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A late nineteenth century nonconformist renaissance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Let us start from the propositions that we need a new model of late nineteenth-century English nonconformist history, and that one might be found by making some use of the idea of ‘renaissance’, especially if one uses ‘renaissance’ to point to the emergence at a particular time of humanist attitudes. This new model needs to be both less anglican and less nonconformist than its predecessors. The anglican model of nineteenth-century nonconformity is obsessed with anglicanism, and the nonconformist model is equally obsessed with the behaviour of an earlier, largely unrelated evangelical protestantism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Both, in other words, are affected by shallow ideas of historical continuity. The individual nineteenth-century anglican often thought of nonconformity as the shadow cast by anglicanism; individual nonconformists believed that seventeenth-century independency had founded English political freedom, or that eighteenth-century non-anglicans had saved evangelical protestant truth from total disappearance. These were myths, however.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 14: Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History , 1977 , pp. 351 - 360
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1977
References
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