The Evangelical Revival

G.M. Ditchfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135364786
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The word-wide impact of evangelicalism has long been recognized as a vital force. Providing both a clear and accessible guide to the recent literature, this introduction examines the revival in the British Isles during the 18th and 19th-century within a broadly international context. By investigating the nature of the revival and emphasizing its link with popular culture, this analysis explores the centrality of religion in this period. Posing questions such a "how far was the revival a threat to order?" And "what was its influence on society?" This work provides an introduction to the topic for all A-level and undergraduate students of 18th and 19th-century British history.

CHAPTER ONE
The international dimension

Evangelicalism was the principal feature of the Protestant world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its origins in Germany, Britain and North America, though far from identical, had important features in common. The characteristics which it developed make international generalizations possible, and those generalizations apply to other areas to which it was communicated, notably to British colonies in India, Australasia and the Caribbean. Its geographical extent was such that it cannot be attributed purely to national or local factors. Although it took different forms in different societies, the evangelical revival is best regarded as a series of separately-generated but none the less interdependent international events. Indeed, evangelicalism placed so heavy a stress upon the duty of seeking to save souls by preaching and by missionary endeavour that it could hardly be confined to one community, one state or even one continent.

It has become conventional to regard the 1730s as the decade during which the continental European, the North American and the British revivals began. This was the decade in which Count Zinzendorf in Saxony, Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts, Howell Harris in South Wales and the Wesley brothers and George Whitefield in England launched the campaigns which achieved such celebrity. However, recent work by W.R.Ward has located the origin of many of the religious characteristics which came to be termed ‘evangelical’ in central and eastern Germany at a somewhat earlier period, at the end of the seventeenth and the very beginning of the eighteenth century. Hence it is necessary to examine the religious condition of Europe at the time when the celebrated individuals mentioned above were born, rather than when they came to maturity.

The second half of the seventeenth century in Europe was the high point of the Counter-Reformation. It was an age of Catholic recovery and resurgence. Of course in parts of southern Europe the Catholic Church had remained virtually unchallenged. Protestantism made no progress in Spain, Portugal or Italy, and it is not surprising that these areas tend to be absent from histories of evangelicalism. But in other areas the Catholic Church appeared to be advancing. The Austrian Habsburgs pushed back the invasions of the Ottoman Turks and began to re-conquer Hungary for Catholicism. More significantly, however, the Catholic Church appeared to be in the process of reversing the verdicts of the Reformation and of the Thirty Years’ War. Although the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) had provided legal recognition for the Protestant rulers of German states, in the succeeding half-century several of those states acquired Catholic rulers. In 1685, for instance, the formerly Protestant Palatinate of the Rhine was inherited by a branch of the strongly Catholic Wittelsbach family of Bavaria. In southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland the triumphalism of the Counter-Reformation was powerfully expressed in visual form by the ornate Baroque churches with their distinctive onion-shaped domes. Many of them proclaimed their Jesuit origins with their dedications to St Francis Xavier, reminding those who saw them that the Jesuit Order was one of the spearheads of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 forced much of the Protestant, or Huguenot, minority in France, into exile. This was Catholicism at its most flamboyant and expansionist and the effect upon European Protestantism was dramatic.

Not only did beleaguered Protestant minorities face the likelihood of persecution under hostile Catholic regimes but there seemed a serious danger to Protestant states themselves. While in 1580 almost half of Europe had been Protestant, by 1700 that proportion had been reduced to only about one-fifth. The Protestant states were confined to the northern and north western fringes of Western Europe and there seemed to be every prospect that they would be pushed back even further. In 1719 there was serious danger of a religious civil war in Germany (Ward 1980: 234), while international support for Jacobite rebellions threatened to bring about a restoration of the Catholic Stuart family in vehemently-Protestant Britain.

A combination of increased repression within Catholic monarchies and what appeared to be a process of Catholic encroachment upon Protestant states led to an understandable sense of crisis on the part of European Protestantism. Traditional Protestant depictions of the Catholic Church as intolerant, persecuting and corrupt were reinforced. Such depictions were rapidly communicated through the testimony of refugees, through print and through the visual image. One should not underestimate the extent to which the evangelical revival derived succour from a strong sense of anti-Catholicism, a sense which it retained well into the twentieth century. It helps to explain why the revival largely took the form of a process whereby Protestants converted other Protestants or the previously irreligious to another form of Protestantism and why the revival made little if any direct impression upon European Catholicism.

