Church History

The book takes a wide-ranging look at all of the main bodies — Anglican, Free Church, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic — which collectively make up ‘the Christian Church’. Their distinctive beliefs, attitudes, structures, and personalities receive attention, but all are firmly set in social, political, and cultural contexts. The comparisons, connections, and contrasts across England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales that raise issues of identity and allegiance, particularly at moments of political change and conflict, are emphasized. The book identifies a series of underlying tensions. In charting the stuttering development of ecumenism, it stresses a place between ‘unity’ and ‘diversity’, both within and between the Churches. In considering ideologies, it notes contrasting attitudes to liberal democracy, communism, and fascism. In analysing attitudes during the two world wars, the Cold War, and decolonization, it detects a place between patriotism and pacifism. In considering social welfare, it observes support for ‘the Welfare State’ and some apprehension about its implications. These and other cognate matters, particularly the control and content of education, are manifestations of a wider issue which pervades the book: the ambiguous ending of ‘Christendom’. The context in which the churches functioned at the beginning of the 20th century, in both Britain and Ireland, was very different from that at its close. The final concern, therefore, is with countries variously described as Christian, multi-faith, post-Christian, or secular. The book concludes with an exploration of the puzzling and unresolved uncertainties which this ‘pluralism’ presents, both for the Churches and the wider society.

This book is a study of a fundamental and neglected aspect of the Oxford Movement. The term ethos appears often in the writings of the Oxford men, especially in their correspondence, and the concept makes its presence felt in every aspect of the Tractarians' intellectual life and religious or social activity. The present study fills a gap in the research about the Oxford Movement and it revises commonly held assumptions about it; the scholarly overlook of the topic has prevented a proper understanding of significant aspects of the intellectual and social history of the Movement. Ethos, for the Oxford men, was more than just a general ‘tone of peculiar gentleness and grace’. It represented a complex theory of religious knowledge which deeply influenced the genesis and development of the Movement. The Tractarians were conscious from the first of how far their ethos distinguished them from the High Church party, with whom they shared much common doctrinal ground. Recent historiography's overstressing of the High Church dimension of the Oxford Movement has tended to obscure Tractarian intellectual originality and the motivation behind many of their actions. The Oxford men were radical religious reformers inspired by an uncompromising principle which urged them forward towards the full restoration of early Christian doctrinal orthodoxy and the recovery of the Catholic ethos. They considered that this Catholic ethos, long lost in the Church of England, was the only ground where a real revival could take root and grow up. The book studies the pre-Tractarian formation of the concept of ethos, and its later development; it explores the intellectual and practical consequences of the notion for the religious and social revival the Oxford Movement tried to promote; it also offers a study of the formation of Newman's theory of doctrinal development and of the defining and definitive role ethos played in its conception.

This book is about conversion narrative, a popular genre of spiritual autobiography that proliferated during the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century within the context of the Evangelical Revival in England. The subject is set in a large chronological frame, beginning with the rise of the genre in the mid-seventeenth century and ending with the ‘fall’ of the genre among some of the non-Western converts of early nineteenth-century missionaries. This large frame allows the genre to be seen whole, and draws attention to the particular conditions under which early modern people turned to spiritual autobiography. Tracing the development of the genre across the period of the Evangelical Revival through different communities and representative writings, the book provides a comprehensive typology of conversion and evangelical self-identity as it differed among the Arminian and perfectionist followers of Wesley, the Moravians under the influence of ‘stillness’, the moderate Calvinists in the Church of England, the Particular Baptists who continued to embrace high Calvinism, and others. A chapter is also included on conversion narrative among evangelical Presbyterians involved in the Cambuslang Revival in Scotland. On the basis of extensive, untapped archival sources, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative explores the different forms of expression among the educated and uneducated, pastors and laypeople, women and men, and Western and non-Western peoples. By being on the trailing edge of Christendom and the leading edge of modernity, eighteenth-century England provided the right conditions for evangelical conversion narrative to flourish, and the concluding chapter examines afresh the significance of the appearance of the genre in this context. This book is concerned with the history of autobiography, the study of eighteenth-century religion and culture, and our understanding of the Evangelical Revival.

If one is saved by faith alone in Jesus Christ, then what is the origin of that faith? Is it a preordained gift of God to elect individuals, or is some measure of human free choice involved? Initially, Philipp Melanchthon concurred with Martin Luther—that the human will is completely bound by sin, and that the choice of faith can flow only from God's unilateral grace. But if this is so, what about those whom God has not chosen? Is he not casting people into hell who never even had a chance? What are the pastoral implications for believers thinking about the nature of God and their own relationship to him? As a result of practical concerns such as these, aided by an intellectual aversion to paradox, Melanchthon came to believe that the human will does play a key role in the origins of a saving faith in Jesus Christ. This was not the Roman Catholic free will of Erasmus, however. It was a limited free will tied to justification by faith alone. It was an evangelical free will.

