CHANGE AND DECAY:
Primitive Methodism from Late Victorian Times
to World War 1
By David M. Young
Tentmaker Publications. 318 pages. £6.50
ISBN 978 1 911 005 087
David Young writes a sad but very important book. Sad because it is the story of a Bible-believing group that succumbed to liberal theology in a relatively short time. Important because the seeds of such decay are never far away.
In the early years of the Primitive Methodists they were considered zealous witnesses to salvation through the atoning work of Christ, received by faith alone, albeit Arminian.
Their decline was the result of an ethos which exalted experience above doctrine, an attitude by no means restricted to the Primitive Methodists. The Great Revival of the previous century had demonstrated that truth must be experienced and that doctrine unattended by the power of the Holy Spirit is a withering experience, but by the 1830s there was a tendency among Calvinists as well as Arminians to over-emphasise Christian experience. The careful blend of doctrine and experience found in the Puritanism of 200 years earlier had disappeared from many pulpits.
Universalism and hell
In this book, David Young also shows that in the late 19th century, sentimentalism caused some preachers to widen the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God to embrace everybody. The error of universalism was inevitable.
By 1869 a Primitive Methodist magazine could warn that ‘among our churches the most bold and unblushing attacks are now being made on the doctrine of eternal punishment’ (p.73). He identifies three important figures in this process: J.D. Thompson, A.S. Peake and William Hartley.
In his early ministry in Australia, Thompson was charged with heresy in the Australian Conference courts of the denomination, but acquitted on making ‘an affirmation of loyalty to Methodist doctrine’ (p.158).
When his case was reviewed in the English Conference he was vindicated after one speaker made a powerful speech appealing to ‘the spirit and genius of our Constitution. Its spirit was the spirit of liberty, of elasticity as opposed to the rigid and the narrow’. Thompson, ‘the bold thinker and foe of traditionalism’ returned to Liverpool, England in 1898, where his congregation included the wealthy jam manufacturer, William Hartley, who had already used his considerable resources to secure Peake’s appointment to a teaching post in the denomination’s training college and then to distribute his writings.
Deserves a wide circulation
David Young examines Peake’s disastrous influence in detail. He quotes the summary of Ian Sellers who wrote that in Hartley College, ‘Evangelical Arminianism was being rapidly transformed into universal benevolence, while critical views became endemic among the younger men’ (p.173). Another writer noted: ‘His students not only admired him, they loved him. He won their admiration by his great intellectual gifts, and their love by the radiant charm of his personality’.
This book is well-written, it seems well sourced, its message is relevant. It deserves a wide circulation.
