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"Throttled by a Dead Hand"? the "Wesleyan Standard" in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century British Methodism

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Methodist History, 37:3 (April 1999) "THROTTLED BY A DEAD HAND"? THE "WESLEYAN STANDARD" IN NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH METHODISM MARTIN WELLINGS The Wesleyan Methodist Conference held in Liverpool in 1912 was described by one wit as the "Jackson Conference" because of the honors paid there to the Rev. George Jackson (1864-1945). 1 Jackson, who had established his reputation as the creator of the Edinburgh Central Hall in the 1890s, had been working in Canada since 1906, first as minister of Sherbourne Street Church, Toronto, and then as Professor of English Bible at Victoria Univer­ sity. At the Liverpool Conference of 1912 Jackson was elected to the Legal Hundred and designated Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Theology at Didsbury College, Manchester. He also delivered the Fernley Lecture, pub­ lished as The Preacher and the Modern Mind (1912).2 The juxtaposition of the appointment to Didsbury and the Fernley Lecture brought Jackson fame of a different kind, as he became the center of what has been described as "the chief theological controversy of the 20th century in British Methodism."3 The purpose of this article is to sketch the Jackson controversy and to relate it to the use of the "Wesleyan Standard" in 19th and 20th century British Methodism. This is an initial exploration of a large subject, so the treatment will, of necessity, be brief and selective. It is hoped, however, that it will open up a fruitful area of debate about the usefulness or·otherwise of Wesley as a theological resource. The Preacher and the Modern Mind was an appeal for passionate, effec­ tive, biblical and doctrinal preaching, addressed by an experienced pulpit ora­ tor and brilliant communicator "especially to the young preacher, who feels, and is himself seeking to minister to, 'the necessities of the times.'" What made the work controversial was its frank acceptance of the conclusions of mainstream biblical criticism, exemplified for Jackson in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. 5 Jackson saw higher criticism as an essential compo­ nent of the "modern mind," forming an unavoidable part of the context for contemporary preaching and offering an opportunity for an apologetic freed 1Annie Jackson, George Jackson, A Commemorative Volume (London, 1949), 36. 2Jackson, George Jackson, chs. 4, 6, 7. 30. W. Bebbington, "The Persecution of George Jackson: A British Fundamentalist Contro­ versy," in W. J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration (Oxford, 1984), 421. 4G. Jackson, The Preacher and the Modem Mind (London, 1913~), vii. [hereafter PMM]. ~Jackson, PMM, 91. 162 "Throttled by a dead ha11d 11 ? 163 from the necessity of defending unedifying stories and incredible miracles. Although committed to a high Christology and to the broad historicity of the New Testament, Jackson was prepared to see "unlawful excrescences" in the miracle stories and to make belief in the Virgin Birth optional. He took a much freer line with the Old Testament, dismissing many of the narratives as ''symbolical history" and rejecting the Genesis account of human origins. He called for "the acknowledgement of a much narrower area of certainty than was claimed by the orthodoxy of the past, and for a corresponding simplifi­ cation of our creed.''6 George Jackson was well aware that his beliefs did not command uni­ versal assent. He was no stranger to controversy, having engaged in debate with the ultra-conservatives in Toronto/ and one of the stated aims of The Preacher and the Modern Mind was to draw attention to the wid~ning gulf between the assumptions of the. younger generation ofpreachers an(f those of the majority of church members. 8 It seems unlikely, however, that Jackson was prepared for the storm of opposition that broke out within Wesleyan Methodism as the Connexion came to grips with his Fernley Lecture. The reception of higher criticism within the British churches has been much studied~ and the general conclusion has been that the crucial period of debate stretched from the early 1880s to the early 1890s: from the publication · of William Robertson Smith's The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881) and The Prophets of Israel (1882), through the debate over Lux Mundi (1889}, to the first edition of S. R. Driver's Introduction to, the Literature of the Old Testament, which appeared in 1891, marking the acceptance of the Graf­ Wellhausen hypothesis by a scholar who combined academic respectability with Christian orthodoxy. 9 Within Wesleyan Methodism, a cautious endorse­ ment ofcritical scholarship was offered by W. T. Davison (l.846-1935), who held a succession of teaching posts at Richmond and Handsworth between 1881 and 1920. Davison kept the readers of the London Quarterly Review abreast of the latest theories through the 1890s and 1900s, advocating open­ ness to the principle of free enquiry, but opposing, on scholarly grounds, the. "advanced" theories of Kuenen, Wellhausen and the Encyclopaedia Biblica. 