The Nonconformist Inheritance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
The Many ◽  
John Owen

This chapter analyses the editions, abridgements, and recommendations of texts by seventeenth-century nonconformists that were made by eighteenth-century dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England evangelicals. The nonconformist writers they chose include Joseph Alleine, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, John Owen, and John Bunyan. The editors and recommenders include Philip Doddridge, John Wesley, Edward Williams, Benjamin Fawcett, George Burder, John Newton, William Mason, and Thomas Scott. Detailed accounts are provided of the large number of Baxter’s works that were edited, notably A Call to the Unconverted and The Saints Everlasting Rest, and a case study is devoted to the many annotated editions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the ways in which they were used. The editors took into account length, intelligibility, religious attitudes, and cost, and sometimes criticized their rivals’ versions on theological grounds.

The Pilgrim’s Progress in the Evangelical Revival

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
History Of ◽  
George Whitefield

This chapter is concerned with the ways in which evangelicals of various persuasions in the later eighteenth century—Methodists (both Arminian and Calvinist), Church of England evangelicals, and evangelical Dissenters (both Congregationalist and Baptist)—adopted The Pilgrim’s Progress as one of their key texts and made it speak to their own situations. It focuses on three main topics: first, how, in the hands of its editors, The Pilgrim’s Progress became a polemical text, especially from the 1770s onwards, one hundred years after the book’s publication; second, how it was used as a guide to Christian experience as lived by evangelicals; and third, how it became a means of writing the history of Dissent and evangelicalism. The key figures discussed include John Wesley, George Whitefield, John Newton, Richard Conyers, William Shrubsole, William Mason, George Burder, John Bradford, and Thomas Scott.

The Episcopalian Inheritance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
George Whitefield

This chapter begins by emphasizing the return to the theology of the Thirty-Nine Articles and Homilies by Methodists and Church of England evangelicals, notably John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Thomas Scott. Many Anglican writers of the second half of the seventeenth century were recommended by dissenters, such as Philip Doddridge and Edward Williams, as well as by Methodists and Church of England evangelicals. Works by the churchmen William Beveridge and Benjamin Jenks were edited, abridged, and widely read across denominations. A case study is devoted to the influence and editorial transformations of The Life of God in the Soul of Man by the Scottish episcopalian Henry Scougal.

Theology in the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.

Epilogue

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 191-196
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Slow Mode ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Political Justice ◽  
The Many

This epilogue studies William Godwin's theory of ideology, assessing his book Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1796), which identifies unfelt and active forces holding humanity back from social happiness. The virtuality of feeling for Godwin is a potential menace. The very mechanism of the human mind perpetuates a tacit politics of nonconsciousness, a politics embedded in tacitness, and “it is this circumstance that constitutes the insensible empire of prejudice.” In the interaction between felt and unfelt, perceptible and imperceptible, lie the deepest roots of oppression. The many kinds of writing surveyed in this book that use the idiom of the insensible in some ways anticipate what must look to people now like Godwin's theory of ideology. What the writers discussed in this book—from the late seventeenth century onward—have treated as natural changes wrought by the slowness of time can be seen through Godwin's eyes as entailing a political dimension: an oppressively slow mode of acquired and reinforced beliefs that humanity is desperate to overcome. Beyond that, the four areas of eighteenth-century prose treated in this book's four chapters each employs the idiom to describe what could look like the basic components of an ideology of modern Western liberalism.

scholarly journals THE INNER LIVES OF EARLY MODERN TRAVEL

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK R. F. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Many ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

Inward Baptism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baird Tipson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Evangelical Christian ◽  
New Birth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
George Whitefield

Inward Baptism describes theological developments leading up to the great evangelical revivals in the mid-eighteenth century. It argues that Martin Luther’s insistence that a participant’s faith was essential to a sacrament’s efficacy would inevitably lead to the insistence on an immediate, perceptible communication from the Holy Spirit, which evangelicals continue to call the “new birth.” A description of “conversion” through the sacrament of penance in late-medieval Western Christianity leads to an exploration of Luther’s critique of that system, to the willingness of Reformed theologians to follow Luther’s logic, to an emphasis on “inward” rather than “outward” baptism, to William Perkins’s development of a conscience religion, to late-seventeenth-century efforts to understand religion chiefly as morality, and finally to the theological rationale for the new birth from George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards. If the average Christian around the year 1500 encountered God primarily through sacraments presided over by priests, an evangelical Christian around 1750 received God directly into his or her heart without the need for clerical mediation, and he or she would be conscious of God’s presence there.

