Colonial Contexts and Global Dissent

Abstract

Until late in the nineteenth century, the otherwise fractious universe of Dissent united in affirming Scripture as the supreme religious authority and in exalting the individual conscience as the final interpreter of the Bible’s message. Because of this scriptural fixation, Dissenters contributed disproportionately to the manifestly biblical character of nineteenth-century Anglo-American civilization. It is for that very reason often hard to differentiate a specifically Dissenting history of the Bible from much shared with other Protestants. General cultural influences such as an emphasis on human subjectivity had a lot to do with how Dissenters read their Bibles. The ‘Bible civilization’ to which they contributed was permeated with scriptural phrases and assumptions. Disputes about biblical authority became important because most people were privately committed to the intensive reading of Scripture with the aid of family Bibles. Scripture also lived in public through hymnody and preaching. The Bible featured heavily in political controversy, notably due to disagreements about its place in systems of public education. The tendency to found claims to religious authority on a purified reading of Scripture and to contrast this with the practice of Roman Catholicism was characteristic of Dissent, as was the tendency for those claims to clash. Dissenters divided, for instance, on prophetic interpretation or on whether biblical interpretation needed to be guided by creeds. Conflict over how to interpret the Bible deepened and widened to encompass questions about the character of Scripture itself. Representative early nineteenth-century Dissenters such as Moses Stuart and Josiah Conder held on to unsophisticated if potentially liberal assumptions about the nature of its inspiration but disputes about higher criticism would mount in the wake of Anglican controversies in the 1850s and 1860s. It was striking, however, that these disputes were not as acrimonious in the British Empire as in the United Kingdom or the United States, perhaps because Canadian or Australian Dissenters were more interested in confessional identity and national service. By the end of the century, the expanding terrain of intra-Protestant conflict made it increasingly difficult to discern a unified Dissenting voice. By 1900, it was not as clear as it had once been that ‘the Holy Scriptures are the sole authority and sufficient rule in matters of religion’.