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.

Foundations of the Anglican Church, CX

William Juxon, Archbishop
of Canterbury from 1660
until his death in 1663.

All good things must come to an end—and so too the Cromwellian dictatorship over the Commonwealth. In this posting, we will look at the restoration of Crown and Bishops in England after the Civil War and the Commonwealth. 

Oliver Cromwell died on September 3, 1658 and was succeeded as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth by his son, Richard.  Richard lacked his father’s resolve and in the face of conflict between the Army and civilian government, resigned.  The majority of the English people had grown very disillusioned with Puritan government.  The draconian laws that restricted any games or pleasure on the Sabbath, the abolition of holydays—including and especially Christmas, the wordy and drab forms of worship in the churches, the excessive Calvinistic moralism all combined to wear down even the dour English.  With the resignation of Richard Cromwell as Lord Protector and the aimless policies of the Council of State—the group that had served as the “Privy Council” to Cromwell Senior and Cromwell Junior, the administration of government began to implode.  The office of Lord Protector was replaced by a seven (later eleven) member “Committee of Safety.” This arrangement lasted only two weeks.  Fighting broke out in England as the Royalists under George Booth began to push against Parliamentarian government.  General John Lambert defeated Booth’s army and tried to put down the rebellion but Cromwell’s governor of Scotland, George Monck, saw the inevitable end of the Commonwealth and led his forces to defeat Lambert.  Monck entered into secret communication with Charles II, son of the “martyred” Charles I, who issued the Declaration of Breda from his exile in the Spanish Netherlands.  This declaration promised a general pardon for all involved in the rebellion against the monarchy, assured all who had purchased or legally obtained property during the Cromwell years that they would retain ownership, and finally promised payment of back pay to the army and guaranteed all officers that they would continue to serve under the monarchy as they had under the Commonwealth.  Eight weeks later Charles was back in England and on the Throne. 

One of the first concerns was to restore the Church to its former status.  In 1662 Parliament passed an act of Uniformity imposing a new Prayer Book and requiring ordination by a bishop for all clergy.  Those who had been ordained according to Presbyterian polity during the Commonwealth were required to submit to re-ordination by a bishop.  Approximately 2000 clergy refused and lost their livings.  The Act of Uniformity also imposed a new Book of Common Prayer upon the English Church.  Anglicans and Presbyterians had met for the Savoy Conference in 1661 but in the end were unable to agree on a liturgy acceptable to both sides. The failure to agree on a liturgy and the disenfranchisement of those clergy who would not accept Episcopal Ordination (or re-ordination in the case of those already ordained during the period in which the episcopacy was abolished from 1646 until 1660) led to a final separation of the Presbyterian/Congregationalist faction in the Church of England from the Anglican/Episcopal faction.  Those who broke with the Established Church were referred to as non-Conformists (because they would not “conform” to the official rites) and included Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists.  (The Methodists, originally a 18^th century movement within the Church of England also joined the non-Conformists when it broke with the Anglican Church.  More will be written on that in later posts.)

The Episcopacy was restored in the Church of England in 1660 and William Juxon, who had been Bishop of London before the suppression of Episcopacy in 1646 was named Archbishop of Canterbury, thus guaranteeing continuity in lineage and Apostolic Succession (at least according to Anglican perspectives) with the pre-Civil War bishops.  Similarly Accepted Frewen (yes, his first name was ‘Accepted’—that is the sort of things evangelicals do to their children), one-time bishop of Litchfield and Coventry before the Civil War, was named to York guaranteeing the succession in the Northern Province as well. 

In doing some background for this entry I found out that George Montaigne who served briefly as Archbishop of York before the Civil War and previously held the sees of Lincoln, London, and Durham had, among his consecrators when consecrated as Bishop of Lincoln in 1617, one Marco Antonio de Dominis who himself had been the Catholic Archbishop of Split in Dalmatia.   De Dominis had apostatized when caught in a political dispute between Venice and the papacy.  He later returned to the Catholic Church, and he was still later tried for heresy.  Be that as it may, it is interesting to note that Catholic lineage was re-instated into the Anglican line as early as 1617. De Dominis also was co-consecrator for Nicholas Felton who served first as Bishop of Bristol and later as Bishop of Ely.  Montaigne had little chance to consecrate bishops himself when Archbishop of York—he only held the see a few months before his death, but as Bishop of Durham he probably would have been a co-consecrator for a number of bishops in the Northern Province and as Bishop of London for a number of bishops in the Canterbury province.  