Vanity Fair and the Celestial City

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Religious Books ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Looking Back

In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the pilgrims cannot reach the Celestial City without passing through Vanity Fair, where everything is bought and sold. In recent years there has been much analysis of commerce and consumption in Britain during the long eighteenth century, and of the dramatic expansion of popular publishing. Similarly, much has been written on the extraordinary effects of the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century in Britain, Europe, and North America. But how did popular religious culture and the world of print interact? What religious books were read, and how? Who chose them? How did they get into people’s hands? This study attempts to answer these questions in detail. It explores the works written, edited, abridged, and promoted by Protestant dissenters, Methodists both Arminian and Calvinist, and Church of England evangelicals in the period 1720 to 1800, while also looking back to seventeenth-century and earlier sources and forward to republication and dissemination up to the nineteenth century. Part I is concerned with the publishing and distribution of religious books by commercial booksellers and religious societies, and the means by which readers obtained them and how they responded to what they read. Part II shows that some of the most important publications were new versions of earlier nonconformist, episcopalian, Roman Catholic, and North American works. Part III explores the main literary kinds, including annotated Bibles, devotional guides, exemplary lives, and hymns. The book discusses c.200 writers and provides detailed case studies of popular and influential works.

The Politics of Anti-Corruption

2021 ◽  
pp. 297-340
Author(s):  
Mark Knights
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
The Many ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Modern Era

As other chapters have made clear, the corruption of politics was a concern of the pre-modern era, especially in relation to political officers. Yet alongside the corruption of politics there was also a very strong politics of corruption. ‘Anti-corruption’ was nearly always political, in the sense of having a political agenda, implicit or explicit, behind it. This chapter argues that these political dimensions need to be recognised more than they have been. The chapter examines the ‘work’ done by the discourse of corruption, underlining its emotive power and its capacity both to challenge political rules and to help define boundaries of legitimate behaviour. The politics of anti-corruption is highlighted in the imperial context through a case study of early eighteenth-century Barbados. The chapter then examines these political functions in relation to the many highly politicised impeachments for corruption, from 1621 to 1806.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Modern State ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

The conclusion explains why the English Reformation ended in the late eighteenth century. It discounts a secular and secularizing Enlightenment as an explanation. Rather, it offers three other reasons for the Reformation’s ending. Firstly, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century enough time had passed to make the seventeenth-century wars of religion less threatening than they had seemed earlier in the century. Secondly, the Reformation issues with which the eighteenth-century English dealt got supplanted by other, more urgent ones, often having to do with England’s expanding empire. Finally, and importantly, the Reformation ended because the polemical divines who are the subject of this book failed fully in their tasks of defining truth and of defending the autonomy of the established Church of England. In the end, the modern state took on the role as truth’s arbiter and made the Church a subordinate, dependent institution.

Transatlantic Anglican Networks, c.1680 – c.1770: Transplanting, Translating and Transforming the Church of England

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 127-142
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Distribution Networks ◽  
Book Distribution ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Religious Networks ◽  
The Many ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
The Church

In recent years, much historical interest has been paid to the evangelical (and often by extension the Nonconformist) international and transatlantic religious networks which communicated ideas and personnel from and to various parts of Britain, the Continent and North America during the eighteenth century. Historians of the Evangelical Revival have looked at individuals, most notably the dynamic and much-travelled George Whitefield, whose criss-crossing the Atlantic exemplified the international reach of the revival, and also at the many hundreds (perhaps thousands) of less colourful personalities who created, and moved through, the international evangelical world. In addition, attention has been given by Susan O’Brien (and others) to the vibrant publishing and book distribution networks which enabled the Evangelical Revival to have a truly international impact (mirroring – perhaps beating – the Enlightenment republic of letters). In particular, O’Brien has emphasized the ways in which the transatlantic movement of letters, books, pamphlets, tracts and journals was a vital way by which what David Hempton has recently termed the ‘Empire of the Spirit’ was able to expand.

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