The Sung Theology of the English Particular Baptist Revival

A Theological Analysis of Anne Steele's Hymns in Rippon's Hymnal

Joseph V. Carmichael

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725270855
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Denominazioni cristiane

Anne Steele (1717-1778) originally wrote her hymns to be sung in the Baptist congregation pastored by her father. The foremost female contemporary of hymn-writing giants Charles Wesley, John Newton, and William Cowper, her hymns are infused with spiritual sensitivity,theological depth, and rawemotion. She eventually published her hymns under the pseudonym, Theodosia, which means "God's Gift." She believed God had given her a gift to share. Steele's work was warmly received in her own day. Pastor and publishing pioneer of the modern English hymnal, John Rippon, included more than fifty of her hymns in the various topical sections of his wildly successful Selection of Hymns. Rippon's hymnal was popular on both sides of the Atlantic, but was especially influential during the nineteenth-century revival and renewal of English Particular Baptists. This book introduces Steele's hymns in the context of her life and times and of Rippon's hymnal. It illustrates that Steele's approach to hymn-writing is a model of biblical spirituality. Each hymn as printed in Rippon's hymnal, and thus sung by congregations and used as devotional literature, is considered. The sung theology of these congregations is a gift to the church universaland worth rediscovering in the twenty-first century.

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Introduction

Anne Steele, the English Hymn, and Rippon’s Selection of Hymns

Anne Steele (1717–1778) was an early pioneer of the English hymn. Celebrated as “the female ‘Poet of the Sanctuary’,”1 Steele was among many other early English Particular Baptists as well as other Dissenters and Nonconformists in her hymn-­­writing efforts.2 From the end of the seventeenth century through the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, a group of English Particular Baptists joined Anne Steele in a broader movement that later came to be known as the “Golden Age of Hymnody.”3 This period, which coincided with the rise of evangelicalism, is certainly known more for its two leading hymn-writers, Isaac Watts (1674–1748) and Charles Wesley (1707–1788), both still well-represented in modern hymnals. However, there is a group of English Baptists, whose evangelical and theologically compelling hymns—once received warmly—have been practically forgotten.4 At the head of this group, otherwise made up entirely of pastors, is Steele, a pastor’s daughter, who has been called the “all-time champion Baptist hymn-writer of either sex.”5 J. R. Broome points out that, writing among a generation of hymn-writing giants such as Watts, Wesley, William Cowper (1731–1800), and John Newton (1725­­­–1807), Steele is “in fact the only woman of that period whose hymns have stood the test of time.”6 Other notable Particular Baptist hymn-writers7 of the era include Joseph Stennett I (1663–1713), Benjamin Wallin (1711–1782), Benjamin Beddome (1717–1795), Samuel Stennett (1727–1795), Benjamin Francis (1734–1799), John Fawcett (1739–1817), and John Ryland Jr. (1753–1825).8

Writing her hymns originally not only for personal devotional purposes but also to supplement the collection of Watts’s hymns sung in her father’s congregation, Steele finally allowed them to be published in 1760, though under a pseudonym, Theodosia. W. R. Stevenson calls the thirty years that followed the first publication of Steele’s hymns in 1760 “the palmy days of Baptist Hymnody.”9 Hymnologist Louis F. Benson adds that the publication of Steele’s volumes launched Baptist hymnody into its own golden age.10 Paving the way for Steele and the other English Particular Baptist hymn-writers had been Benjamin Keach (1640–1704), who argued for the propriety of singing hymns in worship and who introduced the practice to his Baptist church in 1673. Keach in fact published two hymn books of his own compositions.11

Benson suggests that “the year 1750 begins a new period in Baptist hymn writing” in “the school of Watts.”12 That is the year Benjamin Wallin’s Evangelical Hymns and Songs was published, which Richard Arnold believes to be the first congregational hymnal to use the word “evangelical” in its title. The Particular Baptists thus wedded themselves to this word, which meant at the time, “‘Agreeable to the gospel; consonant to the Christian law revealed in the holy gospel,’ and ‘contained in the gospel.’”13 Wallin’s publication therefore placed the Particular Baptists self-consciously in the evangelical stream.

Now, in a recent morphology that has received wide acceptance, David Bebbington has grouped the attitudes and convictions of early British evangelicals under four qualities or characteristics.14 First, there is what he calls conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed. Second, there is biblicism, a commitment to and belief that all spiritual truth is to be found in the Bible. The third characteristic is activism, the commitment of all believers to lives of service for God, especially through evangelism (spreading the good news) and mission (taking the gospel to other societies). Finally, there is crucicentrism, the conviction that Christ’s death on the cross was the sacrifice providing atonement for sin (i.e., providing reconciliation between a holy God and sinful humans).15 As the high point of the English hymn coincided with the rise of evangelicalism, it will be seen that Steele’s hymns also reveal Bebbington’s quadrilateral.

In his study, The Anatomy of Hymnody, Austin C. Lovelace defines a hymn as “a poetic statement of a personal religious encounter or insight, universal in its truth, and suitable for corporate expression when sung in stanzas to a hymn tune.”16 The singing of hymns served a number of functions in the evangelical circles within which Steele and the other Particular Baptist hymn-writers of her day composed their hymns. Louis F. Benson, leading early twentieth-century hymnologist, for example, lays out a typology of such functions based on the content of the hymns: the hymn of praise, the hymn of prayer, the doctrinal hymn, the didactic hymn, the sermon...