Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O'Connell by Donald Harman Akenson (review)

This is an important and splendidly researched book about the origins of the religious movement that became known as the Plymouth Brethren. Never numerically very strong, this group nevertheless became enormously influential not only in the British Isles but also in Continental Europe and especially America, where its theology helped to shape twentieth-century "Fundamentalism." Such success was remarkable in view of the peculiar context in which the Brethren originated. Despite their later association with Plymouth, the group was first started in Ireland and, more precisely, in County Wicklow. Their early views, Donald Akenson argues, can only be understood in the social and historical context of southern Ireland at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the time, their radical pre-millennialism suited the anxieties of the Protestant minority, including not only the landed elite but also professionals, farmers, and working-class people. They were aware of facing an uncertain future, caught between the hope of a "Second Reformation" (a revival and the mass conversion of Catholics) and the rise of Catholic nationalism. While the former remained wishful thinking, the latter was an inescapable reality; throughout the 1820s, agrarian secret societies targeted Protestant farmers, who fled the country in large numbers, while the authorities were apparently unable to check terrorism, and, in 1829, Daniel O'Connell forced the London government to grant "[e]mancipation" (that is, the right for Catholics to stand for public office and Parliament).

Akenson adopts a social and intellectual history approach, combined with in-depth biographical analysis of some of the movement's leading figures. The latter hailed from a small group of intensely religious aristocratic families, associated with famous family names such as Guinness, La Touche, Synge, Parnell, and Daly. Akenson focuses on the movement's leading lights: first and foremost, the movement's main leader, John Nelson Darby (a disillusioned Church of Ireland clergyman who became impatient with the institutional rigidity of the establishment), as well as Lady Powerscourt (one of the movement's early converts and patrons). He unpacks their ideas and social networks and sheds new light on their complex and controversial personalities. It is important to note that, despite contemporary assumptions about apocalyptic fundamentalism as an expression of the religion of the poor, marginalized, and powerless, the early Brethren shared a "background [that] was culturally rich, financially privileged and … cosmopolitan in its network of useful contacts." These families' large estates, like self-contained economic worlds, provided a sheltered space for County Wicklow's sizable Protestant community, at the time accounting for over 22 per cent of the county's population.

Without a stipendiary, full-time ministry, the Brethren championed a form of "primitive" Christianity and contributed to the wider nineteenthcentury phenomenon of the "domesticization" of religion. Refusing to regard themselves as a new denomination, they articulated a theology dominated by the expectation of Christ's Second Coming, a commitment to spreading the Gospel, and a simple, independent ecclesiology and liturgy, with members "devot[ing] themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer" (Acts 2:42). Their religious "primitivism" became the cornerstone of their apocalyptic message, with its emphasis on the final judgment and the saints' rapture into "deep eternity."

There are areas that the author surprisingly neglects; in particular, he does not have much to say about Darby's relationship with Irish Romanticism, whose influence was powerful and pervasive, as Roy Foster has shown in Words Alone (2011). Nor does he discuss the extent to which Darby's pre-millennial apocalyptic thought was a reaction to the postmillennial optimism characterizing much contemporary Protestant thought. That notwithstanding, Discovering the End of Time is an admirable contribution to the existing scholarly debate. It offers a new account of the origins of a major theological movement and exemplifies an effective and innovative methodological approach to the study of religious groups...