Baptists

Author(s):  
Ian Randall

Early in the nineteenth century, British Quakers broke through a century-long hedge of Quietism which had gripped their Religious Society since the death of their founding prophet, George Fox. After 1800, the majority of Friends in England and Ireland gradually embraced the evangelical revival, based on the biblical principle of Jesus Christ’s atoning sacrifice as the effective source of salvation. This evangelical vision contradicted early Quakerism’s central religious principle, the saving quality of the Light of Christ Within (Inward Light) which led human beings from sinful darkness into saving Light. The subsequent, sometimes bitter struggles among British Quakers turned on the question of whether the infallible Bible or leadings from the Light should be the primary means for guiding Friends to eternal salvation. Three of the most significant upheavals originated in Manchester. In 1835 Isaac Crewdson, a weighty Manchester Friend, published A Beacon to the Society of Friends which questioned the authority of the Inward Light and the entire content of traditional Quaker ministry as devoid of biblical truth. The ensuing row ended with Crewdson and his followers separating from the Friends. Following this Beacon Separation, however, British Quakerism was increasingly dominated by evangelical principles. Although influenced by J.S. Rowntree’s Quakerism, Past and Present, Friends agreed to modify their Discipline, a cautious compromise with the modern world. During the 1860s a new encounter with modernity brought a second upheaval in Manchester. An influential thinker as well as a Friend by marriage, David Duncan embraced, among other advanced ideas, higher criticism of biblical texts. Evangelical Friends were not pleased and Duncan was disowned by a special committee investigating his views. Duncan died suddenly before he could take his fight to London Yearly Meeting, but his message had been heard by younger British Friends. The anti-intellectual atmosphere of British Quakerism, presided over by evangelical leader J.B. Braithwaite, seemed to be steering Friends towards mainstream Protestantism. This tendency was challenged in a widely read tract entitled A Reasonable Faith, which replaced the angry God of the atonement with a kinder, gentler, more loving Deity. A clear sign of changing sentiments among British Friends was London Yearly Meeting’s rejection of the Richmond Declaration (1887), an American evangelical manifesto mainly written by J.B. Braithwaite. But the decisive blow against evangelical dominance among Friends was the Manchester Conference of 1895 during which John Wilhelm Rowntree emerged as leader of a Quaker Renaissance emphasizing the centrality of the Inward Light, the value of social action, and the revival of long-dormant Friends’ Peace Testimony. Before his premature death in 1905, J.W. Rowntree and his associates began a transformation of British Quakerism, opening its collective mind to modern religious, social, and scientific thought as the means of fulfilling Friends’ historic mission to work for the Kingdom of God on earth. During the course of the nineteenth century, British Quakerism was gradually transformed from a tiny, self-isolated body of peculiar people into a spiritually riven, socially active community of believers. This still Dissenting Society entered the twentieth century strongly liberal in its religious practices and passionately confident of its mission ‘to make all humanity a society of Friends’.

Author(s):  
John Stuart Mill

‘it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well developed human beings’ Mill's four essays, 'On Liberty', 'Utilitarianism', 'Considerations on Representative Government', and 'The Subjection of Women' examine the most central issues that face liberal democratic regimes - whether in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first. They have formed the basis for many of the political institutions of the West since the late nineteenth century, tackling as they do the appropriate grounds for protecting individual liberty, the basic principles of ethics, the benefits and the costs of representative institutions, and the central importance of gender equality in society. These essays are central to the liberal tradition, but their interpretation and how we should understand their connection with each other are both contentious. In their introduction Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen set the essays in the context of Mill's other works, and argue that his conviction in the importance of the development of human character in its full diversity provides the core to his liberalism and to any defensible account of the value of liberalism to the modern world. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.


2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.


Author(s):  
Rainer Forst

This chapter addresses the classical question of the relationship between enlightenment and religion. In doing so, the chapter compares Jürgen Habermas's thought to that of Pierre Bayle and Immanuel Kant. For, although Habermas undoubtedly stands in a tradition founded by Bayle and Kant, he develops a number of important orientations within this tradition and has changed his position in his recent work. The chapter studies this change to understand Habermas's position better. It also draws attention to a fundamental question raised by the modern world: what common ground can human reason establish in the practical and theoretical domain between human beings who are divided by profoundly different religious (including antireligious) views?


Author(s):  
James Deaville

The chapter explores the way English-language etiquette books from the nineteenth century prescribe accepted behavior for upwardly mobile members of the bourgeoisie. This advice extended to social events known today as “salons” that were conducted in the domestic drawing room or parlor, where guests would perform musical selections for the enjoyment of other guests. The audience for such informal music making was expected to listen attentively, in keeping with the (self-) disciplining of the bourgeois body that such regulations represented in the nineteenth century. Yet even as the modern world became noisier and aurally more confusing, so, too, did contemporary social events, which led authors to become stricter in their disciplining of the audience at these drawing room performances. Nevertheless, hosts and guests could not avoid the growing “crisis of attention” pervading this mode of entertainment, which would lead to the modern habit of inattentive listening.


