The Elect Methodists

Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735-1811

David Jones, Eryn White, Boyd Schlenther

• Editorial: University of Wales Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781783165056
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Britische Geschichte

The Elect Methodists is the first full-length academic study of Calvinistic Methodism, a movement that emerged in the eighteenth century as an alternative to the better known Wesleyan grouping. While the branch of Methodism led by John Wesley has received significant historical attention, Calvinistic Methodism, especially in England, has not. The book charts the sources of the eighteenth-century Methodist revival in the context of Protestant evangelicalism emerging in continental Europe and colonial North America, and then proceeds to follow the fortunes in both England and Wales of the Calvinistic branch, to the establishing of formal denominations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

1

‘A sweet prospect’ for the gospel: the origins of Calvinistic Methodism, 1735–1738

Calvinistic Methodism had its roots in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Historians increasingly regard the Reformation as a long process drawn out over three centuries. The final phases of this process began with the ending of confessional conflict at the conclusion of the Thirty Years War in 1648. The signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in that year set the pattern for the future: neither Roman Catholicism nor Protestantism would prevail.¹ The easing of religious tensions, as states gave up on the policy of creating comprehensive churches within their territories, created space for alternative strains of popular spirituality to develop, pieties that tended to be more individualistic and experiential, stressing the cultivation of an inward religion of the heart.² These included Catholic Jansenism, Hasidic Judaism, Lutheran Pietism and Evangelicalism, one of whose offshoots was, of course, Methodism; and these groups tended to encourage what has been called religious ‘enthusiasm’.³ What united them was a desire for a more emotive and practical spirituality: one that preferred action over passivity, feeling over intellect, and informality over order, and where the clergy encouraged lay participation. Each new tradition, in its own way, endeavoured to bring about religious renewal through persuasive rather than the more coercive state-driven methods of Christianisation that had been customary.⁴

In the British Isles, strategies aimed at securing total confessional uniformity can be seen to have been gradually abandoned during the seventeenth century. The religious conflicts that had resulted in the execution of a king in 1649 and the attempt at godly reformation by the Puritans during the 1650s had been an abject failure. The restoration of the monarchy, and with it the established Church of England, largely settled religious questions; a Protestant succession was guaranteed in 1689, as was the hegemony of the Anglican Established Church.⁵ But, significantly, its monopolistic hold on the religious life of the nation had certainly been loosened: a measure of toleration was granted to the Dissenters, a move which made confessional pluralism the order of the day.⁶ The decades between 1660 and the beginning of the evangelical revival in the mid-1730s have often been seen by historians as a religiously quiescent period.⁷ In comparison with the turmoil of the Civil War and Interregnum this may certainly be so, but these were decades of slow gestation, when important – if sometimes subtle – changes in the religious landscape of England and Wales took place; they were developments which created the context necessary for the emergence of the Calvinistic Methodist movement.

It was no accident that both George Whitefield and Howel Harris chose to define themselves deliberately as Calvinists. They were proud of the fact that they stood within a Calvinist tradition that, in Harris’s words, stretched back to the ‘good old orthodox Reformers and Puritans’.⁸ But the spirituality and vigour of the contemporary descendants of the Puritans, the Dissenters, was a pale reflection of what had been normative in the seventeenth century. The persecution that had accompanied the re-establishment of the Church of England in the early 1660s had taken its toll, and many Dissenting congregations emerged numerically small and inward looking, preoccupied with maintaining their doctrinal purity and defending their legal status. Many of them had also become enmeshed in constricting theological debates over the nature of genuine Calvinism, a strict and increasingly popular version of which elevated predestination to such an extent that evangelism was rendered superfluous.⁹ But there were also flickers of life and vitality and evidence that attitudes within the Dissenting community were becoming more fluid. Both Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge had warned against the dangers of theological precisionism and the application of detailed doctrinal tests which tended to alienate genuine Christians from one another. Instead, they stressed the importance of what they called ‘heart-work’, evangelical conversion, the cultivation of the life of the soul and the necessity of affirmative spiritual nurture.¹⁰ These emphases were supported by a growing body of affordable and accessible devotional literature, featuring such writers as Joseph Alleine, John Bunyan and Richard Baxter himself, as well as a commitment to preaching specifically for conversions among some of the more missionary-minded members of the Dissenting community.¹¹

