Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T01:13:45.507Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The ‘Restitution of All Things’ in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Premillennialism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Martin Spence*
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford

Extract

This paper explores the nineteenth-century doctrine of the ‘restitution of all things’, a concept of the afterlife which emphasized material continuity with the present and generated detailed speculation about the activities and events which would take place in the eternal realm. Such beliefs, it will be suggested, resonated with broader developments in nineteenth-century theology which tended to soften the boundary between this life and the life to come, and increasingly suggested that the Christian hope was for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth rather than for the soul to go to heaven after an individual’s death. This belief has been almost completely neglected in previous historiographical discussions of nineteenth-century evangelical eschatology. To recognize its existence challenges many historiographical depictions of the ‘world-denying’ nature of Evangelicalism in general and the pessimistic temperament of pre-millennialism in particular.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The research upon which this article is based was funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

References

1 Pym, W. W., The Restitution of All Things (London, 1843), xi.Google Scholar

2 The most comprehensive study of the premillennialist movement remains Sandeen, Ernest, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago, IL, 1970)Google Scholar. Several recent studies have supplemented this work, including Gribben, Crawford and Stunt, Timothy C. F., eds, Prisoners of Hope? Aspects of Evangelical Millennialism in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1880 (Carlisle, 2004)Google Scholar; Gribben, Crawford and Holmes, Andrew, eds, Protestant Millennialism, Evangelicalism and Irish Society, 1790–2005 (Basingstoke, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The most detailed, although highly subjective, work on historicist premillennialism is Froom, Le Roy Edwin, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, 4 vols (Washington, DC, 1946).Google Scholar

3 See Bebbington, D. W., Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), 8586.Google Scholar

4 Birks, Thomas Rawson, ‘The Resurrection to Glory’, in Pym, W. W., ed., Good Things to Come (London, 1847), 22772, at 253.Google Scholar

5 The article, a review of Waldegrave, Samuel’s 1854 Bampton Lecture on ‘New Testament Millenarianism, also noted that ‘the Tractarians are at least favourably inclined to it’: British and Foreign Evangelical Review 4(1855), 697710, at 698.Google Scholar

6 Nolan, Thomas, ‘The Saviour’s Throne’, in Bickersteth, Robert, ed., The Gifts of the Kingdom (London, 1855), 289334, at 32324.Google Scholar

7 Christian Ladies’ Magazine, April 1841, 7.

8 Christian Herald 1 (1830), 159.

9 Newport, Kenneth G. C., Apocalypse and Millennium: Studies in Biblical Eisegesis (Cambridge, 2000), 1213.Google Scholar

10 Cox, John, The Future – An Outline of Events Predicted in the Holy Scriptures (London, 1862), 120.Google Scholar

11 Anon., , ‘God’s Purpose Concerning Man and the Earth’, Quarterly Journal of Prophecy 6 (1854), 25067, at 264.Google Scholar

12 Binfield, Clyde, ‘Jews in Evangelical Dissent’, in Wilks, M., ed., Prophecy and Eschatology, SCH.S 10 (Oxford, 1994), 22570, at 234.Google Scholar

13 Goodhart, C. J., ‘The Established Holiness of the Church at the Lord’s Advent’, in Birks, T. R., ed., The Hope of the Apostolic Church (London, 1845), 79118, at 112.Google Scholar

14 ‘Life in the Sick Room: Essays by an Invalid’ [review article], Churchman’s Monthly Review, April 1844, 253–68, at 262 (italics mine). All articles in the Churchman’s Monthly Review were anonymous.

15 Noel, Gerard, A Brief Enquiry into the Prospects of the Christian Church (London, 1828), 65.Google Scholar

16 Churchman’s Monthly Review, August 1843, 555–56. The statement was made as part of a review of Cheyne, John’s Essays on Partial Derangement of the Mind, in Supposed Connexion with Religion (Dublin, 1843).Google Scholar

17 Philpot, Benjamin, ‘The Last Invitations of the Gospel’, in Cadman, William, ed., The Parables Prophetically Explained (London, 1853), 10328, at 121.Google Scholar

18 Burns, J. D., ‘The Apostle Slept’, quoted in Castle, Brian, Sing a New Song to the Lord (York, 1998), 35.Google Scholar

19 Christian Herald 1 (1830), 64.Google Scholar

20 Birks, Thomas Rawson, The Victory of Divine Goodness (London, 1867), 11.Google Scholar

21 Maurice, John Frederic, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, 2 vols (London, 1884), 2: 244.Google Scholar

22 Bickersteth, Edward, ‘The Earth Yielding Her Increase’, in Dallas, Alexander, ed., Lift Up Your Heads. Glimpses of Messiah’s Glory (London, 1848), 33059, at 33738.Google Scholar

23 Anon., The Earth: Its Curse and Regeneration’, Quarterly Journal of Prophecy 2 (1850), 28197, 44469, at 457.Google Scholar

24 Cumming, , Millennial Rest, 363.Google Scholar

25 Birks, Thomas Rawson, The Ways of God (London, 1863), 114.Google Scholar

26 Dalton, W., ‘The Delay of the Second Advent, its Causes and Practical Lessons’, in Bickersteth, Edward, ed., The Second Coming (London, 1854), 10535, at 133.Google Scholar

27 Brock, Mourant, ‘The City which hath Foundations Prepared for the Faithful and Suffering Pilgrim’, in Stewart, Robert Haldane, ed., The Priest Upon His Throne (London, 1849), 289332, at 317.Google Scholar

28 Malmgreen, Gail, Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760–1930 (London, 1986), 106 Google Scholar (italics are the author’s).

29 Goodhart, C. J., ‘The Powers of the World to Come’, in Stewart, , ed., The Priest Upon His Throne, 183231, at 216.Google Scholar

30 Noel, A Brief Enquiry, 14–15.

31 Erskine, T., The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel in Three Essays, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1828), 111 Google Scholar. For a detailed discussion of the development of Erskine’s theology, see Horrocks, D., Laws of the Spiritual Order (Carlisle, 2004).Google Scholar

32 Erskine, , The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel, 111.Google Scholar

33 Ibid. 112.

34 Birks, The Victory of Divine Goodness, vi. For a recent discussion of Birks and the emergence of modified views of hell during the mid-nineteenth century, see Brown, Ralph, ‘Victorian Anglicanism: The Radical Legacy of Edward Irving’, JEH 58 (2007), 675704 Google Scholar, esp. 698–99.

35 Birks, , The Victory of Divine Goodness, 47.Google Scholar

36 Ibid. 190–92.

37 Plumptre, E. H., The Spirits in Prison (New York, 1894),232.Google Scholar

38 Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988), 300.Google Scholar

39 Noel, , Brief Enquiry, 27.Google Scholar