tradition inaugurated by George Whitefield and John Wesley in the eighteenth-century, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the English Baptist preacher, was an evangelist sans pareil, sermonizing against the evils of the age, and urgently calling for the repentance of his hearers. Beginning his ministry in 1854, Spurgeon preached assurance during a period of radical ambiguity for the English Protestant tradition. In the 1850s the via media of the established church was particularly vulnerable, offering the certainties of neither Papal Rome nor those of Calvinist Geneva. Could the Church of England continue to fulfil a prophetic role when so many members of its communion were assailed by scepticism? In 1851 Daniel Wilson, an Anglican clergyman, proclaimed that the impasse was caused principally by the church having lost sight of its evangelistic responsibilities:

souls are perishing all around. What are we doing for them? Have we a due sense of the value of a soul - of a single soul? What is a lost soul? What efforts ought not to be made to save a soul? A revival of spiritual religion would produce a great change in this respect. There would be a general longing after the conversion of souls, a travailing in birth again till Christ be formed in them. (Wilson, 1851, p. 8)

The Church of England, he maintained, had become apathetic, failing to respond to the challenges posed by the recent re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He observes that ‘conversion is not sought for or recognised in the proper sense of the term’ (pp. 11, 7). This Anglican clergyman’s censure of the Church foreshadows the rise of Spurgeon and a ministry that concentrated on conversion. In a decade of major debates regarding episcopal authority, the individual search for salvation and assurance had, perhaps, not been closely addressed by the Church of England. Wilson’s anxieties may have been soothed by the appearance of this Baptist preacher who, from the mid-1850s, marked a ‘revival of spiritual religion’.

Speaking at first from the pulpit of New Park Street, subsequently at the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall and from 1861, in the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Spurgeon attracted thousands of intrigued listeners to every service. People from all classes came to hear him, and he influenced thinkers whose churchmanship was radically different from his own. He impressed Matthew Arnold, corresponded with Gladstone, and held private discussions with John Ruskin.

This chapter will examine the role of Spurgeon as an emergent Evangelical voice during the 1850s. Spurgeon’s personal ‘salvation’ testimony will be scrutinised in the wider context of 1850s Protestant England. One of his sermons will be read as an important example of crisis literature. His sermons and his personal testimony are at once a reaction against crisis - relying on conservative doctrinal assertions, and biblical authority to refute contemporary ontological uncertainties - and a means of engendering it, exhorting the unregenerate listener to seek the turning point between life and death, where he or she will abandon their sins, acknowledge the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ and become ‘bom anew’.

Learning to tell stories is a foundational exercise for Christians, both Protestant and Roman Catholic alike: in common with all world religions it is a faith of parables and history, of poetry and living myth. Edifying stories are told from the pulpit, written in testimonial pamphlets, and shared in prayer meetings. Roman Catholic and Anglican children are introduced, albeit unconsciously, at an early age into the broad narrative of Christian history through the rite of baptism. The importance of narrative, however, has particular significance in the Evangelical tradition: the personal account of how faith in Christ was found is explicitly regarded as vital proof of regeneration. As one critic has recently claimed, ‘to become a Christian … is to embrace the story of Christ in such a way that we join the story line’ (Kallenberg, 1995, p. 348). In his autobiography, Spurgeon prefaces an account of his own conversion with a statement on the importance of Christian testimony. The legitimacy of an individual’s claim to conversion can be judged, he notes, by the quality of the story that is told:

I have heard men tell the story of their conversion, and of their spiritual life, in such a way that my heart hath loathed them and their story, too, for they have told of their sins as if they did boast in the greatness of their crime … Oh! when we tell the story of our own conversion, I would have it done with great sorrow remembering what we used to be, and with great joy and gratitude, remembering how little we deserve these things. (1897, p. 97)

Spiritual autobiography, the preacher reasons, should exist solely to glorify the saviour, and never its ‘saved’ narrator. Evangelicalism is characterised by an acutely self-conscious form of piety, promoting constant, close scrutiny of the conscience. It also, however, perpetuates a heightened sense of the narrative tradition of which each new convert enters: Spurgeon’s emphasis on the way such a story is told is not merely zealous impatience. Nineteenth-century Protestant conversion narratives are foreshadowed not only by the writings of Saint Paul and Augustine but also by those of John Bunyan and John Wesley. For Spurgeon and his co-religionists contemporary narratives had to conform to a specific tradition of conversion: they must be self-abasing, emphasising grace and election, sole gratitude to God, and explicitly acknowledge the necessity of substitutionary atonement.

