Anglican Evangelicals: Protestant Secessions from the Via Media, c. 1800-1850 (review)

Grayson Carter's enormously interesting and important book is the most significant study of English evangelical religion since Boyd Hilton's Age of Atonement (1988).Carter provides the clearest available exploration of the complex relationships of early nineteenth-century evangelical Christians within and to the Church of England.He achieves this goal through a series of deeply researched and richly detailed studies of individual evangelical clergy and lay followers who seceded from either the Church of England or the Church of Ireland into the ranks of Nonconformity.These figures were a distinct minority, but the activities and ideas of each sent ripples—and, occasionally, genuinely lasting shock waves—through the wider evangelical community of faith and the Anglican establishment.

Carter's volume commences with two well-informed chapters on the relationship of evangelically minded Christians to the established church.These tightly argued essays, now the best treatment of this conceptually and theologically difficult subject, explore how the issues disturbing most evangelicals in the establishment changed from eighteenth-century concerns over church order, most prominently irregular preaching, to nineteenth-century concerns over doctrine and liturgy, most particularly baptism.Carter understands the "impulse to secession" (31) as arising from the desire of like-minded radically evangelical Christians seeking common fellowship to organize themselves into what they regarded as congregations of a true church of the elect visibly separated from the world.He convincingly agues that the evangelical seceders stood functionally to establishment evangelicalism as the Roman Catholic seceders stood to the High Church tradition.Both groups eschewing Anglican moderation found themselves religiously satisfied only with doctrines, modes of preaching, or liturgy that the establishment would not embrace.In the long run, however, by defining the real character of the religious extremes, the actions of both radical evangelical and Roman Catholic seceders served to strengthen a broader middle spectrum of religious support for the establishment.

Moving from these conceptual baselines, Carter presents detailed examinations of evangelical clergy who seceded from the Church of England and Church of Ireland into the ranks of Nonconformity.These include the Irish evangelicals Thomas Kelly and John Walker; the short-lived Western Schism; the English and Irish millennialists around John Nelson Darby who seceded and founded the Plymouth Brethren; Henry Bulteel and other Oxford seceders; the famous London figure Baptist Noel; and James Shore, a seceding clergyman who suffered actual imprisonment.Behind many of these figures stands the spirit and influence of Edward Irving and the Albany Circle of prophetic students of scripture, of which Carter presents a very clear portrait.Each of these highly textured individual studies could stand alone as a brief monograph.

Except for Irving, none of Carter's intensely interesting protagonists appear in the major narratives of Victorian religion.Carter, however, persuades the reader that they are essential for a new, more precise understanding of those narratives.First, he demonstrates the importance of the interaction of Irish and English evangelicals.Just as seventeenth-century British history has discovered the importance of the three kingdoms, Carter's analysis urges that Victorian religious historians must grasp the interactions of evangelicalism within the three kingdoms.Indeed, he might have gone beyond the three kingdoms to emphasize the enormous transatlantic influence of Darby, whose premillennialist theology proved one of the most lasting contributions to evangelical Protestant thought from his own time to the present. Second, Carter demonstrates how local religious occurrences, previously ignored or virtually unknown, produced a deep impact on personalities and events in the standard Victorian religious grand narrative.His account of the Oxford seceders of the early l830s—as the present reviewer discovered from reading the Oxford dissertation upon which this book is based—is of fundamental importance for understanding the career of John Henry Newman, who during the late l830s and early l840s behaved very much in the cultural...