Bible Christians Research Articles

Extravagance amidst Extreme Poverty? A Focus on ‘New Religious Movements’ within the Development Discourse in Zimbabwe.

During the early 80s, Zimbabwe witnessed a rapid growth of the Third Wave Religious Right Movement (TWRRM), commonly known as New Religious Movements (NRMs). These movements pride themselves on the premise that the gospel of prosperity is its central maxim. The article investigates the theological and developmental contribution of the gospel of prosperity towards its adherents' existential necessities and needs. It is on this premise that these churches have registered considerable success and popularity. This article thus seeks to provide empirical evidence on the contribution of three Charismatic churches and specifically highlight the benefits produced by this type of ‘gospel’ to the basic existential needs of Zimbabweans. The article will further explore whether or not this type of ‘gospel’ contributes to community development. In exploring the contributions of the gospel of prosperity and community development, the study will use a phenomenological approach by E. Husserl as a framework. The term means fundamentalist independent groups which often consider themselves as ‘Bible Christians, born again and charismatic, not as Pentecostals (Kalu 2008, 8). The third wave implies there was the first wave, which was the missionary evangelicalism of the 19th century. The second wave of response was in the 1920s with a “pneumatic challenge with white theology” (Kalu 2008: 8, Mpofu 2014). This African initiative in Christianity thrived on communality and incorporation of facets of primal religion and culture (Ethiopianism and Zionism). The third wave of response gave birth to charismatic Christianity, a movement of revival and renewal, a third response to white cultural domination and power (Anderson 2001). This third wave differs from Pentecostals, deriving from Pentecost with a focus on the gift of the holy spirit. Founders or pastors of this third response are central to lifestyle choices based on religious discourse. The founder leader is understood as the voice and message of God.

Constructing imaginative geographies in Genesis

This article considers Edward W. Said’s proposals on ‘imaginative geographies’ as suggested in his leading work Orientalism as a tool to analyse the ideological circumstances that shape geographical spaces in the Bible. My purpose is to discuss how these imaginative geographies are present in the patriarchal narratives of Genesis and how they have left their mark on the history of the interpretation of these texts and on the not always easy relations between members of the religious traditions inherited from the Bible (Hebrews, Muslims and Christians). I propose four types of ‘imaginative geographies’: (1) ‘Equalness’ is the way to represent what is considered as sharing the own identity. The geography of ‘Equalness’ defines the spaces of Isaac, Jacob and their families. (2) ‘Otherness’ is the way to represent the ‘Other’ as opposite or juxtaposed to one’s own identity. A common border is shared, thus kinship relationships can be established. It defines the spaces of Ishmael, Esau/Edom, Lot (Ammon and Moab) and Laban. (3) ‘Foreignness’ is the way to define what is strange, odd or exotic considered as external to the own identity, in a space set beyond even the space of the ‘Other’. Egypt is in Genesis a land of ‘Foreignness’. (4) ‘Delendness’ encompasses whatever claims our same space and therefore threatens our survival and must be destroyed (delendum). As such, processes of annihilation and dominion of Israel on Canaanites and Sichemites are justified.Contribution: The article applies Said’s ‘imaginative geographies’ as an identity mechanism for the creation of biblical literary spaces. A quadripartite classification (‘Equal’/‘Other’/‘Foreigner’/‘Delendum’) instead of the usual bipartite one (‘Equal’ vs. ‘Other’) is proposed and the consequences for the current coexistence between religious identities inherited from Abraham are shown.

The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland by Patricia Palmer (review)

