It is thirty years since Boyd Hilton narrated the British nineteenth century as the ‘Age of Atonement’ followed by the ‘Age of Incarnation’. Hilton suggested Victorian intellectual culture (and Anglican thought within it), shifted sometime around 1860 from a hegemonic evangelical view of God as an approaching judge, requiring atonement and recompense for sin, and animated about heaven and hell, to a liberal, ‘Broad Church’ view of a divine parent involved in redeeming the world through the incarnation, and rather vague on eternal destinies. To many since, this dichotomy has made sense of a host of Victorian proclivities and seemingly changed priorities: evangelicals are remembered for judging the poor as deserving or undeserving, and liberals for intervening to improve conditions; evangelicals gave out Bibles to save souls, but liberals gave bread to fill stomachs; evangelicals expected a messiah in clouds of glory, and liberals looked to build the Kingdom on earth.
Given time, all influential histories are exposed for their simplifications and inconsistencies, and Hilton’s work has been no exception. But Martin Spence’s work of focused revisionism is a rare gem. Spence has done the spadework in the obscure print journals, published sermons and association archives of mid-nineteenth-century evangelicalism to uncover a distinctive theology which dismantles the atonement/incarnation dichotomy, exhuming a variety of Victorian evangelical thought with curiously contemporary resonances.
At the heart of this book is a reinterpretation of a rather arcane-sounding eschatological opinion known as ‘historicist premillennialism’. Spence openly acknowledges the inelegance of the term, but sees few alternatives. The several hundred, mainly Anglican clerics and lay allies that garner his attention here all believed passionately in a coming millennium – the thousand years of peace and harmony at the end of the age. They thought Christ would return before this period to initiate it (hence the ‘pre’). And they interpreted the biblical prophecies of the millennium historically – that is, they supposed some had already been fulfilled in the past, and the remainder would be in the ongoing progression of human history. These precise points distinguished the group’s beliefs both from ‘post-millennialists’ – who expected Christ to return after a millennium achieved by human agency – and ‘futurist premillennialists’, who considered all the prophecies in Revelation, Daniel and elsewhere, still to be fulfilled. The latter view is the better-known variety of premillennialism, representing the views of J.N. Darby, certain Brethren, revivalist, then fundamentalist circles, and recent ‘rapture fiction’. After 1860, ‘futurists’ hunkered down and ignored the icy winds of Higher Criticism and Darwinian evolution while the ‘historicists’ perished. Spence contends that this futurist supremacy has distracted scholars from appreciating the social and intellectual implications of the historicists’ alternative beliefs in and of their time. ‘Premillennialism’ is assumed a gloomy, reactionary creed that rejects any human effort to improve society, and sees this world as a place from which Christians must simply await their spiritual escape. ‘By contrast’, Spence maintains, ‘historicist premillennialists were optimists, progressives, and materialists’ (p. 51).
Emblematic of the way premillennial opinions have confused historians – Boyd Hilton among them – is the case of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the philanthropic Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury was a card-carrying premillennialist, who once stated there was ‘no real hope for mankind, but for the Second Advent’. Yet Shaftesbury was famously committed to social reform and improvement. Scholarly attempts to make sense of this apparent contradiction – a pessimist attempting to make the world a better place – have offered up various explanations, few of which get further than assuming Shaftesbury belonged to the ‘Jesus is coming; look busy’ school of evangelical activism. Spence now casts Shaftesbury’s personal convictions in a radically different light: as being ‘robustly positive about the created order’ because the millennium was viewed as God’s imminent act of earthly restoration (p. 62). With Christ’s return, Shaftesbury and others believed that ‘God intended to bring about heaven on earth’, and this material salvation would be ‘the final destiny of Christians’, not a separate, ethereal heaven (pp. 62-64). Shaftesbury therefore anticipated not the rejection but the redemption of space and time as the completion of history. His campaigns and concerns flowed naturally from this world-affirming creed.
Belief in Christ’s physical second advent, coupled with an acknowledged ‘materiality’ to salvation on a restored earth, meant there was actually an ‘incarnational’ perspective to historicist premillennialism – one which informed a palpable shift in evangelical concern for collective circumstances and the social environment between 1840 and 1860. This insight alone complicates the neat chronology and contrast of the ages of ‘atonement’ and ‘incarnation’. Yet Spence goes further in his corrective, by identifying how the ‘eschatological revisionism’ of these premillennialists, which assumed a continuity between ‘time’ and ‘eternity’, led to striking theological innovations around universal salvation and the ‘downgrading of hell and punishment’ (p. 147). A notable number of premillennialist evangelicals therefore colonized theological territory more associated with ‘Broad Church’ views, most notably the totemic mid-century liberal, F.D. Maurice.
Turning to Maurice, Spence undertakes what may just be the most significant reassessment of this enigmatic Anglican in a decade or more. Themes and perspectives from Maurice’s Kingdom of Christ, as well as the views on hell and eternity that got him sacked from King’s College London, are each linked to the historicist premillennialism of Maurice’s tutor and mentor in the early 1830s, Joseph Adam Stephenson. Spence claims Stephenson’s thought ‘cohered with Maurice’s sense of the unfolding of a pre-existing divine order within the existing structures of the historical and material order’ (p. 197). Reading Maurice against a backdrop of early nineteenth-century apocalypticism, his kingdom theology is shown to be ‘a premillennialist theme transposed in a new key’, and his ‘stated creed about the future … one with which most historicist premillennialists would have been very content’ (pp. 199-200).
In this manner, Heaven on Earth gently and compellingly reframes a chunk of nineteenth-century church history in Britain. Yet, there is an additional dimension to this work worth acknowledging – the parallels it draws with ongoing debates in Anglophone evangelicalism today. For Spence uses his Victorian premillennialists to demonstrate there is really little new in the theologies of megachurch pastor Rob Bell’s Love Wins or N.T. Wright’s hope of a ‘restored earth’ rather than heaven. Evangelicals are once again arguing over eschatology and the nature of eternity. Here’s to hoping the optimists and progressives win out this time.
