The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Timothy Larsen and Mark Noll are to be warmly congratulated for persuading Oxford University Press to complement its five-volume Oxford History of Anglicanism with a parallel series on Protestant Dissenting Traditions. The present substantial book is the first of the series to appear, expertly edited by Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas, of King's College, London. Their team of twenty distinguished contributors, drawn from North America and Great Britain, cover the subject in five sections. In Part One of the volume, traditions within Britain and Ireland are considered, with chapters on Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, Unitarians and Presbyterians, Methodists and Holiness, and Restorationists and New Movements. In Part Two a similar approach is taken to traditions outside Britain and Ireland (mostly North America, with a concluding chapter by Joanna Cruickshank on ‘Colonial Contexts’). In Part Three, Mark Noll explores the Bible and scriptural interpretation, David Bebbington discusses theology, and Robert Ellison draws on the Lyman Beecher and other lecture series to consider preaching and sermons. In Part Four examples of Dissenting activism are surveyed, with chapters on evangelism, revivals, foreign missions, and social reform. Part Five looks at ‘Congregations and Living’, through gender (S. C. Williams); ministerial training (Michael Ledger-Lomas); and spirituality, worship, and congregational life (Densil Morgan). Each chapter has its own select bibliography, so there is no overall bibliography for the volume.Two chapters deal specifically with Methodism. In Part One, Janice Holmes traces the history of Methodism and holiness in Britain and Ireland, exploring the numerical expansion of the movement in the first half of the nineteenth century, its steady institutionalization, and the schisms that divided the Wesleyan Connexion after 1791. This chapter covers a great deal of ground, picking up such major topics as Methodist worship and piety, attitudes to politics, and the ‘new Methodism’ of the late nineteenth century, particularly associated with Hugh Price Hughes, and drawing on the recent work of Ted Royle and Kate Tiller on church attendance and of Sandy Calder on Primitive Methodism. The section on ‘Varieties of Methodism’ notes that histories of Methodism tend not to include the Calvinistic Methodists; the point that perhaps needs to be made here is that ‘Methodist’ was used generically in the eighteenth century to describe all those associated with the Evangelical Revival, whether Arminian or Calvinist, conformist or dissenting, while later histories have differentiated between the Arminian heirs of the Wesleys, Whitefield's Calvinistic successors, and evangelicals who continued to conform to the Established Church. By the early nineteenth century, relations between these groups were very strained. It might be added that Wesleyan Methodists resisted alignment with Dissent, disagreeing with its Calvinist theology, its Congregationalist ecclesiology, and its antagonism to the Church of England.The parallel chapter in Part Two, on ‘Methodists and Holiness in North America’, is contributed by Jay R. Case, who notes that the ‘dissenting’ and anti-elite approach of Methodists enabled them to grow exponentially in the early years of the Republic and thus become effectively an ‘establishment’ in the nineteenth-century United States. Professor Case deftly handles the tensions over respectability and the issues that divided the Methodist Episcopal Church in the years before the Civil War. He writes thoughtfully on black Methodists, noting that despite the greater financial resources of the MEC, it was the black-led denominations that proved most effective in reaching the black population in the South. A section on the holiness movement traces the development of independent holiness institutions, sowing the seeds of new denominations. The separate history of Methodism in Canada, where British and American streams converged, is considered briefly.As well as these two dedicated chapters, Methodists feature in some of the other sections of the book, particularly in S. C. Williams's chapter on gender, Michael Ledger-Lomas's chapter on ministerial training (though it should be noted that A. S. Peake was tutor at Hartley College, but never its principal [491]), and Densil Morgan's chapter on spirituality. Morgan's assertion that Sunday worship was ‘led, almost invariably, by the minister’ (513), although true for most Dissenting denominations, was emphatically not the case in British Methodism, where most services were led by local preachers. In addition to these references, Andrew Holmes's luminous discussion of revivals and revivalism will also be a valuable resource to historians of Methodism, while David Bebbington's mapping of the theological terrain of evangelicalism, enlightenment, and romanticism sets the intellectual and cultural context for the whole period.As a learned and concise summary of key themes in the history of the Protestant Dissenting traditions, distilling the work of established scholars and incorporating the latest research, this is a very welcome volume, and the rest of the series is awaited with eager anticipation.