In Ward’s view the most important Catholic advance took place in 1697, when the wealthy and strategically important Protestant state of Saxony passed under Catholic rule. Its elector, Frederick Augustus II, was chosen to succeed to the vacant (and elective) throne of Poland and converted to Catholicism as a condition of doing so. Saxony, the homeland of Martin Luther and one of the cradles of the sixteenth-century Reformation, found itself under what threatened to be alien government. There was also criticism within Saxony itself of what was allegedly the excessively dry, formal and rigid worship of the orthodox Lutheran Church which, in the Electorate, was the dominant form of religion. It was depicted as narrowly scholastic, socially exclusive and remote from ordinary people. Hence at the popular level, the Lutheran Churches of Saxony (and elsewhere) seemed to be in no position to resist the perceived threat from an advancing Catholicism.

Much of this criticism emanated from that group of German Protestants known as Pietists. Though not easy to define, the term denotes a highly personal form of religion, with a strong emphasis on the individual’s direct relationship with God and the need for a ‘New Birth’ to cement that relationship. Its principal spokesman—and, according to some authorities its founder—was Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705). Whereas orthodox Lutheranism in Saxony gave priority to outward observance through official institutions, Pietism stressed the individual’s inward experience acquired independently of those institutions. Although born in Alsace and with a distinguished pastoral reputation as a Lutheran minister in Strasbourg and Frankfurt, it was Spener’s appointment as court chaplain to the Elector of Saxony at Dresden that made him a figure of international importance. He introduced in Saxony the characteristics of Pietism which were to be among the hallmarks also of early evangelicalism. The Pietists promoted a domestic approach to religion which refused to confine itself to formal church services. Spener organized a series of class meetings, often in private houses, in which those who took part reviewed their religious conduct, provided mutual support and encouraged each other in biblical and devotional reading. He was neither a theological innovator nor a separatist; he promulgated no new (or ‘heretical’) doctrine and had no ambitions to become the charismatic leader of a breakaway movement. As Professor Ward puts it, he offered ‘not a protest movement of the “spiritualist” or quakerish kind, but a response from within the church to a perceived spiritual need’ (Ward 1992:58). However, the implication that those who had experienced the ‘New Birth’, whatever their social status, were entitled—indeed obliged—to preach it carried a potential challenge to the authority of the established clergy. Male and female servants as well as artisans had attended Spener’s class meetings at Frankfurt (Ward 1992: 57). By proclaiming the ‘priesthood of all believers’, Spener and his associates, notably August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) of the university of Leipzig, were—however indirectly—introducing a quasi-democratic element into their religious proceedings. Such an element had been present in later medieval heretical movements and, more recently, among English Puritans, whose devotional literature had been well received in Germany. Invariably it led to political controversy.

The official response to Pietism in Saxony is revealing. The Lutheran churches in the German states were far from uniform in their devotional practices. In parts of the Rhineland and elsewhere the prevailing tendency of Lutheranism was of a ‘reformed’ type, involving a more thorough repudiation of Catholic practices (such as confession) and the acceptance of a greater degree of lay initiative than in Saxony, where the Lutheran church was more resistant to innovation. In particular, in the universities of Wittenberg and Leipzig there was a sincerely-held fear that a combination of an active piety and lay participation would lead to religious excess and schism. It will be evident that such fears were expressed, and often acted upon, wherever evangelicalism subsequently appeared.

By 1692 Spener, Francke and their associates had been expelled from Saxony. But, not for the first or last time in the history of religion, an expulsion had considerable international effect. The Pietists quickly found refuge and succour in the adjacent territory of Brandenburg-Prussia, a rising power in north Germany, whose ruler, the Hohenzollern Frederick I, was elevated from the status of Elector to that of monarch in 1701. Prussia, too, was a Protestant state, anxious about a Catholic threat and in a state of rivalry with the Austrian Habsburgs, who had been the principal Catholic champions in the Thirty Years’ War. The Habsburg family had come almost to monopolize the title and prestige, together with the ecclesiastical patronage, of Holy Roman Emperor. The Prussian monarchy also regarded Saxony as a rival, initially for the leadership of the Protestant states of Germany, latterly as a potentially hostile Catholic power with the conversion of Augustus II and his accession to the Polish crown. In Prussia, moreover, the bulk of the population adhered to a less rigid form of Lutheranism than that officially promulgated in Saxony. Accordingly, the Pietist exiles were well received and, not unlike Huguenot refugees in England and elsewhere at exactly the same time, were perceived as an asset to the state. Spener became Rector of the Nikolaikirche at Berlin, while Francke was made a professor, first of oriental languages, then of theology, at the newly-founded (July 1694) university of Halle and pastor of the nearby parish of Glauchau.

