The Liveliest Way with Dissenters

In Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology, Timothy Larsen, professor of Theology at Wheaton College, has brought together nine journal articles and three previously unpublished pieces to show how it is “only by drawing close enough in to see [the] very human struggles between beliefs and practices that one can gain a truer understanding of the nature of Victorian Britain’s contested Christianity.” Apropos that contest, Larsen makes a persuasive point when he says that if one were to credit most accounts of Victorian Christianity, “no free Churchmen ever had a theological thought… worthy of a second look.” The essays in his book demonstrate otherwise. Well-researched and provocatively argued, his book deserves a wide readership. Some of the dissenting figures he covers include D. F. Strauss, Bishop Colenso, Joseph Barker, Charles Bradlaugh, and Thomas Cooper. Since none is exactly a household name, some background may be in order before considering what Larsen makes of them.

Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology

Timothy Larsen (Author)

Baylor University Press

234 pages

$9.00

David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) was a German theologian and disciple of Hegel. In Leben Jesu (1835), which George Eliot translated into English in 1846, he set out to show that the New Testament was a tissue of myths, which might yield historical but not supernatural truth. The book caused a good deal of controversy when it first appeared in English and is now seen as a milestone in New Testament criticism. Strauss may have willy-nilly introduced the notion that the Christian religion is based on myth, but it is worth noting that in the book’s preface he assured his readers that “the author is aware that the essence of Christian faith is perfectly independent of his criticism. The supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension remain eternal truths, whatever doubts may be cast on their reality as historical facts.” One cannot divorce the miraculous from the historical. Still, this was a sensible qualification, even if he repudiated it as he grew older. In his second work, Die christliche Glaubenslehre (1840-41), Strauss passed in review the whole history of Christian dogma only to attempt to demolish it with the aid of various Hegelian wrecking tools. In his last work, Der alte und der neue Glaube (1872), he concluded that Christianity as a belief system was kaput and that a new and improved faith was required, which he suggested might be cobbled together out of art and the scientific knowledge of nature. Echoes of this theory can be heard in one of H. G. Wells’ favorite philosophers, Winwood Reade, who wrote in The Martyrdom of Man (1872): “A season of mental anguish is at hand.… The soul must be sacrificed; the hope in immortality must die. A sweet and charming illusion must be taken away from the human race, as youth and beauty vanish never to return.” Interestingly enough, Strauss married an opera singer, the famous Agnese Schebest, who tired of his theories and left him. It is a pity that not more is known about this failed marriage: it might shed light on the “beliefs and practices” of Strauss’ career. In all events, in 1851, Strauss did the responsible thing by taking charge of his two children, Fritz and Georgine. He died in 1874 on February 8, the feast of St. Jerome of Emiliani, the patron saint of orphans, who wrote the first catechism, an aid to understanding the eternal truths of God and man that might have helped Strauss disentangle reality from myth.

Larsen argues that criticism of Strauss in England missed its mark. Strauss was not as radical or as destructive as most of his English critics charged. To make his point, Larsen quotes A. M. Fairbairn (1839-1912), the Scotch Congregationalist and principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, who argued that “Strauss was no revived eighteenth-century infidel, or vulgar official controversialist against an accepted faith. He was a critic by nature and discipline, scientific in spirit, veracious in purpose. His attitude to Christianity was not Voltaire’s. He approached it from within, not from without, his primary aim being to reform and refine rather than abolish it.” Is this persuasive? Where reform figures in Strauss’ work is rather questionable. After all, at the end of his career he came to the fairly destructive conclusion that belief in Christianity was simply untenable. The most hostile contemporary critic of Strauss was J. R. Beard, the English Unitarian minister who claimed that the English translation of the book had “not the slightest literary value whatever, being obviously brought out to supply food to the… depraved appetite for skeptical productions… prevalent in these times among our manufacturing populations.” Who was right? Readers will have to make up their own minds.

Perhaps the most thoughtful critic of Strauss was Thomas Cooper (1805-92), the English Chartist and poet. After being apprenticed to a shoemaker, he taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French. By the age of 23, he had become a schoolmaster and Methodist preacher, admitting later that the book that influenced him most was Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, his “book of books.” In 1841, he became leader of the Leicester Chartists, whose demands were set out in a six-point charter calling for universal suffrage, annual parliaments, vote by secret ballot, abolition of property requirements for mps, payment of mps, and equal electoral districts. Some chartists advocated constitutional means and others violence to achieve their ends. Cooper was one of the constitutionalists, though he got two years in Stafford jail on a sedition charge. In jail he wrote The Purgatory of Suicides in Spenserian stanzas and Wise Saws and Modern Instances (1845). In 1855, Cooper became a Christian lecturer for workingmen and thereafter wrote a number of works of apologetics. It is on these that Larsen concentrates his essay.

