T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity

Robert Pope

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780567669933
• eBook ISBN: 9781472558305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

Protestant Nonconformity, the umbrella term for Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and Unitarians, belongs specifically to the religious history of England and Wales. Initially the result of both unwillingness to submit to the State's interference in Christian life and a dissatisfaction with the progress of reform in the English Church, Nonconformity has been primarily motivated by theological concern, ecclesial polity, devotion and the nurture of godliness among the members of the church. Alongside such churchly interests, Nonconformity has also made a profound contribution to debates about the role of the State, to family life and education, culture in general, trade and industry, the development of philanthropy and charity, and the development of pacifism. In this volume, for the first time, Nonconformity and the breadth of its activity come under the expert scrutiny of a host of recognised scholars. The result is a detailed and fascinating account of a movement in church history that, while currently in decline, has made an indelible mark on social, political, economic and religious life of the two nations.

Part I

Historical and Theological Topics

1	The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000

John H. Y. Briggs

Nonconformity finds its historical roots in those groups – Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists together with the Quakers – which, for the most part, insisted on a radical Puritan theology, experience and liturgy and found themselves outside the national church after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In subsequent years its numbers grew as other groups emerged and developed outside the Church of England, and indeed outside the older forms of Dissent. In the eighteenth century Methodism, in all its forms, constituted a substantial body, which, not without struggle, came to identify itself with evangelical Dissent. In the nineteenth century bodies such as the Plymouth Brethren again sought to implement what they thought was a more apostolic pattern of ecclesiology, while in the twentieth century Pentecostal experience and the migration of peoples from the Caribbean and the continent of Africa have created further new churches which have increasingly sought to identify themselves as part of the ‘Free Church’ family.

I. Sect, Church and Denomination

Historians have borrowed from sociologists of religion, whose interests lie in the broad sweep of religious movements and organizations, language used to describe different ecclesiastical groupings. These were classically described by Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch,¹ who wrote of ‘church’ or ‘parish-type’ and ‘sect-type’ groups, with the notion that the first were essentially comprehensive, embracing all citizens in a given area, while the second were exclusive, confined to those who had made a deliberate choice to join the committed and themselves to take on the responsibilities of membership; thus the frequent over-neat contrast that, whereas one was born into the church, one had to be reborn into the life of a sect. Some theologians have been less than happy with such distinctions because of the not unnatural deduction that sects are necessarily sectarian, without due appreciation of the catholic dimensions of ecclesiology.²

While some Dissenters were undoubtedly sectarian, others cherished contrary convictions. Indeed, a large part of the rationale for their separation from the national church was occasioned by their desire to reclaim the true catholicity and apostolicity of the church, in which ‘the Crown Rights of the Redeemer’ were truly respected without fear of state interference. This church was to have a defined covenanted membership of regenerate believers gathered out of the world, with powers through church meeting or through representative Connexional synod, to discern the mind of Christ for itself and for its mission in the world, and therefore to appoint its own officers. Within such a church the theology of the priesthood of all believers, without degrading the importance of ordination, underlined the participatory nature of the church with high responsibilities assigned to the laity

Thus, the influential Congregational theologian John Owen, sometime vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, speaks of Christian congregations being ‘obliged into mutual Communion among themselves, which is their consent, endeavour and conjunction in and for the promotion of the Edification of the Catholic Church, and therein their own, as they are Parts and Members of it’. As a consequence, to separate from other members of the Church Catholic was a denial of Christian truth:

No Church therefore is so Independent, as that it can always, and in all Cases, observe the Duties it owes to the Lord Christ and the Church Catholick, by all those Powers by which it is able to act in itself distinctly, without conjunction with others. And the Church that confines its Duty unto the Acts of its own Assemblies, cuts itself off from the external Communion of the Church Catholick; nor will it be safe for any Man to commit the Conduct of his Soul to such a Church.

In categorical language Owen asserts:

That particular Church which extends not its Duty beyond its own Assemblies and Members, is fallen off from the principal end of its Institution. And every Principle, Opinion, or Persuasion, that inclines any Church to confine its Care and Duty unto its own Edification only; yea, or of those only which agree with it in some peculiar practice, making it neglective of all due means of the Edification of the Church Catholick, is Schismatical.³

Accordingly, even in the earliest years there were difficulties with the church–sect classification, but over time H. Richard Niebuhr asserts that church and sect were necessarily compelled to acknowledge the other’s continued existence, and even their capacity to be of service to the Missio Dei. Accordingly, he argues, it is better to replace the older terms with the language of ‘denomination’. A denomination is thus a church, or indeed for that matter a sect, ‘which has accommodated itself to the reality of the permanent competition with other “churches” in its territory’. He also suggests a generational succession in the history of sects, by which they began to respond to a perceived need for institutional support (seen, e.g., in the emergence of theological colleges to train a clerical leadership, a denominational press, central administration, etc.). At the same time he argues that ‘as generation succeeds generation, the isolation of the community from the world becomes more difficult’,⁴ with all the necessary adjustment of actions and attitudes therein involved.

