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Download Complete Issue THE JOURNAL of the UNITED REFORMED CHURCH HISTORY SOCIETY incorporating the Congregational Historical Society, founded in 1899, and the Presbyterian Historical Society of England, founded in 1913) EDITORS: Revd. Dr. R. BUICK KNOX and Dr. CLYDE BINFIELD, M.A. Volume 3, No.5 March 1985 CONTENTS Editorial 0 0 •••••••••••• 0 •••••• 0 ••••••• 0 •• 0 ••••••••• 159 Newman and Prophecy, Evangelical and Catholic by Sheridan W. Gilley B.A., Ph.D., F.R.Hist.S. 160 Reviews by Stephen Mayor . ..................... : . 188 Our Contemporaries 190 EDITORIAL For reasons which will become pleasantly apparent with the next issue, 1985 will see three issues of the Journal. The present issue is devoted to the society's annual lecture which was delivered during the study weekend held at Kirkley Hall, Ponteland, in September 1984. Dr. Sheridan Gilley, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham, has placed the society firmly in his debt both by his readiness to lecture at unavoidably short notice and by the theme of his paper. At first sight "Newman and Prophecy", whether Evangelical or Catho­ lic, is unlikely to be of immediate relevance to our concerns. The past year, however, has seen the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Edward Irving's death, and Dr. Gilley's paper, by reminding us that prophecy was a major concern of mainstream Protestantism until well into the nineteenth century, provides a context for our understanding of what otherwise is an embarrass- . ingly eccentric (and therefore ignored) aspect of our past. Other aspects of this will be explored in the Journal's October issue by Professor Roger H. Martin and Dr. Stephen Orchard. Dr. Gilley's paper has two further claims on our attention. The first is that it demonstrates the development rather than the reaction of a theological mind: it helps to explain why Congregationalists, Presbyterians and others of the evangelical mainstream were not held fast by prophecy. The second is that any contribution to Newman studies is of the most catholic interest. This contribution includes some unpublished material. It is part of that ferment with which Durham theology is currently to be associated. 159 160 NEWMAN AND PROPHECY NEWMAN AND PROPHECY, EVANGELICAL AND CATHOLIC1 You may have read recently in the Times of the worst modern fire in York Minster: not the recent blaze in the south transept, but the great chancel fire of 1829, the work of a pyromaniac called Jonathan Martin, a native of the Hexham area of Northumberland. Martin had already disrupted a confirmation by a Bishop of Oxford in 1817 by threatening him with a pistol, and now he presided in solitary glory over the nocturnal flames in the Minster dressed in velvet hangings and claiming to be King David? The scene ought to have been painted by Jonathan Martin's older brother John, the visionary planner of a London sewerage system, who had become still more famous for his gigantic lurid oils of stories from the Books of Daniel and Revelation: "The Fall of Babylon", "Belshazzar's Feast", and later, "The Last Judgment", "The Great Day of His Wrath" and "The Plains of Heaven"? Jonathan and John, and their equally eccentric brother the inventor and natural philosopher William Martin, were haunted by the contemporary apocalyptic imagination, and John's fiery canvases remain as a witness to the influence of Daniel and Revelation on the prophetic and millenarian fantasies of the nineteenth-century religious world.4 The Millennium is the era of a thousand years described in the twen­ tieth chapter of Revelation, when Satan will be bound and Christ will reign with his saints on earth. The idea was widely current in the Early Church, but suffered eclipse when Augustine identified the Millennium with the Church Militant, while the accompanying events described by St. John the Divine were, by the Roman Catholic scholars of the Counter-Reformation, assigned, on the "preterist" theory, to the first Christian century, or on the "futurist" view, to the end of the world. In its Protestant form at theRefor­ mation, however, millennia! prophecy drew on the antipapal rhetoric of the medieval heretics to acquire its specifically anti-Roman Catholic character, as an apocalyptic assurance of the ultimate triumph of good over evil, and in the hands of the disciples of the seventeenth-century Joseph Mede it was 1. I wish to thank Gerard Tracey, the archivist of the Newman papers in the Birming­ ham Oratory, for his expert guidance to the Newman papers relating to prophecy in his care. I am also grateful for assistance from Mr. Louis Allen. 2. George Hill, "York Minster's Human Firebug", The Times 17th July, 1984. The Times, with a Freudian inaccuracy, attributed the confirmation of 1817 to the Bishop of Durham, for whom the Bishop of Oxford was acting. 