Halle merits special consideration in the history of the Evangelical Revival. Situated as it was in the Prussian-controlled territory of Magdeburg, it rapidly acquired a reputation as a kind of early headquarters of reformed and outgoing Protestantism. It was the birthplace of George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), an appropriate piece of symbolism in view of the centrality of music in the revival and Handel’s later role as the trumpeter of the Protestant succession in Hanoverian Britain. Halle was an industrial town of con siderable economic and strategic importance. Over and above that, however, its new university became a remarkable intellectual centre, with high prestige attaching to its medical, law and theological faculties. It drew scholars from all over Europe and beyond; Halle is believed to have been the first university to have admitted an African. It has been described as ‘a powerhouse of early Enlightenment thinking’ (Geyer-Kordesch 1994:311). The theology faculty was dominated by Pietists. Under Francke’s leadership they were able to advocate the personal nature of Christianity and to involve the laity in biblical exploration. They were opposed, it is true, by elements among the orthodox Lutheran clergy but, as had not been the case in Saxony, they benefited from royal favour and protection. Most significant of all was the philanthropic work to which Francke devoted the rest of his life.

Francke’s main legacy was the construction of a series of schools and orphanages which combined a charitable and an educational purpose. The ‘Waisenhaus’, or orphanage, which he established in 1696 provided pupils for the university and soon attracted large numbers; its residents and staff exceeded 3,000. Whether all its residents were in fact orphans is open to question; what is certain is that Halle as a well-marketed philanthropic institution flourished. Francke was responsible for the education of his charges in the Pietist manner and added a dispensary to his other foundations. Its medical products were advertized in the major European languages and were soon in demand throughout Europe (Ward 1992:62). Hence finance for these ambitious projects was raised and it was supplemented by charitable appeals. Moreover, since the educational reforms promoted by Francke included practical training for the service of the state, Halle was of considerable value to the Prussian monarchy, which was in the process of developing a substantial army and state bureaucracy and welcomed sources of well-educated recruits for both.

Partly for this reason Francke was able to publish and disseminate his views without official censorship—an unusual condition in the Europe of his time. His printing press issued Bibles and devotional literature on a substantial scale. In what was to become a characteristic feature of evangelicalism (though not something peculiar to it) Francke and his associates provided bible translations and religious literature in the languages of eastern Europe. He sought to spread the Pietist message, particularly to the Protestant minorities in the Catholic territories of the Habsburg empire. Silesia, Lusatia, Hungary and Bohemia were among Francke’s targets and he succeeded in establishing a mission at the strategic town of Teschen, from where easy physical access to all these territories could be obtained. Francke’s aspiration to ‘create a second Halle at Teschen’ (Ward 1992:63) was unsuccessful, but his wider objective of communicating his ideas was more than fulfilled. He published a newspaper, the thrice-weekly Hallesche Zeitung, from 1708, at much the same time as the first daily newspaper in England, the Daily Courant, appeared in 1702. He also communicated by means of an astonishingly large private correspondence. It has been estimated that altogether he had some 5,000 correspondents and that he remained in contact with 300– 400 of them on a regular basis (Ward 1992:2). Pietism found a response in the south-western German state of Wurttemberg, where its leading figure, Johannes Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752) is credited with having written some 1,200 letters per year (Ward 1992:2). In Wurttemberg, too, one finds the same private meetings for prayer and self-examination, together with Bengel’s own contribution of millenarianism. His textual researches into the New Testament convinced him that the second coming of Christ upon earth could be predicted with total certainty for the year 1836. The element of millenarianism in the Evangelical Revival, thought not shared by all its exponents, should not be overlooked. Bengel was far from the only writer to engage in millenarian expectations. His specific prediction, however, became known and was discussed in England. The Public Advertiser of 19 June 1788, along with other newspapers, published a letter from John Wesley to one of his lay preachers in which he dissociated himself from the prophecy.

It is a central argument of Professor Ward’s work that many of the characteristics of the British and American revivals had been anticipated in late seventeenth-century Germany and in seventeenth-century Scotland. He refers particularly to camp-meetings, field preaching, class-meetings and informal domestic piety, together with the circulation of classics of Reformation literature (Ward 1980:239, 248). Certainly the international dimensions of the Pietist movements at Halle and elsewhere are undeniable. They were reinforced by what may be termed, without exaggeration, a diaspora of Protestant refugees in early eighteenth-century Europe. Most of them sought to escape from that sense of Catholic encroachment and persecution to which reference has been made. They included Huguenots escaping from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685; refugees fleeing the Palatinate of the Rhine during the war of the Spanish Succession; emigrants from Silesia (a Habsburg possession until its conquest by Prussia in the 1740s), Poles and Slovaks. The most dramatic and startling episodes of migration, however, were those which involved the Moravians and the Salzburgers and each requires slightly more detailed treatment.