Cooper was drawn as a young man to the argument from design, though for him the design only proved certain things. It did not prove Hell, which he denied on the grounds that, “if I admitted the doctrine of eternal punishment & endless misery for man’s errors, I must give up my conviction of God’s perfect goodness.” In his Journal, Cooper shows that he was in some initial sympathy with Strauss’ attack on miracles. Larsen quotes Charles Kingsley’s response to the challenges that he found in the Journal: “There is something which weighs awfully on my mind,—the first number of Cooper’s Journal, which he sent me the other day. Here is a man of immense influence, openly preaching Straussism to the workmen, and in a fair, honest, manly way, which must tell. Who will answer him? Who will answer Strauss?”

Larsen shows that it was manly Cooper who answered both Strauss and his own more youthful Journal entries. In a later letter to Kingsley, Cooper wrote: “Can you tell me what to do—anything that will help me to Christ? Him I want. If the Four Gospels be half legends I still want him.” Larsen captures the import of this by observing: “In the end, for Cooper, the figure of Christ revealed in a traditional reading of the Gospels was more compelling than the theories of Strauss.”

For the mature Cooper, man’s moral nature, not the argument from design, was most emblematic of the truth of orthodox Christianity. One example of this was our yearning for knowledge. Cooper, the shoemaker who read Hume and Kant, was convinced that this yearning was an intimation of immortality:

Do we not all know that the more we learn to know, the more we thirst to know? Is the wisdom of God so abortive as to make a being of boundless desires for knowledge only at the end of a few years to put him out of existence? The Progressive Nature of Man… is a strong presumptive argument for a Future Life for Man.

Nonetheless, Cooper acknowledged the force of Strauss’ criticism: “These blows have knocked many a man down, to my certain knowledge: many a man who has never got up again.” In refuting “these blows” he invoked what was in effect Augustine’s great principle, securus judicat orbis terrarum, “the whole world judges rightly.” For Cooper, it was simply not probable “that the reason why upwards of 300 millions of human beings are now numbered among the professors of Christianity, the reason why the highest and wisest nations of the earth now profess this religion, and why millions upon millions have professed it in past centuries is solely because a weak fanatical woman first imagined she saw Jesus in the garden where his sepulchre was.”

Larsen concludes his essay on Cooper by stressing that if there were many learned apologists for orthodox Christianity in 19th-century England, there were not many working-class laymen who “had imbibed a significant portion of the learned literature for and against orthodox beliefs and who endeavored to distill it in an apologetic form” for workingmen. Cooper was a maverick. About the difficulties of his self-appointed task, he was realistic: “I do not imagine, or expect, that I can win over, to Christianity, the minds of skeptical workingmen.… I know too well, by personal experience, how hard it is to part with skeptical convictions.” Still, he persevered. In his case, there was more heroic resolution than struggle between “beliefs and practices.”

Other interesting pieces in the book include one on Bishop Colenso’s reading of the Pentateuch and another on the 1865 riot in Jamaica that became a cause célèbre for Baptists. On Bradlaugh’s attack on miracles, Larsen observes that Victorian Britain’s most notorious atheist had “a delightful gift for high-hearted sarcasm, or even scurrility.” To make his point he quotes Bradlaugh on God’s smiting of Uzzah for trying to steady the ark of the covenant after the oxen had tripped: “This shows that if a man sees the Church of God tumbling down, he should never try to prop it up; if it be not strong enough to save itself, the sooner it falls the better for human kind—that is, if they keep away from it while it is falling.” A little of this smarty boots mockery goes a long way. Yet Larsen quotes it to make a worthwhile point. Bradlaugh may have wished his rejection of Christian orthodoxy to have the force of positive criticism, but he spent much more time deriding the Bible than constructively engaging with Christian dogma. From this it follows, as Larsen shows, that “An examination of popular polemics against miracles in the Victorian era serves to underline the very large extent to which nineteenth-century popular freethought was animated and held together by a common vehement rejection of the Bible.”

As this incisive analysis shows, Larsen is a historian to watch and Contested Christianity is an original, engaging, informative book.

Edward Short is at work on a book about John Henry Newman and his contemporaries.