Anglicans in America
This past year I reread big portions of The Critical Years and Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church, and it just occurred to me that the first generation Anglican leaders in America were pragmatists, not theologians. The second generation Anglican bishops were solidly grounded theologians and wildly successful missionary bishops.
Samuel Seabury’s influence barely reached his own diocese of Connecticut. much-less beyond. Our first bishop could never really shake the stigma of “Toryism” and the presumption of being anti-laity, and there was nothing of significance to report that happened in his diocese between 1801 and 1811. Samuel Provost, the bishop of New York, was worse. After 1801 he just stopped performing episcopal functions - he didn’t resign, he just quit. William White didn’t see the need to travel (visit parishes) as Bishop of Pennsylvania, and his ministerial reach never extend much beyond Philadelphia. The Bishop of Virginia, James Madison, made one trip across his diocese after his election before he stopped exercising his episcopal ministry altogether. He never attending a General Convention, nor did he call his diocese together for a council. Robert Smith, the first bishop of South Carolina, was a successful rice farmer (and college president, like Madison and White) but he reportedly did not performed a single ecclesiastical function pertaining to his office. When Smith died in 1801 the diocese didn’t seek another bishop until 1812.
Things dramatically changed for the Episcopal Church in 1811, the year when two fiery new bishops were consecrated: Alexander Viets Griswold (New England) and John Henry Hobart (New York). Soon thereafter three more were made bishops: Richard Channing Moore and William Meade (Virginia) and Theodore Dehon (South Carolina). In his first year as bishop Griswold visited every parish and confirmed 1,160 people. Hobart traveled like a Methodist circuit-rider across his diocese and confirmed 1,200 his second year as bishop. Virginia and South Carolina saw similar growth and vitality under their new bishops.
The difference between the first and second generation Episcopal bishops was theology. The second generation bishops were converted Christians who were committed to the great evangelical teachings of the English Reformation: Tyndale, Cranmer, Hooker, Jewel, and Donne. Each of them was a Reformation Anglican; yes, even Bishop Hobart!
Bishop FitzSimons Allison, in his 1977 DeBose Lecture at the University of the South said:
“John Henry Hobart, high churchman that he was, insisted in his charge to the diocese in 1815 that justification by faith was ‘a fundamental doctrine of the Gospel. It pervades all the Articles, and animates all the offices of our church.’ Hobart had recovered something of the spirit as well as the substance of classical Anglicanism missing from the piety of the great figures who were his predecessors. . .Hobart’s hearty commitment to the teachings of the English Reformation surprises many modern descendants of the Tractarians who often have assumed that justification by faith was not a ‘Catholic doctrine.’ Although Hobart showed no hesitancy in unchurching Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians after his Princeton days, he remained fervently faithful to the Anglican formularies.”