Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXII

John Wesley (1703-1791)

I was going to do my next posting continuing on the theme I began several posts back of the Church facing Postmodern culture, but Peter Williams has called me to task for not doing enough straight history.  So I will do my next posting on the History of the Anglican Church and then look at the Church and Postmodernism.  Just as well as I am still not sure that I am grasping the geist of Postmodernism whereas 18^th century Anglicanism is more a matter of dissecting a corpse, 

I had already covered how the Church of England, so vibrant under the influence of the Caroline Divines and particularly in the Restoration phase (1660-1688) went into a malaise after the Glorious Revolution replaced James II with his Protestant daughter and son-in-law, William and Mary.  The Low Church/Evangelical faction had pretty much abandoned Anglicanism for the non-Conformists in 1660.The High Church party was decimated—actually far worse than decimated—when the non-Jurors refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchs and were replaced in their leadership by the Latitudinarian prelates favored by the Whigs.  It was Enlightenment Liberalism at its worst.  There was neither the theological continuity of the High Church nor the evangelical fervor of the Low Church but only the sort of blasé Gentleman’s Club culture of the ecclesiastical arrivistes.  The traditional doctrines of the Christian Church were subjected to the rational autopsies of men who were more inclined to the physical sciences and natural philosophy than metaphysics and mysticism.  The empty positivism of the Enlightenment allowed no room for Original Sin—or subsequent sin except on the most general levels of social disorder.  Without a strong notion of sin, original or otherwise, Christianity collapses into little more than feelings of universal good will.  I think it was H. Richard Niebuhr who went after the liberal Protestantism of his day (the fifties and early sixties) with the caricature of its theology:

A God without anger

Led a People without sin

Into a kingdom without judgement

Through the ministry of a Christ without a Cross. 

18^th century Anglicanism devolved into this vapid moralism of a natural ethics society.  Sermons were long and tedious, read in a monotone and concerned with the most abstract of ideas. Liturgy was perfunctory at best.  The sacraments were largely uncelebrated.  And religion became no more than a support for the established order and irrelevant in the lives of the underclass. 

Perhaps most tragic is that God had become more or less impersonal, a somewhat elegant abstraction not much unlike that to which “The Crown” had been reduced from the sort of charismatic leaders who had once worn it.  And just as the Georges I, II, and III had been more or less relegated to domesticated fops, Jesus was no longer Saviour but only the speaker of inoffensive aphorisms of a general good will. 

Such as situation was bound to trigger a reaction and it came with the First Great Awakening.  In 1729 a group of Oxford scholars led by the brothers John and Charles Wesley, formed “The Holy Club.”  Other members included John Clayton, James Hervey, Benjamin Ingham, Thomas Brougham, George Whitfield and John Gambold.  The members of The Holy Club were in some way a revival of the Caroline Divines in as that they were serious High Churchmen of not inconsiderable piety.  “High Church” at this point of Anglican history has not the significance about “smells and bells:” that would only come in the 19^th century.  To our taste today they would be impossibly Low, with black gowns and tabs and never a surplice to be found.  In the 18^th century to be High Church meant to be serious scholars of Patristic theology, familiar not only with the scriptures but how they had been interpreted in the Tradition of the Church before the East/West schism of 1054.  This Patristic heritage made them aware of the centrality of a rich sacramental life as well as the role of Christian mysticism in the faith.  Unlike run of the mill Anglicans who might dine at the Holy Table three or four times a year,  High Church Anglicans favored frequent reception of Holy Communion and members of the Holy Club celebrated the Eucharist several times a week.  They also encouraged fasting on the traditional days of Wednesday and Friday.  Such pious customs as the examination of conscience and meditation were re-introduced.  Some went so far as to reintroduce a form of confession of sin, either private or within the group.  They also understood the relationship between faith and good works, visiting the sick, educating orphans and children of the poor, assisting those incapable of supporting themselves. 

The movement spread within the Church of England and became highly evangelical as some of the leading members began preaching to huge crowds, mostly of the underclasses who had been feeling somewhat estranged from the Established Church because of its ties to the rich and the powerful. 