10 The point needs to be made, however, that tacit acceptance of the new ideas by a rising generation of scholars did not indicate the approval of major­ ity opinion in the churches. Many people,. both lay and ordained, remained hostile to, or simply unaware of, the critical theories. Even Davison"~ CY.Lutious 6Jackson, PMM, 143, 172, 147, 23. 7Jackson, George Jackson, 30-2. 8Jackson, PMM, 13. 9See, for example, W. B. Glover, Evangelical Nonconformists and Higher Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1954). iow. F. Howard, "William Theophilus Davison. A Memoir," in W. T. Davison, Mystics andY"oets (London, 1936), 30-2; [W. T. Davison], "The Pentateuch Controversy," Londoil Quarterly Review 73 (London, January 1890), 261-88; W. T. Davison, "The Progress of Biblical Criticism," LQR 93 (January 1900)1 1-24. 164 Methodist History welcome of higher criticism went much further than many within Wesleyan Methodism were prepared to go, and opposition was such that he became the subject of a formal, though unsuccessful, heresy charge in the early 1890s." The formidable Benjamin Gregory (1820-1900), Connexional Editor until 1893, ensured that the new theories received an unsympathetic treatment in the pages of the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine. F. J. Sharr's Fernley Lecture of 1891, The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, held to a conservative posi­ tion, while William Spiers, later a protagonist in the Jackson controversy, defended traditional views in The Age and Authorship of the Pentateuch, and savaged the critics' "crude and ill-digested theories" in The Christ of the Higher Critics (1897). 12 Although by 1912 Davison was an influential Past President of the Conference, and Principal of Richmond College, and although Connexional publications were more open to new ideas, conserva­ tive forces were still very strong within Wesleyanism, and The Preacher and the Modern Mind forced traditionalists to confront the views which were increasingly gaining ground among the younger preachers. Opposition to Jackson began early in 1913, with pamphlets by W. Shepherd Allen and the Rev. George Armstrong Bennetts. An article in the British Weekly in May, claiming inaccurately that Jackson had described Genesis 1-11 as "antiquarian lumber," raised the temperature of the debate, and an attempt was made at the subsequent Conference, held in Plymouth, to censure the Fernley Lecture. Although the conservatives suffered a humiliat­ ing defeat in both sessions of Conference, the opposition continued, taking shape at the end of the year as the "Wesley Bible Union" was formally con­ stituted. Spiers was the W.B.U.'s first Secretary and Shepherd Allen its Vice­ President, while G. A. Bennetts was a member of the committee. 13 The Jackson controversy was the catalyst for the formation of the W.B.U. and George Jackson himself remained the object of special loathing among Wesleyan fundamentalists in this period, 14 but the conservative cam­ paign against perceived Modernism within the Connexion soon acquired other targets. J. H. Moulton's Fernley Lecture of 1913, Religions and Religion, was denounced by Bennetts as "an extremely dangerous book" because of its acceptance of higher criticism and evolution. A symposium edited by Davison, and published under the title The Chief Corner-Stone (1914), warranted three condemnatory articles in the W.B.U.'s Journal as Spiers, Bennetts and Harold Morton vied with one another for the most 11 Howard, "W. T. Davison," 31. 12 1. R. Gregory (ed.), Benjamin Grego111, D.D. Autobiographical Recollections edited, with memorials of his later life, by his eldest son (London, 1903), 438-43; Glover, Evangelical Nonc011f'ormists, 210; W. Spiers, The Christ qf the Higher Critics. An Examination (London, 1897), 92. 13Bebbington, "Persecution of George Jackson," 422-3; Journal qf the Wesley Bible Union (Gloucester), January 1914, cover [hereafter JWBU]. 14 JWBU, Oct. 1914, 119; June 1915, 139-42, 150-2. "Throttled by a dead hand''? 165 opprobrious epithets to apply to it. The robust views of the Rev. Dr. Frank Ballard, Connexional Christian Evidence Missioner, and Fernley Lecturer in 1916, attracted equally robust criticism, and the W.B.U. also rebuked two Connexional institutions: Dr. John Scott Lidgett, in mild terms, for allowing Modernists access to the columns of the Methodist Times, and Samuel Chadwick, with venom born of disappointment, for refusing to rally Cliff College and Joyful News to the fundamentalist cause. 15 The closing years of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century were marked by controversies over biblical criticism and Modernism in many British denominations. Much of the rhetoric provoked by The Preacher and the Modern Mind found echoes in the debates around the near­ contemporary. development of Liberal Evangelicalism in the Church of England, and parallels may be drawn between the W.B.U. and fundamental- ist groups in other branches of the church. 16 What helped to make the Jackson controversy distinctively Wesleyan, however, was the appeal to Wesley's example and teaching, and particularly to the expression of that teaching in the authorized formularies of the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion.
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