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The persecution of George Jackson: a British Fundamentalist Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

D. W. Bebbington
D. W. Bebbington*
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
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Extract

The debate surrounding the appointment of George Jackson to a chair at Didsbury College in 1913 has been the chief theological controversy of the twentieth century in British Methodism. It forms an instance of an effort to extinguish alleged theological error, an attempt at persecution within rather than outside the church. It was, as contemporaries complained, a heresy hunt, comparable in some respects to the suppression of Modernism in the Roman Catholic Church in the previous decade and in other respects to the outcry over the appointment of Hensley Henson to the Anglican episcopate four years later. The issue was, in fact, most similar to controversies over the legitimacy of biblical criticism that took place in Scotland in the later nineteenth century and in America over a much longer period. Fundamentalists argued that Jackson was unsuitable for the appointment because he was prepared to doubt the historical accuracy of the Bible. The debate and its aftermath raised questions about the limits of toleration, revealed the balance of forces on the propriety of doctrinal discipline and contributed to shaping the destiny of evangelical Protestantism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 21: Persecution and Toleration , 1984 , pp. 421 - 433
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1984

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References

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63 I am glad to acknowledge the support from the British Academy and from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland that made possible the research on which this paper is based.