The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions Volume III: The Nineteenth Century ed. by Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas Mark Knight (bio) The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas; pp. xix + 546. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, £103.00, $145.00. Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas’s The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions Volume III: The Nineteenth Century makes a wonderful contribution to Oxford University Press’s five-volume history of Protestant Dissent, and the editors and contributors are to be congratulated for the expert way in which they help us understand the complex contours of this part of the church. Protestant Dissent played a pivotal role in the nineteenth century theologically, politically, and socially, and its influence grew as the decades went on. One of the contributors to this volume, Eugenio Biagini, describes the years between 1862 and 1922 as a “golden age for British Dissenters in politics,” and he is far from alone in calling us to recognize the reach of Dissent across different areas of the Anglophone world (416). The volume is impressively wide-ranging in its scope, focusing on both sides of the Atlantic but looking more globally, too, and the editors have assembled a strong team of scholars to help them in their theological and historical explorations. Among the many things the contributors do well is finding an appropriate balance as they seek to convey the unity and diversity of Dissent. The vision of Dissent that emerges in the volume is coherent enough to hold the essays together but alert to the differences and diversity of those who identified with this part of the church. Bill J. Leonard writes compellingly about the ways in which Baptists in North America “searched diligently for common threads of theology and praxis that provide continuity,” finding them on some occasions but not on others (233). And as the other contributors to the volume consider different denominations, such as the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Quakers, and the Methodists, we are led to see how the Dissenting impulse gave rise to multiple movements, fractures, and new communities of faith, some of which were too small to merit a denomination label. Ledger-Lomas acknowledges that “the history of nineteenth-century Anglophone Protestantism is often largely identified with global evangelicalism,” but he still insists on [End Page 156] the value of shifting the spotlight from evangelicalism to Dissent (2). The positive results of such a shift in focus are evident throughout the volume—but it is noticeable, too, how many of the histories of Dissent written by contributors lean heavily on evangelicalism. Timothy Larsen’s essay on the Congregationalists observes how closely the denomination was incorporated “into the wider evangelical movement” (41); Thomas C. Kennedy’s chapter dwells at length on the evangelical orientation of many (though certainly not all) of the Quakers; Janice Holmes’s essay on the Methodists remarks at one point the ways in which the denomination was “like many other evangelical groups in Britain” in its struggle “to maintain its distinctive identity and presence” (124); Mark A. Noll’s discussion of the Bible and scriptural interpretation is heavily indebted to evangelical thought; and David Bebbington’s chapter on theology draws extensively on his expertise as a historian of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism may not be the only way of conceptualizing Protestant Dissent, but it is vital to that tradition and rightly given a great deal of attention in this volume. Recognizing the central role of evangelicalism in our stories of Dissent does not need to blind us to other actors, and the “sheer variety” of Dissent, as Tim Grass puts it, is fundamental (150). In a chapter on the Unitarians, Shakers, and Quakers in North America, Stephen P. Shoemaker reminds us that “[w]hile evangelical Protestantism held a hegemonic position in American culture, plenty of religious groups deliberately swam against that cultural tide” (256). There are similar instances elsewhere across the volume where the accounts of Dissent (and evangelicalism) highlight this plurality and difference. This can be seen in the careful explanations of the ways in which denominations such as...