What Is Anglicanism? (Part 4)

Amazing Grace

Four weeks in. This is the one I most wanted to write. Here is Episode 4.

White Gutters

Picture a field on the edge of Bristol, one afternoon early in 1739. The men gathering at the edge of it are coal miners, colliers, coming up out of the pits at Kingswood. They are poor, they are rough, they have a reputation for being half wild, and respectable England has more or less written them off. Most of them have never been inside a church in their lives, and the church, if we are honest, has not gone looking for them.

And there is a young preacher standing on a little rise, with no building, no pulpit, no robes, just his voice in the open air. His name is George Whitefield, and he is telling these men, these specific unwashed and unwanted men, that God loves them and that they can be born new.

Whitefield noticed something that day, and wrote it down afterward, one of the most piercing little details in the whole history of this church. As he preached, he could see the men beginning to weep. And he could see it because of the coal dust. Their faces were black from the pits, and the tears cut clean white lines straight down through the grime. White gutters, he called them, made by their tears.

Keep that picture, because that is where we are going today. We are going to meet the people who looked at a comfortable, sleepy, respectable church and went out into the fields after the ones it had forgotten. And the thing they carried out to those coal miners, the thing that cut those white lines down through the coal dust, was not a rulebook and not a scolding. It was grace.

A Word We Need to Defuse

Welcome back. Let me set the scene, because the church had changed since we left it.

When we ended last time, England was staggering out of a century of religious war. And after all that blood, the Church of England did what exhausted things do. It calmed down. It grew orderly, reasonable, dignified, and more than a little cold. By the early 1700s, a great deal of English religion had quietly become a matter of good manners and good sense. Be decent. Be moderate. Do not get carried away. Church was a respectable habit, the kind of thing a sensible person did on a Sunday. There was a lot that was admirable in it, real learning, real decency. But for an enormous number of people, the pulse was faint again. The heart had gone out of it.

And into that, in the 1730s, came a jolt. It is usually called the Evangelical Revival, and before I say another word I have to deal with that adjective, because for a lot of us it is radioactive. When you hear Evangelical today, you may hear a political team, a voting bloc, a culture war, a set of associations from the news. I am going to ask you to set all of that down for the next half hour, because the word started somewhere very different, and that older meaning is the one we need.

Evangelical comes from the Greek word for good news. The gospel. That is the whole root of it. An evangelical, in the plain old sense, is someone whose Christianity is organized around the good news, and historians usually name four marks that go with it. A love of the Bible. A focus on the cross of Christ. An insistence on the new birth, that faith is something you come alive to and not just inherit. And a faith that acts, that spills out of you and into the world. The Bible, the cross, the new birth, and a faith that acts. Keep those four in your head, because everything that follows hangs on them, and because, by the end, I think they will complicate whatever picture you walked in with.

And this is our old friend by another name. From the very first episode we have been tracking a living faith, faith that is alive in the whole person rather than parked as a respectable habit. Every so often in this story a church goes quiet, and somebody reaches for the pulse. The high church folks did it in the last episode through beauty and holiness. Now the low church folks are about to do it through the open air and the new birth. Same pulse. Different hands.

The Warmed Heart

So who were these people?

It starts, of all places, with a tiny, intense little student club at Oxford in the 1720s and 30s. A handful of young men, including two brothers named John and Charles Wesley, who were so disciplined and so methodical about prayer and Bible study and visiting prisoners that the other students mocked them for it. They called them, as a sneer, Methodists. The name stuck, the way these names always seem to.

And this next part should encourage anybody who has ever tried very hard at religion and come up empty. For years, all that method did not give John Wesley a living faith. He was earnest, he was rigorous, he even sailed to the American colonies as a missionary, and he came home rattled and aware that something at the center was missing. He had the machinery of faith without the fire.

It broke open for him on an evening in London in 1738. He went, reluctantly, to a small religious meeting on Aldersgate Street, where someone was reading aloud from Martin Luther, from Luther’s preface to the letter to the Romans, on what God does in the heart through faith in Christ. And Wesley wrote one of the most famous sentences in English religious history. He said he felt his heart strangely warmed. He felt, he said, that he did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation, and that an assurance was given him that his sins, even his, were taken away. Not the machinery. The fire. The thing he had been methodically failing to manufacture for years was simply given to him.

And notice what set him alight. Not a feeling conjured out of thin air, but a man reading theology aloud, Luther on Romans, the same good news Cranmer had built his prayer book around, that we are put right with God by faith. The fire came through the doctrine, not around it. When the fire came, he did not throw the discipline away, either. He kept all of it, the study, the rigor, the early mornings, and now it was lit from the inside. The thinking was never the enemy of the fire. It was the match.