One of the ways in which the Pietist message reached a wider audience was through Spener’s godson, Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf. His importance lies partly in his aristocratic status and personal wealth; his family owned substantial estates in lower Saxony and their patronage was bound to be of considerable assistance to a religious group which found favour with them. Zinzendorf was, as his biographer puts it, ‘cradled in religion’ (Lewis 1962:21). His mother was a fervent Pietist and he himself was educated partly at Francke’s school at Halle. He developed a strong sense of personal religion, a personal relationship with Christ which involved an impulse towards sacrifice, asceticism and service in return for the sacrifice of Christ which, Zinzendorf believed, had secured the forgiveness and salvation of those who would recognize the fact and act accordingly. His independent means allowed him the opportunity for travel and his visits to Holland and France brought him into contact with other groups of Protestants. Partly because of such connections he began to add to his Pietist convictions a zeal for an active, preaching ministry which would supplement the printed word propagated by Halle with an international network of missionaries. His interest in missionary work was made possible by his acquaintance with the Moravians, a group which, despite its smallness of numbers, appears and reappears in the early history of the Revival.

The Moravian Church has a legitimate claim to be the oldest Protestant Church in Europe. Its origins lie in the Bohemian reform movement of the early fifteenth century and its leader, and martyr, John Hus. He was condemned at the Council of Constance and burned at the stake in 1415, but his followers survived and, despite internal divisions, in 1457–8 formed their own formal organization, the ‘Unitas Fratrum’ (Unity of the Brethren). Their objections to the practices of the Catholic Church were more moral than theological and their ethos took the form of a communitarian way of life, a material simplicity and a degree of unworldiness which repudiated the sophistication and wealth of the higher clergy. There was no intention to break away from the Catholic Church, merely to seek its internal reform. For many decades, indeed, the Bohemian church enjoyed considerable local autonomy and the Brethren spread into Moravia (whence their subsequent name) and Poland. But as the Brethren began to move in what was perceived to be an anti-Catholic direction, and particularly when it became their practice to administer the communion in both kinds to the laity, they incurred increasing official hostility. The latter point was of much political, as well as devotional significance; the Catholic practice had been for the priest alone to take the wine as the symbol of Christ’s blood. For the laity to be so directly involved in this ceremony was another example of that quasi-democratic ethos which caused anxiety both to the ecclesiastical and secular authorities.

The subsequent history of the Brethren was one of alternating periods of persecution and slight relaxation. The rulers of Bohemia, the Austrian Habsburgs, regarded them with increasing suspicion, especially at times of religious warfare, when their reluctance to serve in the armed forces gave them the appearance of subversives. Their fortunes reached their lowest points during European conflicts. The early stages of the Thirty Years’ War in the 1620s resulted in the persecution, and virtual extinction, of the Brethren in Bohemia and Moravia and the severe reduction of their numbers in Poland. One of their most gifted members, however, Johannes Amos Comenius (1592–1670) achieved celebrity as an educational reformer. His works, advocating what were by the standards of his time fairly libertarian ideals with an aspiration towards a unified Church based on Christian love, helped to give the Brethren an influence far beyond the boundaries of their original settlements. Comenius ended his days in Holland and in the half century after his death the Brethren seemed on the verge of extinction. But at Fulneck in northern Moravia, where Comenius had been minister, a few settlements persisted and at the turn of the century they made contact with the Silesian revival which had been inspired by the Pietists through Francke’s outpost at Teschen.

From here in 1722 a small group of Moravian families retreated into southern Saxony and found refuge on Zinzendorf’s estate at Berthelsdorf. Led by the carpenter Christian David, an inspirational if excessively impulsive figure, they were allowed to build a new settlement, which they named Herrnhut (the watch of the Lord). At first their skills as artisans helped them to win acceptance by Zinzendorf’s steward, but subsequently the Count himself became keenly interested in their history and communitarian ideals. In May 1727, by which time the settlement at Herrnhut numbered 300, he imposed his own authority on the incipient factionalism of the new arrivals, won their acceptance of a regular series of statutes and transformed them from ‘a group of quarrelling schismatics to an organized body of orderly Christian tenants’ (Hutton 1909:207). The celebration of Holy Communion on 13 August 1727 set the seal upon the renewal of the Unitas Fratrum, or, as they were increasingly known, the Moravian Brethren. Like their predecessors, and like the Pietists, they had no intention of forming a separate church. As a young man, Zinzendorf had formed a small society call...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The International Dimension
• Chapter Two: Problems and Definitions: The British Context
• Chapter Three: Revival and the Existing British Churches
• Chapter Four: The Growth of Methodism
• Chapter Five: Evangelicalism and Authority In the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
• Chapter Six: The Wider Impact of the Evangelical Revival
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Select Bibliography