History of the Anglican Church CV

Charles I at his trial

To pick up on the English Civil War and its impact on the development of Anglicanism, after only a few years following his accession to the throne in 1625, Charles was losing popular support.  Archbishop Laud’s High Church liturgical reforms went too far for many who had accustomed themselves to Calvinist austerity in worship and resented the innovations.  (There are always those who resist and resent liturgical development, even when it is to improve the theological footing of the Liturgy.)   His wars were costly and his failure to win them a national embarrassment.  His dependence upon his favorites for council and his opposition to Parliament left the people feeling unheard and unrepresented.  Charles also had a program to drain “The Fens”—the marshy swamplands in eastern England.  The program would enrich his friends who were investing in it with hopes of converting the swamps to good rich farmland, but disrupt the lives of the locals who for centuries had made their living fishing and wildfowling.  The King and Parliament were in a political tug of war with the Commons reflecting the mood of the ordinary people, especially the merchant class of the South and South East (including London) and the King representing the views of the landed aristocracy. 

By the beginning of 1642 as Parliament became more assertive in their resistance to the King’s policies, and the King felt himself losing control, Charles appeared at the House of Commons with 400 soldiers to arrest five members of the House whom he perceived to be the leaders of the opposition to his policies.  Charles was angry about the execution of Lord Wentworth, his Lord Deputy for Ireland and fearful about the fate of his Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud, whom Parliament had imprisoned.  Wentworth had only carried out the King’s requirements to raise funds in order to avoid having to convoke Parliament to impose new taxes and Charles was in sympathy with Laud’s ceremonial approach to worship.  The King’s failure to arrest the opposition left him fearful of his safety and the safety of his family and fled London.  The rumors—quite probably true—were that that the Queen, Henrietta Marie, had persuaded Charles to arrest the Parliamentarians.  It was a disaster.  The five members of the House had been pre-warned and fled before the King arrived.  The King’s coming into the House and intimidating it with his 400 guards was seen to be a gross violation of Parliamentary right and no monarch has since been permitted to enter the House of Commons. 

After staying briefly first at Hampton Court and then Windsor, Charles sent his family to safety in France and proceeded to the North of England where he hoped to find support among the more traditional nobility and gentry.  Meanwhile the country polarized with some cities and towns declaring support for the King and others for Parliament.  This put King and Parliament at war with each other—civil war.  Painting the picture with somewhat of a broad brush, the King controlled Wales, the West, the Midlands and the North. Parliament held the allegiance of London, the South, the East and the Navy.  Charles established his capital at Oxford. 

It is beyond the point of this blog to go through the Civil War battle by battle, suffice it to say that as the war raged back and forth over the next five years, the King lost more and more and Parliament was more and more victorious.  After being besieged in Oxford, Charles fled and sought refuge with the Scots army at that time in the Midlands.  The Scots, firm in their Presbyterian belief and angry with the King for his attempts to force Anglicanism on them, betrayed Charles and sold him to the Parliamentary forces in January 1647. 

