/pdf/spiritual-renovation-through-accountability-a-contemporary-41x5d43yx4.pdf

Spiritual Renovation through Accountability: A Contemporary Look at John Wesley's Class Meeting and his Admonition to Watch over one Another in Love

Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, Hasidism and the Judaic Counter-Enlightenment Jewish Antecedents: Sabbatian Judaism The Medieval Torah: Paquda and piety, Maimonides’s Enlightenment, De Leon’s Zohar and Kabbalism Hasidim between Mithnagdim and Maskilim

The Crucible of the Counter-Enlightenment, III

Religious revivals in early industrial England have received considerable attention from historians concerned with explaining their appearance in relation to social, economic, and political trends. R. B. Walker, for example, in a general assessment of the impact of external forces on Wesleyan Methodist growth after 1830, argued that political tension in the years 1832 to 1834 may have contributed to religious revival, and that the outbreak of cholera in 1832 certainly increased religious excitement. Chartism, on the other hand, probably competed with the chapels and made revival less likely, while general economic trends of boom and depression had no apparently conclusive impact. Some historians have noted these connections between religious revivals and secular stimuli and have gone on to ask what functions revivals might serve for those participating in them. Eric Hobsbawm in 1957 suggested that, in the half-century after 1790, intense political and religious excitement often coincided and that at such times ‘preachers, prophets, and sectarians might issue what the labourers would regard as calls to action rather than to resignation’. E. P. Thompson, by contrast, forwarded an ‘oscillation’ theory by which it was conceivable that religious revivalism reflected ‘the chiliasm of despair’ amongst working people and occurred ‘just at the point where “political” or temporal aspirations met with defeat’. More recently, Hobsbawm appeared to concur with this theory when he interpreted the revivalism which superseded Swing riots in several parts of the country in 1830 as ‘an escape from, rather than a mobilisation for social agitation’.

Revivalism in Theory and Practice: The Case of Cornish Methodism

Following a period of neglect Methodist historiography in the three decades since 1930 has taken a new start. The keynote of this revived interest is not antiquarian but existential, and manifests a concern for the recovery of the Methodist heritage as roots for the faith of the present. Curiously, this interest in the denominational background arises in part from increasing participation in the Ecumenical Movement. Methodists have felt that they had something of their own to offer, but were not quite sure what it was.

Methodist Historical Studies 1930–1959*

And all that believed were together, and had all things common. And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. And they continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart. Acts 2. 44–5. Among the strangest of the rumours circulating about early Methodism was the charge that it promoted the notion of Christian communism—‘the community of goods’. In the early summer of 1739 Lord Egmonc, one of the Georgia Trustees, got wind of the story and after hearing Whiteficld preach at Blackheath pressed him whether, among other eccentricities, he held that ‘all things should be in common’. The same year two anti-Methodist pamphlets raised the same issue, and in 1740 it surfaced again in the papers when another former Oxford Methodist, Benjamin Ingham, was accused by his local vicar of helping to foment a violent riot of Dewsbury cloth workers by ‘preaching up … a community of goods, as was practised by the Primitive Christians’. Ingham was said to urge a sharing of wealth so drastic that his brother had remarked in disgust, ‘if I mind our Ben, he would preach me out of all I have’.

Wellman Joel Warner

Papers

The Wesleyan movement in the industrial revolution