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Tim Macquiban, The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions. Volume II: The Long Eighteenth Century, c.1689–c.1828. Edited by Andrew Thompson, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 70, Issue 2, October 2019, Pages 906–907, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flz102
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Extract
This second volume of a series to complement the Oxford History of Anglicanism acknowledges from the start the difficulty of differentiating between these two streams of religious life, whose boundaries, within and without, are porous. Revival movements particularly criss-crossed this ecclesiastical divide, between the establishment and dissenting traditions, with for some a ‘one foot in, one foot out posture, towards Anglicanism’. In the period covered by this book the Church/Chapel divide of the later century was not so acute.
Having said that, there is sometimes an unevenness of approach towards those religious movements which do straddle the divide, particularly the Methodists. The five main traditions described in general chapters (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, and Methodists) are covered by those well qualified to give scholarly overviews, as also in the chapters dealing with dissent in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the American colonies, and the Atlantic world. So too with the chapters in the section on Awakening, dealing with revivalism and the missionary societies, which acknowledge the contribution Moravians and Methodists made in pioneering missions as a mark of being church, as well as integrating aspects of the revivalism which had brought new life to Old Dissent. The emergence of different streams of Methodism in Britain at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century is not given sufficient weight in the chapter on Methodists by Professor Heitzenrater.