That is the engine of this whole movement. And the engine is grace. It is the Reformation balm from our very first episode, the Comfortable Words, justification by faith, coming roaring back, not as a doctrine on a page but as something a person could feel land in the chest. The new birth. Not turn over a new leaf and try harder. Be made new, as a gift.

And once that fire caught, it would not stay indoors. Wesley’s friend George Whitefield, the man we met in the coal field, was the real pioneer here. He started preaching the new birth with such force that the respectable clergy recoiled, called it enthusiasm, which was a serious insult back then, meaning something like unhinged religious excess, and they began closing their pulpits to him. So Whitefield did something that scandalized everyone. He went outside. If they would not let him preach in the churches, he would preach in the fields, in the streets, at the mouths of the coal pits, to anyone who would stand and listen. Two hundred coal miners at first. Within weeks, by his own astonished count, many thousands.

Then he dragged Wesley out after him. And I love Wesley’s reaction, because it is so honest and so English. Wesley was a man who loved order, and he wrote that he could barely reconcile himself to this strange way of preaching in the fields, that he had been so devoted all his life to decency and good order that he would once have thought saving souls almost a sin if it were not done inside a church. And then he did it anyway. And he kept doing it, in the open air, for fifty years.

The gift Cranmer fought for two hundred years earlier, preaching, the spoken word that wakes the dead, was never in this whole story more on fire than it was right here, in a field, with no roof, aimed at the people nobody else wanted. And alongside the preaching came singing, because Charles Wesley, John’s brother, started pouring this same grace into hymns, hundreds and hundreds of them, so that ordinary people could carry the good news around in their mouths all week. A lot of what plain Christians know about grace, they learned standing up and singing it.

Whitefield and Wesley did not agree about everything. They held different views about how grace and human freedom fit together, and they argued about it, and around 1740 they even split over it. But they never stopped loving each other or recognizing each other’s work, and Wesley left us the line that ought to be carved over the door of this whole tradition. “Though we cannot think alike,” he said, “may we not love alike?” We have heard versions of that before in this series. Here it is again, between the two greatest evangelists of the age.

A Slaver Named Newton

Now I want to slow all the way down and tell you about one man, because his life is this entire episode compressed into a single body, and because you already know his song.

His name was John Newton. And before he was anything else, he was a slave trader. Not a bystander to slavery, not a man who quietly profited at a distance. A working slave-ship captain, who packed human beings into the holds of ships and carried them across the Atlantic to be sold.

There was a night in 1748 when his ship was caught in a storm so violent he was sure he would drown, and he cried out to God for mercy, and survived, and always afterward marked that night as the beginning of God laying hold of him. And this is the part we must not sand off smooth, because it is the truest and most uncomfortable thing in the story. After that night, Newton went on slaving. For years. He kept captaining slave ships and trafficking human beings well after he believed God had taken hold of his life. Grace had him, and grace had not yet opened his eyes to the monstrous thing his own hands were doing every single day.

That tells you something honest about how grace works on a person. It is not always a lightning bolt that fixes everything by morning. Sometimes it is a slow dawn, and there are things we are complicit in, things our whole society is comfortable with, that take years for the light to reach. That is not a reason to doubt the grace. It is a reason to be humble about our own blind spots, which are surely there.

Eventually Newton left the sea, and the light kept coming, and he became an Anglican minister, a country parson in a little place called Olney. And there, to help his ordinary congregation feel the gospel, he wrote hymns. One of them was a small, plain, autobiographical thing about a wretch who was lost and got found, who was blind and came to see. He called it by its theme. Amazing grace. He was writing about himself. The wretch was the slave-ship captain.

And the eyes that grace had opened slowly kept opening. As an old man, Newton finally turned and faced what he had done, and he did it in public. He wrote a searing pamphlet against the slave trade, confessing his own guilt in it, naming the horror in detail so that no one could look away. He had once helped run the machine. Now he was going to help break it.

He wrote his own epitaph, and the heart of it is the whole gospel on one gravestone. John Newton, it says, “once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long laboured to destroy.”

That is what grace looks like on a person. It is what these people meant by the word. Not a pat on the head. A dead man walking, who knew exactly what he had been, and knew exactly Who had reached down and hauled him out.

The Dust on the Preachers

Before we leave these men, there are two hard things I have to tell you, one about each of the friends we started with. And I want you to hear why I am telling you. Not to take back anything I have said about them. Because they are the point.

Whitefield first. The man who wept with the coal miners owned slaves. Worse than owned. When slavery was still illegal in the colony of Georgia, he campaigned to make it legal, and he won, and his orphanage there ran on the labor of enslaved people until the day he died. And he was told. Christians who loved the same gospel he did said to him, in his own lifetime, this is evil, turn. He never turned. Newton’s dawn came slowly, but it came. On this one enormous thing, Whitefield’s never came at all.