Eventually Wesley’s followers would separate from the Church of England as the Methodists, another non-conformist denomination, but that would only be at the end of the eighteenth century.  By that time there had been somewhat of a revival in Anglicanism spurred on by the success of the Wesleys and others in what is known as the First Great Awakening.  While the Wesleys were High Church in their orientation towards Patristic Theology and sacramental life (though a fairly unritualistic sacramental life), many of their successors at the end of the 18^th century were more “Low Church,” sticking to the biblical text without patristic commentary and somewhat indifferent to any sacramental piety.  The Low Church party also embraced a return to the Calvinism of early Anglicanism with an emphasis on the depravity of human nature and the idea that God predestined some to eternal life and others to eternal punishment.  In a religion with such predestination, sacraments lose their importance as they cannot be of any help when one’s final disposition is already predetermined.  Also predestination makes any work among the poor—other than the “spiritual ministration” of preaching irrelevant as charity is incapable of saving one, and indifference to the needs of the poor won’t change one’s final destination either.  By the end of the eighteenth century then the Church of England had its Latitudinarian hierarchy with its colossal indifference to things religious and its preoccupation with gentry life; its High Church party centered among the educated elite and at the universities, and its Low Church party of evangelical preachers.  Methodism had robbed the Church of England of many in the working class who wanted an evangelical emotionalism but found the doom and gloom of Low Church evangelicals too joyless.  But a major revival was at hand.  

We All Need To Wake Up III

The Presbyterian Meeting House

at Cane Ridge--sight of a key

Revival Meeting in the Second

Great Awakening

The Second Great Awakening is often said to have begun with a revival meeting at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky in 1801, but in fact, Cane Ridge was only one of a series of revivals that had been going on for over a decade and would continue into the 1840’s. 

The more traditional denominations—Catholics, Episcopalians (formerly known as Anglicans), and Congregationalists stayed aloof from the revivals and, for the most part, the revivals were on the American frontier—in what is today Kentucky, Southern Ohio, and Tennessee though there were also revivals in the rural areas of the South, in particular the Carolinas and Georgia and western Virginia.  Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians predominated in the revival movement and each of those denominations grew considerably as a result of the converts the revivals drew. 

The revival movement fragmented the Presbyterians as the more staunchly Calvinist—and in general the more theologically sophisticated Presbyterians—found many deserting their ranks for breakaway groups headed by Barton Stone and the father and son team of Thomas and Alexander Campbell.  These groups would eventually evolve into what is today known as the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ.  The Stone-Campbell movement is known as “restorationism” and was an attempt to transcend Christianity’s having fractured into denominations by going back to what was perceived as the New Testament model of Church.  I hope to do some entries on the Campbellite movement in the future, suffice it to say for now that what began as frontier revival has developed into some fairly sophisticated Christian denominations. 

Far more impact was felt in what happened to Baptists and Methodists as a result of these revivals.  As the movement spread like wildfire on the frontier, both denominations came to rely more and more heavily on lay preachers who were generally poorly educated and without any theological formation.  In the case of the Methodists this established a radical discontinuity with the original Methodist spirit of the Wesleys which was both theologically sophisticated (the Wesley brothers were Oxford men) and highly sacramental (they were also high-church—by 18^th century standards and favored frequent communion as well as traditional Christian spirituality).  Frontier Methodism, propagated by lay preachers, had little time for formal worship or sacraments, and was characterized by wildly emotional preaching and doctrinal imprecision.  Even worse were the Baptists who, though in their Rhode Island origins were theologically sophisticated, in the frontier became both biblical fundamentalist and doctrinally loosey-goosey with individual congregations ranging from strictly Calvinist predestinatarian with the gloomiest theologies of fallen human nature to wildly Arminian semi-pelagians.  Religious truth was reduced to whatever the individual thought that it was and religious experience was nothing more than raw subjectivity.  It ended up, of course, with Jesus telling President Bush to invade Iraq, but that is a story for another day.    

The end result of the Second Great awakening was the snapping of the cord that ties religious faith to human reason.  Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin all rolled over at once in their individual graves.  This sort of fundamentalism combined with religious subjectivity has come since World War II to infect American Catholicism as well.  The Katholik Krazies just feel that it isn’t Mass if you can understand it and it isn’t Jesus if you aren’t receiving on your knees with your eyes closed and your tongue stuck out.  The happy-clappy crowd, on the other extreme, just wants to hold hands and sing Kumbaya as some just-beyond-middle-aged two-bellied and three-chinned creature in capri pants hands them a piece of French bread or a glass goblet of wine.  (Lest I be accused of chauvinism, I have two bellies and three chins, though I never—ever—wear capri pants, not even at the beach.)  I think the first thing we need to do—even before we send Cardinal Burke packing to permanent retirement with the boys in blue at Gricigliano, or even have another synod—is restore the proper balance between religious faith and human intellect.  Don’t get me wrong, I am not opposed to emotions, but they are no basis for the commitments of Christian discipleship.  We Catholics were once known for our keen intellects, our spirit of inquiry, our willingness to refine our theology in the light of expanding human knowledge.  We cannot afford to be intellectually sloppy in this post-Christian world or else the credibility of Christ and his Gospel will be lost. The Second Great Awakening is over.  Move on.