3. On John Martin, see Christopher Johnstone, John Martin (London, 1974). 4. On the general background, see E.R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism 1800-1830 (Chicago, 1970); David N. Hempton, "Evangelicalism and Eschato­ logy", The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol.31 (April, 1980), pp.179-194. Both writers stress the strict attention to the word. of Scripture in prophecy as a source of twentieth-century fundamentalism. For a comprehensive bibliography of recent writing in the area, see Hillel Schwartz, "The End of the Beginning: Millenarian Studies, 1969-1975", Religious Studies Review , vol.2 (July, 1976), pp. 1-14, which lists more than two hundred and fifty items for the period covered by the survey alone. NEWMAN AND PROPHECY 161 cast in its obvious pre-millennia! form, in which the Second Coming of Christ precedes and ushers in the Millennia! kingdom.5 Pre-millennialism, however, with its vision of Christ's sudden advent, inspired radical Puritan insurrectionists in the 1650s, and demanded a revo­ lutionary discontinuity with the present which was unacceptable to Mede's more respectable successors, but learned exegetes continued their specula­ tions, attracting to their number Sir Isaac Newton and his episcopal namesake Thomas.6 The apocalyptic of the Puritan radicals went underground, and had little influence on the great Evangelical Revival; indeed it only resurfaced in the 1790s, under the pressure of a new literal attention to the word of scripture, in the spectacular revelations of Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott,7 when the French Revolution shook the thrones of Europe, both papal and royal, and the last days seemed to be at hand. The revival of pre­ millennia! theory, however, was reserved to the 1820s, and it was then that there occurred the international crisis of Evangelical Protestantism,8 in which the centre of the Clapham Sect of William Wilberforce failed to hold, the Evangelicals suffered division and schism, and Edward Irving and J.N. Darby founded two of the most famous of pre-millennia! sects, the Catholic Aposto­ lic Church and the Plymouth Brethren.9 What was still .more important, the leaders of the Anglican Evangelical party, Edward Bickersteth, Lord Ashley and Hugh M'Neile, were converted to pre-millennia! doctrine, with some of the most influential Protestants in the mainline churches;10 while out of this turmoil there arose between 1830 and 1850 those adventist sects and churches which now live in the expectation of Christ's imminent second coming, and which number their adherents by the millions in America and round the world.11 5. On Mede see especially Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English apoca­ lyptic visions from the reformation to the eve of the civil war (Toronto, 1978), esp. pp.124-9. 6. On Isaac, see Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 1974), pp.55-67, 83-106; for Thomas, see note 14. 7. Ronald Matthews, English Messiahs: Studies of Six English Religious Pretenders 1656-1927 (London, 1936), pp.43-126; J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780-1850 (London, 1979), pp.57-134. 8. David Newsome, "The Crisis of Evangelicalism", The Parting ofFriends. A Study of the Wilberforces and Henry Manning (London, 1966), pp.1-19; lain Murray, The Puritan Hope (Edinburgh, 1975), esp. pp.187-206. 9. H.H. Rowdon, The Origins of the Brethren (London, 1967), pp.1-33; F. Roy Coad, A History of the Brethren Movement (London, 1968). For the materials on Irving's millennia! ideas, see notes 4, 8, 10, 11. John Henry Newman's conception of pro­ phecies fulfilled not once but through a succession of types is anticipated by Irving. See Edward Irving, "Preface", to his translation of The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty, by Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra, a converted Jew (London, 1827), 2 vols., vo1.1, pp.xxxiv-xxxv. 10. S.C. Orchard, English Evangelical Eschatology 1790-1850 (University of Cam­ bridge Ph.D., 1969); W.H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland, New Zealand, 1978), esp. pp.144-9, on John Henry Newman, on which see also note 47 below. 11. A vast body cf information about the history of millennia! prophecy interpreted from a Seventh Day Adventist pre-millennia! viewpoint is set forth in Le Roy Edwin Froom's The Prophetic Faith of our Fathers 4 vols. (Washington 1950- 1954). 162 NEWMAN AND PROPHECY The essential outlines of prophecy are furnish~d by Daniel and Revela­ tion, which on Mede's historicist theory were believed to describe the whole course of Judaeo-Christian history. Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel Chap­ ter, 2 of the great image of gold, silver, brass and iron, with its proverbially famous feet of iron and clay, was generally held by Protestant scholars, in a tradition deriving from St.
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