- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Preface
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Introductory Note
- 1 ‘The God of the hills’
- 2 ‘Destructive of the authority of divine revelation’
- 3 ‘The ground on which Rational Christianity may firmly take its stand’
- 4 ‘An inspired communication from the Deity … Or … Nothing’
- 5 ‘The seal and servant of Christianity’
- 6 ‘An easy good-natured God’
- 7 ‘The hateful mystery’
- 8 ‘The sceptical tendencies of modern times’
- 9 ‘The heresies of the Baptist Union’
- 10 A ‘conspiracy to undermine our holy faith’
- 1 Church Membership and Chapel Attendance
- 2 ‘Conversion is not necessary to regeneration’
- 3 Nonconformity’s Shrinking Consituency
- 4 ‘Influential families … lost to nonconformity’
- 5 The Failure of Success
- 6 The ‘most spiritually destitute and degraded’
- 7 ‘Diversity of opinion … no bar to Christian communion’
- 8 ‘We must not leave Satan … to provide the recreations of life’
- 9 The ‘social and intellectual well-being of our members’
- 10 ‘A liberal education’
- 11 ‘Winning souls’ or ‘unlimited speculation’?
- 12 Frugality and Overwork
- 13 ‘The future rests with the Free Churches’
- 1 ‘The largest and widest Church ever established’
- 2 ‘Once bit, twice shy’
- 3 ‘A torrent of gin and beer’
- 4 ‘The right of the people to judge for themselves’
- 5 ‘A mutual benefit association’
- 6 Making ‘men moral by act of parliament’
- 7 ‘To reconstruct the existing organization of society’
- 8 ‘A most astonishing opening, furnished by the providence of God’
- 9 ‘The thunder of British guns’
- 10 ‘The descendants of men like Oliver Cromwell’
- Appendix
- Index
‘An easy good-natured God’
‘An easy good-natured God’
The Collapse of Calvinism
- Chapter:
- (p.42) 6 ‘An easy good-natured God’
- Source:
- The Dissenters Volume III
- Author(s):
Michael R. Watts
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This chapter discusses the growing rejection of Calvinism in nineteenth-century England. By the end of the eighteenth century, Calvinism was abandoned by Presbyterians who saw themselves as rational Dissenters, and was being undermined by Particular Baptists and by Congregationalists who struggled to reconcile the eternal decrees of Calvinism with the missionary impulse of the Evangelical revival. By the 1860s, the nonconformist revolt against the doctrine of eternal punishment was growing apace, stimulated by the concept of the ‘larger hope’ to which Tennyson gave expression in In Memoriam. In 1875, the doyen of liberal Congregationalists, Baldwin Brown, came out strongly against both eternal punishment and conditional immortality (conditional on faith in Christ), and was adamant that the preaching of eternal punishment was no longer acceptable in the late nineteenth century.
Keywords: religious dissent, Presbyterians, Dissenters, Baptists, Calvinist system, Baldwin Brown, eternal punishment, immortality, Christianity
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Preface
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Introductory Note
- 1 ‘The God of the hills’
- 2 ‘Destructive of the authority of divine revelation’
- 3 ‘The ground on which Rational Christianity may firmly take its stand’
- 4 ‘An inspired communication from the Deity … Or … Nothing’
- 5 ‘The seal and servant of Christianity’
- 6 ‘An easy good-natured God’
- 7 ‘The hateful mystery’
- 8 ‘The sceptical tendencies of modern times’
- 9 ‘The heresies of the Baptist Union’
- 10 A ‘conspiracy to undermine our holy faith’
- 1 Church Membership and Chapel Attendance
- 2 ‘Conversion is not necessary to regeneration’
- 3 Nonconformity’s Shrinking Consituency
- 4 ‘Influential families … lost to nonconformity’
- 5 The Failure of Success
- 6 The ‘most spiritually destitute and degraded’
- 7 ‘Diversity of opinion … no bar to Christian communion’
- 8 ‘We must not leave Satan … to provide the recreations of life’
- 9 The ‘social and intellectual well-being of our members’
- 10 ‘A liberal education’
- 11 ‘Winning souls’ or ‘unlimited speculation’?
- 12 Frugality and Overwork
- 13 ‘The future rests with the Free Churches’
- 1 ‘The largest and widest Church ever established’
- 2 ‘Once bit, twice shy’
- 3 ‘A torrent of gin and beer’
- 4 ‘The right of the people to judge for themselves’
- 5 ‘A mutual benefit association’
- 6 Making ‘men moral by act of parliament’
- 7 ‘To reconstruct the existing organization of society’
- 8 ‘A most astonishing opening, furnished by the providence of God’
- 9 ‘The thunder of British guns’
- 10 ‘The descendants of men like Oliver Cromwell’
- Appendix
- Index