We All Need To Wake Up II

John Wesley

Let me pick up on the theme of the Great Awakenings because I think that this is a topic on which a knowledge of history can help us understand the present situation—and, in this case, in particular some of the flaws in the American approach to religion—and options for the immediate future.

The bridge connecting the First and Second Great Awakenings is Methodism and the Wesleys.  I will be dealing with Methodism again and in more detail when I get to the 18^th century in my series on the history of the Church of England, but I will sketch it out in this posting so that we can see how it affects American Protestantism—and by extension, American Catholicism. 

Methodism began in the Church of England as part of the First Great Awakening.  Eighteenth century Anglicanism had devolved into a pretty tepid shadow of its once great self.  It lacked the intellectualism of an Anselm, the courage of a Becket, the industry of a Cranmer, the piety of a Laud, or the pastoral care of a Tillotson.  Indeed it was upper-crust, entitled, lazy, and blind to the social realities of the day.  One wag called the Church of England “The Tory Party at Prayer.” 

At Christ Church College in Oxford in 1729 two brothers, John and Charles Wesley, the sons of a Church of England priest, the Reverend Samuel Wesley and his deeply pious wife, Susannah, gathered a group of like-minded students and formed “The Holy Club”—a society in which the members studied together the scriptures, the classics of Christian literature (including the Fathers), and engaged in devotional practices such as fasting and frequent communion, as well as giving time for the service of the poor and the education of poor children.  Their zeal and devotion won them only the scorn of the more secular university members, faculty and students alike.  A number of members of the Holy Club went on to be ordained in the Church of England and several of them: the Wesleys, George Whitefield, and Benjamin Ingham became famous evangelists.  The Wesleys had brief ministries in the American Colonies, but Whitefield made over seven preaching tours of the Colonies and was probably the single most influential preacher of the First Great Awakening, at least in the Americas.

The pious practices of the Holy Club formed the backbone for a renewal in the Church of England, at least in parts of the Church of England, led by the Wesleys.  John was an outstanding preacher and Charles Wesely had an extraordinary gift for composing hymn lyrics that were both theologically sound and deeply moving.  Methodism, with its emphasis on personal piety, frequent communion, and spiritual discipline proved attractive to many who had grown weary to the spiritual tedium of mainline Anglicanism.   

John Wesley, on his journey to America, had an experience that would not only change his life, but which would fashion American religion from his day to ours.  On the ship from England to Georgia, Wesley encountered a group of German pietists known as the Moravian Brethren.  The Moravian Brethren, known officially as the Unitas Fratrum (The Unity of the Brothers) are a Protestant denomination that traces their origins back to the preaching of Jan Hus in 15^th century Bohemia and Moravia (today’s Czech Republic).  During a frightful storm in which the boat was being tossed about by high waves, while the English were terrified, the Moravian  Brethren very calmly prayed and sang hymns.  Wesley wanted for himself the deep religious sentiment that shaped the piety of these devout men and women. 

Even by the Wesleys’ time, there was still enough Calvinist residue in the Church of England to trouble those few pious souls who remained among the Tories at prayer and make them anxious for some assurance that they were among the elect.  John Wesley was desperate for the sort of religious experience that would assure him of his salvation.  Wesley describes what happened when he attended a Moravian prayer gathering on May 24, 1738.

"In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."

This was the pivotal experience for the remainder of Wesley’s ministry and as Methodism was rooted profoundly in Wesely’s own piety, the desire for that “warm feeling” of God’s love and election became an irreducible part of the Methodist Gospel.  Now for Wesley and his immediate disciples—all university trained preachers—this subjectivism was balanced by a keen appreciation for both sound Scripture and the Tradition of the Church Fathers.  The problem would be when Methodism crossed to the Americas and, due to an insufficiency of theologically trained preachers, fell into the hands of lay preachers with stronger hearts than brains.  We will talk about that in the next posing on the Second Great Awakening, but suffice it say it has given an emphasis for Americans that religion is primarily about feelings and emotions. 