Richard Hooker has long been viewed as the first systematic defender of Anglicanism, as a via media between Roman Catholicism and Reformed Protestantism. In the last twenty years, this traditional assumption has been increasingly challenged, and it has been argued that Hooker was a Reformed figure whose Anglican credentials are the invention of the Oxford Movement. Whilst the theological ambiguity of Hooker remains perplexing, this study makes clear that the 17th and not the 19th century was responsible for the creation of his reputation as a leading Anglican father. It is argued that Hooker’s position of authority was much disputed and only gradually fashioned, and that his variable significance was dependent on the interplay between the polemical and religious needs of those who used him, and the complexities and evasions of his own work. Hooker initially came to prominence due to a suspicion that he was insufficiently Reformed. This then encouraged Catholic polemicists to view him as being representative of the theological position of the English Church. Although there was a desire to retain him as a Reformed figure, he was eventually appropriated by the avant-garde churchmen who eventually triumphed at the Restoration and enthroned him as the epitome of the Anglican identity. Unsurprisingly, the unfolding of contemporary crises led to some reappraisal of his standing. Notably, the Glorious Revolution meant that Hooker’s previously marginalized belief in an original governmental compact came to the forefront, and he was increasingly recognized as a meaningful political writer. Whilst the boundaries of Hooker’s emblematic status continued to expand and contract, the developments of the 17th century ensured that his status as an important writer has remained constant ever since.

The 1893 Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, presented the Latter‐day Saints with their first post‐polygamy opportunity to exhibit the best of Mormonism for a national and an international audience. The Columbian Exposition also marked the dramatic reengagement of the LDS Church with the non‐Mormon world after decades of seclusion in the Great Basin. Between May and October 1893, over seven thousand Latter‐day Saints from Utah attended the international spectacle popularly described as the “White City.” While many traveled as tourists, oblivious to the opportunities to “exhibit” Mormonism, others actively participated to improve their church’s public image. Hundreds of congregants helped create, manage, and staff their territory’s impressive exhibit hall; most believed their besieged religion would benefit from Utah’s increased national profile. Moreover, a good number of Latter‐day Saint women represented the female interests and achievements of both Utah and its dominant religion. These women hoped to use the Chicago World’s Fair as a platform to improve the social status of their gender and their religion. That summer two hundred and fifty of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s best singers competed in a Welsh eisteddfod, a musical competition held in conjunction with the Chicago World’s Fair, and Mormon apologist Brigham H. Roberts sought to gain LDS representation at the affiliated Parliament of Religions. My book explores how Latter‐day Saints attempted to “exhibit” themselves to the outside world before, during, and after the Columbian Exposition. Indeed, I argue that their participation in the 1893 Columbian Exposition was a watershed moment in the Mormon migration to the American mainstream and its leadership’s discovery of public relations efforts. The exposition marked the dramatic reengagement of the LDS Church with the outside, non-Mormon world after decades of isolation in America’s Great Basin desert. After 1893, Mormon leaders sought to exhibit their faith rather than be exhibited by others.

French émigré priests fled the religious turmoil of the French Revolution after 1789 and found themselves leading a new wave of Roman Catholic missionaries in the United States. This book explores the diverse ways that French missionary priests guided the development of the early American church in Maryland, Kentucky, Louisiana, and other pockets of Catholic settlement throughout much of the trans-Appalachian West. This relatively small group of priests introduced Gallican, ultramontane, and missionary principles to a nascent institutional church in the United States. At the same time, they struggled to reconcile their romantic expectations of missionary life with their actual experiences as servants of a foreign church scattered across a frontier region with limited access to friends and family members still in France. As they became more accustomed to the lifeways of the American South and the West, French missionaries expressed anxiety about apparent discrepancies between how they were taught to practice the priesthood in French seminaries and what the Holy See expected them to achieve as representatives of a universal missionary church. As churchmen bridging the formal ecclesiastical standards of the church with the informal experiences of missionaries in American culture, this book evaluates the private lives of priests—the minimally scripted thoughts, emotions, and actions of strange men trying to make a home among strangers in a strange land—and treats the priesthood as a multicultural, transnational institution that does not fit neatly into national, progressive narratives of American Catholicism.