As England devolved from monarchy and episcopacy into what became political tyranny and religious chaos, the Church of England not only split along the High Church/Puritan fault line, it shattered into numerous religious sects.  With the execution of Charles in 1649, England was declared to be a “Commonwealth” with a Republican form of government.  With the abolishment of bishops in 1646 the Church officially became a Presbyterian Church.  The 39 articles—the key statement of Anglican doctrine—was replaced by the Westminster Confession; the Book of Common Prayer by the Directory for Public Worship adopted from the Church of Scotland.  I say “Presbyterian” because its ecclesial polity was Presbyterian (as different from Episcopalian—that is governed by bishops.)  As opposed to Episcopal government—government by a bishop with his officials such as Archdeacons and Deans, in the Presbyterian system local churches are governed by a body of elders (presbyters).  Churches were no longer gathered in a diocese under a bishop but governed by an assembly of presbyters known as the presbytery or classis.   I want to be careful to nuance this correctly but when I say the Church of England was Presbyterian, I am not correlating it to modern Presbyterianism, but simply to say that it adopted the Presbyterian form of organization typical of most Churches in the Reformed (as opposed to Catholic, Orthodox, or Evangelical [aka Lutheran]) traditions.  In fact both today’s English Presbyterians and Congregationalists would find in the time of the Commonwealth not their origins (they date back as movements within the Church of England to the late 16^th century opposition to the Prayer Book and to Bishops) but certainly their coming of age.  The Church of England during the Commonwealth (or as it is sometimes called the Interregnum)  was a Reformed Church that was home to groups that would later distinguish themselves from one another as “Presbyterian” or “Congregational.”  And indeed, in 1972 the majority of Congregational Churches in England united with the Presbyterian Church of England to form the United Reformed Church. 

This Presbyterian/Congregationalist Church of England satisfied the Puritans who had long wanted to get rid of Bishops and the Prayer Book and Christmas and other “popish” traditions. Yes, Christmas was outlawed in England from 1647 until the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660—giving rise to the popular rhyme:

Now thanks to God for Charles return

Whose absence made old Christmas mourn

For then we scarcely did it know

Whether it Christmas were or no

But as I said, the Church did not split in two, it shattered.  The Puritan faction was not sufficiently radical for tens of thousands who found expression for their faith—or their psychosis—in dozens of far more radical groups ranging from the Anabaptists to the Diggers to the Fifth Monarchists to the Sabbatarians to the Quakers to the Ranters.  We will look at some of these groups in the future postings.  Suffice it to say that what had once been one Church with a lot of factional tension now became dozens of sects ranging from the respectable to the totally out of control.  While the Church of England had up to this time (quite unofficially) encompassed a wide variety of theological opinions and forms of worship, these various groups now broke apart into a wide variety of sects that, like Humpty Dumpty, never be put back together again.  Suffice it to say for the purposes of this blog, that the traditional Church of England, a National and Episcopal Church, ceased to exist.  It would be restored in 1660 along with the monarchy, but never again would it encompass the almost universal composite of the English people.   

Foundations of the Church of England CIV

Charles I

We haven’t finished with the Caroline Divines but as they span the better part of the 17^th century we are going to intersperse postings on them with what was going on politically and religiously to shape the Church of England.  To understand the next phase of development in the Church of England we need to take a look at the English Civil War and to understand the Civil War we need to keep a few things in mind.

1.     There was as yet no Great Britain.  There were the separate kingdoms of England (and Wales) and Scotland.  (There was also the Kingdom of Ireland, but as that is on a different island and as in this phase of the development is not germane to our story, let’s just put it aside for the moment.)  England and Scotland were separate kingdoms with separate parliaments and separate Churches, but James VI (of Scotland) & I (of England) was king of both Kingdoms.  He was succeeded upon his death by his son Charles who also ruled each kingdom. 

2.     The Scots did not have as strong a parliamentary tradition as did the English and the English grew fearful that under these Scots Kings, the monarchy would grow stronger at Parliament’s expense. 

3.     James and his son Charles were highly influenced by the theory of the “Divine Right of Kings” that they held their thrones from God and ruled by his authority regardless of the consent of the people or the parliaments of their kingdoms.

4.     In England the king could not levy taxes without the consent of Parliament.

5.     The Church of England had always been an Episcopal Church (governed by bishops) and had since the reign of Elizabeth been strongly Calvinist in its theology.  However there was a strong faction in the Church of England that wanted Presbyterian government (Boards of Clergy replacing bishops in setting policy) which was more typical of the Calvinist tradition.  The Church of Scotland, on the other hand, had been Presbyterian but James had gradually re-introduced bishops to it, over and against the preferences of most of its staunchly Presbyterian members.  By and large, Scotland was not happy with bishops. 