Reviewed by: The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland by Patricia Palmer Patrick Murray The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland, by Patricia Palmer, pp. 185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. $90. William Faulkner’s aphorism that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” emphasizes the relevance of the historical to the present. Imbued with all sorts of insinuations and counter-insinuations, claims and counter-claims, prejudices and counter-prejudices, the perception of the past remains a decisive factor in the reaction to current affairs. Placed in the context of Ireland, and in particular its partitioned Northern statelet, which keeps a tentative peace after centuries-old violence and enmity, history can be an incendiary device. Providing a narrative of the history of Ireland, and especially Ireland in the early modern period necessitates engaging with contemporary events in a profound and often fraught way: as David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait reminded us in Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (2007), “so much of Ireland’s twentieth-century conflict could be traced back to early modern origins.” The significances of articulating a history of the epoch in question are doubly intensified by the authorial voice. “Who said that?” is not just a query; depending upon its source it can prove a provocative accusation. In 1995, Ian Paisley made a speech to a gathering of Protestant Orange Order members in Drumcree. In the face of attempts to reach a resolution regarding the contentious issue of parades in the province, the future first minister provided his own outline of Ireland’s troubled past in forthright tones: Some of us know our history. Some of us know who the followers of the [other] are. What their oath is. What their aim is. Their aim is for the extermination of heresy, and we are the heretics, and they have not changed their objective. I say to that priest tonight—you may take on other people . . . but you can’t take on Ulster Protestants. Our forefathers knew the system that you represent. They knew its darkness, its superstition and its priestcraft and its epeolatry and its idolatry. And with that system as Bible Christians we have nothing to do, and we will not bow in subjection to it. [End Page 147] Verbalizing a history characterized by binary oppositions—ours and theirs, Protestant and priest, Ulster and non-Ulster—Paisley’s words also underline the significance of the narrative voice in the recording of past events. His remark “Some of us know our history” at once claims history and simultaneously reveals its very subjectivity. It strives for neutrality, seeking to espouse a detached “true” account of events. At the same time it also, through its narrator, remains inescapably biased. As Patricia Palmer’s engaging book reveals, the tongue that narrates—and the head to which it is attached—is freighted with especial importance in the context of early modern Ireland, an arena where beheading was viewed not only as an act of terror but also a legitimate policy of government. Moreover, where the dual roles of the severed head as a literary trope and a trophy of war coexisted, the aesthetic and the atrocious were often indistinguishable. “Bouncing, winking, cursing, crying out, such heads,” Palmer observes, “haunt the extraordinary range of literary works that emerged from the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland.” In investigating the role of such an object in the landscape of sixteenth-century Anglo-Irish relations, Palmer elegantly draws out what it meant to be the propagator, perpetrator, and victim of decapitation in an epoch where barbarism and erudite civility often commingled with shocking ease. The litany of violence recounted by the author will strike the reader most forcefully. Recent volumes such as the aforementioned Age of Atrocity, and the recuperation of Henry Sidney’s journal A Viceroy’s Vindication: Sir Henry Sidney’s Memoir of Service in Ireland 1556–78 (2002) by Ciarán Brady, have enhanced our awareness of the ferocity of the martial engagement between the native Irish populace and the colonizing New English forces. Brady...

Brands Plucked from the Burning: Essays on Methodist Memorialisation and Remembering.

Brands Plucked from the Burning: Essays on Methodist Memorialisation and Remembering.

The vegetarian crusade: the rise of an American reform movement, 1817-1921

Vegetarianism has been practiced in the United States since the country's founding, yet the early years of the movement have been woefully misunderstood and understudied. Through the Civil War, the vegetarian movement focused on social and political reform, but by the late nineteenth century, the movement became a path for personal strength and success in a newly individualistic, consumption-driven economy. This development led to greater expansion and acceptance of vegetarianism in mainstream society. So argues Adam D. Shprintzen in his lively history of early American vegetarianism and social reform. From Bible Christians to Grahamites, the American Vegetarian Society to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Shprintzen explores the diverse proponents of reform-motivated vegetarianism and explains how each of these groups used diet as a response to changing social and political conditions. By examining the advocates of vegetarianism, including institutions, organizations, activists, and publications, Shprintzen explores how an idea grew into a nationwide community united not only by diet but also by broader goals of social reform.

‘Domestic Charms, Business Acumen, and Devotion to Christian Work’: Sarah Terrett, the Bible Christian Church, the Household and the Public Sphere in Late Victorian Bristol

Sarah Terrett died suddenly on 25 November 1889, aged 53, after speaking at a meeting of the White Ribbon Army, the temperance organization she had founded in 1878. Following her death many people sent letters of sympathy to her bereaved husband, William. One of these, from the Rev. W. F. James, a minister of the Bible Christians, makes for especially interesting reading. The Bible Christian denomination, to which Sarah and William belonged, was one of the smaller Methodist connexions, and had its heartland in rural Devon, the area where she had grown up. James recalled the hospitality he enjoyed when visiting the Terretts’ home, Church House, in Bedminster, south Bristol:

Maximizing Learner Autonomy Through Reflective Teaching

In The Bible Christians are likened as salt by Jesus. But if they lose the salt-like flavor and become useless, they will be thrown away, and be trodden under the feet of men. This article aims to analyze the causes and results of the lost taste of salt and explore that Christians, although suffering, yet becoming victorious in a difficult environment, will be blessed, be rich in the taste of salt and live a valued life.

On the Implication of the Missing Flavor of Salt in the Bible

In The Bible Christians are likened as salt by Jesus. But if they lose the salt-like flavor and become useless, they will be thrown away, and be trodden under the feet of men. This article aims to analyze the causes and results of the lost taste of salt and explore that Christians, although suffering, yet becoming victorious in a difficult environment, will be blessed, be rich in the taste of salt and live a valued life.