Spurgeon dates ‘that day of days, that best and brightest of hours’, when he experienced a ‘conversion of the heart’, as 6 January, 1850: at the very beginning of the decade when Protestant anxiety would be perpetuated by a number of major challenges. Although the account of the event described by Spurgeon as ‘the Great Change’ has its origins in the same tradition as the conversion narratives written by many of his literary contemporaries, it is written from a very different perspective. The preacher’s tale is governed by limits from which other narratives are free. Pseudo-autobiography gave Carlyle the liberty to explore scepticism and spiritual re-birth in the influential Sartor Resartus (1833-4), without fear of condemnation. In Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850) Robert Browning could satirize and celebrate the major interpretative frameworks of European Christianity using the ‘mask’ of dramatic monologue. Ruskin’s writings on his ‘unconversion’ experience were initially limited to private correspondence with a number of trusted friends, and he produced his first public account eighteen years after the event in Letter 76 of Fors Clavigera (1877).

These narratives were all constructed by individuals on the margins of orthodox belief, independent of institutional regulations and without the burden of clerical responsibility. Even Ruskin, who had become an eminent apologist for Protestant thought and was accordingly cautious regarding public proclamation, held no official position that could compromise his narrative. Spurgeon, however, was subject to rigorous doctrinal imperatives. His ‘story’ had to correspond with the orthodoxy of his professed theological position. As a Baptist minister he was accountable to a powerful leadership, and he also had an obligation to the wider Evangelical community to perpetuate the compelling invitation to repentance and regeneration. Spurgeon’s narratives of conversion are, therefore, simultaneously an act of interpretation and persuasion, transforming private experience into public discourse. The accounts he gave had to appear free from artifice, to be pure utterances that communicated the literal truth of a meeting between God and man. Yet, despite the aspiration to purity of representation, his accounts were also informed by the literary tropes invoked by Carlyle and Browning.

Spurgeon’s own ‘redemption history’ is shaped by the paradigm narratives of Puritan tradition, most explicitly those of Bunyan and Wesley. His autobiography acknowledges that particular texts prompted and shaped his conversion: ‘I have to bless God for many good books’, he states, citing, among others, Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul and Baxter’s Calls to the Unconverted. He argues, however, that it was another textual encounter that precipitated his decisive Christian commitment: ‘but my gratitude most of all is due to God, not for books, but for the preached Word’ (Spurgeon, 1897, p. 104). Spurgeon problematizes the traditional Evangelical emphasis on private judgment of scripture by elevating the role of the sermon in his conversion. His experience is auditory rather than literary, one of passive reception rather than of engaged interpretation. The hermeneutic act has already been begun by the preacher. The responsibility of the listening subject becomes radically limited, and he is only granted a choice between total assent or dissent, allowing no ambivalence. The rhetoric of the evangelistic sermon is privileged above private acts of reading:

The revealed Word awakened me; but it was the preached Word that saved me; and I must ever attach peculiar value to the hearing of the truth, for by it I received the joy and peace in which my soul delights, (p. 104)

This affirmation does not, however, indicate that Spurgeon was equivocal regarding the value of regular, solitary reading of scripture. Indeed, in an early sermon focusing on biblical authority, he accused his listeners of abandoning the Bible, counselling them to read it with reverence and expectation:

This Bible is God’s Bible; and when I see it, I seem to hear a voice springing up from it, saying, “I am the book of God: man, read me. I am God’s writing: open my leaf, for I was penned by God; read it, for he is my author, and you will see him visible and manifest everywhere”. (1856, p. 110)

The emphasis on the ‘peculiar value’ of the ‘preached Word’ originates from anxieties of authority: as the Bible became an increasing focus of debate, and its status as the infallible Word of God was openly challenged, so was the possibility of ‘innocent’ interpretation reduced. Spurgeon suggests that many readers are incapable of reaching the correct interpretation of scripture, and that they need to be guided by orthodox teaching from the pulpit. He censures clergymen who appear to relax the challenges of scripture, arguing that to substitute the word ‘damned’ with ‘condemned’ was gross deception: ‘Gentlemen! pull the velvet out of your mouths; speak God’s word; we want none of your alterations’ (p. 112).

Biblical authority was as vital for Spurgeon as autobiographer as it was fundamental to his role as preacher. His generation, both educated and illiterate, was immersed in the language of the Bible; the pietist and the ‘infidel’ alike would have been familiar with the parables and the ten commandments, and from infancy aware of Old Testament stories of exile and redemption. Victorian popular culture was explicitly rooted in the Bible: from Spurgeon’s theatrical preaching before 10,000 strong crowds (significantly most often in a very secular venue, a music hall), to the allusive fiction of Dickens, the language of scripture imbued most forms of public discourse. James Garbett, Keble’s successor as Professor of poetry at Oxford, contradicted the emergent Zeitgeist of biblical criticism by arguing that the Bible was not simply a work of literature but the living, dynamic Word of God:

When you open the Word, which, like Himself is not dead but living, and shooteth life from it into the dead, do not separate it from Him. Treat it not as words in a book, or as issuing from the lips of man … The words of the Book are no more mere words, than the promises or the threats of men like ourselves … They are God speaking, inviting, loving, justifying. (Garbett, 1849, p. 50)

The language of scripture, therefore, was not to be used indifferently, but with reverence. According to this argument the words of the Bible act as the ultimate signifiers of meaning. In a culture pervaded by biblical narrative this ‘canonical language’ could legitimate private narratives, whether or not they were written by practising Christians, giving implicit credibility to their arguments.

