Swedenborgianism: heresy, schism or religious protest?

Abstract

The separation of Methodism from the Church of England has become one of the famous chestnuts of ecclesiastical history; despite the allegations of excited high-churchmen and Tractarians at the time, it was not well described in terms of heresy or schism, and embodied a great many other things besides religious protest; moreover it was a separation which has never been quite complete. The case of Swedenborgianism is interesting not only in its own right, but as showing that the issue between the Methodists and the Church was not a bi-partite affair, that there were other possibilities within and between them both, and it illustrates the curious mixture of spiritual and social factors which underlay the religious fragmentation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.