Wesley and the Anglicans: Political Division in Early Evangelicalism

Abstract

The relationship between the Wesleys' Methodism and the Church of England has exercised historians, theologians, and ecumenists for a long time. On the one hand, John and Charles Wesley were nurtured in the best traditions of High Church spirituality at Epworth, educated in Anglican divinity at the University of Oxford, and professed lifelong loyalty to the Established Church. On the other hand, they shaped a movement that gave rise to the largest of the English Free Churches, setting in train a separation that is still in search of full reconciliation with the Church of England. Within this broad context, there is the specific issue of the Wesleys' often fractious relationship with the group of ‘Gospel clergy’, who were the forerunners of the evangelical school within the church. Why, when the Wesleys shared so many doctrinal, experiential, and missional emphases with evangelicals like Samuel Walker, Thomas Adam, Henry Venn, and John Newton, was there so little cooperation and so much suspicion and distrust between them? In this impressive study, Ryan Nicholas Danker argues that an exclusively theological explanation, focusing on predestination and perfectionism, will not suffice. True, most of the evangelicals were moderate Calvinists, unpersuaded by the Wesleys' assertive Arminianism and alarmed by John Wesley's advocacy of Christian Perfection. But this theological divergence gained strength and significance because of a whole range of ecclesiastical, social, and political factors. John Wesley's commitment to an itinerant preaching ministry, his disregard for parish boundaries and for the authority of incumbents, his use of lay preachers, and his apparent willingness to entertain the possibility of his preachers seeking licences under the Toleration Act, and even celebrating the Eucharist, drove a wedge between him and the small band of beneficed evangelicals whose vision for the renewal of the church required a patient parochial ministry. Episcopal hostility and public ridicule of ‘Methodists’ combined to encourage the ‘Gospel clergy’ to draw away from Wesley, especially as threats to the established order in Church and State provoked a Tory and High Church resurgence in the middle years of the eighteenth century, seen, for example, in the expulsion of six undergraduates from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, for ‘Methodism’ in 1768. Put simply, the evangelicals had too much to lose in associating with the Wesleys, and they chose to pursue their own course of institution-building within the Establishment. Although there were successful local pacts, like the 1764 ‘Huddersfield Compromise’ with Henry Venn, John Wesley's attempts to forge a wider union of ‘Gospel clergy’ (inevitably under his own leadership) through the early 1760s failed, and by 1770 the Wesleys and the evangelicals were set on their separate paths.Danker has read widely in the literature of the period and is fully abreast of modern scholarship on the Wesleys, early Methodism, and the various strands of the Evangelical Revival. He is at pains to emphasize the insufficiency of a single line of explanation for a complex web of personal relationships, and his combination of political, ecclesiastical, and theological factors is helpful and persuasive, especially with regard to the beneficed evangelicals—one suspects that George Whitefield had a different perspective on ‘irregular’ missionary methods. In the final chapter he advances a particularly thought-provoking thesis, suggesting that there was a fundamental incompatibility between the outlook of the evangelicals, grounded in the Reformation and a desire to reinvigorate Puritan ‘Old Divinity’, and that of the Wesleys, derived from a High Church paradigm that looked for inspiration to the primitive church and the theology and spirituality of the Caroline divines. Here Professor Danker's reference to John Wesley's ‘strange amalgamation of high churchmanship and Pietism’ (239) is telling, and it connects with wider debates about how far the Revival was a development from Puritanism and how far a new phenomenon. It raises too the question of the importance and also the limits of a shared evangelical experience in the face of deep-seated doctrinal, political, and ecclesiological differences—the question posed by Wesley in his sermon ‘Catholic Spirit’.A few minor slips notwithstanding—‘Maxwell’ for Maxfield (25), ‘John’ Bell for George (224), ‘Gareth’ Lean for Garth on page 57, and some consistent misspelling of ‘Forsaith’—this is an excellent study, and well deserves the commendations it has received from leading scholars in the field.