2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 593-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Williams

ArgumentMontpellier vitalists upheld a medical perspective akin to modern “holism” in positing the functional unity of creatures imbued with life. While early vitalists focused on the human organism, Jean-Charles-Marguerite-Guillaume Grimaud investigated digestion, growth, and other physiological processes that human beings shared with simpler organisms. Eschewing modern investigative methods, Grimaud promoted a medically-grounded “metaphysics.” His influential doctrine of the “two lives” broke with Montpellier holism, classifying some vital phenomena as “higher” and others as “lower” and attributing the “nobility” of the human species to the predominance of the former. In place of Montpellier teaching that attributed health to the holistic equilibration of vital activities, Grimaud embraced spiritualist dualisms of soul and body, Creator and created. Celebrating the divinely-ordained “wisdom” evident in involuntary physiological processes, he argued that such life functions were incomprehensible to human investigators. While Grimaud's work encouraged inquiry into the division between the central and “vegetative” nervous systems that became paradigmatic in nineteenth-century neuroscience, it also opened Montpellier vitalism to charges of conservatism and obscurantism that are still lodged against it to the present day.


Author(s):  
John Halsey Wood

In the midst of the roiling chaos of the nineteenth century, Abraham Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinism was a strategy to maintain a Calvinist unity and engagement with an increasingly disintegrated Western world. The unity Kuyper pursued was of two kinds: intellectual and social. As a thinker, Kuyper valued coherent, interrelated systems. He took as his starting point the systematic Calvinism of Protestant scholastics and the Reformed Confessions as well as Romanticism’s organic impulse which elevated the organic and natural over mechanical and artificial. In addition to a unified mind, Kuyper also pursued a unified Calvinist community, albeit a different kind than imagined by earlier Calvinists. Under the pressures of modernity, Kuyper didn’t pursue a repristinated Calvinist culture, but a renewed Calvinist subculture.


Author(s):  
Paul Franks

This article examines three moments of the post-Kantian philosophical tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Kantianism, Post-Kantian Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism. It elucidates the distinctive methods of a tradition that has never entirely disappeared and is now acknowledged once again as the source of contemporary insights. It outlines two problematics—naturalist scepticism and historicist nihilism—threatening the possibility of metaphysics. The first concerns sceptical worries about reason, emerging from attempts to extend the methods of natural science to the study of human beings. Kant’s project of a critical and transcendental analysis of reason, with its distinctive methods, should be considered a response. The second arises from the development of new methods of historical inquiry, seeming to undermine the very possibility of individual agency. Also considered are Kant’s successors’ revisions of the critical and transcendental analysis of reason, undertaken to overcome challenges confronting the original versions of Kant’s methods.


2000 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 325-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Spaulding

Modern nationalisms first arose during the later eighteenth century around the wide periphery of the ancient heartland of western culture and gnawed their way inward during the course of the nineteenth century to the core, culminating in World War I, Each new nationalism generated an original “imagined community” of human beings, part of whose ideological cohesion derived from a sense of shared historical experience. Since the actual historical record would not necessarily satisfy this hunger, it was often found expedient to amend the past through acts of imagination aptly termed the “invention of tradition.”One of the many new “imagined communities” of the long nineteenth century took shape in the northern Nile-valley Sudan between the final disintegration of the old kingdom of Sinnar (irredeemable after the death of the strongman Muhammad Abu Likaylik in 1775) and the publication of Harold MacMichael's A History of the Arabs in the Sudan in 1922. The new national community born of the collapse of Sinnar, strongly committed to Arabic speech and Islamic faith, was tested by fire through foreign conquest and revolution, by profound socio-economic transformation, and by the challenges attendant on participation in an extended sub-imperialism that earned it hegemony—first cultural, and ultimately political—over all the diverse peoples of the modern Sudan.One important response of the nascent community to the trials of this difficult age was the invention of a new national historical tradition, according to which its members were descended via comparatively recent immigrants to the Sudan from eminent Arabs of Islamic antiquity.


1997 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 475-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Logan

‘Civilization’ was a major keyword in the Italian Catholic discourse of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Indeed Catholic Christian civilization was seen as synonymous with true civilization itself insofar as the post-classical era was concerned. The concept of ‘Christian civilization’ was closely allied to that of cristianità, as distinct from cristianesimo (Christianity). The terms cristianità and chrétienté, like English ‘Christendom’, had originally had primarily geographical connotations, but in post-Revolutionary Catholic thought they acquired connotations of a Christian order of society under the leadership of the Church, the evils of the modern world being presented as consequences of its breakdown. The allied discourse on ‘Christian civilization’ itself in the Italian Catholic world, as in the French one, was in large measure reactionary in character, associated with Counter-Revolutionary ideology and with opposition to liberalism. It asserted that a return of society to the Church was a precondition of social order. Thus the myth of a lost universal order offered a paradigm for the future.


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