Evangelical Anglican Way: Post- and Pre-millennial 1790-1828 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Evangelical Anglican Way: Reacting, Reviving and Reforming 1828-1900
The privatization of evangelical religion was an unwelcome development commonly associated with the nineteenth century. By the middle of it, evangelical Anglicans had lost the visionary vitality of earlier years but none of their hostility to Roman Catholic faith and practices. Increasingly adopting a pre-millennial expectation of Christ’s return, some became profoundly pessimistic about the world and were seduced into a withdrawal from the kind of engagement in public life that had marked the previous generation. Visitors from America offered hope of revival, and a deeper life of faith. Although some leaders abandoned their evangelical roots, Lord Shaftesbury and Josephine Butler did not. They were two exceptional examples of those who resisted the temptation to opt out of their Christian responsibility within the nation at large. In fine, the evangelical priority in the last half of the nineteenth century was to preach the transforming gospel of Jesus Christ which would lead to the conversion of persons and their spiritual improvement individually and collectively in anticipation of the expected return of their Lord.
Evangelical Anglican Way: Imperial but Vulnerable 1900-1920
By the beginning of the twentieth century evangelicals had grown in strength and confidence. Their expansionist mission throughout the British Empire, expressed in the ‘World Missionary Conference’ in Edinburgh 1910, gave way to a fearful defensiveness and disarray, exacerbated in the wake of World War I. Evangelical Anglicans divided over the nature of Biblical inspiration and its interpretation. Consequently, within the wider Church of England they were ill equipped to address the incoming threats to their faith and practice. Having reacted pragmatically in the 19th century to contemporary intellectual, economic, cultural and spiritual challenges, in the first two decades of the 20th century they declined in influence. The more conservative among them became noted for their distinctive other-worldly pietism and ongoing anti-Catholicism. Their mood did not lift significantly until after World War II.
Evangelical Anglican Way: Individualist and Disengaged 1920 - 1940
In the inter-war period evangelical Anglicans were poorly equipped to respond to the philosophical, political, social, cultural and religious challenges that confronted British Christianity. They were preoccupied with their own internal doctrinal problems to do with Biblical inspiration and the Atonement, their own priorities in evangelism at home and overseas, and their ongoing suspicions about Anglo-Catholics, along with ‘liberal’ Christians. However new expressions of evangelical witness did appear, some of them from the evolving Keswick Convention. The Oxford Group that became Moral Re-armament (MRA) and the East African Revival were two examples. At the same time evangelicals of different shades of opinion welcomed the return, from a fundamentalist tendency in interpreting the Bible, to a more holistic and reverential approach which did justice both to its theological integrity and prophetic intensity.
Evangelical Anglican Way: Post-war Renaissance 1940-1967
A turn-around in the fortunes of evangelical Anglicans followed the ending of World War II. From being an embattled and defensive enclave in the Church of England, they grew in theological awareness and maturity, and numbers and practical commitment to the wider national and global mission of the Church. They were led by younger men who were increasingly respected not only for their Christian integrity, ability and insight but also for their hopeful spirit and confidence in orthodox Christian doctrine and its challenge to Britain in a post-war period of recovery, and nervousness about the ongoing possibility of global nuclear war. They sought to preserve what was good in their tradition, beaten out on the anvil of experience over six hundred years. They resisted the temptation to secede from the Church of England, which was urged upon them by some. Instead, they were devoted to the reform the Church of England from within. In the National Evangelical Anglican Congress in Keele (NEAC 1967) they expressed a united vision, to increase their impact through the established church, and hence in the nation as a whole.
Finding the Evangelical Anglican Way 1375 to the present day: Introduction and Conclusion
The papers in this collection trace a movement the character of which can be seen by following clues lying in the history of British Christianity over a period of more than six hundred years. It is not about two 'isms', evangelicalism and Anglicanism, labels often attached to particular positions and parties. Nor is it about the discovery of a clear path by which one may demarcate precisely who is on a particular road. Owing much to the contribution of past Protestants, Puritans, Pietists and Pentecostalists, radical evangelical Anglicans have found the message of regeneration and spiritual transformation revealed clearly in the bestowed Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. These strike a prophetic note that is both realistic and optimistic in anticipating God’s future. Evangelical Anglicans believe the good news to be revealed in Jesus Christ, the expression of crucified God in person. They have been sustained in this by a liberating, reasonable, experiential and experimental faith. Ready to ‘try God out’ in the practical realities of daily human life, and in spite of their acknowledged and ongoing sinfulness, they always expect Christian discipleship to be expressive both in word and deed, and certainly never exclusively for their own benefit.
