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.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXIX

Gerald Valerian Wellesley,
canon of Durham Cathedral
and avid reader of the Times
of London 

Well, I have promised a number of faithful readers that I will get back to our series on the history of the Anglican Church—and so here we are, back in the last decade of the 17^th century with a deposed King and a deposed Archbishop of Canterbury and a Church facing a crisis, a crisis which it will not navigate without banging itself on a few rocks that will leave it battered and weakened and with lifeboats setting out on the seas of evangelicalism. 

In 1688 a coup d’etat replaced the Catholic King James II with his Protestant daughter Mary and even more Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.  Nine bishops, including Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury, were deposed for refusing to wear allegiance to the new monarchs—they saw their support of the “Glorious Revolution” and the new co-monarchs (an oxymoron if there ever was one) William and Mary as being contrary to the oaths they took at their episcopal consecrations to be loyal to the King (in this case, James).  It was a bitter irony as they were being deprived of their sees for loyalty to a Catholic King when to a man the bishops were rabidly anti-Roman.  Anti-Roman, but not anti-Catholic in as that they were all High Churchmen who saw the Church of England as being a branch of that catholic (i.e.) universal Church along with the Greek and Roman Churches.  But deprived and deposed they were.  They are referred to as non-jurors as they would not swear (Latin: jurare) the oath of allegiance. 

Now Mary was very devout, but while Protestant, wasn’t much interested herself in matters of doctrine, but her husband, William, was a passionate Calvinist.  While Mary was the one with title to the Crown, William’s head was not graced with a “Crown Matrimonial,” i.e. he was no mere consort.  He was, by the grace and invitation of Parliament, co-regent.  In fact, given his domination of Mary and her willingness to leave politics to the husband whom God had set over her in authority (they were Protestants after all and thus unblinking subjects to the Word of God), William was the power figure in this equation.  William was no fan of the High Church movement (which he considered too close to the Catholic theology) represented by the Caroline Divines and consistently appointed Latitudinarians to the episcopal bench. 

High Churchmen represented a somewhat Catholic (though not Roman Catholic) school of thought that stressed the Prayer Book liturgy and sound patristic theology.  They encouraged—and practiced—a devout personal life with a piety rooted in the Prayer Book offices and many showed an interest in the continental mystics.  (The continental mystics tended, of course, to be Roman Catholics such as Francis de Sales, Archbishop Fenelon, Dom Augustine Baker, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection and others, especially French and Spanish spiritual writers.)

The Church of England had been drained of most of its Low Churchmen at the Restoration when they tended to go with the various dissenters: Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and others.  Low Churchmen tended to look only to the Biblical text for theological guidance and were liturgical minimalists.  Their piety was more rooted in evangelical preaching than the Prayer Book offices and they looked askance on the mystical tradition as being among the worst abuses of superstitious Romanism.  But, as I said, their influence in the Church of England had been minimized with the definitive break of the Dissenters with the official Church in 1660. 

The Latitudinarians or Broad Churchmen were somewhere in the undefined middle of these two extremes.  The old couplet tells it all:

High and Crazy

Low and Lazy

Broad and Hazy

It is hard to pin down exactly what a Latitudinarian believes—or if they believe at all.  They usually are inclined to ignore the sort of details of dogmatic theology in which High Church advocates of the time found their entertainment, but they also differed from low Church people in tending to like the various forms of biblical criticism that stretch the text to make it mean whatever you wish it to.  When it comes to liturgy they follow the Prayer Book but without much enthusiasm, much less an imagination.  I always think of the Reverend and Honorable Gerald Valerian Wellesley, brother of the Duke of Wellington and a canon of Durham Cathedral who was said to take the Times into choir with him tucked under his surplice and read it while the choristers sang Morning Prayer.  Though coming towards the end of the period we are looking at, Wellesley’s morning reading is that sort of cavalier abandon that typifies the Latitudinarians.  It wasn’t rooted in an indifference to matters religious as much as it was symptomatic of a religious liberalism that downplayed personal faith for intellectual abstractions. 

After leaving off the series on the Church of England about eight weeks or so ago, I did a series on the Enlightenment because if we are to understand the malaise of the Church of England in this period we need to understand that intellectual environment that pervaded European society at the end of the 17^th century and throughout most of the 18^th.  The Enlightenment’s contempt for the medieval period, a time which Enlightenment thinkers referred to as “The Dark Ages” (as if the sun had taken a thousand year hiatus), pushed philosophers and historians and even theologians into an intellectual corner where, if they wished to be thought at all critical in their scholarship, they distanced themselves from the sort of faith and piety characteristic of pre-Enlightenment societies.  It is not unlike the supercilious phony liberal intellectualism of today when people think they have to dismiss millennia of wisdom in favor of abstract and cerebral theories they can parrot without comprehending. 

This Enlightenment spirit infected the Church of England as its bishops and higher clergy were invariably members of the same clubs and traveled in the same social and intellectual circles as the various scientists and philosophers who were advancing the secularist thought of the time.  (This intellectual contamination affected Scandinavian Lutheranism and Continental Catholicism as well, particularly in France, but also to some extent in the Austria and its possessions, as well as Spain and Portugal, but nowhere nearly as much as it did in England.) It was typical of many clergy and not a few bishops to belong to a Masonic Lodge and thus inevitable for some of the theological freethinking of the Lodges to find their way into the Church.  Archbishop Tillotson, William’s nominee to succeed the deposed Sancroft at Canterbury, had to dispel rumors that he was a Unitarian, a not uncommon theological position among Enlightenment thinkers. 

While they were soft on doctrine and often somewhat broad minded on personal (i.e. sexual) morality, the Latitudinarians were inclined to an excessive emphasis on social mores.  They tended to espouse economic liberalism and Adam Smith ideas on Free Market Capitalism, but they regularly used the pulpit to call for reform of the Poor Law, educational reforms, and prison reform as well as hammering away at such social evils as slavery, alcoholism, prostitution, and child employment.  By and large, the 18^th century Church of England was a rather limpid thing whose appeal was primarily among the fashionable well-to-do’s and Whig part politicians.  It would produce two important reactions: one in the eighteenth century and the other—and at the other extreme of the ecclesial spectrum—in the nineteenth.