<em>Women and the Shaping of British Methodism: Persistent Preachers, 1807––1907</em>, by Jennifer M. Lloyd

Reviewed by: Women and the Shaping of British Methodism: Persistent Preachers, 1807-1907 Robert Penner (bio) Women and the Shaping of British Methodism: Persistent Preachers, 1807-1907, by Jennifer M. Lloyd; pp. ix + 305. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009, £60.00, $89.95. The narrative energy of Jennifer Lloyd's Women and the Shaping of British Methodism is generated by a contradiction between the egalitarian enthusiasms of the evangelical project and the repressive discipline of the institutional church. She neatly—and convincingly—reveals this contradiction by dividing her impressive collection of characters into a drama of two acts. Beginning with John Wesley's grudging acceptance that some women did indeed possess the exceptional gifts required to preach God's word, the drama reaches its climax with the heyday of female itinerancy in the years just prior [End Page 723] to the 1832 Reform Act. In the second and more somber act, an increasingly professionalized Methodist ministry forces women out from behind the pulpit and almost, but not entirely, off the public stage. The momentum of Methodism as a social and cultural force was not so much slowed by its founder's death in 1791 as it was split into a variety of trajectories. So long as Wesley was alive his charismatic leadership eased the tensions between the crowds that flocked to hear outdoor preachers, the lay leaders who held the chapel leases, and an itinerant ministry seeking to discipline the congregations. When he died, things fell apart. In her introductory chapters, Lloyd guides us through the hectic first half of the nineteenth century, which saw Wesleyanism fractured by dispute, dissent, and outright secession. The period between the Kilhamite New Connexion of the 1790s and the Methodist Union of 1907 saw a startling proliferation of sects: the Leeds Protestant Methodists; the Warrenites; the Wesleyan Methodist Association; the United Methodist Free Churches; the Arminian Methodists; the Tent Methodists; the Magical Methodists; and the two groups who provide Lloyd with her greatest numbers of preaching women, the Bible Christians and the Primitive Methodists. During this period of institutional fragmentation, Methodist women had the greatest success in establishing themselves as prophetic voices in their own right. Lloyd is at great pains to remind us that these women were not interested in supplanting the administrative monopoly of men but simply in praying, exhorting, and preaching. If they were practicing a nascent feminism it was at best a rather opportunistic sort, and the arguments justifying their practices tended to follow action rather than precede it. The continuing expansion of Methodism, particularly in isolated or industrializing regions, nonetheless meant that the demand for devotional leadership could not be met solely by the official representatives of the various conferences. It was in these already marginalized communities that female evangelicals thrived. Yet women never held anything like bureaucratic power. So long as Methodism was wracked by schism and institutional infighting it was possible for women to establish some degree of influence over religion in the chapel and cottage. That influence declined rapidly, however, as increasing organization brought stability to Methodism. This once rough and populist movement became professionalized, and the conferences began to negotiate reunions; evangelical women were often the first to be thrown under the bus of ecumenical cooperation. One of Lloyd's most important observations on this point, however, is that Methodist women did not vanish altogether from public life. They became increasingly active as philanthropists, fundraisers, missionaries, and even, for a brief period in the 1860s, nondenominational revivalists. Historians of Methodism have recently tried—rather bravely—to construct a post-Thompsonian frame in which to hang their subject. The incandescence of E. P. Thompson's polemic has illuminated a great deal about the role of evangelical religion in Britain, but it has, perhaps, obscured almost as much. Lloyd's book represents an attempt to write critically and thoughtfully about Methodists while avoiding the polarizing malice that resulted from finely calibrated phrases such as "the chiliasm of despair" and "sanctified emotional onanism" (Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class [Victor Gollancz 1963], 391, 40). Thompson receives barely a nod from Lloyd before she gets down to her work. She does not even condescend...

Women Preachers in the Bible Christian Connexion

In 1862 Mary O'Bryan Thorne, daughter of the founder of the Bible Christian Connexion and a Bible Christian local preacher, wrote in her diary: “At our East Street anniversary I spoke at 11, and Serena [her daughter] at 2:30 and 6; one was converted in the evening.” She regarded this as a routine engagement; something she had been doing since her sixteenth year, and that her daughter had every right to continue. Female traveling preachers (itinerants) were important, perhaps crucial, in establishing the Bible Christians as a separate denomination and their use was never formally abandoned. The persistence of this tradition makes their history an important case study of women preachers’ experience in nineteenth-century Britain, showing a trend toward marginalization similar to the experience of many other nineteenth-century women who sought to enter increasingly professionalized occupations open only to men. Even in the early years of the Connexion when the organizational structure was fluid and evolving, women were never on an equal footing with male preachers. With the development of a formal organization in the 1830s their numbers started to drop and the gap between male and female responsibilities widened, with women never assigned the full duties of male ministry.

Collective Memory, Commemoration, Memory, and History: Or William O'Bryan, the Bible Christians, and Me

An experiment in combining autobiography with history, the essay explores the meanings of a writer's chance encounter on a return to the Cornish farm where she grew up. These include the nature and failure of collective memory, the significance of acts of commemoration, and the importance of a shared location in shaping historical research.

