A holy huddle?

To proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in brutal old Sydney town has never been easy. The second chaplain to the colony, Samuel Marsden, became known as ‘the flogging parson’ because of his over-zealous administration of his weekday duties as magistrate. Despite his evident enthusiasm to preach the good news in New South Wales and also in New Zealand, he became perhaps not unreasonably diverted by the task of building and maintaining social order in a hostile and fragile environment.

His successors likewise felt the combination of inertia and hostility to the gospel wearisome. In his study of Sydney Anglicanism from 1885 to 1914, former lecturer at Moore College Bill Lawton argued that the Sydney Anglicans of that period felt under pressure from the advance of secularism. In this period, churchmen noted and bemoaned the loss of respect for Sabbath observation, the prevalence of drunkenness and threats to traditional patterns of marriage as symptomatic of the decline in the church’s influence on social order. In response to this felt crisis, Lawton argued that local Anglican leaders such as the then Principal of Moore College the Welshman Nathanael Jones came to focus their attention not on society but on the ‘little flock’ – the small gathering of believers who were waiting deliverance from the trials and tribulations of the world. They were influenced in this by the Brethrenism and revivalism characteristic of the evangelicalism of the period. As Lawton writes:

The religion of these evangelicals was essentially introspective and futurist, fearful of the social and ideological changes taking place around them. Intuitionism combined with millennialism to inhibit their developing a coherent social theory. By concentrating exclusively on ends and goals, Moore College fashioned a clergy whose sole task was to interpret the mind of God to the people of God, but who failed to interpret that mind to a secularised society.

If the choice was between accommodation and retreat, then retreat was certainly preferable.
For Lawton, the teaching about the last things – eschatology – explains the increasing defensiveness of local church pronouncements on social issues. Eschatology inevitably leads to questions about the nature of present social order and the role of the Christian church in it. Jones and others taught a form of premillennialism shaped by the thought of the well know Irish preacher John Nelson Darby (1800-82). For Darby, Scripture was an essentially prophetic book which describes humanity as being progressively dealt with by God in a series of ‘dispensations’. Each dispensation begins with a divinely appointed task that comes with a promise of blessing, and ends with an act of divine judgement. In the present dispensation, that of the church, we are to live following the judgement of God on Israel for its hardness of heart and in the light of the expectation that God will restore the kingdom to Israel. The task of the Christian evangelist is to call people out of the fallen and disgraced world and into the church – to become one of the truly converted, spiritual gathering of believers. Failing to keep society Christian by legal means or by persuasion in the press, the evangelicals prayed for the coming of revival instead.

A case study from this period was the church’s response to the Divorce Extension Bills which were proposals for liberalising the divorce laws. While in 1886 there was intense debate about the issue of divorce, but the late 1880s, the local churchmen seemed to have retreated. Society’s unwillingness to respond to the Bible’s authority on this issue seemed to take the wind out of their sails. The intervention of the clergy on this matter had not endeared them to the public:
The daily press, and particularly the Sydney Morning Herald, responded at first cautiously and deferentially but soon editorials began a hostile attack on the churchmen’s lack of compassion and their legalistic concern for semantics.

The advancing tide of secularism was met by an attempt to use the law as instrument to bring about conformity to the will of God. However when it became apparent that a gap was opening up between Christian standards and the standards of the society at large, Anglicans turned their attention back to the ‘little flock’ as a community where divine law could certainly be maintained.

Lawton the historian writes:

Sydney evangelical Anglicanism drew upon the Brethren doctrines of the church as ‘gathered community’ and Bible as a record of unfulfilled prophecy. The denomination developed a futurist eschatology in which the local ‘gathered’ community of Christians was seen as the proleptic expression of the heavenly Church.

But this is also evidence of Lawton the contemporary (1987) churchman and commentator. Throughout his book Lawton shows himself convinced that this pattern of retreat and defence against the rising tide of secularism driven by a certain eschatology and ecclesiology is characteristic of present day Sydney Anglicanism. His clear purpose is not merely antiquarian interest but critique of the present by uncovering a genealogy of theological ideas and tribal instincts. Unfortunately, he makes this case only by inference and not so much by evidence. In order to be convincing, he would have to show that even though pre-millennial theology and holiness movement piety from Sydney Anglicanism since at least the 1950s has completely faded, their impress on the Sydney Anglican mindset is still in evidence. A former longtime lecturer at Moore College, Lawton doesn’t carry out this tracing of connections explicitly – probably because of the deep personal regard he felt for Broughton Knox and others. The lines of connection between the two phases of Sydney Anglican history are not simple and are drawn here over six decades or more. Yet the relationship of eschatology to a theological understanding of the world is a connection still very much in evidence.