Gordon Mursell. English Spirituality from 1700 to the Present Day. Louisville KY: Westminster, 2001. Print.
English Spirituality from 1700 to the Present Day is a history of Christian teaching and experience in England in the last 300 years. It focuses on various movements and individuals to come up with a fascinating and well-researched overview. It is very helpful to anyone interested in English literature and history as well as the theology. Paul Jehle calls literature the handmaid to history. If that is so, then religion is the mistress of both.
Mursell devotes chapters the people and movements emphasizing their beliefs and how they fit in with what was going on in Christianity as a whole, not just the Anglican Church.
The first of three major divisions describes the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It tells of reform movements like the Great Awakening and Methodism. The author pulls out important writings and sermons by Whitefield and the Wesleys as well as opponents to Christianity like Gibbon. He notes the mainline Anglican and Catholic approaches as well. He includes Dissenters like Defoe and a number of other well-known writers.
He does a direct and honest study of Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example. He puts William Blake among the orthodox believers, something I was surprised at since Blake seems to known for his syncretism. After all, one of his collections is called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Mursell makes a case that Blake, while taking artistic license, was at his core still a Christian.
William Law is still read and cited in some circles today. Perhaps it was the author’s choice of selections, but most the quotations from Law made him sound legalistic and even angry. The contrast with Isaac Watts could not have been stronger. If one were to read just the dozen or so pages on Watts, he would be edified. That was the most uplifting chapter of the entire book. Although best known for his hymns, Watts wrote other things as well, and love of God and the joy of salvation in Jesus shines through all his works cited here.
The section on the Victorian era may be most helpful for the student of literature. Many of the issues and controversies in the church and the culture are reflected in the literature of the time. The treatment of Dickens and George Eliot are especially helpful for literary study and to illustrate the cultural changes of the period.
Although I have read little of Cardinal Newman, I recall being taught that he was a mighty force for orthodoxy in nineteenth-century England: that without him England would have fallen away entirely. I was therefore disappointed in the chapter on Newman. He seemed pretty ordinary and not especially inspiring. However, the chapter on his disciple Gerard Manley Hopkins provided a lot of understanding into that poet’s life and works.
English Spirituality from 1700 to the Present Day shares many perspectives from this time from the Nonconformists like Darby and the Irvingites to Unitarians. In all cases the book keeps a narrative thread but lets the people speak for themselves. Among all this variety, the treatment appears fair and evenhanded.
The section on the twentieth century is entitled “Losing our Absolute,” an appropriate choice of words. Here Mursell sometimes uses the term spirituality very loosely, but in a manner that many contemporaries do use it. Still, he discusses writers and speakers who point to the “older ways” like Chesterton, Lewis, and Sayers.
In England it appears that Pentecostalism was largely a phenomenon among Blacks. And the book points out the trends among the skeptics in the church—those who belong to and even ordained, especially Anglicans and Catholics, who really do not take the Scriptures seriously or, at best, choose the parts they like. So he notes feminists, anti-war activists, the effects of psychology, and the like.
While not light reading, this is a great book for background and for helping us understand England and, to a great degree, the English-speaking world. Of all the authors, speakers, and clergy represented, I was most familiar with Coleridge, having done my college thesis on him and having read him pretty widely. Mursell does a more than adequate study on Coleridge and presents his life and ideas fairly and accurately. That gave me confidence that his take on others would be fair and accurate.
He wraps us his chapters on Blake and Coleridge with a quotation from Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection which brought back memories of my college studies and which I would learn a few years later is precise and true:
Christianity ‘is not a Theory, or a Speculation; but a Life…TRY IT!’ (60, emphases in original)