Augustus Montague TopLady (1740-78) and the Limits of the Evangelical Englightenment

Abstract

Augustus Toplady is famous for his hymns, and infamous for his very public and acrimonious disagreement with John Wesley over the historic Reformation doctrine of predestination. Whilst the residue of his published polemic has been leveraged by both sides of the theological debate, and whilst Toplady himself has been treated as a kind of lodestone of Christian culture, there has never been a serious attempt to assess his significance as a theological writer in his own right, within the Enlightenment context which framed his life’s work. This thesis explores Toplady’s published contributions within his immediate context. His vocational life was cut prematurely short, but the nature of his personal formation appears to have uniquely equipped him for a particular kind of ‘elenctic’ theological contribution within the polemical culture of the long eighteenth century. Toplady’s personal credentials facilitated a distinctive perspective on the nexus between the Calvinistic and Arminian branches of Evangelicalism, and on the interaction between historical scholastic disciplines and modern Enlightenment thinking, underpinned throughout by his own Anglican convictions. This thesis explores his key writings, published over a brief, nine-year period, and recalibrates the focus of Toplady’s key publications, raising question-marks over a significant proportion of the historical commentary regarding his method and priorities. The conclusions are therefore relevant to the studies on the origin and definitions of Evangelicalism, the distinctives of confessional Anglicanism, as well as the historic narratives concerning the eclipse of scholasticism.

Date of Award	2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Aberystwyth University
Supervisor	Iwan Morus (Supervisor) & David Jones (Supervisor)