Book Review: A Century of Bible Christians in the Philippines

Book Review: A Century of Bible Christians in the Philippines

‘Women may preach but men must govern’: Gender Roles in the Growth and Development of the Bible Christian Denomination

When the Cornish lay evangelist, William O’Bryan, founded the first Bible Christian societies in the late autumn of 1815 he was responding, in the main, to female initiatives. This is not altogether surprising. For several decades before 1815 women had been playing a much larger role in English evangelical Christianity than they had done in the early years of the Evangelical Revival. The informal groupings which came into existence in its second phase, c. 1790-c. 1830, gave women opportunities to initiate, organize, and exhort on a much more extensive scale. As cottages and farmsteads became centres of worship, women were well placed to play a more important role as initiators and organizers, especially in those areas barely affected by John Wesley, George Whitefield, and their travelling preachers. The more articulate went even further and followed the example of some eighteenth-century Quaker women by speaking in their own localities and further afield. Before the eighteenth century came to an end a number had acquired the reputation of being gifted preachers and ‘holy women’, ‘owned by God’, and called to instruct others, both men and women, in the Christian faith. For a short while women were poised in Wesleyan, and later, Primitive Methodism to play a major role in evangelism and church-planting; but it was only amongst the Bible Christians that they, for a time, played perhaps an even more significant role as evangelists than their male colleagues. As such they were in no way inferior to men; but when the denomination acquired a governmental structure copied from Wesleyan Methodism the patriarchal ordering of contemporary society set limits to their Bible-based notions of sexual equality.

“In the Thickest of the Fight”: The Reverend James Scholefield (1790-1855) and the Bible Christians of Manchester and Salford

Few places in early nineteenth-century Britain had as grim a reputation as the Manchester suburb of Ancoats. In this concentration of “dark, satanic mills” and festering slums were some of the worst social problems of the Industrial Revolution. Angus Reach, a journalist with the Morning Chronicle, who visited Ancoats in the late 1840s, described it as “entirely an operative colony” containing “some of the most squalid-looking streets, inhabited by swarms of the most squalid-looking people which I have ever seen.” While making his way through this “labyrinth,” Reach saw no promise of anything better. Even the handful of chapels seemed to complement the scene of hopelessness; in a pathetically futile attempt to carry the eye up to a vision of something better their “infinitesimal” Gothic arches and ornaments only served to reinforce “the grimy nakedness” of the surrounding factories.

Restoring Man’s Creative Power: The Theosophy of the Bible Christians of Salford

As the reformation took effect, claims of miraculous healing were discountenanced. So argues Keith Thomas in his fascinating book on the decline of magic in modern Europe. He argues that protestants turned to natural methods and empirical science for answers to their medical and practical needs. If he is right there may seem to be little to say about the relationship between the churches and healing in the history of the church in modern western society. Yet, as Thomas himself admits, the link had not been completely destroyed. Traditional culture proved resistant to this aspect of the reformation. It seems to me that this traditional culture was revitalised and redirected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by revivalist and heterodox protestantism and not just by secular developments. The case of the Bible Christians or Cowherdites of Salford in Lancashire may illustrate my point.

Gordon Roy Cameron, 1899-1966

Gordon Roy Cameron was born in Australia on 30 June 1899 at Echuca, a small town on the Victoria side of one of the bends on the Murray River. His father, George Cameron, was then a Methodist minister at a small village called Wamboota. George Cameron’s parents (Grandfather Cameron and his wife, earlier a Miss Miller) who came of hard-working farming stock in Dyce, Aberdeenshire, with forbears in Inverness and Fort Augustus, had left Aberdeen for Australia the day after their marriage early in the 1870’s and taken up land in Minlaton in St Vincent’s peninsula, South Australia. They had eleven children, of whom George Cameron was the eldest; he seems to have had a hard life on the farm. When he was twelve years old the Government of Victoria began opening up the Mallee area in northern Victoria, and he and his father each drove a wagon containing members of the family and their few goods over the 500 miles trek—much of it over uncleared scrub, desert and hill country—from Minlaton to the Mallee area, where they took up about a hundred acres of scrub to make a farm, later extended to some two thousand acres. There they and their neighbours built the mud house that still survived in 1920. Some fourteen years later the farm was going well, the younger children were growing up, and George Cameron, who had recently taken part in Bible Christian services and had developed a reputation as a local preacher, decided to join the Bible Christians as a candidate for the Ministry. In due course he was appointed to a circuit as a probationer in Horsham, North Victoria, where he met Emily Pascoe, whom he later married.

Bible Christians

New BlackfriarsVolume 25, Issue 294 p. 346-349 BIBLE CHRISTIANS First published: September 1944 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-2005.1944.tb05715.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume25, Issue294September 1944Pages 346-349 RelatedInformation