6.     During the reign of King James and especially after the accession of Charles, there developed a faction in the Church of England that theologically and liturgically began to move away from the Calvinism that characterized Anglicanism since Cranmer and particularly since the reign of Elizabeth.

7.     James reputed homosexuality and his attachment to a number of “favorites,” especially George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, caused significant scandal to the Puritan (Calvinist) faction of the Church of England.   Given James’ piety and general good nature, it pretty much only remained as grumbling during his reign, but when Charles ascended the throne and kept Buckingham as a chief advisor, the Puritan faction began to openly challenge royal policy. 

8.     Charles’ marriage to the openly Catholic Henrietta Marie, a French princess, angered the Puritan faction, not only because she was a Catholic but because of the persecution of French Calvinists by the Crown in France. 

The pot came quickly to a boil in the reign of Charles.  He became king in 1625 and by 1628 the English Parliament was determined to limit his power with the “petition of right.”  Charles needed Parliament to grant him new taxes to support English participation in the Thirty-Years War.  This was an essentially Catholic-Protestant War and England was to come in on the Protestant side, but Parliament used the King’s need to wring from him agreement that

1.     the King would not levy taxes without parliamentary consent

2.     soldiers would not be billeted in private homes without the owners’ consent

3.     martial law would not be imposed to quell political unrest

4.     Englishmen would not be arbitrarily imprisoned for dissent from royal policy

Charles had no choice but to agree to the petition, but he determined not to call Parliament again and for eleven years ruled without it.   Tensions mounted.  We mentioned Archbishop Laud and his revival of a certain amount of ceremonial in the Church of England and this did not sit well with the Puritan faction.  Laud and other High Churchmen also renounced the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination in favor of Free Will.  Laud also enforced the laws on Church attendance, fining or imprisoning those Puritans who refused to attend the Prayer Book liturgy.  Those who criticized the Archbishop and his leadership of the Church, were dragged before Church courts which had the right to various punishments such as lashings or cutting off of an ear.   Laud’s unpopularity with the Puritan faction—which was also the Parliamentary faction—only increased the unpopularity with King Charles.

When Charles and Laud tried to force a new Prayer Book on the Church of Scotland—a very “High Church” Book (for the day) rebellion broke out in Scotland with the so-called “Bishops’ Wars”  (There were actually two, on in 1637 and the other in 1640.)  Charles ended up being trounced by the Scots and he needed money to pay the war debts.  This led to the calling of Parliament in April 1640.  Parliament, once assembled, was not about to limit itself to voting the needed revenues for the King, but began to debate their grievances against the King.  Charles dissolved Parliament after only three weeks.  This was the “Short Parliament.” 

Charles turned to Ireland for revenues where his viceroy, Lord Wentworth, was able to raise funds by persuading the Irish Catholic Lords to vote the King funds in return for greater religious liberty for Catholics.  Trust me, this only enraged the Puritan faction all the more.  Emboldened by the new monies, Charles could not stop himself from poking the hornet’s nest and once again invaded his Scots Kingdom to assert his authority.  Once again he got trounced.  To keep the Scots from invading England he had to pay the Scots army £ 850 a day.  He also had to fund his English army to defend England against these Scots.  In other words, he was paying to support both sides in a war.  Desperately short of funds, he had no choice but to call Parliament again in November 1640.  This Parliament had cojones.  It arrested Laud in 1640. It would have him executed in 1645.  It convicted Wentworth (the fellow who raised the money for Charles in Ireland) of treason and executed him in 1641.  It passed a Law that the King could not dissolve Parliament without its consent.  It passed another Law that Parliament had to meet at least every three years.  It declared that the King’s advisors were subject to Parliamentary review.  It abolished the Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber—two of the Courts subject directly to the King.  In 1646 this parliament—known as the “Long Parliament”—abolished episcopacy making the Church of England Presbyterian in government.    To be cont.