At the same time churches, too, as Alan Gilbert has shown, even established churches, were compelled to move in a denominational direction. To demonstrate this he cites John Keble’s frank admission in his famous 1833 Assize Sermon that henceforth the Church of England was ‘only to stand, in the eye of the State, as one sect among many, depending for any pre-eminence she might appear to retain, merely upon her having a strong party in the country’. To support his argument Gilbert invokes Peter Berger who suggests that in the second quarter of the nineteenth century the Church of England moved towards ‘a typically denominational solution as an ex-monopolistic institution in a pluralistic society’, for whereas a church can behave ‘as befits an institution exercising exclusive control over a population of retainers’, a denomination must organize itself so as ‘to woo a population of consumers, in competition with other groups having the same purpose’.⁵ In this way the scene was set for the twentieth century and the birth of increasingly cordial ecumenical relations.

II. Dissent, Nonconformity and the Free Churches

The language describing Protestant Christians who do not belong to the Church of England has changed over the last five centuries or so, the language of opposition reflected in the terms ‘Dissent’ and ‘Nonconformity’ giving way to the more positive affirmations of the ‘Free Churches’. Dissent described those Christians who in conscience dissented from the teaching of the Established Church, while Nonconformity described those unwilling to conform to its discipline and practice, and, in particular, the totality of its liturgical demands. Both these descriptions were dependent for the actuality of their definition on the faith and practice of the Church by law established, from which they wished to distance themselves. Thus they would describe different groups in Scotland from those they identified in England, and had no strict meaning in Ireland and Wales after the Anglican churches in those nations were disestablished (in 1871 and 1920 respectively).

The language of Nonconformity goes back to the sixteenth century: Elizabeth I, in her attempt to secure a broad-based religious settlement after the persecution of the reign of her sister Mary I, secured in 1559 an Act of Uniformity prescribing the use, with some conservative revisions, of the Prayer Book of 1552 introduced in Edward VI’s brief reign, and the vestments and religious practice then authorized, which clearly set out the distinctiveness of the outlook of the new English Church from its Catholic roots, but falling short of that sought by more radical minds. But it was the 1662 Act of the same name which confirmed the nature of Nonconformity as we know it, for it required ‘unfeigned assent and consent’ to all that was in the Book of Common Prayer and for clergy, if not Episcopally ordained, to seek (re-)ordination at the hands of a bishop. This act forced moderate Presbyterians to choose whether to conform, or to decline assent and suffer the consequences of their nonconformity. Similar conformity was also sought of university fellows, schoolmasters and private tutors.⁶

The ‘Toleration Act’ (1689), which followed the failure of attempts to widen the terms of communion within the reconstituted Church of England to secure greater ‘comprehension’, provided a limited toleration for Protestant Dissenters professing an orthodox, Trinitarian confession. However, even its limited terms had to be defended, and the so-called Committee of the Three Denominations – Baptist, Congregational and Presbyterian – was set up in 1702 for this purpose. This was followed by the corresponding lay body, the (Protestant) Dissenting Deputies, established in 1732, to seek amendment of the penal legislation, which continued to circumscribe the freedom enjoyed by Nonconformists, often identified as ‘Dissenting disabilities’, that remained on the statute book.⁷ While the Test and Corporation Acts were repealed in 1828, thereby removing the penalty from Nonconformists taking office under the crown and sitting on representative governing bodies, other disabilities, especially those associated with religious tests in the ancient universities, remained in force till the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Though such inequalities may not have inhibited Nonconformists from exercising their full citizenship in the way that they had once done, they did serve to foster Nonconformist militancy against such perceived injustices for which purpose the Liberation Society (founded in 1844 as the Anti-State Church Association, before being renamed nine years later), driven by its fiery secretary the Revd Edward Miall, engaged in passionate polemic.

Other pieces of language are also bound up in this identity; thus the early Nonconformists were uniformly considered to be ‘Puritan’, concerned both for purity of life and purity in the church, defined in relationship to biblical principles rather than church traditions or state legislation. However, not all Puritans were Nonconformists, indeed some would limit the term to those within the Established Church seeking more forthright reform. Early Non...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Part I   Historical and Theological Topics
• Part II
• Contributors to the Volume
• Index