As the reformation took effect, claims of miraculous healing were discountenanced. So argues Keith Thomas in his fascinating book on the decline of magic in modern Europe. He argues that protestants turned to natural methods and empirical science for answers to their medical and practical needs. If he is right there may seem to be little to say about the relationship between the churches and healing in the history of the church in modern western society. Yet, as Thomas himself admits, the link had not been completely destroyed. Traditional culture proved resistant to this aspect of the reformation. It seems to me that this traditional culture was revitalised and redirected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by revivalist and heterodox protestantism and not just by secular developments. The case of the Bible Christians or Cowherdites of Salford in Lancashire may illustrate my point.
The theme of apocalypticism has been interpreted by various scholars either as a heretical diversion of the Christian community, a central theme in the shaping of theology, a manifestation of sectarian impulses, a sign of social strain within the Christian community, or sometimes a mixture of all of these themes. The term millenarianism or millennialism is often used in connection with these themes, but it only deals with an aspect of the Christian apocalyptic literature, although sometimes “millennialism” is used misleadingly as a term to cover all Christian interest in eschatology (the end‐time). Apocalypticism is a genre of writing and thinking in which a mood of expectation of the end is heightened. It extends beyond those movements and people who have sought to bring about the millennial reign of Christ.
This survey of recent writings on the religion of New Zealand shows how social and political themes have taken precedence over institutional history and suggests that religious history is one of the most vigorous aspects of historical work in the country. Yet it also notes that this category of history has only gradually been recognised as significant in general accounts of New Zealand. It suggests that as in other western countries, new writings on religion have shown that it raises profound contemporary historical issues, whether in relation to race relations, reformist movements, political culture or community structure.
The Plymouth Brethren is a movement in Protestant Christianity which emerged in the third decade of the 19th century in southern Ireland and southern England. The name most strongly associated with it as founder is John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), a clergyman in the Church of Ireland, a passionate evangelical with a very high view of the church, who came to believe that ordained ministry was a sin against the Holy Ghost, and that the church should focus on being prepared for the future return of Christ. Alongside Darby were a number of other church reformers, mostly Anglican, but also including some discontented Nonconformists, troubled at the emergence of the age of denominationalism. They included Anthony Norris Groves (1795–1853), a dentist and missionary to Persia, famous for his views on discipleship, J. G. Bellett of Dublin, and Lady Powerscourt of Ireland. Their views were shaped by extremist Protestants at odds with establishment churches, including J. A. and Robert Haldane, radical evangelical renegades from the Church of Scotland, Edward Irving, the proto‐Pentecostal, and H. B. Bulteel, the high Calvinist. The movement was thus a protest against the cautious evangelical Anglicanism and Presbyterianism of the early 19th century. The movement practiced a weekly communion service conducted somewhat after the manner of the Quakers, waiting on the leadership of the Holy Spirit. It rejected ordained ministry in favor of the gifts of Christ disposed on the church. Early leaders were fascinated by futurist eschatology and the movement gradually developed the approach known as Dispensationalism, which has had great influence in America through the Scofield Bible and is sometimes called rapture theology because of its emphasis on a secret rapture of Christ prior to the second coming. By the 1840s the movement had made significant gains in the west of England but it was then rent by extreme tensions over eschatology, Christology, and ecclesiology. The largest of the earliest assemblies was at Raleigh Street in Plymouth, where Benjamin Wills Newton was the most prominent leader, but he was accused of heresy by Darby and a subsequent dispute about what to do with people contaminated by Newton's ideas led to a deep ecclesiological dispute about how far to take the demand for “purity” of belief and separation from the impure. The vision of Darby was both purist and sectarian, while on the other side, leaders like Anthony Norris Groves and George Muller argued for a nonsectarian abandonment of denominationalism. It was a tension that reappeared frequently in the history of the movement.
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