‘Anglican Evangelical Theology, c.1830-1850: the case of Edward Bickersteth’, Journal of Religious History, 38 (2014), 1-19 (original) (raw)

In June 1810 Edward Bickersteth sat down to write to his sister, Charlotte. He missed home, he admitted, and looked forward to hearing the family news. But soon he moved onto weightier subjects. 'My dear Sister, nothing but spiritual, internal, heart religion can give composure and peace,' he began. 'It matters comparatively little whether we are Churchmen or dissenters and I was going to say and will say Papists -God has doubtless his people among all these and they form one family in Christ.' 'Do not suppose from what I say that I am not sincerely attached to the Church of England,' he went on. 'I love it -I admire its liturgy articles and homilies -it is the best church I know on the face of earth and I hope has been the means of preserving and reviving the true doctrines of Christ throughout the world.' 1 At the time, Bickersteth was only a tyro lawyer in London. Within a few years, however, he had been ordained; during the 1820s and 30s he became a leading missionary publicist and bestselling author; and by his death in 1850 was probably the most prominent Evangelical clergyman and widely-read devotional writer in the country. 2 Nevertheless, his youthful letter serves to underline tensions that pervaded his later life and work. As an outspoken advocate of interdenominational co-operation, on the one hand, he was a founder-member of the Evangelical Alliance [EA] in 1846. As an Anglican, on the other, he was deeply dismayed by the well-publicized secession of his clerical colleague Baptist Noel only two years later. As will become clear, Bickersteth's balancing act has important implications for our understanding of Evangelical churchmanship and its development in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.