The Emergence and Development of Missiological Themes in Early Nonconformist Hymnody (1706-1755)
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TextPublication details: Johannesburg South African Theological Seminary 2023Description: 275 PDF A4 Abstract, TOCSubject(s): Dissertation note: Doctor of Philosophy in Theology (PhD) South African Theological Seminary 2023 Summary: Beginning in the 1790s, the Nonconformist churches of England were instrumental in launching a global mission movement which accelerated the spread of Christianity and changed the course of history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some historians regard the Nonconformists as having been unlikely candidates for this development, having been a minority movement with little discernible missiological interest a century beforehand. To explain the emergence of the mission movement, its ideological roots are often traced to its initial promoters in the 1780s and ‘90s, or further back to the Evangelical Revival and Moravian mission movement of the 1730s and ‘40s. This study posits that such explanations, while partially valid, nevertheless leave out a major formative source of missiological development in Nonconformist church culture: the contents of the new genre of hymnody that blossomed in the early decades of the eighteenth century.
This study undertakes to analyze the emergence and development of missiological themes in early Nonconformist hymnody, acting under the hypothesis that the theological roots of missiological ideas which were later important in the mission movement of the 1790s were already present in the hymnody of a half century to a century before. This study proceeds by using a content analysis research design, coding for the missiological themes in William Carey’s 1792 treatise, An Enquiry Concerning the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, and then examining the corpus of hymns produced during the first major period of Nonconformist hymnography (1706–1755) to study the frequency and usage of those themes. After the content analysis survey, this study uses a modified exegetical methodology, which is geared toward the detailed analysis of representative texts from a broader corpus, to examine ten key hymn texts for their treatment of those missiological themes.
As revealed by the content analysis survey, the hymn collections produced by Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge show a significant presence of missiological themes, reflecting the development of a theological mindset which was beginning to consider the question of the global spread of the gospel at least half a century before the missiological treatises of the 1780s and ‘90s. Of particular interest is Isaac Watts’s 1719 collection of hymns, entitled The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, in which missiological material rises to a far greater prominence than in any other work in the period, including Watts’s other hymns. By comparing Watts’s Psalms of David to other hymns and to the preceding psalter tradition, this study argues that a plausible case can be made for Watts’s Psalms of David to be considered an original infusion of missiological content into the liturgical life of Nonconformist church culture, and thus to be ranked alongside other leading historical causes of the mission movement at the end of the century. Finally, the results of this research also suggest that a prominent place needs to be given to the use of communal song as a vehicle of theological immersion, with applications for church leaders and liturgists to consider the theological and missiological content of their ecclesial worship practices.
| Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | URL | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
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Thesis
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South African Theological Seminary Online Resource | Electronic Holdings | Link to Resource | Available | 0000000014076 |
Doctor of Philosophy in Theology (PhD) South African Theological Seminary 2023
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