Wesley remained an Anglican for the rest of his life and the movement long remained within the Church of England.  Wesley also encouraged his English followers to remain in the Church of England and to receive the sacraments in the Established Church. However when the American Church needed ministers at the time of our Revolution and the Anglican Bishops would not ordain clergy for the rebellious colonies, Wesley ordained Thomas Coke as “superintendent” of the American Methodists and also ordained two ministers to work with him in the American missions.  Wesley’s brother Charles was appalled at John’s ordaining on his own authority and saw the threat it would eventually pose to the Methodists remaining in the Church of England. 

Eventually after John Wesley’s death the Methodists separated out of the Church of England and joined the various dissenter Churches such as the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians.  In America the break was almost immediate with Coke and his ministers working solely with Methodists and without reference to the Anglican/Episcopal structures in the colonies. Methodism quickly grew into the second largest American denomination, second only to the Baptists.  In the Second Great Awakening, the emotionalism that characterized Methodism was spread throughout American Protestantism and has eventually come to color American Catholicism as well.  

We All Need To Wake Up!

George Whitefield--preacher
of the First Great Awakening

In my last posting I made a reference to the Second Great Awakening and the consequent dumbing down of American Religion with the rise of biblical fundamentalism.  I want to explore this further, but to do so we need to go back to the First Great Awakening and American Revivalism in the 18^th century.  The First Great Awakening, an evangelical revival among English and (American) Colonial Protestants had an intellectual integrity lacking in its 19^th century successor—the Second Great Awakening—and the spinoff movements that (unfortunately) stamped most American Protestantism—and now, by contagion, Catholicism—with an anti-intellectualism which is increasing undermining the foundations of Christianity in American society.

What really distinguished the First Great Awakening is the quality of the preachers who engendered it.  Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Samuel Davies, and the Wesleys were all men of high culture and unparalleled education and the movement they started never deviated into the rank theological subjectivism of later American religion.

Perhaps we need to begin with the Anglican priest George Whitefield (1714-1770).  Whitefield, an Englishman, had been a fellow at Pembroke College Oxford where he knew the Wesleys and, like them, had been part of the Holy Club.  The Holy Club was an association of devout scholars at Christ Church, Oxford who devoted themselves to prayer, study, and works of charity among the poor and sick.  It was the spiritual fountain from which Methodism—originally a movement within the Church of England—sprung.  Whitefield, like the Wesleys, decided to come to the American colonies to work as a missionary.  After an initial trip to Savannah Georgia to assess the needs of what he thought would be his future parish, he returned to England to be ordained.  While in England raising money for a proposed orphanage in the new parish, he began preaching to large crowds.  His preaching was so effective that no church was large enough to hold the assembled crowds—mostly of working class people in the factories and mines of Industrial Revolution Britain.  Whitefield presented the Gospel to them in a way that spoke to their everyday lives with their frustrations, poverty, and suffering.  Returning to North America in 1740 he was invited to preach up and down the colonies, again drawing huge crowds wherever he went. 

While being a committed Anglican and even having a Calvinist bent in his opinions on pre-destination, Whitefield was willing to preach wherever invited and to work with Protestants of any and all sorts.  He worked closely with the Moravian Brethren in Pennsylvania to establish charity work among the poor Blacks.  Among Whitefield’s admirers was Benjamin Franklin who, though a Deist, was deeply impressed at the moral changes in people effected by Whitefield’s preaching.  He was also amazed at Whitefield’s ability as an orator and at his intellectual skills.  Franklin published a number of Whitefield’s tracts.  Whitefield eventually returned to England where he was never given a church of his own, but where he continued to draw large numbers to open-air revivals.  He made seven trips to America for preaching and died in Boston on the last of his missionary journeys. 

