Theologia Cambrensis: Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales, Volume 2: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1760–1900

Abstract

The much-anticipated second volume of Professor Densil Morgan’s history of Welsh theology from the Reformation to the dawn of the twentieth century completes a genuinely ambitious scholarly endeavour, the like of which we might possibly never see again. The first volume appeared in 2018 and covered developments from the sixteenth century and the publication of the Bible in Welsh in 1588 to the middle of the eighteenth century and the bright dawn of the Methodist revival. Now this second and, we are assured, final volume deals with what has been termed the long nineteenth century, the period from 1760 until 1900, without doubt the golden age of Welsh theological reflection. Professor Morgan is one of Wales’s leading theologians and has written on many of the individuals and themes dealt with in this volume at greater length at other times and in other places. So, while these volumes are very much works of synthesis, they draw upon much of the latest scholarship, a goodly proportion of it Morgan’s own work! What we have here, though, is not only a survey of Welsh theological developments in the nineteenth century, but something more ambitious still, a history of Welsh Protestant Christianity at the height of its power, influence, and creativity as well.For many readers, both within Wales and beyond the borders of the principality, the riches of the Welsh theological tradition will have hitherto been a closed book. Those without the Welsh language have, until now, only been able to glimpse at some of its treasures in the translations of a few selected texts. One thinks, for example, of the foresight of Martyn Lloyd-Jones in encouraging his wife to translate William Williams’s rules and advice for the Welsh Methodist societies into English in 1973 (The Experience Meeting), or Eifion Evans’s 1996 partial translation of Williams’s epic poem ‘Theomemphus’ (Pursued by God). Across seven fulsome chapters Morgan introduces us to many of the main figures in the nineteenth-century Welsh Christian story, preachers, evangelists, bishops, theologians, and one or two others. We have extended treatments of the contribution of William Williams himself, the publication of whose hymn book in the early 1760s sparked off nearly a century and a half of religious revival in Wales, but also Thomas Charles of Bala, Thomas Jones of Denbigh, the Presbyterian-esque Lewis Edwards and his son Thomas Charles Edwards, the first principal of Wales’s first university at Aberystwyth from 1872. Each of their main theological works is summarized in detail and their significance carefully weighed. Morgan’s approach is even handed throughout with detailed treatment of both Nonconformity and the Anglican Church, Methodism both Calvinist and Wesleyan, and rational Dissent too. The treatment of Lewis Edwards stands out, and it is those like Edwards, who sought to improve the intellectual sophistication of Welsh Calvinism, whom Morgan champions with most élan. Throughout there is something of a contrast drawn between popular Welsh Calvinism, which could all too often get bogged down in speculative debates about the extent of the atonement, and the more scholarly activities of those like Edwards (and others) who attempted in the middle decades of the nineteenth century ‘to improve the cultural and intellectual standards of a country which by now was highly Christianized’ (168). Inevitably, given the title of the book, there is a preference for the scholarly and the official, rather than the populist and spontaneous.The book is packed with vivid descriptions of preachers and sermons, revivals, and theological debates and disputes. Welsh Nonconformists entertained a long debate over the nature and extent of the atonement in the early decades of the nineteenth century, disputes covered here with an enviable lightness of touch. ‘Narrow and intense’ (319) they might perhaps have been, but they also revealed the existence of a popular religious culture that saw people traverse the varieties of Calvinism as if their lives depended on it. As a slightly wet-behind-the-ears evangelical curate at All Saints, Llangorwen, this reviewer was also fascinated to read of evangelical John Roberts’s ‘fiery anti-Tractarian’ sermon at the consecration of Wales’s first purpose-built catholic renewal church, stone altar and all, in 1841 (211–12, 218). His palpable discomfort struck a familiar chord.Looming over the book are inevitable questions about why such a vibrant religious culture proved to be so ill-equipped for the challenges of the twentieth century, and why it seemed to wilt so quickly when confronted with a powerful impulse toward secularization. In spite of ‘all the outward signs of progress, expansion and advance’, Morgan writes, ‘its internal weaknesses were severe’ (319). Morgan hints at answers to this question, inevitably focusing on the rise of liberalizing theological tendencies championed by individuals such as David Adams, having the dubious honour of being Wales’s ‘most advanced Modernist’ (301). By the final third of the nineteenth century, the focus on the atonement of Christ, one of the defining features of the evangelical Nonconformity laid bare in this volume, had largely given way to a stress on the incarnation. There was widespread embarrassment, if not revulsion in some quarters, at the idea of a penal and substitutionary atonement, and the Calvinism that had infused Welsh Nonconformity with such vigour earlier in the century had become increasingly rare. Morgan also criticizes the political conservatism of Welsh Nonconformity and its reluctance to ‘develop a rigorous and biblically orthodox social gospel’ (196) that would address some of the social problems of newly industrialized Wales. Yet when that duly arrived in the early twentieth century, its relationship with orthodoxy was often uncertain.With the publication of this second volume of Theologia Cambrensis, Morgan assures us that his project is complete. It is a massive achievement, a magnum opus perhaps, and confirms the author’s reputation as undoubtedly the premier interpreter of Wales’s recent religious past. Yet volume II also leaves us with some important unresolved questions. Morgan’s The Span of the Cross: Christian Religion and Society in Wales, 1914–2000 (1999) tells us much about later developments, of course, but perhaps less about theological developments, at least in a similar vein to Theologia Cambrensis. Might Professor Morgan be persuaded to add a third volume, laying bare the theological hollowing out of much of Welsh Nonconformity in the twentieth century, and guiding readers to those figures who sought to recapture something of the glories of the Welsh Calvinist past, both Barthian and evangelical? One hopes so.