And Wesley. His blindness was not moral but theological, and it is the very one this series has been fighting since the first episode. In his later years he began to teach that a Christian could be made perfect in this life, lifted into a love so complete that willful sin simply fell away. He meant it as grace at full stretch, and he hedged it with a hundred careful qualifications. But you have met this drift before, in Jeremy Taylor, a century back. Lean hard enough on the climbing and holiness quietly becomes a ladder again, something to attain and then anxiously measure. And there is a strange sorrow in it. The man who learned at Aldersgate that a living faith cannot be manufactured, that all his method and striving had failed and the thing had to be given, spent his old age teaching a kind of striving after all. Nobody in this story ever throws grace away on purpose. They just move on from it, to the deeper things, the next things. And grace is the one thing you cannot move on from without losing all the rest.

So what do we do with these two? I will tell you what we do not do. We do not hold their failures up, conclude that we would have known better, and walk away feeling clean. That feels like justice, but look at what it is. It is the performance program again, just running on someone else’s record instead of your own. The sorting of the deserving from the undeserving is the exact machine this whole movement was preaching against.

No. Here is what their failures actually mean, and it is the gospel of this entire episode. Whitefield stood on that rise at Kingswood with coal dust of his own, thick on him, and he could not see it, and the grace he was shouting across that field was not his gift to the miners. It was his own only hope, and theirs, the same grace for the preacher and the pit. And the warmed heart Wesley received at Aldersgate was never his to keep warm by effort, not that night and not fifty years later when he had half forgotten it. These men were not the source of the thing they carried. They were carriers: flawed all the way down, blind in one and drifting in the other. The gift came through them anyway, and it was for them too. That is not the embarrassing exception to the story of grace. That is the story of grace. If it were only for the people who get it right, there has never once been anyone to give it to.

The Fruit and the Root

And now we come to the fourth mark, the one I told you to keep in your pocket. A faith that acts. Because the grace that reached Newton did not stop with Newton.

In the 1780s, an old Newton became the spiritual counselor of a brilliant, witty, ambitious young member of Parliament named William Wilberforce. Wilberforce had had his own awakening, his own coming-alive to faith, and it threw his life into crisis. He assumed, naturally, that a serious Christian could not stay in something as grubby as politics, and he came close to quitting Parliament to go into the ministry.

It was Newton, the former slaver, who told him to stay. Stay where you are, Newton said in effect, and serve God there. Use the seat. And out of that counsel Wilberforce made a decision that changed the world. He would remain in Parliament, and he would aim his whole life at one thing. He would try to abolish the slave trade.

He did not do it alone. He was the center of a circle of evangelical friends, wealthy, well connected, devout, who lived near each other in a London suburb called Clapham and worshiped together at the parish church there. People sneered at them and called them the Clapham Sect, the way you belittle a group by calling it a cult. They wore the insult well. And they were not all men. One of the most powerful of them was Hannah More, a writer whose tracts and books outsold nearly everyone in England, and who did as much as anyone in that circle to turn the conscience of a nation against the trade. She reached, through the printed page, the vast public the men in Parliament could only argue in front of. They poured their money, their writing, their political muscle, and their prayers into the cause, year after grinding year.

Now set this next to the caricature. The picture a lot of people carry of the word Evangelical is narrow, political in a sour modern way, maybe a little mean. And here is the original article. People so soaked in grace that one of them, a former slave trader, wrote the most beloved hymn in the English language, and a circle of them spent their entire lives and fortunes to end slavery in the largest empire on earth, because they believed every human being bore the image of God. And do not imagine this was the easy or obvious thing for a Christian to do. The trade was woven straight through the British economy. Plenty of respectable Anglicans defended it, profited from it, or simply did not want to hear about it. These evangelicals were fighting against the grain of their own society and often against their own fellow churchgoers, and they lost the vote, and lost it, and lost it again, for the better part of two decades.

That is the public faith. And the order of it is everything. It was not a political program wearing a cross. It was grace first, in the heart, in the new birth, in Amazing Grace, and then that grace overflowing, unable to stay private, pouring out into the most courageous public action of the age. The action was the fruit. The grace was the root. Get that backward and you get moralism. Keep it in order and you get Wilberforce.

The slave trade was finally abolished in the British Empire in 1807. Newton, old and nearly blind, lived just long enough to hear the news, and then he died. But the slaves already in bondage were not yet free, so Wilberforce and his friends kept going for another generation. The act that finally abolished slavery itself across the Empire passed in 1833, three days before Wilberforce died.