Jonathan Edwards was born in East Windsor Connecticut in 1703, the son of a Puritan clergyman.  He studied at Yale College (today’s University) where he showed an aptitude in a wide variety of fields, including the natural sciences.  Edwards was fascinated with the discoveries of Isaac Newton and found that, unlike others whose interest in science pushed them away from religion, science to him was a demonstration of the Divine origin of Nature and Nature’s Laws.  Valedictorian of his class, he went on after graduation to study Theology.  After several temporary positions—some pastoring, some academic—he was ordained as minister-assistant to his grandfather who pastored the Church at Northampton Massachusetts.  Both Edwards and his wife—who also came from a family of ministers—were noted for their ascetic lives and devout piety.  Edwards’ grandfather died in February of 1729 and by the summer of 1733 Edwards’ preaching had triggered a revival in Northampton with several hundred new members have been converted and joined the church.  Joining the church was not simply a matter of signing up and getting one’s offering-envelopes; joining the church meant committing yourself to a rigorous discipline of moral life, prayer, fasting, and study.  Yet the revival spread beyond Northampton and throughout New England and even New York.  Edwards standards of Christian living, however, became ever more strict and this eventually prompted his home congregation to dismiss him from the pastorate.  His popularity as a preacher gained him several calls to fill pulpits from Scotland to Virginia, but he finally accepted a church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  From there he went on to the President of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University.  He died there in 1758 after being inoculated for Smallpox.  Given his interest in scientific development, he was a strong proponent of the new vaccine and volunteered for the inoculation, but his health was not sufficiently strong for him to survive the resultant case.  Edwards’ entire ministry had been marked by rigorous scholarship—philosophical, theological, scientific—and yet also stressed, and saw as compatible, a life of religious devotion. 

Whitefield was Anglican, Edwards a Congregationalist, and the third voice of the First Great Awakening was Samuel Davies, a Presbyterian.  Davies' family was too poor to send him on to college—unlike the Oxford educated Whitefield and the Yale educated Edwards—but he was tutored by the Reverend Samuel Blair at his academy in Faggs Manor Pennsylvania.  The education must have stood him well as Davies went on to become the fourth President of Princeton.  Davies was, as I noted, a Presbyterian and served dissenting (non-Anglican) congregations in Virginia, becoming the first non-Anglican clergyman to be licensed to preach in Virginia. He was known as an enthusiastic preacher and served seven churches spread out over five counties, riding from one to another on horseback.  In 1753 Davies went to Great Britain where he preached more than 60 sermons.  Returning to America he beat the drum in Virginia for recruits to fight the British cause in the French and Indian War and in 1759 he succeeded Jonathan Edwards as President of Princeton.  He died two years later, aged only 37 years. 

We will write more about John and Charles Wesley at another time, saying now only that their tenure in the American colonies was too short to have an immediate influence, though long-term they would be the most important shapers of American religion.  Charles spent only one year and John two in the colonies before returning to England.  They both studied at Christ Church College in Oxford with John later becoming a fellow at Lincoln College.  Charles was among the organizers of “The Holy Club” at Oxford—the aforementioned society of devout scholars who wished a more intense Christian life.  Upon their return to England both brothers took up open-air preaching under the tutelage of George Whitefield.  Wesley’s influence will be stronger in the Second Great Awakening when his American disciples will play a significant role in American revivalism.  In England, however, the Wesleys were highly influential in the revitalization of Christian living through the Methodist movement which started in “The Holy Club.”

The religious revival of the 1730’s through 1750’s gave a shot in the arm to the Congregational and Presbyterian—and to some extent, the Anglican—Churches which had over time become somewhat staid and, well, comfortable.  They set a higher bar to which Christian men and women found themselves called.  Discipleship could not be taken for granted and tepidity was not acceptable in matters of Christian commitment.  On the other hand, the preachers were educated men, conversant with the intellectual currents of their time.  They knew philosophy.  They knew biblical languages.  They knew the theological traditions of Calvin and the Reformers.  Some, like Whitefield or the Wesleys, knew the Fathers of the Church.  Some, like Edwards, were passionate about the sciences but none were opposed to any field of knowledge or learning.  The anti-intellectualism of today’s Christian right would have disgusted them as much as any sin or moral decay.  Indeed, they would be embarrassed by the uncouthness of many a priest and many a pastor today. 

We need a revival in the Church today, a new evangelicalism but it can’t be the sort of dim-witted fundamentalism of an Andy Gipson or a Jeff Smith or even the coat-and-tie ignoramity of a Franklin Graham.  For that matter we don’t need the gender-bending foppery of a Raymond Burke or a Salvatore Cordileone, much less the glass closet of a Michael Voris spinning the Gospel to their own peculiar tastes.  We need intelligent people, men and women who have their feet on the ground but know both the Scriptures and our Catholic heritage—the Patristic Tradition of Augustine and Ambrose and Jerome and Chrysostom et al—to motivate us intelligently and yet with full hearts to make Christ the center of our lives.  There is a golden opportunity here for a Third Great Awakening—one that calls Christians of every Church and denomination to faithful discipleship in a 21^st century world.