This book is the first volume to cover the study and use of the Bible by Protestant dissenters in Britain from the mid-seventieth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The claim that the Bible was ‘the Christian’s only rule of faith and practice’ has been fundamental to Protestant dissenters, steeling them to resist persecution, to preach and teach and to travel across the globe in an effort to bring the Bible’s message to as many people as possible. Yet the protracted conflicts over biblical interpretation that resulted from the bewildering proliferation of dissenting denominations have always made it difficult to grasp the scale of their contribution to the Bible’s presence in Britain. The ten essays in this volume range across the period from the later seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, taking in all of the major dissenting denominations of the United Kingdom. They are woven together by a thematic introduction which places the Bible at the centre of dissenting eschatology, ecclesiology, public worship and ‘family religion’, while charting the political and theological divisions that made the cry of ‘the Bible only’ so divisive in practice. The book offers a new way of understanding the divided history of Protestantism in Britain, presenting dissenters as people drawn together by the belief that they were truer to the Bible than other Christians, while remaining divided by deep-seated differences in how to read it.

Dissent and the Bible in Britain, c.1650-1950 PDF

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