Heaven on Earth

Reimagining Time and Eternity in Nineteenth-Century British Evangelicalism

Spence

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498270120
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In nineteenth-century Britain, a large number of prominent Anglican and Presbyterian Evangelicals rejected the idea that salvation meant "going to heaven when you die." Instead, they proposed that God would establish his kingdom on earth, renewing the creation and reanimating embodied humans to live in a world of science and progress. This book introduces the writings and activities of these women and men, among whom were counted the ardent social reformer Lord Shaftesbury, the highly-respected clergyman Edward Bickersteth, the popular author Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and the General Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, Thomas Rawson Birks. The book shows that the catalyst for such theological revisionism was the end-times doctrine known as "premillennialism." While commonly characterized as a gloomy and sectarian belief, the book argues that premillennialism in Victorian Britain was actually an optimistic and often liberalizing creed. It dissolved older Evangelical assumptions about the dissimilarities between time and eternity, body and soul, heaven and earth. The book demonstrates that, far from being eccentric pessimists, premillennialists were actually pioneers of trends in nineteenth-century Christian theology that stressed the importance of the incarnation, prioritized social justice, and even entertained the idea of universal salvation.

1

Evangelicalism’s Eternal Vision

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

bears all its sons away;

they fly, forgotten, as a dream

dies at the opening day.

—Isaac Watts (1674–1748)

The Evangelical Enterprise

The modern Evangelical movement sprang from a series of inter-linked religious revivals within eighteenth-century British and North American Protestant Christianity. The preaching, prayer, and worship of eighteenth-century Evangelicals reignited the central doctrines propounded by the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers: justification by grace alone, obtained through faith alone, authorized by Scripture alone.12 Into this Reformation fabric were woven three new strands.13

First, Evangelicals adopted the accent of Pietism, a renewal movement within late seventeenth-century German Lutheranism that proposed that “real faith” was a matter of a pervasive experience of God rather than bald creedal affirmations about his nature. British and American Evangelicals absorbed the temperament of this movement through literature and personal contacts.14 Evangelicals claimed that correct doctrine about Christ should be supplemented by a deep experience of Christ that would transform the emotional center—“the heart”—of the individual.15 “If religion be necessary at all it must be a religion of the heart,” wrote nineteenth-century Congregational minister Alexander Fletcher (1787–1860) in characteristic fashion.16 The entry point into this “vital” Christian experience was described by Evangelicals as “the new birth,” defined by the Evangelical pioneer and founder of Methodism, John Wesley (1703–91), as “that great change which God works in the soul when he brings it into life when he raises it from the death of sin to the life of righteousness.”17 This conversion translated the individual from the realm of formal assent to orthodox doctrine into a sphere of dynamic and joyful Christian experience. “We must distinguish between real and vital Christianity and what constitutes a merely nominal adherence to its external ordinances,” explained nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelical Daniel Wilson (1778–1858).18

The second eighteenth-century “twist” on classical Protestantism was the enlightenment-inspired claim that one could know truths about the nature of reality—in this case about God and salvation—through individual sense perceptions. This belief owed much to the epistemological theories popularized by thinkers such as John Locke (1632–1704) and Scottish “Common Sense” philosophers. Evangelicals presumed that one could feel confident and assured of the reality of salvation because of a personal encounter with the divine.19 This mindset led to a robust and confident faith that appealed to personal testimony, particularly to narratives of conversion, in order to prove the redemptive power of Christ.20 As Welsh Evangelical Howell Harris (1714–73) described his own Evangelical conversion: “I knew that I was His child, and that He loved me and heard me.”21 This new epistemological disposition also heightened Evangelical confidence in the Bible as a clear and lucid revelation of God, the meaning of which was plain and accessible to any individual who approached it with confidence in its divine origin.22

Finally, eighteenth-century Evangelicalism was characterized by a commitment to dynamic and expansive missionary strategies. This impulse was also derived from the Pietist movement, in particular from the Moravians, a lay community that traced its roots back to the followers of Jan Hus (c.1369–1415) in late fifteenth-century Bohemia. Fired by the Pietist conviction that the joy of an experiential relationship with Jesus Christ ought to encourage individuals to share their faith with others, Moravians established religious communities, orphanages, and evangelistic enterprises across Europe and the Americas. Their example was widely emulated among eighteenth-century British and North American revivalists, not least by John Wesley, whose own experience of having his “heart . . . strangely warmed” owed much to his encounter with Moravian Christians. From field preaching to the foundation of international mission societies, Evangelicals poured time, energy, and money into enterprises of proclamation and persuasion. These agencies aimed for both individual conversion and societal regeneration.23

Evangelicalism did not create a single new church or international religious order. Instead it seeped into the veins of North Atlantic Protestantism, creating and reforming the structures, priorities, and tone of multiple Christian communities. In some cases Evangelical renewal stimulated the creation of new ecclesiastical groupings, such as the Methodists in the eighteenth century or the Plymouth Brethren in the nineteenth century. In other instances, Evangelicalism helped generate distinct groupings within historic denominations, such as the “Evangelical Party” in the Anglican churches of England and Ireland and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. On occasions, Evangelical impulses fractured churches, as evidenced by the mass exit of Evangelicals from the Church of Scotland in 1843 to create the Free Church of Scotland. At other times, though, Evangelicalism was a force for unity and consolidation, as exemplified by the foundation of the interdenominational British Evangelical Alliance in 1846.

The diversity inherent in the movement meant that there was no single way of being Evangelical; there was neither membership nor formal confession. However, the diffusion of Evangelical energy across multiple institutions in several continents was guarded from atomization by the imaginative ability of Evangelicals to perceive unity and solidarity despite their obvious ecclesiastical and theological divergences. “Evangelicalism” is thus more than a convenient label that historians have attached to a certain way of being Protestant; it describes the reflexivity possessed by certain Christians about their own identity. Evangelicals have not only shared certain beliefs or performed certain activities, they have also always been conscious of “being part of a complicated fellowship and infrastructure of trans-denominational Evangelical organizations.”24 Utilizing the assumptions and techniques of the eighteenth-century marketplace, most notably a relentless exploitation of print media,25 Evangelicals established a conversational community that encouraged participants to narrate their personal and local spiritual experiences, and in tu...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Evangelicalism’s Eternal Vision
• Chapter 2: Eschatology and the Evangelical Imagination
• Chapter 3: The Romance of History
• Chapter 4: The Renewal of Time and Space
• Chapter 5: Premillennialism and “The Age of Incarnation”
• Chapter 6: Prophecy and Policy
• Chapter 7: The Afterlife of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Eschatology
• Bibliography