This is the living faith we have been chasing since episode one, the faith that gets into the whole of a person, the prayers and the politics both. And abolition was only the sharpest edge of it. The same grace drove these people into the prisons, the factories, the schools, anywhere human beings were being ground down. Grace had gotten into them, and it kept spilling out. We saw it reach inward in the last episode, into holiness and beauty. Here it reaches all the way out, into Parliament, and breaks a chain.

Who Leaves and Who Stays

So we are back at the question this series keeps asking. Did all this stay inside the Anglican tent, or did it leave?

The honest answer, again, is both. And it rhymes with what happened to the Puritans in the last episode.

The established church, by and large, did not know what to do with the revival. It found the open-air preaching undignified, the emotion alarming, the whole thing a bit much. It called it enthusiasm and kept many of its pulpits closed. And a movement that cannot find room inside will eventually build its own house outside. John Wesley himself lived and died a loyal Anglican priest, he never wanted to leave, but the Methodist movement he had built grew so large and so distinct, and met so much coldness from the church, that after his death it became its own separate family of churches. A huge, world-changing branch of the faith grew up, and grew away, partly because the home church was too chilly to hold it.

There is a lesson in that, and it is the same lesson as last time. A church that has no warmth for the pulse should not be surprised when the pulse goes looking for a body somewhere else. And hold onto that word they used as a weapon, enthusiasm. The heat the cold church could not abide did not die out. It crossed oceans, and today, on a scale no one in this story could have pictured, it is simply how millions of Anglicans worship.

But a great deal of it stayed. Not everyone went out the door with the Methodists. An evangelical movement put down deep roots inside the Church of England and never left. Newton stayed, a parish priest to the end. At Cambridge, an astonishing man named Charles Simeon preached at the same church for fifty four years, outlasting congregations that at first despised him, and quietly trained whole generations of evangelical clergy and helped launch the great missionary societies that would carry this gospel around the world. The Clapham circle stayed. They were Church of England to the bone.

So once more we get the same shape we have seen at every turn. Some go out. Many remain. And the ones who remained became a permanent stream inside Anglicanism, the low church, evangelical stream, that is still there today, right alongside the high church stream from the last episode, in the same wide, arguing, living church.

Downstream of Grace

So what do we carry out of the open fields?

We carry, first, the same treasure under a new form. Think back to Cranmer’s three gifts, all the way at the start: prayer, preaching, and theology. The preaching gift, in this episode, caught fire, in Whitefield and Wesley and Simeon and in voices reaching crowds the church had abandoned. The theology was the old Reformation theology of grace, found again and felt in the bones. And the prayer was carried now not only in the Prayer Book but in a whole new treasury of hymns that put grace on the lips of ordinary people. The gifts endure. They just keep finding new ways to burn.

We carry, second, a correction. If you walked in with a small or sour picture of the word evangelical, I hope a former slave trader and a circle of friends who broke an empire’s chains have made it harder to hold. At its origin, this was a movement of people undone by grace and remade into some of the bravest public Christians who ever lived.

And we carry, underneath all of it, the one thing this whole episode has been about. Grace. Not earned, not deserved, not manufactured by method or effort, the very opposite. A storm-tossed slaver hauled out of the sea. A methodical failure given a warmed heart he could not produce on his own. Coal miners weeping clean white lines down their black faces because someone finally told them they were loved.

And do not stand outside that last picture, as though it belonged only to them. You have your own coal dust. The thing you are sure disqualifies you. The part of your record you keep turned away from the light. The whole of this episode says the same word over all of it that Whitefield said in that field, needing it as badly as any man listening. Not scrub yourself clean first and then come. Come. And grace runs down through the worst of it like water, and cuts clean white lines straight to the skin, and the dirt was never the thing that decided whether you were loved. I once was lost, the slaver wrote, but now am found. That is the engine. It always was.

Next time, the pulse gets reached for one more time, and from the exact opposite direction. The revival we just watched reached for it through the warmed heart, the gospel come alive in the open air. What comes next does not reach that way at all. It reaches back, behind the Reformation, to the ancient roots, the bishops, the sacraments, the beauty we touched in episode three. A generation later, a few intense scholars at Oxford will look at this same comfortable church and decide that what it has lost is its depth, and they will go digging for it, and set off a revolution that splits the church and changes how a huge part of it worships to this day. They are called the Oxford Movement. And we will meet them next.

Thanks for listening. I’m glad you’re here.

Portrait of "George Whitefield" by David Martin, curtesy of John Wesley's Chapel Museum of Methodism; "John Wesley," detail of an oil painting by Nathaniel Hone, 1766; "William Wilberforce" by Anton Hickel, 1794; "Hannah More," John Opie, 1786.