Sensing Salvation in Early British Methodism: Accounts of Spiritual Experience, 1735–1765

Abstract

Erika K. R. Stalcup’s Sensing Salvation in Early British Methodism beautifully captures the sensory nature of the varied spiritual experiences—and the language used to describe those experiences—that shaped the religious lives of the first British Methodists. Rather than viewing conversion and religious experience through the lens of pulpit, leadership, or formal worship, Stalcup expands the narrative by considering those who filled the pews, the experiences of laypeople, and the physical manifestations (groaning, visionary experiences, weeping, etc.) that contributed to individual and collective spiritual development and identity formation. To accomplish this, Stalcup highlights thoughts and impressions held by the earliest Methodist converts, internal tensions that emerged throughout their conversion processes, their perspectives about death, and their views on writing about and recording spiritual experiences. The origins of Methodism, the author suggests, reach far beyond the contributions of a few; the power of early Methodism is rooted in ordinary women and men encountering and describing the extraordinary in a plethora of ways.In order to capture the depth and breadth of religious experience inherent in early Methodism, Stalcup draws upon her training as a historian of Christianity by engaging with an impressive array of primary and secondary source materials. For example, her research draws heavily upon the previously under-analysed collection, ‘Early Methodist Volume’, located at the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester. This collection includes autobiographical details, conversion narratives, deathbed accounts, and correspondence solicited by and sent to Charles Wesley, primarily in the 1740s. Of particular value to Stalcup’s study is the high ratio of female-to-male authorship of about 3:1, the diversity in literary and social background held by the different writers, and the ‘freshness’ and ‘authenticity’ that emerges from accounts written in ‘the immediate wake of those [early] experiences’ of conversion (8). The individuals who penned this primary source material wrote with a rawness and intensity that is rarely found within the archive. As Stalcup observes, feelings, emotion, fluidity, and chaos ‘render these accounts a particularly remarkable source for the study of eighteenth-century evangelicalism’ (9). Indeed, the richness found within the pages of this collection allowed Stalcup to reconsider the narratives of the first generation of Methodist converts by grappling with ‘their initial impressions of Methodism, and their early attempts to express their experiences verbally and on paper’ (161). Voices typically forgotten within the annals of religious history emerge afresh due to the author’s careful engagement with often overlooked primary source material.Stalcup’s work also engages with scholarship that highlights the agency of early Methodists, and she carefully situates the experiences of early converts within the framework of enlightenment thought. ‘The language used to describe their spiritual experiences and the strategies employed to legitimate the novel act of writing about those experiences’, Stalcup writes, ‘reveal a surprisingly holistic theology of resurrection and transformation which incorporated both Enlightenment and evangelical ideologies’ (3). Indeed, Stalcup argues, Methodists valued sensory perception as a means of spiritual knowing. As writers of autobiography, they also experimented with Enlightenment forms of self-expression and helped shape the future use of conversion narratives in print media. Conversion for these early converts was more than a change of belief or a transformed perspective, the author contends. Rather, it was a holistic change that impacted their entire selves: body, mind, and soul (161).Sensing Salvation is meticulously researched and argued, and beautifully written. While it offers crucial insights into understanding the first generation of Methodist converts and their contributions to eighteenth-century evangelicalism in Britain, Stalcup’s work also sheds light on religious history more broadly conceived and would prove invaluable to those interested in the history of women, emotion, and religious experience.