Evangelical Anglican Way: Timeline 1375-2019
Historically speaking, the evangelical Anglican way is a movement the character of which can be discerned by following clues lying in the history of Christians, in this case mainly English ones, over a period of more than six hundred years. There were four movements that contributed to the evangelical Anglican way over the period: Protestant, Puritan, Pietist, and Pentecostal. Each one left its mark at the time although none succeeded in including all ‘evangelicals’, or indeed in excluding unwanted others. Consequently the outcome was never the desired unity of faith or practice to which they aspired, for evangelical Anglicans have never wanted to be regarded as ‘tribal’ even if that is how many observers have described them. Unlike evangelical-ism, the evangelical Anglican way from its grassroots beginnings in the fourteenth century to its fresh expressions in the new millennium was and is a path-finding ‘movement’. This timeline therefore outlines only the bones of a fuller story in which despite grave weaknesses, failures and sinfulness, there have been markers - defenders, explorers and writers for example - to signal the way for travelling evangelical Anglicans in the assurance that they are not unaccompanied, but have the faith of their fathers to encourage them.
Evangelical Anglican Way: Pietist and Methodist 1738 - 1790
In the eighteenth century many Anglican clergy were known to be ‘evangelical’ thanks to the revivalist preaching of leading ‘Methodist’ figures who were Pietist but also Anglican, such as John Wesley and George Whitefield. However, towards the end of the century evangelical Anglicans largely distinguished themselves from the more Arminian ‘Methodists’ following Wesley on the one hand, and on the other from the more Calvinist and independent Methodists following Whitefield and his patron Lady Selina Huntingdon. Key to the message and motivation of notable evangelical Anglican clergy was the doctrine of redemption and providence. Personal salvation was the ground of their assurance both here and for eternity. Theirs was a religion of the feelings and the heart even if the one could easily get confused with the other. They also built constructively on the visionary, outgoing and activist implications of the Enlightenment thinking they embraced. Educated Christian concern, strong family life and shared responsibility for the common good would, they believed, deliver the nation and its people from what they most dreaded, religious and political revolution.
Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume II: Establishment and Empire, edited by Jeremy Gregory, 2017
Anglican Evangelicals have always been captivated by their early history. In few places is this more obvious than at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, founded in 1879 to produce educated ordinands and missionaries to combat what its founders considered to be evils that were peculiar to its age: rationalism, 'Romanism', and theological liberalism. 1 It was the product of a movement whose identity was fostered in print and in bricks and mortar through a range of educational and philanthropic institutions, and which raised hundreds of thousands of pounds a year through well-managed societies. Yet although-and perhaps because-the scale and sophistication of the movement would have been unimaginable a hundred years earlier, Evangelicals remained enthralled by an earlier, more rough and ready age. In few places was this more deeply felt than in Cambridge, where Charles Simeon, curate of Holy Trinity from 1782 and vicar there from 1783 until his death in 1836, was still venerated, his sway over generations of undergraduates, according to the historian Macaulay, being 'far greater than that of any Primate'.
British Evangelicals and the United States of America, c. 1775-c.1820
2015
William Wilberforce told the the eighteenth anniversary meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society on 1 May 1822: I know… that so long as the infirmities and bad passions of men remain, there will be differences, arising from ambition, or the jealousies one country may entertain of another; but here we have a principle in operation, which tends all the while gradually and imperceptibly, but surely, to unite the good of both communities, and make them love one another as brethren, and to concur in endeavouring to promote peace and concord among men. As the differences we have had with that country have been peculiarly painful to me, so, I doubt not, there is now a principle at work, which will promote the most lasting agreement. 1 Just as those who have studied the political aspect of the transatlantic association have largely tended either to concentrate on the eighteenth-century colonial nexus, on the war of separation, or on the nineteenth-century post-colonial relationship, so historians of the transatlantic Evangelical connection have not generally scrutinised it at the hinge, at the moment of transition, that is, in the decades following American independence. 2 This essay examines what British Evangelicals thought of the new American republic in the decades following its separation from the British empire. It also explores what they may have contributed to the wider British understanding of America at that time.