Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Church of England Missionary Societies, 1760–1870 by Bob Tennant (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Church of England Missionary Societies, 1760–1870 by Bob Tennant Laura M. Stevens Bob Tennant, Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Church of England Missionary Societies, 1760–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Pp. xii + 342. $105.00. This review is also a tribute, for Bob Tennant died on January 6, 2014, his sixty-fifth birthday, just two weeks after his book was published. Tennant’s posthumous scholarly reputation—especially in regard to his work on Anglican sermons, missionary societies, and the eighteenth-century bishop and philosopher Joseph Butler—will exceed the reputation he enjoyed during his lifetime, because most of his publications either came out in the years just preceding his death or are now in press. Tennant’s career followed a nonstandard path: he earned his doctorate in English literature from the University of London in 1970 and taught at the University of Sussex (where he had received his BA) until 1978; then, for more than two decades, he worked in London as a senior manager in adult education while being active in the labor and trade union movement. It was not until 2001 that he took up full-time scholarly research, first as Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow and then at the University of Durham. During these thirteen years, which included a term as Visiting Scholar at Baylor University, he was remarkably prolific, publishing two books, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics in Joseph Butler’s Philosophy and Ministry (2011) and Corporate Holiness, along with several articles including two chapters in The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689–1901 (2012), a project for which he was a consultant editor. Corporate Holiness is a study of what Tennant calls “the operational ethos” of the Church of England’s three missionary societies in existence between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), founded in 1698; the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), an incorporated society chartered in 1702; and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), founded in 1799. The first two organizations shared founders, many members, and general sensibilities, with distinct but mutually [End Page 303] supporting purviews emerging from a wave of Anglican pastoral and reformist engagement spanning the turn of the eighteenth century. The SPCK’s projects included funding charity schools throughout Britain, providing chaplains for the East India Company, distributing religious literature at home and abroad, and supporting missions to India, many of which were staffed by Danish and German Lutherans. The SPG’s primary tasks were to supply ministers to colonial populations where the Church of England was not the established church, to assist with the conversion of African slaves, and to bring the gospel to indigenous heathen populations near colonial settlements. The CMS was one of several organizations launched by the Clapham Sect, an evangelical Anglican group best known for its abolitionist activism and its moral reform projects. Being “the prototype in a broad-front intervention in society by the Evangelicals” (95), with a stated mission overlapping those of the SPG and SPCK, the CMS occasioned some controversy and competition within the Church of England. The book’s title speaks to a core challenge faced by all three societies: the Church of England “had no obvious mandate beyond the nation,” and thus had a “corresponding constitutional need to justify missionary activity . . . to an extent unapproached by those of the Roman Catholic and Dissenting Churches” (284). The Anglican societies thus faced the task of crafting from scratch an extroverted missiology, with accompanying governing structures and methodologies. Tennant drew the phrase “corporate holiness” from Bishop of Gloucester William Warburton’s conception “of corporate holiness as an expression of national spirituality and practice, grounded on prophesy and the mutually reinforcing platforms of Church and State,” but even more so from Butler’s “projection of the personally ethical into the corporate” (287). This was not a static concept, for the societies’ identities, understandings of their missions, and structures altered over the 110 years covered by this book, while differences both subtle and glaring developed among the three organizations “about the Church’s role in relation to detached...