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The Medieval Church in Early Methodism and Anti-Methodism*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
John Wesley’s sermon ‘Of Former Times’ (1787) provides just one example of his belief in the historical importance of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening. In its conclusion he noted that ‘[n]o “former time” since the apostles left the earth has been “better than the present”’. In another sermon he argued explicitly that religious progress in the eighteenth century was greater than during the Reformation. Undecided about a more suitable comparison, he could not choose between the apostolic age and the rule of Constantine the Great. In these arguments the early Methodists understandably afforded little time to the Middle Ages, which were seen as a dark period between the light of early Christianity and the brightness of their own movement. Yet this essay will argue that, despite this general approach to the history of the medieval church, there is an early Methodist medievalism worth recovering and that it can be best understood in the context of eighteenth-century religious polemic and debate.
- Type
- Part I: The Churches’ Use of the Past
- Information
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013
Footnotes
*
I would like to thank Sarah Scutts for her comments on this essay, Patricia Baker for helping track down a Wymeswold ‘enthusiast’ (see n. 10 below), and Colin Haydon, Bernard Hamilton, John Hargreaves and Peter Forsaith for helpful conversations at the EHS Summer Meeting in 2011.
References
1 Wesley, John, ‘Of Former Times’, in Sermons III, ed. Outler, Albert C., vol. 3 of The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley (Nashville: TN, 1976– ), 442–53 (Sermon 102), at 453.Google Scholar
2 John Wesley, ‘On Laying the Foundation of the New Chapel’ (1777), in Sermons III, ed. Outler, 577–92 (Sermon 112), at 587.
3 For a recent introduction to the role that the medieval past played in debates about Britain’s identity and its relationship with Europe, see Claydon, Tony, Europe and the Making of England (Cambridge, 2007), 101–20.Google Scholar
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5 Ibid.
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24 Walter Sellon was closely associated with John Wesley and a group of Methodist preachers. For the reference to one of Green’s flock attending Sellon’s sermons, see J. B., ‘The Church on the Hill: Recollections of Rev. Walter Sellon’, Wesleyatt-Methodist Magazine ser. 5, 2 (1856), 35–42, 133–40, 231–9, 332–40, at 337.
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26 Ibid.
27 Ibid. Most of this section is extracted from the anonymous work The Frauds of Romish Monks and Priests (London, 1704).
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32 The work in question, Gherardo da Borgo San Donnino’s Liber introductorius ad Evangelium aeturnum (1254), had contributed to the conflict between the secular masters and the mendicants at the University of Paris. See Péano, P., ‘Gérard de Borgo San Donnino’, DHGE 20: 709–21.Google Scholar These details would have been known to Lavington through the work of Matthew Paris, which he used in the compilation of Enthusiasm.
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38 Paris, Historia Major, 211, 407, 408. An English translation of these passages can be found in Roger of Wendover, Flowers of History, transl. J. A. Giles, 2 vols (London, 1849), 2: 212, 599, 600.
39 Paris, Historia Major, 967–8; 986; 611–12; idem, English History from the Year 1235–1275, transl. J. A. Giles, 3 vols, (London, 1889), 3: 278, 324–5, 1: 247.
40 Lavington, Enthusiasm, 1: 169; Paris, Historia Major, 693–5; Paris, English History, 2: 135–40.
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49 Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History, transl. Maclaine, 1: xxiv.
50 Wesley, John, A Second Letter to the Author of Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared (London, 1751), ix.Google Scholar Wesley’s debates with Catholics about Wycliffe and the Council of Constance (1414–18) have occasioned considerable historical discussion: Butler, David, Methodists and Papists (London, 1995), 60–9.Google Scholar
51 Sutcliffe, Joseph, The Mutual Communion of the Saints Exemplified (London, 1796), 11–13.Google Scholar Sutcliffe’s analysis relied on acceptance of the work of the seventeenth-century Waldensian pastor John Leger, whose mis-dating of several documents gave the Waldensians a doctrinally Reformed medieval past. The true picture was more complicated, and Euan Cameron has noted how ‘slender’ the evidence for this Protestant historiography actually is: Cameron, Euan, Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2000), 263, 129 respectively.Google Scholar
52 Wesley, , Ecclesiastical History, 2: 272–9.Google Scholar The ‘execrable crusades against the Albigensians’ also featured in another of Wesley’s works: Popery Calmly Considered (London, 1779), 23.
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59 Mosheim, , Ecclesiastical History, transl. Maclaine, 1: 701.Google Scholar
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