Textual Warfare and the Making of Methodism by Brett C. McInelly (review)

In Bristol in August of 1770, during the annual Methodist Conference that John Wesley had convened with his preachers each year since 1744, the assembly once again tackled the question of justification by faith versus justification by works. Emphatically repudiating the Calvinist doctrine of faith alone and its potential for antinomianism, Wesley insisted that good works are a necessary condition of salvation, and closed the discussion with the rueful question, "What have we then been disputing about for these thirty years?" He answered: "I am afraid, about words." In light of the number of publications he produced throughout his lifetime, Wesley's confession that there had been more empty bark than meaningful bite to the decades of pamphlet war between himself, his followers, and their detractors seems disingenuous. More than any other religious movement that came before it, Methodism was constituted through words. Mr. Mc-Inelly's book explains just how that happened.

Textual Warfare claims "Methodism may have been founded on theological principles, but it was defined and refined by public attacks and defences of those principles." There are two sides to every argument, in other words, and in the case of early Methodism both sides were crucial to the movement's formation and development. Methodism was from its beginnings fair game for satire and vitriol from all quarters, from Fielding's use of George Whitefield's diaries as inspiration in Shamela (1741) to Pope's portrait of the orator in The Dunciad (1743) and Foote's lampooning of him as "Dr. Squintum" in The Minor (1760), to the outraged theological responses to Methodist doctrine and field-preaching of Church of England clergy like Augustus Toplady in the 1770s. The notorious Edmund Curll even profited from the furore, with sensational pamphlets like Methodists Impostors: or, Wickliffe, Whitefield, Wesley . . . detected and exposed (1740). In 1902 the bibliographer Richard Green arranged and annotated all known books and pamphlets written in opposition to the Methodist movement, work drawn on by Albert M. Lyles in 1960 in his Methodism Mocked: The Satiric Reaction to Methodism in the Eighteenth Century, and revised and expanded by Clive Field in 1991. Mr. McInelly's book, however, is the first truly to examine "the specific ways Methodist belief, practice, and self-understanding were conditioned by the clashes with their critics." Textual Warfare insists that the movement be seen as "a rhetorical problem—a point of contestation resolved, at least in part, through discourse."

Mr. McInelly uses Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory of identification as a model with which to argue that Methodism appealed to its converts in large part because it enabled them to participate in "an inter-subjective experience in which individuals see themselves in and through the language of others," and overcome "feelings of isolation" by identifying with a group within which they share common experiences, ideas, and language. Crucially anti-Methodist polemic provided discursive antitheses against which Methodists could collectively define themselves. Methodism thus can be seen as developing "dialectically through a process of statement and counterstatement." From this perspective, the field preaching for which Methodism was famous (or notorious), and which had been the focus of earlier scholarship like Henry Abelove's The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (1991) or Harry S. Stout's The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Methodism (1991), takes second place to "textual practices" such as print and letter writing. One of the strengths of Mr. Mc-Inelly's focus on rhetoric and texts is that it places Methodism firmly within the context of eighteenth-century Britain, as "a by-product of a developing print culture in which a wide array of materials were regularly available to a reading public in a society that allowed for the relatively free exchange of religious opinions."

Looking at Methodism in this way opens fresh perspectives on, for instance, the issue of theatrical satires like Foote's. Rather than victims or targets, Methodists become rivals of the...