With the hegemony of strict predestinarian Calvinism being challenged in some quarters, a more moderate version which attempted to square the sovereignty of God with human accountability was gaining in influence.¹² In provincial Baptist circles, the steady stream of ministers produced by the Bristol Baptist Academy under the leadership of Bernard Foskett were committed to an outward-looking evangelical Calvinism, which gave priority to evangelistic preaching and experiential piety.¹³ It is surely no coincidence that some of Howel Harris’s earliest supporters included some of the many Welsh Baptist ministers who had passed through the doors of the Bristol Academy.¹⁴ Their priorities were reflected in what remained of the Calvinist Internationale, a network of correspondence which brought together experiential Calvinist ministers in the American colonies, Scotland, Ireland and England.¹⁵ When news of the outbreak of a revival at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734 first reached the British Isles, it was this network that became the vehicle for the transmission of such apparently surprising news.¹⁶ For Whitefield and the Calvinistic Methodists it was this embryonic tradition of evangelical Calvinism, with its twin emphases on conversion and heart nurture, which proved to be so compelling. Indeed, in many respects, Whitefield was to be the most energetic champion of evangelical Calvinism in the eighteenth century, with the result that by the end of his life it had become the dominant expression of Reformed orthodoxy favoured by Calvinist-inclined evangelicals almost everywhere.

In a sense these changes in emphasis within the Reformed tradition in England can be seen as an outworking of some of the insights of Lutheran Pietism. Recent scholarship has shown how intimately the religious life of the British Isles was connected to Continental Europe during this period.¹⁷ W. R. Ward has shown how many of the features of what later became Methodism can actually be traced directly to central and southern Germany during the later part of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth century.¹⁸ Pietists like Philip Jakob Spener, whose Pia Desideria (1675) had a genuinely international impact, stressed such things as a return to the scriptures, lay participation in small fellowship groups and the living of lives of active and practical godliness. Among groups like the Huguenots, the Salzburghers and later the Moravians, field preaching, camp meetings and periodic community revivals became common. When groups such as these came under persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, many of them were forced to become religious refugees.¹⁹ Their dispersal in the early decades of the eighteenth century led to the extensive dissemination of their ideas and practices, as many of them settled in the southern American colonies, stopping off en route in England.

Pietistic ideas can first be detected in England during the second half of the seventeenth century largely among Anglicans whose religious monopoly in England, while still impressive, had nonetheless been curtailed in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. Taking their lead from August Herman Francke’s pietist reformation at Hallé, organisations like the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Society for the Reformation of Manners and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, as well as a large number of private devotional societies, tried to raise the spiritual temperature through voluntaristic means like education, the publication of devotional literature and the inculcation of godly standards of behaviour.²⁰ At Oxford, the ‘Holy Club’, formed in 1729 by Charles Wesley, and whose members included John Wesley and George Whitefield, was merely another expression of this desire to recapture the spirit of primitive Christianity through a rigorous lifestyle of ascetic piety and good works.²¹

However, it was the Moravians, who had first arrived in England in 1728 basking in the warm glow of a revival that had taken place on Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf’s estate at Herrnhut in Saxony the previous year, who provided the most attractive and compelling form of heart religion.²² The two strands of pietism, Lutheran and evangelical, were to come together in a remarkable way in 1735. The Holy Club had run its natural course; both John and Charles Wesley, as well as George Whitefield, had found its regimen of devotional exercises, self-denial and sacrificial charity overly burdensome, leaving a legacy of disillusionment and despair. The Moravians taught many of the members of Holy Club about the nature of genuine saving faith, which began a process by which many of them moved towards more decided evangelical convictions.

However, by this stage there were already inklings of much more exciting times ahead. Griffith Jones, who became rector of Llanddowror, Carmarthenshire, in 1716, had for seven years engaged in extensive field preaching. He had witnessed dramatic conversions among many who flocked to these revivals as well as among parishioners in his previous parishes, perhaps especially at Laugharne. Refusing to be confined by parish boundaries, he had engaged in a widespread itinerant ministry throughout south-west Wales with considerable effect.²³ In the American colonies, according to the calculations of Michael J. Crawford, there had been at least fifteen local religious awakenings in New England between 1712...