Anthony Horneck (1641--1697) and the rise of Anglican Pietism

Anthony Horneck (1641–1697), an almost completely neglected figure in church history, is key for Pietism's migration into Restoration Anglicanism. Horneck was a Palatine raised in the Reformed Church who immigrated to England the year of the Restoration and shortly before the Act of Uniformity. He became a committed Anglican clergyman, both in terms of his primitivism and his religious practice. Nonetheless, his life and ministry demonstrate Pietist influences. He was an effective preacher, stressing Pietist themes. His theology was practically and soteriologically oriented. Most significantly, he organized Religious Societies to nurture those affected by his preaching. The rules Horneck drew up for the guidance of his societies bear the marks of Pietism.; Horneck's Religious Societies, like those of Phillip Jacob Spener in Frankfurt, were within the established church and under the supervision of its clergy. They encouraged devotion to the church's public worship and sacramental life. After the Glorious Revolution these devotional groups spawned other organizations with specifically philanthropic agendas. In 1691 they gave rise to the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, in 1699 to the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.). In the eighteenth century Horneck's Religious Societies provided the matrix of relationships through which Moravians (a Continental Pietist group) and Oxford Methodists would meet.; Horneck's story provides insight into the complex religious world of Restoration piety. He combined pietistic Puritan soteriological concerns and methods with a Restoration Anglican understanding of church history, government, and practice. Horneck also provides an early, and generally overlooked, link between continental versions of Pietism and English Protestantism. Finally, Horneck provides a theological emancipation from the usual categories of high church/low church in defining evangelical Christianity. The mixing of these streams at this crucial period and the ability of Pietism to take on various confessional garbs helped determined the character of modern Christianity in its many manifestations. As a forerunner of Methodism, Horneck also helps clarify many of the “contradictions” in the piety of the young John Wesley, giving Wesley's theological journey an appropriate historic background and precedent.