In Spurgeon’s narrative, as with all biblical literalists, this use of ‘canonical language’ becomes more complex. In a recent study Peter Stromberg argues that the individual who, in the Puritan tradition, seeks conversion ‘must learn to understand experience and the Word of God in the same terms’ (1993, p. 11). Spurgeon, like Garbett, understood the Bible in theological rather than literary terms; scripture was not simply a means of describing personal, religious change but the very source of the conversion. The biblical narrative is reconstructed by its reader as the story of personal redemption, integrating scripture and experience. Spurgeon’s narrative of conversion is constructed around a similar trope of integration. Before describing the specifics of ‘that day of days’, Spurgeon locates his story as part of the unfolding Christian grand-narrative, alluding to scripture and asserting confidence in personal knowledge of salvation:

Dying, all but dead, diseased, pained, chained, scourged, bound in fetters of iron, in darkness and the shadow of death, Jesus appeared unto me. My eyes looked to Him; the disease was healed, the pains removed, chains were snapped, prison doors were opened, darkness gave place to light. What delight filled my soul! (Spurgeon, 1897, p. 97)

The biblical discourse of condemnation, with its imagery of disease and darkness, is appropriated to represent the initial state of unbelief; redemption is described as a moment of theophany, when ‘Jesus appeared’ and Spurgeon’s ‘eyes looked unto Him’, and is accompanied by a state of rapture that echoes the experience of Pentecost in the book of Acts. This foregrounding of the narrative is not merely a metaphorical description of the rite of conversion. For Spurgeon these biblical phrases represented the only means of describing his experience; he believed that the moment of repentance, engendered by the vision of Christ, was also the precise instant of his personal salvation. A moment before, he argues, and he was still in the adamite state of ruin. He is also careful to insist on the Evangelical imperative of salvation by grace alone. The narrative of his personal journey begins with reference to his early religious character:

For years, as a child, I tried to learn the way of salvation; and either I did not hear it set forth, which I think cannot quite have been the case, or else I was spiritually blind and deaf, and could not see it and could not hear it; but the good news that I was, as a sinner, to look away from myself to Christ, as much startled me, and came as fresh to me, as any news I ever heard in my life. (Spurgeon, 1897, 102)

Spurgeon’s disclosure that from infancy he had been engaged in seeking ‘the way of salvation’ is significant. Despite emphasis on his pre-regenerate identity as ‘blind and deaf’ to the gospel and unequivocally as ‘a sinner’ he establishes integrity as an individual who has always sought truth and righteousness. This was important for an Evangelical readership. The prior expression of antipathy for those conversion narratives featuring salacious accounts of transgression indicates that his story will not focus on life as ‘sinner’. Similarly he makes it clear that at the time of his spiritual rebirth he was actively seeking the ‘authentic’ faith and the means to gain it for himself. As a fifteen-year-old Spurgeon was living away from home when he became convinced of the necessity of personal faith. He did not, however, discover faith according to the catastrophic Pauline model. Spurgeon was from a Christian background, and had both an earnest belief in God and a sense of conviction for personal sin. His dilemma was one of interpretation, represented by the multiplicity of houses of worship, representing different traditions within one faith. The resolution of his quest transpired in unlikely circumstances:

I sometimes think I might have been in darkness and despair until now had it not been for the goodness of God in sending a snowstorm, one Sunday morning, while I was going to a certain place of worship. When I could go no further, I turned down a side street, and came to a little Primitive Methodist Chapel. In that chapel there may have been a dozen or fifteen people. (1897, p. 105)

Providence, argues Spurgeon, intervened in the pilgrimage and forced him to enter a place of worship he would otherwise have ignored. This action echoes the beginning of Robert Browning’s Christmas-Eve, ironically written only months before, and describing a fictional conversion that is actually set less than a fortnight before Spurgeon’s moment of crisis. Browning’s sceptical traveller stumbles into the Evangelical service at Mount Zion Chapel and joins the underprivileged community of worshippers ostensibly to escape the rain. The Primitive Methodist Chapel of Spurgeon’s narrative is similarly humble, representing the margins of mainstream Protestant rel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART ONE: VARIETIES
• PART TWO: NEGOTIATIONS
• Conclusion
• References
• Index