William Holland’s Short Account of the Beginnings of Moravian Work in England (1745)

Abstract

abstract:William Holland’s Short Account describes church life in the City of London in the 1730s with special reference to the religious societies and their connections with Wesley’s “Oxford Methodists.” He shows how the Moravian Peter Böhler’s preaching cross-fertilized these networks’ High-Church Anglicanism with the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone and thereby sparked the English Evangelical Revival. Recounting the early life of the resulting Fetter Lane Society, which served as the Revival’s London headquarters, Holland emphasizes the frequent visits to and from the Moravian congregations in Germany and the Netherlands. All of this was intended to support his argument that the English Anglican members of Zinzendorf’s Brüdergemeine, while accepting the Lutheran doctrine of justification, were neither Dissenters nor “Old Lutherans” (the name Zinzendorf had invented for them in order to distance the Moravian tradition from them). Rather, they had joined the Moravian Church on the understanding that in doing so they were not separating themselves from England’s established church but joining a “sister church” in a form of “double belonging.” This text thus illuminates not only the early history of the Moravian Church in England but also Anglican church life in 1730s London and the origins of Wesleyan Methodism.